Manga Snark

You would think 2020 would have been THE year to play The Sims for me. All this time stuck indoors, not much else to do but solitary activities, and a craving for control over some virtual life if not your own. But in addition to the stress and horror around every single corner this year, the near constant depression/anxiety cocktail I've been intoxicated on for months on end, I've just been so frustrated with my TS3 game on my desktop. It's gotten bogged down with disorganized custom content, and it isn't long before most of my saves slow down to a snail's pace without any hope of speeding it up again. Anyone who's familiar with TS3 knows its problem with integrating CC so well that it's impossible to uninstall after a while.

My only hope of improving my gameplay was to uninstall the game with all those bells and whistles, obliterate ANY evidence that it existed on the computer to begin with, and then carefully and selectively reinstall everything that I still wanted on the computer, refusing the rest. But because I'm a sentimental digital PACK RAT that balks at the thought of accidentally getting rid of anything I may "need" for future gameplay, I had a hard time with the prospect. Plus, it's a VERY daunting task, and I wanted to play right away.

So, I decided to take advantage of my Origin registration of base game and expansion packs, and take those over to my somewhat robust laplet instead. I figured I could run a fairly vanilla installation of TS3 on here, and just kind of explore the game expansion by expansion through a bare-bones legacy family, moving them through all the content I have in the order it was released, generation by generation. I call this a "discoveracy" but I'm sure the person who came up with it first called it something less awkward, because I KNOW I'm not the first one to try this goofy little idea.

My issue right off the bat was logistics, because I didn't make this easy on myself since the beginning. When I first started with TS3 years ago, I created a profile on the official website that I eventually became rather unhappy with, and I wanted to change the name. EA doesn't allow that level of customizability for your account on the site, so I made another one to use, but I couldn't move the game registrations I already put on the first account. I now had two accounts with a number of different expansions registered to both.

So, THAT was a problem.

A couple of years ago, I wanted to merge the accounts, but this was many MORE years after the first account that I had long abandoned was created, and I didn't remember the email address I used to make it, so I couldn't log into the account anymore. While EA can merge more than one account you've created out of stupidity on Origin/their official site, they need to verify that both accounts are yours, and would have to send an email to the address I had forgotten ages ago with a verification code. Since I couldn't confirm my ownership of the first account, EA sent me an email to my current address to apologize and say there was nothing they could do if I couldn't prove to them that I was the owner of the first account. SIGH.

I gave up for a while, but not permanently. I got a bug up my ass to figure out what that email was one day, and after an afternoon of cyberstalking MY OWN OLD ACCOUNTS on various websites I had also abandoned (the ones that still existed, anyway), I finally cracked my own fucking code. I figured out my old email address, and was able to log into my old account. Huzzah! Victory for Writch!

I figured that since I had access to the old account now, I didn't really NEED to merge it with the newer one, because I could just install the game and expansions on my laplet from each account and it would be fine. I started with the old account that had the base game plus the first expansion registered to it, and then started my little legacy family as described above, my founder dropped in Sunset Valley to begin, and his children moving to Riverview, and their children traveling in World Adventures. Lots of fun was had, and I was cruising through my game.

Unfortunately, when I switched to my newer account to grab a stuff pack I had registered there, all my expansions and store content I had installed from the previous account was lost, and so was my save, corrupted by my carelessness. The installation of ALL my expansions and stuff packs, and worlds was only possible on my desktop because I possessed the physical discs at the time of installation, but I gave those discs away to my sister shortly before I really started leaning into my plan. Now that I only had the games on two separate Origin accounts, I was never going to be able to play all of my content at once like I planned.

Soooooo, back to EA I went with a request to merge the accounts, except this time I had the means to prove I was the owner of the old UN-abandoned account, soon to be RE-abandoned and then deactivated. It went VERY smoothly.

Well... mostly. They were unable to transfer the three worlds I had on the other account, which REALLY stung, because they were a couple of my favorites. Believing they were lost forever, I bugged EA to give me a voucher to get new copies, but to this day I haven't heard back on the issue. Probably because it turns out it doesn't matter, because I can just grab the .sims3pack for each world from my desktop's downloads file and copy them over to a thumb drive, and from there install them easy onto the laplet copy of TS3.

Or so I thought. I tried to do it a few days ago, and while the files said they had installed on the launcher, going into the game revealed that there were no such objects available in the game. At first I thought it was complicated bullshit regarding some sort of digital signature specific to the deactivated account that prevented me from using the content that I BOUGHT, forcing me to buy it again if I wanted it on my new account... but it turns out the downloads folder in my new game was just corrupted by my switching accounts before, and taking it out so it could be replaced by the game again fixed the issue.

And there it is: the result of so much time and effort and many strings of curses, a functioning TS3 game... just in time for 2020 to be over. I guess I can start publishing on this blog the adventures my new "discoveracy" sometime in 2021. If time allows.

Strangely, I hope it won't.