The gallery's filters should actually filter content.

Daleylife

I'm really puzzled by the decision to include filters in the gallery, yet none of the filters actually function.

I don't have any stuff packs and I only have one expansion and one game pack. So, I'm attempting to populate Newcrest. However, even though I have all the stuff packs unticked, everything that shows up for me most likely includes content from a pack I don't have. How is this logical? I am almost completely unable to find houses/venues for my neighborhoods because I can't filter out the content I don't own.

And somehow this is "by design." It makes absolutely no sense. I hope a guru sees this and gets working on getting it changed. How is a person like me, someone that doesn't own every pack, supposed to place buildings in my worlds? As it stands now, I can either use a ton of my time to cross check properties that don't contain content I can't use or I can download whatever and see properties look half finished most of the time because they contain content I don't own. It is really mind boggling. Filters that don't actually filter....

gummybear0724

Are you missing game/expansion packs? The free holiday pack?

Daleylife

Yeah, I thought I said that. I don't have any of the stuff packs. But I have the holiday pack. That is free and comes with the game.

SimmerNickYT

I completely agree! You tick the boxes of the packs that you do want in your lot, but it doesn't filter packs that you don't want.

Daleylife

It's very silly.

plopppo2

Filters are not Maxis' thing.

We think that the people that could do filters did not migrate from TS3 to TS4.

TS4 doesn't have internal filters - take the Relationship Panel as a good example: it is like it was made by an 8 year old.

Filtering and sorting are woeful.

PugLove888

@Daleylife and others, I've always wondered about this as well! Drives me up the wall! And I can only imagine a young teen who doesn't have a job yet trying to explain to their parents that the reason why they need a stuff pack is because without it you cant find free houses to download from the Gallery. I'm sure their parents are thinking this is some kind of excuse.

DKguruArtist

While i agree i doubt it is something that will happen, think EA gets money out of people getting tempted to have those things from gallery. Deciding to avoid hassle then just buys them to have house lot or sims that been uploaded with those things. One thing i found is you can go in on lots and view what items are from packs, decide if you can be without them or not. Imagine might be possible to do same with sims then just replace those item and save them again?

But yeah been nice if they fixed that.

aloadai

Yeah, I own most packs so I don't really filter using the packs. If you don't have the items from that pack, the game will just replace it with something familiar that the base game has. Some people literally only use one object from a pack, so I don't mind that potted plant not showing up lol. Though this sucks if you want to download a venue that centers mostly around items from one or several packs. Doubt they will ever edit this.

I wish they could also just add more filters for finding what you really want. Sometimes I want a one story house or a male single sim, but there are no filters for this....

DKguruArtist

Took me a while to figure this out but you don't really need filtering option for packs, it seems packs you don't have in gallery show up as 3 gems in a green icon. So if that pop on any gallery ones it would seem there a pack you don't have, then seems you can browse it and see details and show items to see which specific items you don't have weight if they're worth getting or you can replace them.

Which makes me wonder why gallery functions aren't better explained and they don't just remove filtering for packs all together as they're broken to removing gallery popups you don't have anyways?

Andigamous

The way it's set up now, it should be called "highlight" instead of "filter". This serves zero purpose. :|

Patchezs

I genuinely don't understand what the point of having these filters even is in its current state.

Either this is just bad design, or it's intentionally built to manipulate players into buying more packs.

Extremely, extremely disappointing.

Xwanton

Too many people use loads of stuff packs in their builds, so for people like me who don't own them all, the filters are useless. We should be able to filter content out.

PreCiious

its by design because they are trying to get the money out of the Players, doesnt matter how…
I for myself am like....
''I really neeed romantic Garden stuff to have this Beautiful park''.

No seriously its really frustrating. You are doomed, espacially when you suck at building houses, or you are stuck with ea Builds. They tend to Forget toilets in the houses or copy paste a Base Game House or leave it half way empty.

QueenMercy

Yeah the closest thing to this we have is that green flag with the three plumbobs in the corner that says you’re missing something from a pack.

I do appreciate being able to see what exactly people used from specific packs though.

Though is it just me, or does the “packs used” ignore anything an alien’s disguise is wearing?

Xwanton

This is such a frustrating issue. I've had to quit the game out of annoyance because finding lots is near impossible. It's either boring full basegame builds, or having to wade through all these houses where the builders felt the need to use every single stuff pack in existence. Why does this feature even exist if it's not going to do anything useful? I'm sorry I can't build. You'd think the Gallery would be such a good tool to share content but instead I'm stuck trawling downloads online and not having any better results.

And no, I'm not going to buy more SPs just to get around this. I already own most GPs, all EPs and a few SPs, so why should I have to own every single release just to be able to use this feature with any kind of success?

afai1261

QueenMercy wrote: »

Though is it just me, or does the “packs used” ignore anything an alien’s disguise is wearing?

Yes, 'packs used' ignores alien disguise forms and vampire dark forms. This includes CC detection.
I was absolutely mortified when I discovered that one of my no CC sims actually had a CC outfit in his dark form that wasn't detected by the filter