I find MTS the most wonderful place for custom lots. It is a lot better than official site, just to leave it at that. But with more than a couple of dozens lots I downloaded, most of them do not contain a name within TS3.

In your Edit Town screen you have a tab that shows all saved lots. All EA lots have a name, and a nice description of what the house is about, even how many bed/bath rooms. I do not expect our creators to include all those details. But here is an annoyance: TS3 sort things in a mysterious way that newest download is not always the first on list. So I would have to scroll through an entire list sometimes to find a lot I want. To make matter worse, I can only rely on a tiny thumbnail to identify each lot beside its size.

A very few lots I downloaded on MTS actually include a name, such as EagleHills.net, Aquarium, etc... they are so helpful when it comes to finding lots in a 2 dimensional primitive list EA provides us.

I am not sure if there is any difficulty to include a name on your saved lot, but I know you guys spent a lot of times creating those wonderful screenshots. So calling all creators, I urge you folks put a name for your lots to make it easy to find within game. I love many lots downloaded from here, I just ... always have a hard time finding them.

This has been said in various ways and in various threads dozens of times. A lot of the creators that make heaps of housing know this - it's most likely the people who are only just getting started who forget to do it. It's annoying, yes, but creating you're own thread about it won't help, since they're only just getting to know how the upload process works. If you come across houses without names, the best idea would be to leave a polite comment on the page you downloaded it from asking them directly. They probably aren't even aware of how to do it if they're new to uploading.

Not true in 100% of all cases. I have downloaded houses from people who have a ton of them uploaded. No name, no description, no nothing.

From the building perspective, I know it only takes a few seconds to name the lot, and add your own name to the description. When I upload houses I put the URL to our website in the description so every player who downloads it will know from where it came, PLUS give it a descriptive title (ie: Mansion with 15-Sim Capacity) or if I feel a bit goofy when I name it, like I did with the mansion I uploaded that holds 15 Sims, I come up with something like "Honkin' Modern Mansion for 15 Sims!". Either way, there's no doubt about exactly what that lot is.

From the downloader's perspective, I don't even want a fancy name for the lot. I really don't care what kind of ostentatious name the creator thinks it should have, I want the facts of the lot. "Edgewood Hills" tells me nothing. 4 Brd., 3 Bath 2-story Vict. home tells me a LOT!

Here is how I work through all of this nonsense in my game:
Install only a handful of houses into my game at one time. Start my game, go to an empty town and place the houses I just downloaded (just make to place them on same-sized lots). Delete the original from the library. Now check through the house to make sure everything's up to snuff, rename the lot to what it REALLY is, possibly add a description, then copy it to the library.

Also, once a house is placed where I want it in my town, I permanently delete it from the library because there's no reason to create more clutter and confusion than absolutely necessary.

The problem is, not everyone who uploads houses has 40 years of organizational experience, so sometimes you just have to come up with your own.

That is something I result into doing, renaming, maybe edit a little bit of my own, and save it as "version 1.1" or "v1.1" for example. But I totally disagree that you should just put it in town and delete it off the bin. Thing is, saved games are not guaranteed. I often have corrupted saved games. The only thing that is safe from corruption is saved family. And because I can not trust saved neighborhood, my only way to keep anything is that lot bin.

And haylz320, I find 90% of the lots here do not even have a name. We do not have that many "noobs" here. It would be nice to have more information like how many bath/bed rooms, but all I really hope for is just a name so I can find what I just downloaded.

i personally prefer it when they don't include a name, because then when you hover over it, it shows what lot it was built on, and where it goes best.
And i'm pretty sure they are ordered by the date they were created, not downloaded.

How about put a name in "description", that would not interfere. But the biggest hurdle is after you download a very nice lot, say, in MTS with creator naming it "My beautiful house". You see all the wonderful screenshots, and you just can't wait to put it in your game. But when in game, you may scroll through about 100 nameless lots and not knowing which one it is. You even tried placing several lots and turn out it is not the right lots.

I have such experience before. I downloaded something so nice and could never find it. And about weeks later by coincident I placed a lot and turned out it was the one I have been looking for the whole time. The thumbnail was not always a good way to find your lot.

Now if TS3 lets us search by suggested location, lot size, etc... that would make things completely different.

[QUOTE=tomomi1922Now if TS3 lets us search by suggested location, lot size, etc... that would make things completely different.[/QUOTE]

Oh god yes!

True, saved games can get corrupted, but off the top of my head I can think of several ways to keep information so all the houses don't need to be kept in the lot bin.

- Keep the original files of those houses downloaded. If needed they can be reinstalled. (If the houses are being installed through the launcher, once installed copy the original files elsewhere.)
- Back up the library. Each house file is contained in My Documents/Electronic Arts/The Sims 3/Library. Once it's backed up, delete all unnecessary houses.
- Periodically back up your towns, either by placing on a second hard-drive or burning to a DVD or putting them on a flash drive. (I periodically archive my town files to .zip files, then put them on my second HD.) Three copies would be plenty enough. It's highly unlikely that all three copies would get corrupted.

Many years of playing Sims games has taught me to keep redundant back-ups of everything, from my game saves to my custom content. I know going through the back-up process is a pain but it's one of the prices to pay for playing Sims games.

Keeping everything in the lot bin not only makes it hard to find the lots we need, but I am noticing it also slows loading times. There's no reason to keep all of them in there.

That is very thorough of CC organization. I am not sure if most of us are willing to go through that much to back up the games. I do back up often (just copy to another hard drive) but not going that far with saved lots. Well, you are right in every way. I would do that too if this is my business. But lots are in .sims3pack files, install/delete them is part of the pain I want to avoid entirely. You can't install while the game is running (unlike .package file where you can download and place them in the right location, and when it is all done and over with, just restart the game). Uninstall the lots from Launcher is also a pain when you are given a 2D list with only a thumbnail and a name, viewable in a tiny window, smaller than that within TS3.

Unlike clothings or other items where I can just store images file along with them, and use a photo album program like Picasa to browse, what I see in the images is what I get. A dress is a dress, once you see the images, you immediately have an idea what it would look in game, especially you have used them before. But for lots, even we can download about all the images given by the creator, like 5-10, we still do not remember the exact house just by looking at the images. Some would look very good on images, but when you place it in game, you may find there is something that really irks you, stopping you from using it at the first place.

I delete all the lots that I consider complete junk. But for those that I still wish to save for use later, whether it is just not yet suitable for my need right now, or there is something about that lot that I use as reference. Such as a color theme that somehow I like, a placement of the bedroom, etc... You see, those kind of things have to come handy. The other day I was remodeling a house, and I just cant get it right. So I loaded another lot (that gave me the original inspiration) place it on some empty lot and somewhat copy the styles, color, wallpaper, etc... from it.

Because this is how I play Sims, I have to have my collection of lots handy. About load/save time, TS3 only saves whatever already placed on the map, and ignore those in the bin completely. TS3 keeps a list of lot descriptions (size, thumbnail image, time/date) of an item in bin (lots, saved families, etc...) so loading this list is minimal effort. TS3 would not read into the saved lots until you actually attempt to place it on the map. So having 10000 saved items in bins do not affect load time that much. However, if you really have 10000, scrolling through them all can be a killer.

I still opt for EA to create something for us to manage saved and custom content better. I mean, how many Sims players just play with 3 lots and 10 sims?