Which do you prefer to play and why?

For me it honestly depends on my mood, but most of the time I prefer to make my own custom sims.

I apologize in advance if some of you misunderstood my question or if I phrased my question kind of weird. I was basically just asking which do you like better, but by no means was I telling you to choose between them.

Custom, only. I have zero interest in a story made up by someone else, which means premades are pointless. Quite confused by how popular the premade hoods are (and the many custom-made inhabited hoods), but clearly there's something fun in it for some people, so good for them. I want to play my own Sims with my own stories

I love the pre-mades, even more so than my custom Sims but I do love both. As long as they have some type of story behind them, whether pre-made or I make one up myself.

Pre-mades. I like the built-in story.

False dichotomy. Most either/or statements are. I love them both. I started with custom sims, but as a neighborhood player who loves university I very soon started adding them. And it's nice to have a premade hood on the side to step into when you reach a scheduled back-up point with time left in the day to play.

If I could only choose one kind, I'd prefer premades. I like the built in stories. But, I've created custom Sims to supplement the premade's lives and i enjoy playing those custom Sims just as much as the premades.

I personally love premades because I can talk about them with other people on this site, or read about what other people do with them. It's fun to see what happens with the sims in my game, and then hear about the totally different things they got up to in someone else's game. I also like seeing what stories the sims started with, and then either continuing in that fashion or going in a completely new direction. I'm having a ton of fun right now with a megahood, which has all the Maxis premades plus Widespot attached. It's been an absolute blast!

I have fun with custom sims too, it's just different. I haven't tried it before, but I think I would enjoy doing a BACC type challenge and starting with all custom sims.

I've always made custom hoods with my own sims. There are a handful or pre-mades I have played over the last 10 years for a short while.

The appeal of pre-mades for me is playing through situations that I wouldn't set-up on my own. That's not to say I prefer them over my custom Sims who are special because they're all my own. Even if I give them boring lives in comparison to the drama in Strangetown/Pleasantview.

I love them both. At the moment I'm in love with my mega-hood, so I guess I'd have to say pre-made at the moment, but overall probably custom sims.

I usually just play with custom sims but lately I have been playing with the Pleasantview sims that have been extracted and placed in a custom hood. The old storyline is completely nonexistant, and even some of the family relationships don't even exist. I have found this to be very fun and exciting as some sims that were together in Pleasantvie have ended up together on their own in my custom hood and some sims that loved each other in Pleasantview hate each other now. Plus playing this way allows for me to give the sims personalities and the like that the original Pleasnatview versions did not have.

I used to play a bit with the premades the first couple or so years, but got bored. Now I play mostly with custom sims.

I love the pre-made ones so much I brought all the dead and deleted ones back to my game and they can be had here at MTS for you to play around with. (Just see my sig.)

I prefer custom sims. I've never found the premades interesting (except for Johnny Smith and Ripp Grunt), but there's nothing wrong with people who do. I've just always found it frustrating to do things that are designed to be fun the way you're "supposed to" do them, even if the "supposed to" exists only in my own head and nobody else gives a rat's patoot what I do.

Different strokes for different folks and all that, right? As long as we're each having fun, that's what counts.

I like both. If I had to pick, I'd go with custom, just because the vast majority of my Sims are ones I've created - either in CAS (a few) or born in game (lots). But mostly, I just like the Sims that I like, and it doesn't make a difference to me whether the Sim is one I put together myself in CAS or if it's one that was already living in the neighborhood in a house or as a townie.

I usually play with both, unless I'm playing a test hood to test some downloads out. I like to see how the maxis made sims we all know interact and react to my sims. Even with my own sims, everyone must marry a townie, so I can get a more diverse mix. My sims will always look pretty, I find it hard to make them intentional ugly, likewise they all have sweet personalities, whereas Maxis sims come in all shapes and sizes. I'd never make a Brandi Broke, (who I always play as desperate to get married and not too keen on work), and I never create elderly custom sims, they are always young adults about to start their life. For me, mixing with the pre-mades gives my game better diversity.

In my test hood, it takes years and years before they got enough back story and a city built up, the pre-mades help me develop much more quickly.

I don't see why I gotta choose - they simply have different purposes.

You can start playing a premade neighbourhood right away so it saves you a lot of trouble. You just have to figure out what you want them to do with their lives from that point on.
On the other hand several of the Maxis premade hoods are rather dull imho - that's why now I'm exploring custom-made inhabited hoods, which is a different way to get a fancier premade hood :D

But premade Sims usually do not cover all my expectatives. I always want a little bit of this or a little bit of that in my hoods, so I keep creating new families which add that little bit until I'm satisfied.
For example, in my current hood there is a custom family moving in every simweek - but they will slow down as soon as population grows a bit.

So, replying briefly to your question, there are some premades I love and others I could not care less; I've created some great custom sims and others which never really developed as intended.
That's the fun of the game, you never know what's gonna happen.

I love both.
I'm absolutely in love with my megahood which contains all premade playables. They are all so unique!
But i also like my custom sims! I love to tell stories! xD
Maybe one day i'll combine those two sorts of sims. I hope that my neighborhoods last long!

All of them. Premades, townies, my own Sims (I make some now and then) all have their place in my game. I do, however, prefer the bin Sims to the other premades At least I can make some choices for them!

I love playing both.

Sometimes I stick with the stories designed for the premades. Sometimes I go a completely different route (mainly if I want a premade with my own CAS sims, I'll change up what Maxis laid out to happen). Sometimes I play premade hoods, sometimes I play my custom hoods.

I will admit that there are some premades and hoods I'm just not interested in and won't touch (Veronaville, among others).

Hate premade!!! Have killed them all and will kill any I spot in a second. Much work to get rid of them. I would buy sims for gamestation if I could mod them away but nooooo.

I always feel awkward playing premades... like I'm poking around in someone else's game. I've tried a few times but I just can't get over this feeling of guilt that I'm not leaving the game how I found it!

So I guess I'm custom all the way. Especially now that I randomize any sims I create in CAS.

I play a custom 'hood where even the townies are all custom (and all Romance!) Everyone enjoys themselves doing the sort of things that Romance Sims like, and it's good for light relief.

I have Pleasantview and Strangetown which I occasionally play fairly conventionally with emphasis on the pre-mades. I play them mainly to get to know the famous Sims I keep reading about here, but even there I have CAS families, who help me find my way into the stories.

But my favourite remains my Veronaville with its rich mix of CAS Sims and pre-mades, which I've been playing from Day 1. I started off just playing my own Sims and slowly the pre-mades, starting with the townies, worked their way into my story. Today all the Veronaville bin families have moved into houses in Veronaville or its downtown and are included in my loose rotations. The last to move in were Goneril's family, because big families are harder to play, and I suspected that Albany would be a troublemaker. They're still in their first day in their permanent house, having stayed briefly on a little house in the Via Veronaville till Consort gave them enough money to buy Cappland. I added Bluewater Village late last year after getting OFB, so now the Bluewater Sims (both playables and townies) are starting to work their way into my game too. True, the Capps, the Montys and the Summerdreams see themselves as "Old Veronaville" and maybe some of the older Capps and Montys resent all the incomers, but the younger generation have no regrets -- they like the way the town is shaking off it's fuddy-duddy old criminal image. Few of them have any interest in continuing the ancient feud. Today's Veronaville is still a beautiful place to live with its historic Tudor buildings, but it has a vibrant heterogeneous population with very little distinction between pre-made playables, CAS Sims and townies -- they are all full Citizens of Veronaville with inaliable constitutional rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. (Veronaville Town Council should pay me for the good publicity I'm giving the town!)

For me, it depends on my mood and what I feel like playing. After a long or bad day I'm more likely to play one of my families with an outgoing teen and send them to a community lot for some in-game fun; days without much else going on I might play families with larger overall goals that have to be worked towards over time. And I do have custom Sims that have lofty goals (like the one that has over 100,000 aspiration points for buying Elixir of Life and wants to fulfill the "20 loves at once" lifetime want as a teen so the love relationship goes away when she ages up to an adult).

I've always thought of the backstories the premade Sims come with as ideas, I can follow them if I want to (or not!). Especially in the base game neighborhoods, since they were released before any of the expansion packs added things to the game. Turning someone into a vampire, witch, or something else in one of the other expansions (if I'd had them), probably changes gameplay in a manner the game designers probably didn't think of when they originally created the neighborhoods. And then there's the premade kid that's in one of the bin families when installing Apartment Life, after I downloaded the recent anime stuff from here I also downloaded some long male hair, changed the wall to pink paint, and made him an otaku.