Hi Simmers!

For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Graham Nardone, and I've been a producer on just about every expansion and stuff pack released for The Sims 3 thus far.  It’s a great job where I get to work with very creative and talented teams to build some of the most amazing games. My job has also made it possible for me to meet many of you, The Sims 3 community members, both in person and within The Sims 3 forums. We’re all very grateful for your passion and love for The Sims and do everything we can to uphold your trust.  As one of the many people working on The Sims 3, I try to engage with you all frequently, listening to your feedback and suggestions, and responding to your comments when the opportunity arises. 

2012 has gotten off to a great start. The release of The Sims 3 Showtime introduced a lot of new gameplay elements, plus for the first time ever in The Sims 3 franchise, new connected features that allowed you to share updates with friends while in-game. In addition, there is a lot of exciting content to look forward to in the upcoming The Sims 3 Katy Perry’s Sweet Treats and The Sims 3 Diesel Stuff Pack. Be on the look-out for more announcements as there’s plenty more to come...and soon!

As promised at the beginning of the year, I wanted to be sure that we’d be communicating more frequently with all of you and have a stronger presence on the forums. Communicating with you all is very important to us and we strive to be as active within the forums and on our social networks as our schedules allow. 

I want to reiterate that we really do listen to your comments and take them seriously, so please keep posting them; we love hearing from you.  We’re also always trying to understand the issues that people have reported in order to work with our QA team to resolve them.  Please understand that the team is very grateful that you bring forward these issues, and we want to be sure your expectations are met.  The team is dedicated to balancing the needs of addressing bugs with the importance of developing creative and innovative new content that will enhance your gameplay.

We’ve released a lot of new content for The Sims 3 franchise making the experience something that is fun for everyone. We hope that our releases will provide you with the creative outlet to tell new stories and extend your gameplay experiences. We’ve seen your tremendous creativity and love that you share your stories and Sims’ worlds with us. Keep building, experimenting and of course, playing!  

From time to time, we provide an update to The Sims 3, which helps to improve your game. We incorporate design improvements, including some that have been suggested by Simmers, as well as fixes for outstanding issues.  Anything from obscure bugs we have found and fixed to driver updates and also new hardware support can be included in these updates.  As you can imagine, game updates are complex and play a major role in our testing and engineering process as each change has to work across all variations of The Sims 3 products. We have a very dedicated QA team that continuously strives for accuracy and efficiency in identifying, understanding and implementing what needs to go into these updates.

During the life of The Sims 3 we’ve released more than two dozen updates with each including the latest bug fixes, revisions and modifications.  In addition, we’ve released six major expansion packs and six stuff packs, plus have created new worlds, venues, items and more available through The Sims 3 Store.  We test all updates thoroughly and across a wide range of system specifications, both for PC and Mac.  We also check the forums to see the bugs you are reporting. When we receive your reports of a new bug we add it to a list of issues that is maintained and monitored daily.  We try to fix and resolve just about each bug that comes to our attention and we believe we have gotten to a significant number of them.

In addition, we want to inform you of the resources that are available outside of The Sims 3 forums and The Sims’ social networks that will help make your playing experience a better one. If you do see a bug, we want to hear about it. The best way to report any issues will be to contact EA’s Origin Customer Support. Start by visiting https://help.ea.com/contact-us and talk to a live representative, chat with one or submit your inquiry via email.  This page also includes an archive of support articles that you may find helpful in resolving an issue you have encountered. We also know the community has some very strong contributors who are very technical, so if you have an idea about a fix, please let us know that too. 

From all of us at The Sims Studio, thank you for being such a fantastic community, and for all the many contributions you make to The Sims. Stay tuned for more updates, developer blogs, FAQs and more!

 
Graham Nardone
The Sims 3 Assistant Producer