My favorite families moved out of town due to story progression so I started a new town and deleted my old one in hopes of playing without story progession, only to learn that turning it off doesn't work.

I don't know what to do. I don't want to hate TS3, I'm bored of TS2, I'm just clueless.

Very disappointed in EA right now for this story progression thing. Are they stupid? Don't they know we like our families to stay -in- the game?

The only thing that can be done is to stick to one family for the mean time, They cant get to them if you are watching them...sorry bout your sims

Just curious where they CAS or townies and were you playing them frequently?

This has already been extensively discussed elsewhere on these forums -- lots of things are broken and lots of people are pissed about it. C'est la vie. My guess is that they'll fix it with the patch, but only time will tell.

I'm rather curious as to whether EA or Pescado will fix story progression first, myself.

Honestly, I'm still amazed that a bug that big (and that easy to recognize) made it to the release version.

They were CAS. I went from house to house.
I'm starting a new town and I'll only save if I'm going to a new house and everyone's still there.

EDIT: I think Pescado will make it to the fix first.

My money is on Pescado.

Uh, this IS EA we're talking about here. I don't think it's that they're stupid, so much as arrogant. They seem to think they know what players want. In many ways, TS3 is great. But releasing that huge of a bug is ridiculous.

My money would also be on Pescado.

And this is why it's been weird watching everyone diss MATY all week.

Well, the problems with the leak were being discussed very openly there, and I think people really wanted to believe the release would be happy puppy sunshine rainbows. I can't blame them.

I can think of two scenarios in which a bug as big as the story progression can get through with only a little carelessness. People who have peeked at the code say the Story Progression Toggle isn't connected to anything. It seems evident there is a broken reference. This reference could have been broken accidently after the final round of testing. You are not supposed to change anything after the final round of testing, but it is always so tempting to just slip in one little fix. It won't effect anything else… Or the reference could have been broken on purpose for some testing program and someone forgot to reinstate it. (Tinfoil hat third case: the reference was broken on purpose because the referenced code is broken and it looks better to say 'Oh how silly of us. We'll fix that reference right away," while frantically trying to rewrite the code than to ship broken code.)

If either of these is the case, my money is on EAxis fixing it first. They know where the reference is supposed to point and merely have to reinstate it. Pescado or any other third party have to find the code the toggle is supposed to reference before they can fix the reference.

I'm kind of looking forward to the unpredictability of families moving away.

Everyone is absolutely right: the option to toggle story progression off should have worked, and EA better be coding a patch that makes it work. However, I look forward to playing with story progression on and having to deal with the risk of losing a family or seeing my plans disrupted because my Sim's betrothed suddenly died in a tragic <insert Sims 3 death scenario here>.

To be fair, I think Pescado's already fixed it, the "Awesomemod" just isn't released yet. Quote:

Yeah, but you'd need to read the paper for that. If you missed it or if it was never reported in the paper, you'll never know what happened to the poor simmie. So much for unpredictability. There's no closure on tragic events.

Looks like I lose my bet. Good thing it was only for my ready cash—$0.