If you want to reduce the complaining but not completely get rid of it, Cyjon has "Less Complaining" that makes the sims more sensible about it.
http://www.cyjon.net/node/122



Probably because it would have changed the games's ESRB rating. I seem to recall seeing a mod for TS3 or TS4 that changed all references to "plasma" to say "blood" instead, but I don't know of a mod like that for TS2.

I'm trying to see if I can recover an old, beloved hood I deleted on my old desktop computer almost a decade ago and I'm really hoping it will work. I used Recuvia and thankfully 98% of the hood files are recoverable but few character files, a lot file and some "snapshots" have been overwritten and aren't recoverable. I'm not sure if it'll be playable long term (or it will even work) but I just want to try it out and see what happens.

Yes, the point here being that you had a second uni attached to the hood. The OP seemed to be asking about removing all universities from a hood.

If you want to recover your playable sims, you could try extracting their appearance with SimPE.

You ever have every intention of playing, even load up the game and carve out the time in your schedule to do so and just...do something else instead? I have opened the game like eight times today, and just ended up building instead. Maybe I'll hop over to Uni and see how that goes.

Seeing how much better the graphics can be on a new computer, I'm kinda tempted to go back and re-do the screenshots for a lot of my old buildings...

"Yeah, I'll take 'Things That Are Not A Good Use Of My Time" for $1000, Alex..."

EDIT: Just to be clear, I'm NOT going to be doing this... I'm sure everyone will agree that working on NEW projects is a much better use of my very limited TS2 time than painstakingly re-working already-completed projects from days of yore...

I just downloaded yet another neighborhood to play-as recommended by our "This awesome thing" thread. (Sims 3 to sims 2 recreation.)
This is game is just so marvelous that you could download every single independently made neighborhood and never find 2 the same kind.
How am I supposed to play all of them when I only have a few hours in a day to play when I work for living and don't have all that time?
The horrible dilemma of being a pixel pusher! Give me another 50 years!

I suppose that I'll have enough of them by the time I retire to keep me happily occupied for a very long time. I just hope the computer doesn't mind...or wear out.

It doesn't help that there are so many sims living in Sunset Valley and I have to get to know ALL of them!

I was saying a while ago how Sports and Fitness should've been combined into one hobby, and I think I've thought of something that could've filled the extra slot: Style&Beauty. Gaining enthusiasm from browsing fashion magazines, using the stylist chair, changing appearance, buying new clothes? Maybe a new toy for the kiddos that's like one of those Barbie busts where you style the hair? Seems like it would've been interesting.

This is why I don't get along with Megahoods, Uberhoods, etc... I get so overwhelmed by the number of sims, and the limited time I have to play. I just end up frustrated and deleting the hood.

I suggest that you take (play) one hood at a time and don't worry about when you'll be able to play. The game (or your computer) isn't going anywhere.

I'm learning to do this as well, I have at least 10 hoods on my 'To Play' list, but I'm not rushing. I'm taking one hood at a time. When I'm done with my current hood, I'll move on to the next one. I have no clue when I'll be able to move on, but that's ok. I'm enjoying the simming moments as they come.

I rotate between hoods the way other people rotate between households. It depends which one I'm in the mood for at the moment. Just play what you feel like playing and don't worry about playing all the families in each and every hood.

As long as I've given them all makeovers and upgrades, I can always go back and actually play them later.

Oh, believe me, I try to play which neighborhoods I want-I've tried new ones, and I'm still with Tinsel Town, although at times it's slow when you have a lot of children and they're still growing up-so I switch out to another neighborhood. Sometimes I don't even play the game.

Although pretty soon I'm going to have to concentrate on TT, because a few of those teens are about to go to Uni, and that's another process, because they'll have to be moved out and set up in their next town.

I try to restrict myself to three hoods. I rotate through one, then the next, and then the final one. I have about 69000 that I want to get to, but I really have my hands full minding the three I have.

I usually have five or six hoods on the go and more or less play them in rotation, but since having to reinstall at the beginning of the month I'm trying to work on having just one uberhood. The idea is to build it up really slowly, only adding a new subhood as a 'spare' male Ottomas reaches maturity and can be assigned to a new district as duke (if he's the younger son of the king) or earl (if he's the younger son of a duke).

But I have a feeling I'll get impatient and end up adding at least one, if not two or three, more hoods sooner or later.

I tend to obsess over one hood at a time, but I do find that eventually I'll get bored with it and want to play another. I'm trying not to restart every single third minute, but the most I've had on the play at once is two. There's always a point where I get kinda bored with a hood and want to play certain things, and if it just isn't in the cards for that particular hood, then it's great to have other options. Within each hood, I like to add subhoods when the original hood is full. The main exception is Universities and Holiday destinations - I add those when they're needed. Otherwise, the main hood is all I play until I have no more housing available << which has never happened.

I only play Oakbrook, but I still have a working copy of Hazelton for when I just want to goof around and my test hood, aptly named Testicles.

I'm sure that everyone knows this, but as long as you have no two hoods numbered the same in your game folder, you can rename the hoods you're not playing to an appropriate title and still keep them in the neighborhood folder for when you do want to play them. Just be sure they're not numbered the same or you won't see them or the game will crash.

Trying to figure out who will be related to whom after 4 generations be like...

Someone's parent's cousin's children won't count as relatives by the game right? So they can still continue on from there? Will it come to an end where they're all related to each other according to the game?
I'm normally no fan of incest, but I'm making a mythological neighborhood with gods and elves and stuff (and eventually human royalty, nobility, merchants and peasants), so I want to try to keep things contained. As long as they don't count as relatives by the game I'm good. And only half of the sims in gen 4 need to not be related because the two higher classes and two lower classes can't marry each other anyway.

Today I was browsing on Twitter, and came across this brief article-true, it's slated for Sims 4, but I don't know how you can represent an entire group of people without offending, or ignoring others: ‘Sims 4’ Producer Wants People With Disabilities Represented
I'd say not to attempt it. Being disabled myself, I don't appreciate the idea of making money from it or depicting it to make money. But there are all kinds of people who think it is a cool idea. They obviously don't understand the problems many disabled people have.

How is it different from representing ethnic minorities or trans people? They're trying to make sure that all different types of people are included.

Months back, I watched the Gurus seeking input from a player who uses a wheelchair after she was one of the people who pitched the idea. Everyone is entitled to their opinion and just because it doesn't line up with yours it doesn't mean they're misinformed.

Representation is important.

Since a lot of disability is only seriously disabling because the environment doesn't accommodate it, the ideal thing would be to include, not only different conditions like lack of mobility, blindness, deafness, chronic illness, etc., but build tools and mechanics that would allow players to build environments and societies that address these conditions in ways that affect gameplay in interesting ways. It would be entirely up to the player how they used these game elements. If they wanted to build fantasy worlds in which birth defects and debilitating illness are unknown and injuries have no permanent effects (like the default Sims 2 world), in which certain conditions are normalized and accommodated and other conditions that our society regards as "normal" are not (i.e. vision correction lenses aren't a thing but full blindness is considered in all construction and design), in which the infrastructure is built assuming everyone is in a wheelchair, or in which people with their own debility are in charge, then they should be able to.

The important thing is to make sure that the players aren't forced to play anything, but have the option to set up their game in whatever way best pleases them. Don't think of it as the corporation "making money off your disability," but as the corporation acknowledging your existence and legitimacy, and actively inviting you to participate.

Consider also that people who don't have these disabilities can get an opportunity to understand the problems that disabled people have in a safe environment, without the disabled people having to explain the basic facts of their existence over and over and over and over and over and over and over - and still find that nobody Gets It. Done properly, giving the conventionally abled the opportunity to experience disability vicariously could be of enormous benefit to society.

Done improperly - well, that's a whole other can of worms. Execution is everything. and the question of whether bad or partial representation is better than no representation is a contentious one among all marginalized people. I certainly can't blame Fran for not trusting EA to do the thing properly. Consulting with marginalized people is good as far as it goes. Hiring marginalized game developers and programmers and not killing their creativity with executive prejudices about "the market" would be much better, and I haven't heard that they've planned to do that.

As I've grown older, I've realized one thing that most people don't acknowledge:

That everyone has a disability,

It can be emotional, physical, mental, sociological, financial or psychological . That means for us to separate out one set of disabilities is to question whether or not it's warranted at all. I say in a game of this kind, it is not because you cannot under most circumstances portray a disability faithfully without going into mockery.

If you were to depict a deaf person in game, how do you do it? What characteristics do you have to be deaf? It is an invisible disability-one that go unnoticed for years before one gets it dealt with, if then. Or perhaps cancer, or Lyme disease-any one of those 'invisible' diseases or defects that many people have but do not acknowledge to be a problem.

I still say we should leave the game out of real life-which is hard enough for disabled people without being depicted in any way on screen.

And by the way, there is no way a 'non-disabled' person would ever understand fully what it is like to be in a wheelchair 24/7/365 without having done so themselves. I can't do it, and nobody I know can. Only someone who does that can.

Empathy is one thing-but first-hand knowledge is the only way you can fully understand what it's like. Portraying it on screen in a game is not going to make you any more empathetic to their suffering than watching a telethon.

I have clicked both agree and disagree because absolutely, we all have some disability or other; but I think you underestimate both the need of most people to see themselves reflected in media and the capacity of media to portray everyone in a respectful and fun way - if (and this is the big if) - the portrayal is done primarily by those who have been deprived of their reflections, not by those who have grown up seeing themselves as the default "person" in the world, as evidenced by their varied and ubiquitous representation in media.

This is not, I grant, something we can expect any large corporation to do on its own hook. Small companies (like those working under the rubric of We Need Diverse Games) are more likely to experiment. But we can and should demand better of them, and eventually, we will get it.

When I was growing up, queer representation in juvenile media was unheard of. Even in adult media, it was largely coded in ways that only those "in the know" would get (some of Gertrude Stein's famous incomprehensibility is due to her playing with and pushing this coding to extremes), treated pornographically, and/or portrayed negatively, often as part of a tragic plot or as the butt of a joke. And these things still happen far too often. (We need a five-year moratorium, at least, on the "kill your queers" trope on TV.) But now every publishing season produces a slightly larger number of YA and Middle Grade books, at least, with queer protagonists. And The Sims franchise made gaming history by giving players the freedom to determine their characters' sexualities, way back in the beginning. Often this has been flawed representation. But the more representation there is, the better and more varied it gets, and the more queer people are empowered to see themselves as normal, demand to be treated as normal members of society, and create new content that reflects their own reality.

The same is true of people of color, neuroatypical people, and people with physical disabilities. We still have a long way to go on all these fronts. And anyone who can't represent a disability without mocking it should definitely be forced to take responsibility for their failure, and either learn to do better, or shut up and try some other line of work.

But the media industries, including gaming, can do better, and should do better, and someday will do better. The process has begun. It's a shame that you can't see the way forward, a pessimism no doubt based on plenty of hard real life experience. (People in the aggregate are such jackasses, and ableism is the default mode of society.) But I have every hope that you will live long enough to be pleasantly surprised.

Just have to chime in: the ABILITY to portray/create Sims with disabilities is what I would agree with. Players should have the option to let the game generate random disabilities or NOT. And they should be able to CREATE Sims, with whatever disability mix they want. I could see where someone with a disability would want to play "themselves" being happy, popular, daring - maybe it would improve their self-image, and their real lives. The game should even let their Sim self be "cured". Even if their own real life cure was impossible, fantasy/trying out possibilities, etc is a big part of what Sims is all about. And mind you, Sims already seem to have personalities; I would like to make that problem child be really "bad" (distructive,etc) but be able to get better. And that stupid Sim? And mental & emotional disabilities are also a thing. Could EA pull it off without being stupid/offensive? I wouldn't count on it. But I DO like the idea.

I remember being momentarily excited when I realized the Sims 3 had canes...and then disappointed that they were restricted to elders! I was going to give my self-Sim one as I have in real life.