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Complaint, Dropping Mac Users
Cinebar
Posts: 33,618 Member
Maxis you give a three day notice MAC users (Lion10.7) should not update their games on Oct. 3rd or they will no longer be able to play their owned packs. To never update their games again. I'm disappointed you couldn't have given a heads up sooner than this. Like a year, or thirty days or more. Especially since some probably are needing a patch for something. I have no idea how many users you have using a MAC (lion 10.7) but this is very disheartening EA and Maxis couldn't have given a wider time frame for these users to find out their games would no longer be able to play if they install any new patches. Surely you knew this longer than the three day warning.
"Games Are Not The Place To Tell Stories, Games Are Meant To Let People Tell Their Own Stories"...Will Wright.
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There are things to be upset about, this isn't it.
So, it's ok to tell those users just a few days ahead of time, they won't be able to play the game if they allow Origin to update, when they may not even be online those few days. I think a larger window of time should have been thought about for some users to see this notice since it's not even over on the EA site. A least a thirty days' notice like when they are ending servers. It doesn't matter if it's one consumer, imagine you didn't see a two or three day notice and allowed Origin to update your game, and could no longer ever play it again. That's just wrong. (Maxis and EA had to know this would be the case before two or three days notice of a patch). ETA: Some consumers are miners, EA should give longer notices/time frame.
Those users had way more than 3 days warnings about the upcoming drop of support for Origin, which also means upcoming drop of support for games themselves. All these warnings are given through the Origin client to the users who are on systems that are no longer supported.
How many users actually go on EA and look at the support pages? About as many who play on pc and complain about the support pages for the pc version are not user friendly so they never go there. This site is where most people go to find out anything, whether it's about a patch or a bug or gameplay problems. No matter if they are playing on the pc, a MAC or the mobile games. What I would pass off as no bother might not be so casual to someone playing on an old machine, and we all know younger people than sixteen or thirteen play these games. The site is badly managed in my opinion when it comes to announcements and notices about changing anything or even announcing packs. I sat here three days when IL was already out and being shown by the game changers and there wasn't even an announcement it was released over in GPs.
I can't say how well the notifications are for PC as I am on a Mac. I can guarantee that the warnings are more than adequate on Macs. If anything, they're a bit overeager even from the OS itself as well as Origin.
I agree that the forum is a good source of information about packs, release dates etc, but "most people"? Maybe that was true before but most people go to a search engine, which may or may not lead them here. (My 12yo daughter who's a Simmer has never been on the forums. She does a search and finds her answers elsewhere. Or honestly, short of the game crashing, ignores them. But that's another debate entirely)
That’s what I was thinking. I thought this was part of the warning along with them dropping support for 32 bit Windows.
"get with the times" and all that
Everything stops getting updated with time. It's to be expected for everything.
There is supposed to be a version of the game they referred to as the “Legacy” edition, which would still allow you to play TS4, but that update and version are nowhere to be seen, and EA has been really silent about it.
Personally, I’d just update macOS if you are able to. It’s free, there have been a ton of new features and improvements since Lion, and it’s better security-wise for your Mac.
I'm not a Mac user, so I don't know how the Origin client works, but on PC, if you don't update your Sims game, you are forced to play offline. And if you have other games you want to play online, there's always the risk of autoupdate being turned on in an Origin update.
Hopefully, EA is proactive and ensures that people on this OS cannot update. Otherwise, hopefully people who do get caught up on this are very, very loud.
Autoupdate doesn't turn on without the users content (I'm on Mac and have automatic updates off and it hasn't changed in the client though I dare say it updates more often than TS4 does). Afaik there was already a rolled back patch that broke the game for Lion users so they'd have already been warned about leaving Auto-updates off. Honestly, I don't know if they even have the regular Origin client. (there's a legacy one for unsupported systems.
I understand the concern. The problem is that the current version of the game contains an element that breaks the game for the upcoming MacOS. To make it work on the new system, because of how MacOS works, the patch I mentioned (that broke it for Lion users before) has to come back.
Since they did the rollback before, I would guess that they will make a compatible version of the game available to anyone who hasn't turned off automatic updates yet. Though with multiple warnings about incompatibility and the issue with the previous patch, I would hope that the vast majority of Lion users have turned off the auto-updates.
Not true.
The drop in 32-bit support for the game is only applicable to Windows users. In the same update Maxis are dropping support for non-Metal Macs. It is the upcoming version of macOS, 10.15 Catalina, that drops support for 32-bit apps. The game has always been 64-bit for Mac, ever since it was released in February 2015, apart from one tiny little niggling file called ActivationUI which is 32-bit. This 32-bit file is causing the game to not run in Catalina. It was fixed in the April patch but subsequently had to be rolled back because it broke the game........ for Lion users. I suspect this is what has been implemented again in this upcoming patch. Hopefully support for Lion may be added to the Legacy edition.
@Cinebar
It would have been nice to have more warning but if people running Lion are not aware and update their game I'm sure they will get online and look for answers. They will then find that all they have to do to get playing again is update their version of macOS to a later version. Macs that cannot be updated past Lion do not have hardware that meets the minimum system requirements, they are typically 10-11 year old machines.
Perhaps all of the games that people are unable to update anymore are the Legacy edition?
From how EA explained it, the game would receive a patch and then become the legacy edition.
Yeah, that's what I figured. Anyone who is no longer able to update their game will automatically own the "Legacy" edition. It's a nice name for those who will be left behind if for some reason they can't upgrade.
When I had a Windows partition, I left that at Windows 7 for the longest time so I could play Sims 2, and Windows updates cost money anyway. But, Mac updates are free.
Is this the first iteration of The Sims series that is dropping the OSes of MACs and PCs? Like dropping the MAC version noted in this topic and dropping Windows 32bit etc. I don't ever recall any of the other games actually dropping an OS in mid stream of production. Of course there were upates and announcements to be able to play newer packs sometimes, the player would need to have a better machine hardware, such as shaders, processors and or video cards to take advantage of a newer packs shading and or processor requirements, but I think this game is the first game I can recall that goes around dropping the OS of a MAC or a PC after the consumer has bought into the idea they can play the game since their OS was listed in 2014 etc. as being supported. Odd set of business ethics.
ETA: As TS4 continues, I wonder if at some point they say hey kids!, we are dropping XP, Windows 8, Windows 7, etc. after the fact those were the operating systems they claimed would play the series. (not just 32 bit) But if at some point they get cut out, too.
My guess is that's because no other Sims games released content past 4-5 years.
5 years is a long time in the tech world. I've never even owned a computer longer than 5-6 years, because technology is constantly improving.
If they made Sims 5, they'd be starting with newer tech, but, they've decided to continue with 4 instead. Which necessitates changing stuff mid-stream if they want to keep up.
Sure, but say you never played TS4, and decided to buy it now, the requirements are still the same though they are no longer going to support some of those OS types. Maybe there should be a big fat warning, such as If you download this game, be aware you won't be able to add all the packs you may want, nor continue past the early part of 2019.
They actually physically stopped supporting XP a good long time ago (like back in 2016 maybe? It was a while ago, I'm trying to find the announcement for it but my google-fu is failing me, there was a lot of activity about it on the forum at the time, and Microsoft themselves stopped supporting XP back in 2014. XP came out in 2001 it was a good system but it's almost 20 years old no one should honestly be trying to use it anymore anyway). I think you can still play on it but they don't actually focus on anything to make sure the game continues to run on it so eventually it probably will stop working for people the way that newer systems can no longer play Sims 1 or 2 without you being lucky or having to jump through hoops to get it to work.
It's seems a bit much to expect a company to spend time and effort and money on making sure their game runs on system that the company that MADE the actual system hasn't supported it in a good long time. Everyone wants the game to grow and improve and this is just part of being able to do that.
It's possible but Macs are pretty persistent about annoying you with the requests to update. Also, if you don't there are internal features that stop working. (like iTunes on the Lion OS)
Macs eventually become unable to support new OS versions though. In this case, Macs from 2009 were all able to update to at least the next one after Lion (Mountain Lion) and only those older than that are stuck on Lion. Most of those older machines barely, if at all, meet the basic requirements to play TS4 to begin with.
Players who have Lion already had their game rendered unusable in April precisely because of the 32bit issue: Maxis patched it so that a message about 64bit incompatibility wouldn't falsely display for every other Mac user (Lion is the only OS that this affects as machines running older OS don't meet the game's requirements) and had to roll back. At the time, Lion users were notified that this fix will happen eventually again since the upcoming OS Catalina would render TS4 unplayable for everyone who updated to it if that one file stayed 32bit. They HAD warnings, this is not coming out of the blue.
Machines that run Lion and also fit TS4's requirements are also capable of updating to a newer OS (for free, unlike Windows). Maxis had a choice here: continue supporting Lion users (after they already warned them that there's an issue with 32bit vs 64bit) which would cause warning messages for everyone else (7 other OS versions) OR patch the issue and not kill the game for anyone who updates to Catalina.
TS3 is going to be useless for every Mac user who updates to Catalina until the 64bit version is released next year. That's kind of a bigger deal than a fix being dispatched that anyone on Mac knew was coming since at least April.