The people trying to wriggle out of their responsibilities are never the ones you're facing, though. It's the employee who's stuck in the middle, between an irate customer now and an irate boss later. People who work in customer service get really sick of being blamed for what the company does; it's not their fault, and they have less ability to change company policy than a customer does. So complaining to the peon will do you no good at all -- better to call customer service directly, because companies do not listen to the people who work in their stores and take most of the flak for their decisions.

All you'll accomplish by throwing a shitfit in a store is to ruin someone's day. You might get your way, but I was always far less inclined to give irate or otherwise obnoxious customers what they wanted than people who were reasonable and civil, and who generally treated me like I was a human being and not a robot slave sent to thwart their whims. I didn't want the tantrum-throwers to be happy with what they got, I wanted them to stay away. Everyone I've worked with in retail has felt the same. We don't like being treated like crap any more than customers do.

The best thing to do is go to the store during a weekday, when the manager is most probably there. Managers of chains will also get in trouble for letting customers return games, but they have more clout and will be more willing to take the hit.

Good luck returning opened PC games. I would usually let customers return them when I worked in a game store, but I got in trouble for it every time. Even when it was for store credit.

If EA were a good company, that would be a major part of their developers' job descriptions. However, EA is not a good company, and their developers' jobs depend on very quickly churning out programs that many people will buy. Not high-quality programs, just programs. So in reality, they are doing their jobs. It's just a crappy reality.

Which would be how he keeps his job.

This isn't MaxoidSam's fault. It's EA and Sony's fault; and he's right, if people want things to change, bitching on the BBS isn't going to do much. He's saying what they tell him to say and what will cover EA and Sony's asses.

Mine are named alphabetically and by set (i.e. floor_neri_carpet_habana_blue), and I compressorized them all at once so they'd have the same "last modified" date, but they still aren't actually organized. They're sort-of organized, but then random crap shows up in the sets, and though the sets tend to stick together, they aren't alphabetical. They do seem to be vaguely organized by price -- but again, not really. I wish someone with the capability to look at this would tell us how the game decides what order they go in. Right now it looks like a 5-year old putting something in order and getting bored 2/3 of the way through.

Yes, I'm necromancing, but I'd like to know if anyone has figured out anything else about this. I just made a huge batch of walls and floors and they seem sort-of sorted, but not really. It is annoying, and I'd like to know if there's a way to get them to actually sort intelligibly.

Horrors about Seasons? Hm. I found it to be the most stable, and certainly the most fun, expansion pack for the game. I'd recommend Seasons above all the other ones.

But significantly less useful.

There are evil versions of all the toys Sims can make, I think. The evil jack-in-the-box is especially nice.

You can't change the defaults without changing what your current Sims are displaying. Your best bet would be to geneticize and make townie available the skin and eyes you want to use. An discussion of how to do this is here: http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,2966.0.html.

Inge made a sign for it: http://simlogical.com/sl/Sims2Pages/Sims2_Petting.htm

I also recommend Planescape: Torment, and I bet both Star Wars: KotOR games will work as well. Also Morrowind if you haven't played it -- I find the setting far more interesting than Oblivion's.

When I was young, I had to switch BGII discs during nearly every loading screen! And the load times were so long I was able to finish my homework during them. Now I bitch about having to install a game from more than one DVD.

That's got to be a joke.

True, laptops are a lot more convenient. Finding one for a reasonable price that will play Sims 2 well shouldn't be too hard; I think Oblivion is where the problem lies. But that could be an opportunity to play some old games you never got a chance to try out before as well.

Well, my computer kicks Oblivion's ass, but it sometimes lags with TS2. Only on lots with tons of Sims, though.  I actually have a problem with it running NWN2 too fast . (Anyone know of a mod for NWN2 that slows camera rotation down, by the way?) My specs for reference are:

AMD X2 Gamer SLI
AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5000+, MMX (2CPUs)
2 Gigs RAM
NVidia GeForce 7900 GT/GTO video cards (2 of these)

It was about $2000, built for me by a local guy last year. He was all excited because it outperformed his friend's brand-new $10,000 Dell

NVidia and ATI cards both have driver issues with certain games. ATI was awful with KotOR, for instance. Also, you'll get more computer for less money in a desktop. I agree with putting money into the CPU and motherboard and save it on the video cards, since those are much easier to upgrade.

I think that one's still needed. Without it, family members get a "spawn got A+" memory every single time said spawn gets an A+. I don't think it has anything to do with the cheering.

Sounds like you need Pescado's romancemod, which quashes that behavior... most of the time.

Yup

I've got a few downloaded lots that cause sinkholes in the middle of normal, non beach terrain as well. One even makes all the ground around it look like desert, which makes no sense since it's not even a desert lot. It worked fine before BV.

That would probably be a good idea, yes. I haven't extensively tested this or anything; I just read it somewhere like mts2 a long time ago, and it's worked for me since.

A while ago, I read that Sims will be drawn to the first door you put on a lot. Since then, I've always made sure the front door is the first door I build, and in combination with Pescado's frontdoorhack, this seems to work for me.

This is probably an extremely silly question, but did you delete the groups.cache file?

Shared PCs are evil anyway. Default replacements would be awesome, and with Halloween here, there are lots of interesting costumes that could replace the 12 colors of gorilla suit.

Members of vacation families aren't flagged as related to each other in SimPE, and they barely know each other. For example, teenage Connor Dawn has a 6 daily relationship with the woman who should be his mother, Caryl Dawn, and they are flagged as "known" to each other but nothing else.

Further, moving all the families around like that would be enough of a pain in the ass that making a whole new replacement template would probably be very little more work, with a much greater payoff. Anyone have links to a good tutorial?

Edit: Never mind, I see you already removed the lot in question. I have no idea what's going on then.

Quite possibly.

Maybe that particular family is somehow bugged?