I am a bit surprised how many people are annoyed with the storyline progression thing. This is The Sims 3, not The Sims 2. And storyline progression can be disabled or enabled - unless the option does not work I am not quite getting why there is already mods out there.

The Sims 3 does compensate as you can place households into the bin and then place A COPY back ingame. So - if something goes wrong or if you want to continue with your old household you can simply place a copy back into game and you are where you were with The Sims 2 - a household unchanged.

Personally I think that with the whole open neighbourhood thing storyline progression is an essential part of TS3 and you`ll miss a bit of fun and oh-no moments if you disable it. Just ... make sure you have a copy of the household or person in the bin when you switch households in case something really goes bad (like the guy/gal you wanted to marry leaves town).

What's so fun about random babies popping up out of nowhere and well established families moving away so a new, random family can move in?

Everything about Story Progression seems random. Marriages, births, "adoptions", moving, career changes. It's all run by a randomizer instead of an AI, so it seems.

Even if I wanted Story Progression on... not like that.

I actually don't mind it at all. It keeps the neighbourhood populated and the changing families gives my heirs more possibilities. Just imagine if you play a legacy how many spares you'd end up with. I don't think there would be enough lots. Especially if you get them married before they move out, and then they have kids...then their kids have kids etc lol. I guess it depends on how you want to play your game. Personally I only liked playing one family at a time and having all those spares around forever bothered me, now I don't have to worry about them.

Well, my level 10 journalist obviously got into a crisis as he switched his job to police officer ....

Babies is a bit of a must if you play an aging population - there should be, however, some finetuning.

I do agree that the storyline mode needs some work over. If the game stores inter Sim relationships for the NPCs too then households with a lot of active connections should not move out as readily as a household that has few to none relations - especially with user created households.

In addition user created households should have a lower chance of moving out than NPC households.

I am curious to see if EA will patch storyline progression mode and if so in what way.

Still, (maybe I just got lucky by not too many weird things happening to me so far) I keep the mode on.

It really depends on how you play your game. I only play one household at a time so the neighborhood growing and changing around me is a good thing. People who switch from household to household have characters quitting jobs they worked forever to max out, having babies with no daddies, leaving town and vanishing forever. If I was the type of person that played one household then the next I could see how this would be terrible for me.

Fortunately the game gives you the option to turn this off. Unfortunately, that option doesn't work...The only way to get it working is to install a hack. Personally, I'm not frustrated, but I can easily see how others with playstyles different from mine (read: control freaks) would be.

I actually love that feature! I love knowing that whatever happens to my sims I'll just have a copy of them but that doesn't help players when their sims "move out". What if you had sims that had full skills and high leveled job and full collections and they "moved out"? You would move in the copy yet that copied sim won't have the skills or high leveled job as the original copy you had. (at least I think)

I don't mind story progression,I'm more of a one family player but I do sometimes tend to play many sims. I agree that parts of story progression need fine tuning.

That's excatly why i like it. But I think that I will make a hood where it is turned off (I downloaded the hack) so that I can just make random family's that i make whenever I feel like it.

I like to create alot of sims throughout town. I hate the ones the town has. i like that they can get married or find jobs or have kids. I just hate the idea that there's a chance my created ones will leave town. there should something so that created sims do not leave town.

Yeah I kind of like how it is now I don't feel pressure to switch households to age up everyone equally now. I can just concentrate on maybe a few. I think though what I'm going to do first (since i never got a family up to like ten generations) is just play one family at least once and i'm going to try out the short lifespan so I can try to get through ten generations for once lol