As you can see its more or less a waste of time to wait for status updates from EA studios. Look at how long this thread has been going on and there is not one post from the staff that even comes close to explaining what the issue even is. They refuse to address any of the bugs with this game. Look at all the threads in this forum, they all end the same with a couple of posts from supposed EA staff saying they are working on it. There is never any resolution. So beware, playing this game will likely result in a colossal waste of energy.
That being said I think I figured out what the issue is here. I don't work for EA, as you can tell, because I actually have some sort of update.
The issue is that you have at least one friend in your friends list that has multiple cities assigned to a single account. This causes the game to error out when it renders the cities list (the code that runs when you hit the millhouse and bart button). This explains why you have other friends that can see your city, but you can't see theirs because they don't have the same friend in their list with multiple cities.
You can remove the offending 'friend' by:
1) logout of your acct from the splash screen when the game starts, there is a button at the lower left that does this.
2) relogin from the splash screen (again lower left button), this will bring up your acct menu.
3) hit the 'My Friends' tab to bring up your friends list
4) You now need to go through your friends list and find the acct that has the error:
5) Hit the arrow to the right of the friends name
6) Hit the 'profile' button
7) You will see a list of icons there with the various games they are playing, if you see two instances of Simpsons then delete the friend out of your list. Also, if you don't see the Simpsons icon you may want to delete the acct too (not sure if that would also cause an error in some cases). You may also just want to remove any friends that have not logged in for a very long time. All these are possibilities, but in my case it was because someone had two cities assigned to one acct.
8) To delete, hit the '+' button then 'Remove Friend'
9) Repeat for the rest of your friends in your list
It is also possible that your acct is the one that is messed up, having multiple cities assigned to it, etc. In that case you need to do something else like delete the city you don't want. I have no idea how to do that but if you figure it out post it because EA won't ever get around to doing that.
This is sort of a waste of typing, but if anyone from EA is reading (not likely)...you may want to put a check in for someone who is playing in anon mode but then assigns this anon city to an existing acct. I'm guessing the issue is caused somewhere around there and can likely propagate out to this persons entire friends list if their friends try to uninstall and reinstall the game once they see the bug. Better yet, just fix all the bad accts with a script or something to get rid of the bug for everyone right away...
