Why I'm so Quiet

Well, yes, it's because I've been playing other video games.

Here's why I've been playing other video games:

Ever since installing Pets, my game has become laggy and unstable enough to more or less suck all the fun out of playing it.

This has been a gradual and measurable decline.

Before World Adventures, I could do as I liked with the game - play in any town I wanted, have a large CC collection, and live with a family of any size in any lot I fancied.  There were still some problems, but overall, not that bad.

By the time World Adventures rolled into Ambitions, I had to trim my CC collection down, and houses with more than 4-5 people in it, or lots of more than 40 x 40 size, were un-doable.

By the time Generations came around, to keep my game performing, my CC collection was bare-minimum at just default replacements, a few skins, and a handful of Twallan's mods.  I was unable to play in a town with more than 50-70 people in it.

When I installed Pets, I tried out Appaloosa Plains with a single sim in a starter home, and crashed three times in the first day.  I pared down my Twallan mods even more, moved to a small custom world with a population of about 30, kept my lot modest, and even then, by the time my singleton sim had acquired a decent collection of pets - a couple horses, a cat, and a dog - I was back to laggy and unstable.

So let's go over that again:

- I cannot play in any EA worlds, or any custom worlds of similar size and population.  I will crash.
- I cannot keep a normal custom content collection.  No custom hair, clothes, furniture, cars, or the like.  I will crash.
- I cannot live on a large lot, no matter how wealthy my sims are.  I will crash.
- I cannot have a household of more than 4 playable individuals, including pets.  I will crash.
- I could theoretically remove Twallan's StoryProgression to try and ease the load, but before I got SP, no one in my towns married, bred, worked, or did anything but age until death.  Boring.

And this is in addition to all the normal bugs that come and go with each update.

My computer is NOT crap.  I have a proper desktop machine, 2.66ghz quad-core processor, 8GB memory, and a 1024MB graphics card.  However, EA cannot code for Mac worth a crap.  They just wrap the game in a Windows emulator and call the bloated result OSX compatible.

So, at this point, I am finding a lot of other things I'd rather be doing than playing Sims 3.  I'm not gonna jump on a soapbox and scream at EA for it - they won't listen anyway -  but I will find other things to do, and stop giving them my money in the meantime.