Posting it here because it's in the Sims 3 launcher. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
Started the Sims 3 yesterday and saw this...

Looks like toddlers in Sims 4. I foolishly tried clicking it, and EA wanted to install something on my browser, so I stopped it.

What's the story? I don't dare open EA because it will do another update, and their updates are killing me. As you can see, I'm already stuck with 1.69, I can't bypass the "Launcher" either, and it makes me ill to know that EA is using MY TIME to download advertising on MY DISK. EA updates always seem to make things worse.

Would like to know if what's going on, however.

Hi Emmett - Since it release Sims 4 adds have always shown up in the Launcher. The three buttons at the bottom are various pages for S3 and S4 ads. Clicking on that will either bring up a screen asking you to log in and/or just provide more detail on their announcements. I wouldn't worry about them downloading anything else. You are already screwed with 1.69.

Toddlers are so cute in Sims 4, i saw the video about their skills, and quite surprisingly it seems like they are getting less annoying than ever. Almost makes me want to "buy" Sims 4. <3

Almost temps me to buy Sims 4 as well, even though I really don't think Sims 4 is nearly as good as Sims 3 and will never give up Sims 3 no matter how much EAxis starts to no longer care about it.

I have TS4 and even played it recently, and, yes, they added toddlers a couple of days ago with the latest patch, but this doesn't make the game more enjoyable, because the overall aesthetics of the game doesn't appeal to me (also, I don't like babies and toddlers at all IRL, and am neutral about them in sims, but it was kind of weird to have a whole lifestage missing in a life simulating game, so toddlers is an important addition).

I don't really like the idea of having kids of my own and am not huge on kids, but I do think they can be cute once they get a bit older and I don't flat out dislike them, I do prefer dolls and cats to them, but I frequently play sims having children and absolutely love the sims 3 toddlers and children (babies and teens I'm not too crazy about, or elders, my most played life stages are probably YAs or adults with babies, toddlers, kids, and the occasional teen that may or may not include a pregnancy and/or boyfriend or marriage due to said pregnancy.). So I definitely would only probably get Sims 4 for toddlers, and probably vampires too since I love them, but I'll probably stick to sims 3 as I don't like any other sims 4 game aspects.

If you want to avoid more ads from EA, you should also set your FeaturedItems folder to read-only if you haven't already. This prevents the game from downloading all those thumbnails you see in-game when you click the Store icon. While they don't take up a lot of space individually, they do add up fast as the game downloads several hundreds of them.

Yeah, I did that.

And on my old computer, I bypassed the launcher and Origin, but that computer failed, and I did a complete reinstall from Origin. That was a major mistake. I should have used the disk and did the upgrade to 1.67.

I play the game with Origin "offline" so I don't need to wait for Origin to download all their ads into ORIGIN, and I have Sims 3 to shut down the in game buying as well. But the launcher still downloads ads, and clicking on them wants to install stuff on Firefox. No way!!

Toddlers in the Sims 4?
We'll that's news. How many years and how big a protest did it take? I don't know if EA/Origin are ever going to wake up to the fact they lose customers this way. The whole 1.69 Update, or as I call it "We have you now!!" where they keep you from your game with more and more crap products is just bad business practice, it's unethical.

blocking application (Launcher and the game) in the firewall would be not so bad. Well, you also can just block the whole domain tree or just register ea domain as localhost in the local machine ip resolver file (hosts in windows). As a bonus - it shall speed up the loading time of the launcher; you won't be loading any content from the ea's site.
It's malicious software designer and provider by definition. Problem solved

Yes, they made them. Now most of the sims 4 community broke in tears because it obviously messed up the whole game and mods. They're (EA staff) like actual goverment in my poor country - they even are unable to screw things in the *right* way. But, well... "beign screwed" is apparently an importand part of the whole "Sims 4 emotions experience" soooo... Design decision! that is! :D

There is a long thread about it on the 4 forum on mts, you don't risk anything reading there. Lots of nice pictures as well.

The toddlers in TS4 look so good, and cute and all the features are amazing, But it broke the game unlike anything before

Umm. Well IMO the game was broken from the start, and nothing they add to it is likely to fix it. Not even the cutest of toddlers.

Seriously though, the toddlers are very well done but when they age up it's still the same boring game it was before that doesn't work right half the time. JMO, YMMV.

If it was a game made for a smartphone, which is clearly a base scope of the its origin design, I'd be an one of those in the 1st line to clap for a "job good done". If Id' be able to cram into, of course

I suppouse my comments may be viewed as very negative and full of hatred or something. It's not the case. It's not so bad game, obviously broken like each franchise iteration because of EA's policies for making savings where they never should. Well, it's the whole industry cancer anyway. Eh, well, we have made them like that, we - costumers - for some extend - taught them than pissing on our head is a good way to make money.

Anyway.
It's just too limited to be "The Sims". A "Sims Series" it's a good line of products where this thing fits well. Just - wrong device from the marketing point of view and definitelly very wrong asking price.

That's nothing new for the Sims franchise. There were a couple of times that patches for The Sims 3 also broke lots and lots of stuff, like when the TS3 Pets expansion was released, for example. This is comparable to that.

Remember in Sims 3 when we were saying that sims having memories like they did in Sims 2 would be nice, and then we got them?

Two months later we started getting mods to turn them back off because EA is really good at promising something that looks really cool and then giving us something that turns out to be broken. Playtesting for the Sims probably would not be easy. You have to test everything that the players might want to do with it, and it's not as straightforward as "make sure the gun shoots instead of exploding." But I still think they don't have enough of a budget for the playtesting because there are always some things that should have been caught that aren't.

For me, it doesn't work. Thumbnails still downloads to Featured Items folder, if I am connected to internet. Hate this.


About sims 4 toddlers - yes they cute and much better than in sims 3, and I envy a bit for ts4 players right now, but.. but it doesn't change the fact that sims 4 is full of crap. Still....

This is clear example of incompetency and very, very little grey mass on the tiny brain of theirs. You do not need to make *any* testing to understand that such solution like that feature shall be burden. Elementary (my dear Watson ) knowledge of that how hardware works and about its limitations, and already present problems because of project would be enough.

I really don't think this is going to prevent EA advertising through the Launcher in particular, but you could try this:

Delete the FeaturedItems folder and its contents entirely.

Create a text document called FeaturedItems.rtf (or .txt, .doc, doesn't matter). With extensions showing in your operating system, lop off the extension so that it's really only called FeaturedItems. Put that document in your TS3 game folder.

The game can't create a new folder with exactly the same name and it can't load its junk into what is really a document, so this might be more effective than the Read Only folder strategy.

Thanks for advice. It worked

Toddlers should've been included in the base game.


Wasn't it pools that EA originally skimped on? And now it's pools...AND toddlers.....

Hoo boy, this is only gonna get worse, isn't it?

^ Sims 5 will probably ship without sims. We'll have to wait for them to be patched 3 years after the game release.

"The Gnomes 5", I believe it'll be titled.

You say it for a joke, but a lot of people use Sims just to build stuff. That was one of the attractions of Sims 4 - building wasn't supposed to suck so much. was supposed to be more fun than ever!

No really... some folks make great houses; the best houses. No one builds sim houses like they do.

Not me tho'. My houses suck.

"Gnomes and Chairs 5," that'll make LGR happy.

The TS5, I mean G&C5, community will be firmly divided into two camps. Those who never liked or wanted sims in the first place, all they ever do is get stuck, stand in the way, cause lag. The game runs much more smoothly without them, especially on lower powered machines. Then there will be those who refuse to play until some sims are patched in and will constantly threaten to hold their breath until they turn blue or get their way.

But FeaturedItems will still work regardless, in case anyone was worried. Should be fun to watch (from a safe distance).