Things are going bad at SimState University, La Fiesta Tech and Académie La Tour. It turns out that today many players of the Sims 2 University have seen a massive number of drop-outs of both NPCs and even playable Sims. Professors could not longer be reached at home for help or private lectures. Even students with a 4.0 GPA and top grades are dropping out, and it doesn't even matter if it's the end of a semester or not. They all autonomously pick up the phone and sign out, to be placed in the Sim Bin in the neighborhood - as adults. It's not entirely sure what is causing this problem, or if it affects every installation of the game. It might depend on the system configuration. Read on for more details...
[Update 11:45] We received the screenshot below from April Flores, which shows the situation. In the dialog that shows up, the "No" button is greyed out and clicking it has no effect, the same goes for the action icon at the top. April also said that this dialog would appear only for playable Sims, but you had to click Yes to be able to continue playing the game. Click the thumbnail to see the full version of the screenshot. We'll keep you updated with more.
[Update 2 April] As you can now read in another post, this news is fake. April fool!
Tim LeTourneau, Senior Producer of the pack, says it's a very rare bug in the game:
[Update 11:45] We received the screenshot below from April Flores, which shows the situation. In the dialog that shows up, the "No" button is greyed out and clicking it has no effect, the same goes for the action icon at the top. April also said that this dialog would appear only for playable Sims, but you had to click Yes to be able to continue playing the game. Click the thumbnail to see the full version of the screenshot. We'll keep you updated with more.
[Update 2 April] As you can now read in another post, this news is fake. April fool!
"The time-flux in the game has caused the game to trigger massive drop-outs starting today. This is also caused due to the difference between real-time and sim-time, causing a sort of virtual black-hole that draws students and other Sims back to their home neighborhood. It's not sure if the bug is in the code of the llama rival mascot, or in the garden gnome object, but it could be something completely different. We are currently doing everything we can to fix this problem, and the engineer responsible for this bug will be sacked, as this is a bug that may have never occured. For now the only solution we have is to stop playing the game when this occurs - even changing your system's time and date won't help as the game uses its own time system. Maxis deeply regrets the social problems, low grades and all other problems caused by this bug and apologizes for it."Other Maxis or EA representatives were not available for comment.
Considering Maxis is working on the problem, a patch can be expected soon, but it's unsure when it will be. It might take up to a few weeks to get through the Quality Assurance department of EA and then all distributing channels. For now, as Tim suggests, it's the best to not play the game until the problem has been solved by Maxis, or if you do to make at least back-ups of all your neighborhoods just in case the problem pops up. Of course we'll keep you updated on this issue - keep checking our news section a lot to be one of the first to know when everything's solved.
Written at 11:38 on Friday, 1 April 2005 by ChEeTaH.
