I was wanting to create a discussion about pretty much what the title says. I feel like The Sims 1 was the only truly stable game in the series with all dlc
The Sims 3 had an unprecendented number of packs and content added onto a 32 bit engine that ended up borking story progression, routing, and other glitches over time. The Sims 4 was an always online game originally before the SimCity 2013 disaster forced EA to rush the Sims team to redo the engine to do something it wasn't originally meant to be, and gamebreaking glitches still occur every so often probably because of it. And the The Sims 2...I think it is actually the biggest offender. You could argue at least that 3 and 4's problems weren't encouraged to happen and TS3 1.69 patch launcher even says not to install more than a few packs at a time for "best experience"
But there are features that are outright ENCOURAGED in 2 that directly and 100% for sure will corrupt your hood. With the option to move active families on lots between neighborhoods and delete sims in the family bin.

It made me think if this was an oversight by the developers with the memories system as the memories and memory markers with sim gossiping are very commonly an issue with corrupted hoods. Could they really not program the game to properly delete ALL of the sim data so that doesn't happen (not enough time maybe).
This also makes me wonder if thats why TS2 style memories are not in 3 or 4 at all so the character files aren't so complicated. ...Or are they..?
I don't really hear players talk about if the type of corruption that plagues 2 creep into the other games. Are 3 and 4 sim character files just as complicated as in 2? Can 3 and 4 be corrupted because of data from deleted sims?? What do yall think are the reasons TS2 corruption exist, time constraints, oversight, etc.

Me personally I think time contraints because making a perfect sims game would take probably YEARS or even almost or even a decade maybe, and even in the "good ole days" of EA in the earlier sims games, they still would never wait that long
But what do other players think?

Sims 2 was always a stable game but it now needs help with modern computers. We recommend everyone uses the 4 gb patch, does up graphic rules and may need standby memory allocation. I now get pink flashing occasionally and my graphics look poorer on my newer better graphics card. I have these faint light lines in my terrain that show every now and then or flickering on the water or objects. It's subtle but I notice a difference. Never had any of this on my older computer. I manage the pink flashing by deleting the files in my thumbnail folder every now and then.

Corruption has always been the big thing with Sims 2. We recommend mods to help stop that, back ups and Hood Checker.

The thing with sims 2 is that by itself vanilla, it plays well. Yes, a new player might move sims between hoods and corrupt both hoods but it would have played well up until they did it and might even continue on for some time playing well after that. They would not have found the number of bugs that the other two games have.

They got rid of memories in sims 3 because of the corruption in 2. So yes I believe you can delete sims 3 sims at will, no issues. The issue with that game is more the pop-ups, the idleing, the world blockages. To give an example I found sims 3 freezing on me every few seconds after I had been playing it for a couple of months. Then in World adventures, my sim was unable to finish the quests, it simply stopped working. Sims 2 I played vanilla from 2004-2006 no issues. So yes I had probably corrupted a hood or two but even with the corruption, I was still able to play.

I definitely wouldn't say TS2 has been stable (without mods) at any point in its development, due to the corruption issues.

Sims 2 does have its issues, but I've probably had fewer problems related to corruption and annoying bugs with TS2 in all the 13 years I've played it, than I had within a couple of years of playing TS3 and another year or so of playing TS4.

My TS3 game would frequently throw bugs and glitches at me, to the point where no saves lasted beyond 4-6 saves, even with minimal to no CC, and each EP I added made thing worse (until the final EP took the entire game down into the drain since my drive couldn't even read the install CD - I still haven't bothered to fix it, and not planning to until I get a more powerful computer).

TS4 is a little less buggy than TS3 in that saves don't get corrupted that easily, but has too many glitches, annoyances and micro bugs (sims running around naked or invisible after rocket trips, routing issues, putting items everywhere except where they should be, general lag for no reason whatsoever, the fast-forward button halting animations, and so forth. Plus, the patches keep breaking the game. In TS2 you need annoyance fixes and the occasional patch or bug fix, and you're good. In TS4 you need fixes for even the most basic game mechanics to work, and that's not good game design), plus vanilla TS4 with one EP lags worse in gameplay on my new laptop than TS2 did on my fossile laptop with all EPs up to FT and 10 GB of CC (which is saying something, because that ancient thing took 3-4 hours to load the game). Plus, it's a little boring. Once again you're confined to the home, but the sims feel less real and much more animated than its TS3 counterpart, which irks me. It's like all the game mechanics are copy/pasta'd to every single thing the sims do. All the jobs in GTW are essentially the same, all the work stations are the same, sims seem to have less personality and are too emotionally unstable to be interesting (which is another thing I see as a bug in the system, because the emotion system doesn't work in a believable way), and aging is worse than ever (don't get me started on babies in TS4 and TS3...). Perhaps CC and mods can fix some of the issues, but when I can barely play the game vanilla, what's the point of trying?

In TS3, bugs would happen for no reason whatsoever. I'd be playing without any mods, and suddenly sims would start sinking into the ground, go invisible, or flat out not be possible to interact with, or custom swatches would start disappearing, or any number of other bugs. Once this happened, the save would start getting corrupted, and once it reached the end of what it could handle (1-2 more saves) that was the end of story, no possible way to salvage anything (that I found, anyway).

I feel TS3 and TS4 are loaded with bugs and issues that cause system lag, and they both had patches that would completely break game mechanics. Which is also why I stick to TS2. TS2 does load slower and have more loading screens, sure, but it also seems to be more stable, has less lag ingame, and as long as you patch up a few bugs and don't do anything stupid, it's a quite stable game. I've used the same neighborhood since 2007-ish for storytelling, and it's worked reasonably well, at least until my computer started bugging out. I also find bugs in TS2 much easier to fix and/or easier to live with. As long as you read up on what causes corruption, and don't do those things, the game is quite stable. Even if there is corruption, it usually takes much longer to screw up things, so there's usually time to salvage sims and lots with programs like SimPE.

My main issues with TS2 have been occasional pink-flashing on the stationary computer (set up to be a gaming computer in 2009, now it's practically ancient with a failing motherboard and/or failing RAM slots), some dual graphic card issues on my laptop (from 2012, with okay-ish specs then, now having a dead battery, and probably also failing in other ways), and the lag on the fossile laptop from 2005-ish (plus some early startup issues where my game would stop working, so I thought I had to reinstall the game because I didn't know about the cache files, but that's ancient history), a couple of issues fixed my patches or mods, and the occasional CC-related bug. Other than that the issues have usually been small and fixable, with the very occasional reset from a backup (probably less than 5 times after I became aware of the cache issue). So yeah - I'd say TS2 works better than TS3 or TS4, because those have caused me more bugs and glitches individually and in a much shorter time than TS2 has in all the years I've played it. More often my TS2 issues have been caused by a computer issue or a piece of bad CC than an issue with the game itself.

TS1 did have some simpler game mechanics, which is probably why it seemed more stable.

I am happy with Sims 2 it is more of a stable game, yes getting the Sims 2 patches for each EPs also help along with fixes that modders created for things Maxis overlooked.
I agree with Jo's your computer have a lot to do with it and getting the 4gb patch really help add memory. But all in all I don't think no Sims version is perfect, I am sure at one time or another,
we have all experience a crash while playing the Sims, sometime it happen when you visit a community lot. The 4gb seem to help with that.

Just the word corruption in my game will scare and sent me running to the hills. I try to be extremely careful to know what will and will not cause corruption.
Well I started playing the Sims 2 around 2006 and here it is a New Year 2019 and I still enjoy the Sims 2.

Sims 2 - a vanilla hood - can last for years - mine lived for four and a half before it vanished back in 2010. I now use the mods But I honestly thing 4 years cannot be seen as bad - by that time I was probably supposed to move on to Sims 3 (which I did, but that relationship did not last long). If only stupid me made a backup in 2005

However - even with all the essential mods, and probably due to using cc, I do have problems now that I never had in the vanilla game (the problems there were different in a way). And the hood that I started in 2014, Black Rock Mountain, is on the verge of going after 4 years anyway. But it looked a lot better than the old one, and the sims looked better, and - both hoods were a lot of fun to play.

I've been playing the game for quite some time now, and on 3 different computers, while adding all the EP's and SP's. I rarely get crashes due to the game itself, but the ones I do have are usually precipitated by outdated/unstable mods and lots that have too much going on with them.

That's why I don't like to download lots that have so much CC that they become literally very painful to play. They cause incredible lag and crashes-not the game itself.
Always pushing it to the edge of playability will degrade the game over time-which is also why I use the Sims2 pack cleaner to keep a lot from grinding the game down to a halt.
One has to accept the limitations from a game that was designed for a specific time and computer. It's sometimes a miracle that it plays at all given the advanced computers we now have that make it look so 'antique' and slow.
As for the other 2 games, I can't say myself whether or not they're more or less stable or prone to crashes, but I've read enough to stay away from them. I don't like playing games that require more work than they're worth. Sims 3 and 4 appear to me to be exactly that.

I feel like Sims 2, perhaps by virtue of its age, and definitely through the efforts of its community, is the one stable experience compared to 3 and 4. Truly, unmodded it has a lot of pitfalls and copious ways to screw things up permanently, but through knowledge and avoidance of VBTs, and treatment by the way of mods and backups, it is more than possible to have it run its long, happy course.

In Sims 4, I feel like I barely have time to settle before another patch breaks everything again. Parts of the code get rewritten and replaced, as is natural for the development process, but it also prevents the modders – who on many an occasion seem more invested in fixing things than EA – from keeping up with the changes.

Sims 3 is admittedly the installment I love to hate, so I'll refrain from saying much about it. I've always found its struggle in pulling more than a few expansions in one go to be weak and kind of a buzzkill.

All in all, I'd say from what we've seen so far that corruption in the Sims 2 is remarkably vicious compared to many other games. The pervasiveness, and the way it seems to occur spontaneously without any known VBTs from the player's side, make me regard it with a depraved kind of fascination. I'm tempted to say it's more insidious, and more aggressive when manifested, than corruption in the other installments, but I don't have enough knowledge of corruption in the Sims 3 to do so in good conscience.

My experience has been similar to that of the others. With Sims 3, things were going obviously wrong very soon, the neighborhood just emptied itself. I had borrowed the disc from my cousin for a week and went back to Sims 2 after that. Meanwhile with Sims 2, I'm pretty sure that I managed to corrupt my objects.package before we even knew that was a thing that could happen, and it still worked mostly fine, flashing beards aside. Since playing Sims 2 I've had exactly one situation that I would describe as severe corruption, when two sims just outright disappeared from my neighborhood. Anything else was easily fixable. Sims 3 seems to me easier to break, even though Sims 2 is broken from the beginning.

Fourteen years and counting and the only noticeable bugs I have seen in my Sims 2 hoods began after I started introducing CC in my game back in 2012. Like others, the chances are excellent I had already corrupted a hood or two (or eight or nine) by then what with all the moving sims in houses and deleting them from the bin. But I never noticed it (back then, I had never even heard of modding or corrupting my neighborhoods). Sims 3? Well, to be honest, I never play it long to really notice the bugs that can crop up with prolonged play in a hood. I have it modded in more less exactly the way I want it, but none of it matters when your brand-new sim freezes every ten seconds. That's the only bug I need to tell me that I'd have an easier time (and more fun) just settling in with Sims 2. It lags every single time I open the buy/build menu, but then, I have a CC problem that I don't care to address anytime soon.

I think that 90% of corruption in TS2 could be easily solved if Maxis would remove the 'delete family' button and any attempts to move occupied lots into the bin.

Agree to that Bulbizzare. It's a hard thing to test thought as corruption can happen whenever and not directly afterwards. But you are right, the Delete Sim button should not have been there. I have been playing the Sims 2 for about 10 years and I'm still scared to death that my hood will die on me. But I'm careful nowadays. Just recently I have started playing the Sims 3. I plan to play it as vanilla as possible and plan to get as many EP's as possible. But reading this thread makes me wunder if it's worth it. I do not want to build a new hood every few moths because the game have glinched out.

The thing with coruption in TS2 is that if there is corruption on alot or with a particular family, and you don't play with that family at all, the corruption doesn't show its ugly face much. That kind of corruption mostly happens through relationships and memories, and if they don't get a chance to mix in with other families, the neighborhood tends to work for quite a while before you get any noticeable bugs in the system. Most of the bugs aren't completely game-destroying like bugs in TS3 and perhaps TS4 to some degree are. In TS3, get a bug and the lot is pretty much unplayable after a very short time. I haven't played TS4 enough to notice any game-destroying bugs, other than the annoying invisible/naked sims that crop up everywhere after changing clothes one time too many (seriously - put some undies under your space suit!), which is annoying enough.

I guess I’d also add the question, WHY does deleting sims and moving household thru the bim HAVE to cause corruption. How come the game can’t properly delete references and sim data so that those features dont cause corruption. How even does data from unrelated sims just magically cause corruption. It boggles my mind! Heck even graves being destroyed can cause corruption without the no unlink mod.
Don’t get me wrong The Sims games are more fun than frustrating and The Sims 2 is a great game and I can find alot of fun enjoying it just like the other games, but i still become frustrated at times with its problems just as much as 3 and 4 and my computers fine for all of them with all packs so that isn’t the issue and i carefully mod all 3 games to hell and back for bug fixes when I can. I wonder if i’m the minority in thinking The Sims 2 is just as guilty for bugs and gamebreaking issues as the others games are save for TS1 bc SIMplicity (I’ll see myself out..)

(..Back In) Arguably I think this game can be just as gamebreaking as 3 and 4. Players shouldn’t have to avoid features and mod the game with no unlink graves or even a mod I think for preventing grand vampires from turning Mrs. Crumplebottom into one. The same reason players shouldn’t have to mod overwatch into TS3 to stop the neighborhood from building up with glitches.

I guess Life Sims really are that hard to make and I wish publishers like EA didn’t treat the sims and its dlc the same time format as say games like Battlefield or other shooters-__-

The fragmented data doesn't "magically" cause corruption. It's straightforward enough.

Sim data are organized by ID numbers. The sims we see are merely the human-interactable representations of all the code that makes up their true selves. New code is generated and old code is modified throughout the sim's existence, and it's all organized by the ID number, which works much like your social security number - it's tied to your identity, and it's used to track all your information through the mazes of government, corporate, and financial data systems. Except that, instead of making sure that the taxes you paid in Massachusetts match up with the benefits you draw when you retire to Florida, the sim ID organizes them right down to their DNA. And instead of doing this job for a single country, it does this for an entire world - which is what a neighborhood and its associated subhood constitutes, a distinct universe, separate from all the other neighborhoods on your computer.

When a sim dies, it doesn't cease to exist - its interactable representation becomes a tombstone, with all the data packed away, ready to be reactivated when necessary, so that when a sim is resurrected, turned into a zombie, or spawns as a ghost, it will behave appropriately. When you delete a sim with move_objects, it doesn't cease to exist; you've just had a subset of its data out on the screen for some reason, and using move_objects puts it all back where you got it, ready to be called out again whenever you need it. Your interactions with the sim send out calls to the vastly complex data in the machine to sort for strings associated with this ID number, so that the sim behaves as it should.

When you send a sim to the lot bin, however, you yank it out of the universe. If you delete a sim with the trash can, or by deleting its tombstone, you annihilate it as completely as it's possible to annihilate it. Its ID number is deleted.

But the system is much too complex for you to take every single bit of data associated with the number. Lots of references (much of it entwined with the data from other sims) have to be either brutally cut out of the neighborhood's system, leaving a hole; or left behind as insignificant trash. I don't know exactly why this was allowed to happen, but coding is a hard, nitpicky job that runs headfirst into the Law of Unintended Consequences constantly. No program gets sent out into the world perfect, and this is a flaw that this game code has. If you've ever worked with paper files, however, you'll have an idea of what's happening. Imagine if you had to get rid of every single reference anywhere in the world to a single person, without wrecking the files on anybody associated with them, and you'd not be surprised to find, a year after you're ostensibly finished, that you missed a mention of them in the legal documents associated with a fenderbender they witnessed in another country twenty years before.

Sim ID numbers, when created, only have to be unique in relation to all the sim ID numbers in the neighborhood. When a sim is deleted, their number is deleted - so the game is free to regenerate it. And when it regenerates, all those little bits of code referring to the old sim now are free to hook up to the new sim. And this is how you get toddlers with adult wants, cats who think they're humans, and so on.

If you move a sim into the lot bin, its number is deleted in the neighborhood of its creation. If you move that sim back into the same neighborhood, a new number is generated - and the odds of it being the exact same number are not great. If you move a sim into a new neighborhood, it's still organized by that number - which may or may not be unique to the new neighborhood. And mass confusion occurs.

So why can't the programmers "just" fix it? Well, they sort of did, in 3 and 4. But I recall the late great Mootilda saying somewhere on here that the only way they found to do it was to make individual sims disposable and their lives meaningless. And, though I have never touched either game, I've heard enough people on here complain about the lack of individuality and personality in the sims of later generation games to be grateful that they never "fixed" corruption in that way here.

Basic untechnical reason: It breaks data. The game doesn't really destroy those sims from the bin, it destroys a part of them while shredding the rest. Broken bits of floating data then look for a place to attach itself. Which is how after deleting a sim you can get a toddler wanting a romantic relationship. The data from the semi-destroyed sim attached itself to that toddler.

In TS2, by now we know most of what causes bugs, and it's possible to avoid them or mod them out. CC and mods made to work with AL/M&G are quite stable. As long as you read some Wikis or forums before you do anything that screws up your game, you're good.

I'm pretty sure I screwed up my game in all of the possible ways on the old laptop I had, and I probably had a few bugs, but nothing very noticeable. The corruption was probably too slow and random for it to have an impact on the game. After a lot of screwing about on that computer, plus after doing a bit of reading on what would cause bugs, I learned what not to do, and stopped doing those things.

In TS3 the reasons for bugs could seemingly be anything. Those I had were so random and out of the blue I to this day have no clue what happened and even why it happened. Sims would just start glitching while doing nothing else than walking across a lot. In TS2 I can leave the Testingcheats cheat active, and have no issues. Five minutes of it being active in TS3, and the game would go down the drain, even when not doing anything with it.

In TS4, the patches are the worst, and since the game goes via Origin, the patches are forced, so without some tinkering your game and a lot of your CC and probably some of the game as well basically get screwed up every time Origin/EA decides to "fix" a set of random (mostly unnoticable) bugs. The updates also take up way too much space on an already quite full laptop, with up to 2-3 new GB for every update. I kid you not - my entire TS2 game (14 GB) takes up less than a GB more than TS4 and one EP in the Program Files (13,2 GB), with TS3 and all but one EP at 31.6 GB, but that's understandable since it deals with a lot more textures than TS2 with all the patterns and presets. I do wonder how much space all of the TS4 expansions and future updates would take up, because it's bordering on ridicolous.

(and we all know EA's track record with "fixing" stuff... Their patches have a tendency to break more things than they fix, probably all the way from TS2).

I know it's frowned upon, but I haven't used the EA patches on my TS2 game, other than whichever patches and fixes came with the install CDs and is applied when installed in the right order. The only bug the patches supposedly fix that I've ever noticed is the one where the drawing table from FT makes ingame pictures go glitchy (I found a mod for that, and I no longer use ingame pictures, so either way it's not a problem). For what is left I've applied some player-made bug fixes, and I feel they're a lot more stable than whatever EA manages to fart out on their best day - because unlike EA, most modders actually fix and update their mods if any issues are noticed...

Love all the discussion in this thread but @Peni Griffin your response spells it out quite well I think. You said what I pretty much believed this whole time but I couldnt be too sure and couldnt put into words like you could since I’m definatley not all that familiar with coding in general.
You pretty much said it, TS2 was pretty ambitious in making the sims complex but it came at a cost in that it risked this kind of corruption.

Was it worth it? I know like you said many players believe TS2 sims are more “deep” than 3 and 4 but me personally I never seen any gameplay changes from the gossiping and memories system. I mean it’s cool in theory in that I *think* i heard your sim can find out about a cheating partner through gossip but i never witnessed this or seen someone else witness it so idk. 3 and 4’s sims *sometimes* at least seem to do a few quirky behaviors according to their traits and they have subtle behaviors that I like just like TS2. If it really is true that the charactile files in 3 and 4 are less complex than I think it a good trade off since I haven’t seen big benefits from 2’s complex character files, though it doesn’t matter that much I guess since 3 and 4 have other problems of their own:P

But I wonder if anyone has looked at how character files in 3 and 4 are handled and if deleting them outright does infact cause any type of corruption similar to 2. TS2’s biggest issue was corruption so that why there seems to be alot more research on files in that game, but since 3 and 4 have different kinds of issues i don’t know if anyone has looked at their files the same way to see if some of their problems come from TS2 styles corruption as well.

TS3 sims are about as static as they come when they're not doing anything, and they have this annoying tendency to stop what they're doing, stand still for a few seconds, and then go do the new thing (I think that may be an issue in TS4 as well). I find that a bit too robotic. TS4 sims do have some quirky behaviour, but I don't like a lot of it, hate the weird smiles, and all of the overdone looney-tunes animation, particularly for the walkstyles. The badly handled emotions make them seem confused instead. Plus, the constant fiddling with electronics and clay toys and the like bothers me. I find they've got a lot of strange routing issues, too.

I find the idles in TS2 least annoying, and some are quite funny and cute. The sims somehow seem a bit more alive, and I think they flow a little better from action to action. Because of the memory system they remember some of what they've done (they remember they've lost a family member, for instance - and the wants panel reflects their personality. If they've been in a fire, they fear fire. If they're romance sims they may fear having kids. Basically, their personality chooses what they want and fear, and usually does so better than moodlets in TS3 and 4). I also like that there are added quirks to the outlayers of personality points, such as very playful sims having fun with the fridge door, or a sporty sim running everywhere. Sometimes these things may even come as a surprise if you're not aware of them. An added bonus is that the genetics and aging system in TS2 is the one that works best out of all the games, so they're the only sims that look like they belong to the same species from baby to elder (TS4 is completely useless in this area since babies don't seem to have proper genetics, and TS3 has given me some very strange results from time to time - and the babies both look like they belong to a different species entirely, not even counting in the alien babies).

I get what you mean, but the animation design of TS3 is what makes them more on the robotic side to me. When it comes to behavior though when they do freaking move lol i see them doing subtle eye, face, and head movenments on their own and around other sims, I see them do stuff like prefering to eat nearby family and romantic partners/close friends just like TS2. Over time they start to favor beds if they have been sleeping in the same one even before the UL update (i had to mod TS2 for sims to do this).

Theres other examples not on the top of my head right now but 3 and 4 sims seem to do realistic behaviors alot of times just like TS2. The memories system is a cute idea fosure but if it truly does risk the kind of corruption 2 has bc of how complex it is I personally would rather not have it, unless it could be made right with enough time and ability. Maxis developers I believe have the ability,.just EA would never give them the time

(btw I get what you mean about them looking like they should belong to the same species. I wish they would at least touch up the baby model in 4 even if its still attached to the crib, the model looks just as alien as the actual aliens from GtW lmao)

The thing is, with TS2 if you avoid the things that could cause corruption, it's quite stable, and usually won't hit you over the head with something suddenly going wrong on its own. Most of the issues people seem to experience are related to CC, computer specs (because it's an old game not meant for newer systems), or to player stupidity.

With TS3, if you just look at it wrong it destroys your saves. White gloves and a dust-free environment won't even keep it safe. With TS4, you have to cross all fingers and hope that the new expansion or patch doesn't screw up all your CC, and things need to be updated pretty much with every new pack or patch (TS2 did have this problem for a while, but mostly just with EPs and the occasional SP, so there were around 9 larger game updates when the larger EPs came out, instead of 20+ halfway random times a year like with TS4. TS3 also had the patch issue). I feel CC in TS2 is also a bit more stable, as long as you think before you put stuff in. A lot of people who have trouble with CC usually skipped the reading.

With TS2 it was also somewhat easier to keep track of mod updates, because the community wasn't as spread out as the current TS3 and TS4 communities are. There were perhaps around 10 sites to keep track of for the most popular mods, and not hundreds of Tumblrs and other sites. Plus, most of those modders lasted around the community for quite some time. Nowadays you're lucky if the site you found the CC for TS3/TS4 is still up a month later (because they often stop playing, make a new site, delete content, or otherwise make things hard for the downloader). TS2 players do seem to be a little less likely to take their content and run away.

I guess this is up to our own personal experiences. There are quite alot of little ways you could corrupt TS2 that very well could come to bite you out of nowhere by deleting sims and other drastic changes. I have experienced this and I remember feeling like “whaaaaAAa” because I believed like you said that if I avoid corruption as much as possible, TS2 would be the most stable in the series...I was proven wrong by witnessing my family being deleted outta nowhere. At least with TS3 and 4 i know they have that reputation of being buggy so i go in knowing what to expect. But I think TS2 seems to have this reputation of being oh so stable when in the blink of an eye The Sims 2 could turn on you and bite, not just taking a toe or finger or foot..,BUT THE WHOLE LEG and BOOM the whole body (aka neighborhood aka BFBVFS!) an from what I understand this could just as easily as not happen with the simplest form of corruption sometimes TS2 can be sorta gracious and take years to build up, but sometimes TS2 can be mean and i actually felt offened more by this happening to me than issues in 3/4 bc i thought 2 was supposed to be the most stable in the series. After sometimes I realized all 3 have their fair share of problems. Always a 66% love/33% hate thing for the Sims for me I save that extra 1% for self-love lol

That's what backups are for. They're like insurance. You hope you'll never need them, but they can be a lifesaver in the cases when you do. Even if there is background corruption in a backup, you may be able to salvage a lot or a sim from it. Besides, some kinds of corruption in TS2 can be fixable, and modders have created some great tools for this.

I find TS3 to be much meaner than TS2, and its corruption usually came literally out of nowhere, losing everything in the process. I find it a lot more annoying to not have a clue where the problem is, because then there's nothing to fix and it's not possible to learn from it.

It's personal experience, sure. 13 years ago I was as clueless as most people who starts out in a game they've never played before, so I probably did a lot of borkage-inducing stuff back then. Now I've played the game for around 13 years, read a lot about the issues, learned how to fix some of them, and pretty much know the quirks in my own game. Can't speak for anyone else, but my TS2 game seems to be quite stable, and nearly all the issues I run into nowadays are computer or CC related.

Yes, once my sim could not finish the WA quests nothing could fix it. I had only installed it to go through the quest line. As to finding out why sims 3 sims can be deleted (I know its to do with them not having the memory system of sims 2)-not really interested. I would hazard a guess most of us here would not be either. There is a reason we post on the Sim 2 board.

Haha true. But I posted here because I wanted to start off talking about exactly why TS2 has the problems with corruption it does have. I don't know If those who post more in the 3 or 4 forum would know as much about TS2 files either, or even about 3 or 4 themselves because at least on the surface it doesn't seem this style of corruption happens in 3 or 4, they seem to have separate problems, but I was curious if maybe deleting sims in those did cause corruption.

I've had some frustrations with TS2 and good times with 3 and 4, and vice versa so alot of our experiences on here are different. I love 2, I just don't think it is anymore guiltless than 3 or 4, but i still love it anyways :lovestruc