I also have this issue and contacted Help about it today because I have 65 unlocked Heirlooms in my total Heirloom list, and only 22 physical statues in Storage. I often sell extra heirlooms, and I think this is a bug that shows more than one heirloom when in fact, there is only one. Once you sell, thinking it's an extra, you lose the only one you had. I just lost all the relationship Heirlooms from the Back to School event in June, and can't play any of those stories even though I have 3 active Sims who have them completed. I have other stories and traits that are also no longer available to play.
Here are links to previously reported issues regarding heirlooms and stories. Are any of them similar to the problem you experience? If yes, which?
https://answers.ea.com/t5/Bug-Reports/Open-Story-gone-after-selling-duplicate-heirloom/td-p/8993258
@lmnmst I don't believe an EA advisor can help as @Keelee717 says.
Hopefully this issue will be fixed so you all can unlock again stories that should be available on your games.
I too am now a victim of this false duplicates glitch.
A couple of days ago I was browsing through My Heirloom Collection, and noticed a couple with the "2" icon badge indicating I had duplicates of Pumpkin Spice Lovers and Study Buddies. For a moment I thought it odd, since I couldn't recall getting duplicates of them, but I had no reason to second-guess the game, so I promptly sold them (the only thing duplicates are good for).
I then happened to click the Info of one of them, and was surprised to see the lock icon appear, even though it appears unlocked in the My Heirloom Collection list. Also it had the strange new text "Requires 1 Pumpkin Spice Storybook" which made no sense; I already had it, otherwise how would the game have allowed me to sell a duplicate?
I keep all my heirlooms in storage, which I then ransacked - and to my horror I realized the associated heirlooms (Pumpkin Spice Storybook and Besties Study Stack) were nowhere to be found. I pulled up the All Stories -> Relationship menu on a random sim...the stories were gone. As a final desperate act I tried starting new relationships with an NPC (one romantic and one friendly to check for both); when the lists of accessible stories appeared, neither of these stories were in the lists.
I started a support ticket via the Settings -> Help menu in-game, and attached relevant screenshots of everything. I got in contact with an EA support agent via webchat, who just gave me the boilerplate, overly-general, very-unhelpful canned troubleshooting steps at https://help.ea.com/en-us/help/mobile/troubleshooting-steps-for-ios-apps/ which I nevertheless followed, even so far as to uninstall/reinstall the entire game, and surprise surprise - the heirlooms were not magically back.
Since those steps included rebooting my device (as if that could possibly have helped), I lost contact with that support agent. So I went back to the EA support site, pulled up my "case", clicked Resume, and got a second support agent. After allegedly discussing with the "game experts team", I got brushed off with the following eloquent reply:
I am afraid would like to inform you that manually we d not have option to validate the missing heirloom content and it might be some sorts of bug so I will request you to please post this issue bug on our EA forums.
As if to add insult to injury, today the featured heirloom is none other than the Pumpkin Spice Lovers. It's as if the game stole something from me and immediately wants to sell it back to me.
Here are the relevant screenshots proving I had these heirlooms.
Pumpkin Spice Lovers unlocked:
...but suddenly locked when looking at its Info panel (this screenshot is particularly telling because you can see it still obviously unlocked in the background):
Same thing with Study Buddies. Here it's obviously already unlocked:
"Hah just kidding, no study buddy for you":
I have the Harvestfest Pie Rack, which was a quest reward alongside the Pumpkin Spice Storybook so if I have one I should have both:
And if you need any more proof, this ought to do: I still have Large Leaf Pile, Pumpkin Spice Scented Candles, and Table of Plenty which are the story rewards from Pumpkin Spice Lovers:
As for Study Buddies, I never finished that particular story, but I still have Rival Debaters Binders (Debasing Debaters story) and Romance Book Collection (Romancing the Tomes story); all three heirlooms were rewards from a questline, in which the Besties Study Stack (Study Buddies) was the first earned reward, so it is impossible to have the other two and not have the first one:
I attached all of this evidence in my EA support case, and said I would gladly pay back the 4 Super Life Tickets I got by selling these "duplicates"...but I got relegated to the forums anyway. I guess I could bite the bullet and re-buy the Pumpkin Spice Lovers (for 100 dang Life Tickets), but I won't have any way to buy back Study Buddies until the next time the Back to School event runs (and it just ran a few weeks ago for the first time in 2 years 😢 ).
What a nasty bug, and what a crappy way for a business to treat its paying customers (I've spent way more real money on this mobile game over the past 2 years than I'd like to admit).
