Why is it that the more ways we get to contact companies, the less we are able to do so. We used to be able to easily email you guys but now it's a 65 minute (or longer) wait for live chat, which I absolutely will not do because the only people on those lines are people with basic information that is pretty useless to most people. I could call but that would mean talking to someone without more than very basic information, my getting frustrated, then having to wait 65 minutes to try and find someone who can maybe help but really can't. With email, I can actually provide all of the information and then let you guys go through it and see if you can figure it out. Much more efficient and more likely to produce real results so I'm at a loss as to why you don't want to provide your loyal consumers with it. But instead I have to write to a community forum where you can shift your customer service responsibilities to unpaid people who are generally more informed than EA.
Now, I'm a bit behind in TS3 because of issues here and there and I've just now gotten around to raising a teen in my family and giving them the option to learn to drive. (I found this ability by accident - I sure do miss those books that came with the games as I don't read documents on the computer.) How excited I was to have this option! Woohoo!!! Wait....nothing is ever what it seems with EA. The "mom" of the family is free-lance in the Interior Designer career so I've obviously been going with her in the mornings - no choice actually. It's a slow tedious process so quitting time generally happens after 4pm so didn't have a clue things weren't right at home. I'd noticed my teen and child getting scolded now and then without a clue as to why and, after several sim days, found they had bad grades - C- & D. What??? They've been doing their homework so what's going on? The next Sim day my Mom stayed in longer to work on her design skills and I discovered that the kids weren't going to school because the bus wasn't coming.
I went online to find out what was going on and found one post where the OP posited that it might be connected to a teen having learned to drive. No one had an answer for the OP - figures. EA sends us to a community instead of actually taking care of the problems themselves. To test this, I picked a different household in the same neighborhood where there were teens who hadn't had driving lessons and, you guessed it, the school bus came. Big stupid glitch that EA either didn't test (how is that even possible) or didn't care.
Now, because teens (or adults like in Sims 2) don't have the option to drive anyone else to school, I have to jump through hoops AND stay on top of something I'd rather just be autonomous. While I've been having to go into each kids career pane to make them go to school (kid is riding a bike I didn't provide), a couple of people have suggested using the go to lot option to make the teen drive the child to school. Whee....so instead of an autonomous action that allows me to take care of other sims, I now have to click on my teen sim, click on the teen's car and choose go to and then who to go with, wait for the map to load, choose the school and then, and only then, move on to something else. Wow! Thanks EA for that fine bit of programming.
I'm hoping someone out there knows of a mod that will allow the bus to continue to function as it should. Barring that possibility, perhaps someone has a fix that at least allows non-driving sim youths to ride the bus autonomously so I only have to worry about one. My future teen sims may not learn to drive at all - great game action, EA.
And BTW, why don't you have a character count for the Subject line! You want to hold us to 80, tell me where it cuts off! Geez! Now I have to keep rewriting it and having to take several steps to pick a product AGAIN - OVER AND OVER AND OVER.
