Various Sims 3 Bugs [ Edited ]

[Corvinus6259]

First bug is to do with the launcher itself. The launcher opens but the main "welcome" page is just a blank screen. If left long enough the screen changes to white and says "504 Gateway Time-Out". I've looked up reasons for that to happen and have ultimately cleared the caches in the Sims 3 files on my PC, I've also cleared caches and reset various settings on my browsers. However nothing seems to work. 

Second bug, when the game launches and it tries to automatically log me into my EA/Sims account an error box pops up saying that my email or password is invalid, despite having not changed either. I can't seem to find any cause for this and therefore no fix. 

What's strange is that these bugs seem sporadic, all over the place. Often what happens is that I will play the game however often and it will work fine until one day it just bugs out and things stop functioning as normal, forcing me to stop playing for some time. After a few weeks or months, having left the game alone entirely, I will be able to launch and start the game without a single problem as if nothing was ever wrong in the first place. It's almost like the game is "fixing" itself over the course of not running for a while. I don't really understand how that works but that seems to be the pattern anyways. 

The bigger frustration is the fact that Origin came into play about half-way through my accumulation of the games expansions so half of them are saved in Origin and don't require me using my key-codes to install, but the other half for some reason never got registered into Origin even though I have them, so I have to use the key-codes, manually reinstalling a handful of expansions and packs. I've avoided having to uninstall and reinstall for this very reason but given that I can't find out what is causing the bugs in the first place, I may not have a choice. 

Hopefully someone has had these issues and can possibly help to figure out all the possible causes and fixes. 

I currently have windows 10 and since I've had Sims 3 since its release, the patches and whatnot are fully up to date.

[puzzlezaddict]

@Corvinus6259  There are a few different issues here.  First, for the blank launcher, the browser cache to clear is Internet Explorer's—even if you never use it, the launcher does for some purposes.  Be sure to uncheck the box to preserve data for favorite sites.

https://kb.wisc.edu/page.php?id=15141

That should hopefully take care of the attempts to automatically login as well.  The other thing to point out about the launcher is that there have been a few different errors on the EA side over the past six months or so.  They've all been resolved, after varying amounts of time, but it sounds like you saw at least one or two of them.

As for the packs that aren't registered, you could still add the codes to your account nowm provided they haven't been used.  Or, if you registered them on the old Sims 3 store site, you could have EA customer support merge that account with your current one.  (Keep in mind that any store content owned by the old account would likely not transfer over to the new one.)  Otherwise, you could always contact support and ask what happened to your codes.  It's possible you'd be able to get a support rep to manually add them to your account, although that doesn't always work.

https://help.ea.com/en/contact-us/

It's unlikely that a reinstall would fix any specific issue with the game—most problems either have less intrusive solutions or are on EA's side.  But if you have a specific problem at any point, please describe it, and I'll try to help.  There are so many issues with the game these days, and each one needs to be addressed separately; there's no cure-all solution to be had.

[Corvinus6259]

@puzzlezaddict I've done all of these things, the issues are still occurring on and off and have occurred on and off for probably a couple years now.

I've become used to just giving the game a break for a few weeks, sometimes even months, before it starts to just work again. I also only have one account for my sims so all of my games should have been merged into Origin, but they weren't. The codes aren't missing, I do have all my physical copies and codes still, the issue is that they should have all merged but didn't so uninstalling and reinstalling becomes a hassle when Origin only has half of them, leaving me to manually do the other half.

I'm at a loss anyways, none of the things makes sense and all the obvious fixes don't actually do anything.

[puzzlezaddict]

@Corvinus6259  When I said missing content, I meant that some of your packs don't show in your Origin library.  I can't help with that—account issues like this need to be handled by customer support.  Whether you want to go that route or not is entirely up to you.

For the rest, there is no one solution.  Each problem that's appeared has had a different fix, if there has been a fix at all.  So I can't tell you what to do to prevent or fix issues that haven't happened yet, or even to lower your chances of having them in any significant way.  The game hasn't been patched in years, so there's no fix forthcoming from EA.  Windows keeps getting updates, as do drivers and other associated programs.

So then all we can do is address each issue as it crops up, hope we can work around those that aren't on the EA side, and ask EA to fix the ones it causes.  Again, if you have a current issue, you're welcome to post about it here and ask for help.  But there's not much point in doing general troubleshooting without a specific problem to solve.

[Corvinus6259]

@puzzlezaddict The issues have happened. I've listed all the current issues that are occurring, and just stated that these exact same issues have been occurring on and off for a few years, and the suggested fixes you offered (Clearing the caches through internet explorer) I've already tried and it does not work to fix the problem..

The specific problems are that the game launcher doesn't load properly, and IF I can manage to get the game itself running, the automatic sign in tells me that my account information is invalid, as if the account itself doesn't even exist, even though it 100% does. These both cause massive lagging and saving issues within the game itself. But I've cleared internet caches. I've cleared game cache files. I've uninstalled and reinstalled the game. All of which I stated in the original post..

If there's really nothing else that any person can possibly come up with that may fix these issues then I guess I'm out of luck.

[puzzlezaddict]

@Corvinus6259  Try moving your Sims 3 game folder out of Documents\Electronic Arts and onto your desktop.  (Then clear IE's cache again, just to be thorough.)  Opening the launcher will create a clean folder with no data, including no cache or log files.  It's not necessary to sign into the launcher unless you're uploading content: I download everything through the store without being logged into the launcher, and it's always fine.  If the clean folder works, you can transfer your content into it in batches, testing each time to make sure the issues don't recur.  Here's a list of the content worth keeping:

https://sims3.crinrict.com/en/2011/01/faq-user-files.html

Signing into the Main Menu isn't necessary either, unless you want to track badges or send gifts to friends or something like that.  It does take extra resources to play while signed in, but the difference is small and doesn't normally cause significant issues.  It could be that your internet connection is slow or doesn't get along with EA servers, or your antivirus/firewall is blocking something.  You can play with the settings if you like, or just not login.  You can also set Origin to offline mode before you play.

If you're having "massive" issues with lag or saving, that almost certainly has nothing to do with the launcher problems.  The only time they're related is when you have bad custom content installed, which can cause lag, crashing, graphics glitches, and also problems with loading the launcher.  A clean folder will get rid of the bad cc, so it will be easy enough to test.  Otherwise, lag can have many causes: overloaded saves, playing in poorly made worlds, underpowered hardware, overpowered hardware generating wildly high fps, random game glitches....  Most of these can be fixed or at least worked around, except usually for weak hardware.  But they do all require different interventions, none of which involve uninstalling and reinstalling the game.

If you want to troubleshoot the in-game problems, great, but that's separate from the launcher not loading.  Let me know whether the launcher issues clear up enough to let you at least load your game consistently, and we can try to address the rest of it.