Great screen shot.

Personally, I like the negative traits. They're great for creating a random Sim and having to deal with all his problems trying to get him through life. That's how I mainly play the game, in fact.

Yeah, the negative traits are more for flavour for the people putting together their own little stories, rather than just gaming it. At least it doesn't force you to take them, or balance traits out with a point system or something.

I wonder if there might be some less-obvious positive elements to them as well. I put Neurotic on one of my sims, and he occasionally gets positive moodlets out of it (one for calming down after a quick freak-out, and one for being soothed after checking the faucets or stove).

My take on negative traits (apart from the role playing thing) is that they're penalties for not making your sims happy. When a toddler, kid, or teen go to the next stage of life without accomplishing some basic tasks (like getting an A in school for the kid), a trait is randomly chosen. If the kid does especially poorly, a negative trait is randomly chosen. So while there's no incentive to choose them, they provide incentive to do right by your sims.

My big complaint with the Sims 3 is that it did step back in many, many ways more than what you have meantioned here. Memories: gone. Chemestry: gone. Traits are fine but personality points and traits would have been so much better. They preached that we weren't going to have "needs" as much anymore, but I find myself babysitting my Sims needs just as much as I used to. I think less needs and more personality is what they promised, and then they failed.

And negative Sims are a good thing in of themselves. It adds that touch of weirdness that Sims require.

I'm entirely fine with the way negative traits are handled, but the newspapers and carpool are definitely annoying (especially since the dead newspapers drag down the environmental rating of the area).

As for the lack of expansion packs... one of the things I like best about the launch of a new Sims title is that very lack - I might miss some things, but both The Sims and The Sims 2 have been shovelled way too full of stuff at this point. It's overwhelming and offputting.

@Xila31, all you have to do is get the reward points up and you won't ever have to worry about going to the bathroom and hardly eat. Plus I found that in the other one I had to make my sim go to the bathroom every 5 minutes now it's more like once an hour and they do it themselves if your busy doing something else or just not thinking about it. See easy fix.

Now we can pick our own personalities which we didn't even get a pretend chance to do in the other sims, All you got to do is choose whether or not to live out what they decided to grow up and do at least the 5 traits you personally choose also lets you choose your career. And you can change it too if you have enough reward points.

Put I'm not gonna lie I miss some of the stuff in the old game, magic, vampires, werewolves, animals, being able to build wherever I wanted, even the annoyance of going to college for 10 million days lmao.

@Xila31, This is my first sims game, so I'm not sure how 2 did it, but chemistry as a concept seems to matter in sims 3. I think you can chat about things you have in common (like traits).

"Hey, why can't see I see my sim's stats from the map view? What's the big idea? That icon filter panel isn't that important!"

This is the big one. What a stupid design decision.

As for the negative traits, if they weren't there, I couldn't have my Firefly household. How could I build Jayne Cobb without negative traits?

Is there a crazy trait? if not then River Tam cannot exist in Sim

There is an "insane" trait. But it's not cute robot insane like River Tam. More random raving insane like Glenn Beck.

Who wins in a fight between River Tam and Glenn Beck? I'd pay to see that. Unless it's a crying contest.

Please please please use this line on the next TMA. If Bruce doesn't take the bait, try switching Beck to Hugh Hewitt.

I haven't built River yet - the game crashed halfway through my household. But I think I'm going to go for Genius, Insane, Perfectionist, Virtuoso, and Inappropriate.

When will people stop comparing sims3 to sims2. They are separate and individual games.

And imagine how much space you would need if you had pets, seasons, university etc altogether in the one game. Either these concepts would be explored in a very shallow manner or you would have a game that required 15Gb of space on your computer.

This game is soo bad, EA had soo many months to make it better before release.. Oooh why release Beta version of the game in May 2009 a month before release?? Something tells me their marketing team was not communicating with the developer team very well becuse this problem would not happen. Anyways as I sit here at the customer service desk hearing thousands of complaints from the phone from this game per day, I wonder what the hell EA is going to do about this problem! Please fix your game because your making it hard for ATI and Nvidia customer service team because you are blaming us for not using our source code to include glide 3d wrappers and Direct X 10.1 will be released soon for your game??? EA did you know Microsoft is about to release Windows Vista SP2 in a couple weeks?? OMG What game company releases something that doesn't include up to date source code that overlapes the video cards released in 2nd quarter of 2009, how about 280 GTX? Now EA has a bigger problem, they have to patch the game to make it work for Vista SP2. Looks like the Dev team will have more work on their shoulders, I feel sorry for the consumers because now their going to be at a loss..

I cant wait till the sims 3 SDK is realease, we will have some high-quality custom content which we dont have to pay for!

actually the negative trait's give benefits.

for example if your sim is unlucky, you can ONLY die from old age, if you die any other way, death will laugh at you misfortune and bring you back to life.

Follow up too:
When will people stop comparing sims3 to sims2. They are separate and individual games.

And imagine how much space you would need if you had pets, seasons, university etc altogether in the one game. Either these concepts would be explored in a very shallow manner or you would have a game that required 15Gb of space on your computer.

15Gb Are you kidding me? You obviously are not a gamer! O.o

I hate that you can't see their stats from the map view.

Maybe they could have put a little schedule into your sim's panels (work, friends, inventory. etc.) so that you could keep track of of the events going on that week, after you read them from the paper. I can't remember 7 days worth of stuff!

Why can't we change the sim's heights?

How come all of the randomized faces are so squished? They have such fat, round smallish faces.

And in the name of indecency: Lemme give my Sims sleepwear, bathing suits, or formal wear for their everyday outfits. I wanna see my ladies in a bikini in at the pool, at the theatre, and in bed. At least throw me a cheatcode if you don't want to put it in the game standard!

A patch was released yesterday by the EA Dev team, to fix some of the game problems within the game. Maybe it will ease some peoples pain from not being able to play the game contently. They will include support in their next patch to incorporate a broader range of new and present video card compatibility. Thanks Dev, team! Keep up the good work!

Complete list of changes:

•Addresses some issues with Speed 2 and 3 moving too slowly. Some machines will have better results when using Speed 2 and 3 now.
•Fix to story progression on/off selection toggle.
•Fix for a possible crash with audio code.
•Fix for babysitter routing off lots with babies.
•Addresses some issues with Vsync and refresh rate problems.
•Addresses some issues with DVD authentication errors and drive compatibility on startup.
•This update deals with some issues on Mac systems that can crash the game while connecting to AFP servers.
•Fix for a freeze that can occur when Sims attempt to clean out bad food from the fridge.

I agree with everything you said, plus one thing. I don't know if it's possible, I sure haven't found out if it is, but I can't move more than one thing to and from my inventory. Talk about a time consumer, my sim harvested 30+ grapes and I have to move them one by one to the fridge!!

^^ To the poster above me, you can just grab the corner tab and move all 30 grapes at once. This works for any item you have multiples of in your inventory.

Also, with the World Adventures expansion you can call services to cancel the delivery of your newspaper. :)