My game will not start. This has been happening for weeks. I've went through every last one of your troubleshooting exercises, including uninstalling the game completely and reinstalling, disabling the antivirus and excluding the sims install folder, removing all user data, starting with -nosound, disabling origin 'in game' from the origin settings for the app, etc. Nothing works. I am using Sophos AV and only Sophos AV. I've tried starting as Administrator, too. Some of the work-arounds are actually blowing my mind. Like, your application gets flagged for being a VIRUS? What the hell are you doing to my computer that would cause that? We have pretty much every expansion there is for this game and the fact that it doesn't work, doesn't even open, is completely unsatisfactory. The fact that you haven't fixed this yet is even more unsatisfactory. The fact that there's literally no log file that I can look at to see what the problem might be is just ridiculous. No error message is logged on a complete crash of the app? Could you at least test your software before shipping it?
So, I did everything that has been suggested on this forum and it didn't help. I also updated to the latest patch and I must say, it's time for your clown shoes EA. 🤡
Fix the damn launch bug.
@bmoviecat and @Cherylw_04 If you've tried all the suggestions in the first post on page one and none of them helped, please run a dxdiag and attach it to a post.
https://help.ea.com/en-us/help/pc/how-to-gather-dxdiag-information/
So, when I went through the forum before and followed troubleshooting guidelines, I did run the "disable antivirus" test. However, it seems there are "grades" to disabling the antivirus. I think in the case of Sophos, disabling the AV actually disables real-time scanning. With that said, it's unclear to me that the exploit mitigations are actually part of the real-time scanning, so disabling real-time scanning maybe did not disable exploit mitigation. In the particular case here, disabling the exploit mitigation technique for "code caves" seems to have resolved my issue with the game crashing and burning immediately from Origin. No useful error message was ever recorded that I could find as to why the application failed.
Now, here's the thing... If your application suddenly starts behaving in a manner that is consistent with the behavior of application MALWARE, perhaps you should re-consider your strategy. We have spent many hundreds of dollars on this game over years and to have it all of a sudden completely fail to work for more than a month is crap. I don't know what you're doing that necessitates using a technique that is consistent with malware behavior, but I do know that you should not be doing that. If I am making a guess, I'd say this is something to do with DRM. I should never, ever have to disable my antivirus software in weird ways to run a game. I should never be told to "run origin as administrator" to run a game. I should never be asked to do things that compromise the safety of my family's PC and all of our data, just to play a game that we've spent hundreds of dollars on. It's just plain unacceptable to have to disable a part of my antivirus engine that's been installed on the system FOR YEARS without any problems, due to "EA released a new patch this month and it broke the world".
Please, consider fixing your software to behave like every other well-behaved application. Getting flagged as malware is an embarrassment to you and a major inconvenience to your customers, most of whom will never, ever be able to fix this problem if they encounter it. They'll just be out hundreds of dollars that have been spent on your game.
