The Sims 3 Season keeps crashing on my MAC HELP!!!

[cornallama]

Don't believe this either. I used to be a big Sims fan, I even had my own Dutch fansite which was really, really popular. It's all gone, thanks to EA not helping us at all. Played the Sims for over ten years, I guess it's time to close this chapter of my life, sell my games and don't bother about EA ever again in my life. Seriously, I'm pissed, and I've to count to ten many times not to curse the people behind this ridiculous company. 

EA, because of this you make 10 years of fun playing completely undone, all at once. My last deed might be going to my neighbors at work. I work at the most popular television company in the Netherlands, and our neighbors make items about customer satisfaction about certain products. It might be time to give EA some attention. So long, suckers. Thanks for not helping at all

[gaa17]

I'm soooooo excited about this: http://consumerist.com/2013/04/12/4-years-after-launch-sims-3-for-mac-still-sucks-and-ea-doesnt-care...

Maybe change will come afterall.

[ppywong]

This is a problem for me as well. I have pretty much the top of the line iMac (spec'd up everything when purchasing, chose Fusion Drive 3TB as my drive though) so it shouldn't be a problem specs wise.

What's going on?

[gaa17]

There's nothing you can do; there's no solution to most Mac crashing.  Memory with the game is handled terribly with Mac Simmers because the game uses Cider.  Cider tells the game our systems are running a 32-bit WinXP system with only 2gb of RAM (even though are Mac specs are better than that!) so that it's "compatible" for our system.  This means our games freeze and crash a lot more often than Windows players because it's easy to use up all the memory it thinks we have available.    

I'm not sure how much troubleshooting you've already tried, but here's some advice:

If you actually want to "play" the game as it's supposed to work, then get a PC or Bootcamp & Windows for your Mac. The game is not natively written for our systems (I have a mid-2009 Macbook Pro). As long as EA uses Cider, a "wrapper" for the game that enables Macs to play Windows games, it's going to crash with memory issues.

Do not follow EA game advisors' advice without taking into account that many times their advice is wrong for Mac users and can harm our systems. Just use common sense when it comes to their "advice."

Here are two good posts from the Sims 3 Mac forum that have a couple of useful "band-aids" to get the game to work temporarily:
-- http://forum.thesims3.com/jforum/posts/list/658546.page
-- http://forum.thesims3.com/jforum/posts/list/611723.page

[yenial]

GOD BLESS YOU FOR POSTING THIS. I STARTED A NEW THREAD IN THE MAC FORUMS ABOUT THIS:

http://forum.thesims3.com/jforum/posts/list/0/678772.page#10806190

[ppywong]

Well it was fine until I installed the last two EP.

I don't know about anybody else but I feel I have had the raw end of the stick by EA. 

If you advertise the game for Mac, it should run properly. If it doesn't work properly, then don't advertise it for Mac at all.

I'm OK (not happy, but OK) to install the game on my Bootcamp partition and play through Parallels, but not OK with EA's false advertising, which it pretty much is.

If there is an EA advisor reading this, please pass on to your superiors and programmers: shame!

[gaa17]

---

@perrypwong wrote:

Well it was fine until I installed the last two EP.

I don't know about anybody else but I feel I have had the raw end of the stick by EA. 

If you advertise the game for Mac, it should run properly. If it doesn't work properly, then don't advertise it for Mac at all.

I'm OK (not happy, but OK) to install the game on my Bootcamp partition and play through Parallels, but not OK with EA's false advertising, which it pretty much is.

If there is an EA advisor reading this, please pass on to your superiors and programmers: shame!

---

EA advisors don't read these forums.  If you want to complain, here's a link to contact them: https://help.ea.com/en/contact-us/ask

Also, here is a post explaining how to navigate the contact page since it can be confusing: http://sims3.crinrict.com/en/2012/10/how-to-contact-ea.html


Best of luck.

[elmerglue77]

I had this problem too.  I read online somewhere that it is the time machine on the Mac, so either turn time machine off or lock it.  I did this and it worked for me.  I hope I helped!

[Lolzkittiezz]

I have these problems, too. It mostly only happens when I use create-a-sim, though! I can't use it for more than 5 minutes without it crashing. D: Sometimes the sim turns entirley grey with black eyes and then I get that error message. 

Also sometimes when I start the game it makes any other audio playing on my computer REALLY deep.

And about 50% of the time when I open the game it goes into fullscreen, freezes on a black screen, and won't let me do Alt+Enter (To close the full screen into a minimized window)

Does anybody else have these problems or know how to fix them? I can barley play the game anymore! D:

[Deligracy]

I'm also a huge Sims fan who has been playing since The Sims one without any issues, until Seasons came out.

I play on my mid 2011 imac. I am waiting on some more RAM (2x 2GB) in the mail to see if this helps. It also may help others to download the sims superpatch (although it has only decreased the amount of crashes for me).

You can also open the  "activity monitor" and go to "System Memory" to look at how much memory you're using whilst playing the game in window mode (command-enter). You can then open terminal and type "purge"  to gradually free up some space through re-setting RAM. You can do this multiple times and watch as the free space goes up. This can help. Mine has been at about 300 MB of free system memory which is woeful (I would think it needs to be at a few GB at least), despite having plenty of free space on my mac. I will let you know if purchasing more RAM will increase this.

I also have read that Cider (what  translates The Sims 3 from PC to Mac http://forum.thesims3.com/jforum/posts/list/539546.page) only allows 2GB of RAM to be used on a Mac device despite how much RAM you actually have, which would mean once you have more than a couple of expansion packs, crashing makes sense - hopefully this information is not correct and more RAM will solve the problem! 

My last plan will be to bootcamp windows and play from there.

M