Mistakes made in Sims 3

[Janna]

My biggest mistake?  I didn't save.  I had played for several hours and had been so involved that I didn't even think to save.  We had a storm come up, and it was litterly tearing branches off one of my trees, the one near the house.  We were so busy watching it bend back and forth, wondering if it would pull up out of the ground that I forgot about the game.  Electric went off, and there went my hours of play. 

I have learned by doing a lot of stuff, but what could be a mistake for me might be what you want to do, so I don't want to list them as mistakes.
Read here, hunt up info, and just enjoy the game.  As stated, there is no real "win" in this game, you can set a goal and can even change it along the way, but the main focus is just have fun in the playing.

[Grim Reaper]

Well, I had a Sim and a husky to start off with in The Sims 3 Pets for PS3.  I had my female husky mate with Marcel Gattus's dog who is obviously male and they had puppies, four puppies to be exact.  Now, I had five dogs to take care of.  It became too overwhelming so I decided to let the puppies starve so they would die and I thought the grim reaper would take them away and I would be left with my one dog again.  Nope, something like child services came but for animals and they said they were taking away my dogs for animal cruelty or something like that.  Come to find out, that included taking away my husky.  I've learned not to do that again.

Another time I had a woman and she had kids with Marcel Gattus, but weren't married just romantically involved.  I had the woman in a high level in her career.  I think I was like two promotions away from achieving my lifetime wish.  Then, at random I decided to make a fire and let her burn to death because I was getting tired of her.  I realized after that I wanted to see her lifetime wish achieved for this particular career.  Her children were teenagers by then.

[Plymouthdodgewreks]

I had my five-star musician, fully-leveled-in-every-instrument-skill, wealthy, married with several kids, prized-possession Sim walk across the road, remembering that cars go right through Sims. What I failed to remember was that I had a mod where Sims were able to be hit by cars and killed by them. Six life stages of success only to end up a flattened ghost.

[thelittlepakeha]

My biggest mistake?  I didn't save.  I had played for several hours and had been so involved that I didn't even think to save.  We had a storm come up, and it was litterly tearing branches off one of my trees, the one near the house.  We were so busy watching it bend back and forth, wondering if it would pull up out of the ground that I forgot about the game.  Electric went off, and there went my hours of play. 

I have learned by doing a lot of stuff, but what could be a mistake for me might be what you want to do, so I don't want to list them as mistakes.
Read here, hunt up info, and just enjoy the game.  As stated, there is no real "win" in this game, you can set a goal and can even change it along the way, but the main focus is just have fun in the playing.

Yeah my MISTAKES have been not saving and not backing up save files that have a lot of work in them. Remembering that Sims, all versions, has been the glitchiest game I've ever played (but I still play it!)...

I do agree though that if you're using mods and codes, doing too much too fast does tend to take some of the grip out of it for me. I don't necessarily want it to be super hard, but having to put a *little* bit of effort into building things up makes it more fun. So I might give myself money to get a modestly sized house or pick a lifetime happiness reward to start off with, like collection helper for gathering sims, but I don't give them everything. That's personal preference though, it depends what aspects of the game you most enjoy.

[shibamistress]

I made my sim repair the stereo (as he was in the military career, so he needed to work on his athletic skill). He ended up being fatally electrocuted, so the Grim Reaper ended up coming for him. But I notice that the chances of being electrocuted seem to be random, so don't be afraid of letting your Sims repair things

That happened to me too!  He was also a military sim!  I was not happy!

I also lost a sim to death by hot dog--she was hungry  and I had her enter the hot dog eating contest and she died of starvation!

I've also had the dogs have puppies and now I have too many to take care of thing happen too, but I just turned all needs to static to deal with it!

[yruvian]

* Factory reset, but instead of renaming the folder, deleting it. Still miss that household.
* Thinking I had to redo the simport thing every time I did a factory reset. I love the showtime careers, but... having to restart those stamps every time got pretty horrid. Of course, I also deleted most older folders...
* Installing way too many CC at once. Since that day, I've learned to test each thing I install before installing another <.<. Way easier to find things that mess up your game if you don't have to browse through pages of newly installed stuff. By now, I'm slowly moving away from CC (except for CAS-items).

[Swirl-Girl]

So, One day I decide, "Hmm, maybe I'll start a legacy," So I made a beautiful female sim, and she got married to Gobias Koffi (Actually I quite like him as a legacy spouse) So I build them a really modest to room hut and say "No nooboos until you are not in a two room shack," So, I let them woohoo because they've been working their butt's off. (Pause for dramatic affect) I clicked try for baby, And there were chimes. I was so angry because I wanted the founder to be the major breadwinner,and she got really set back in her career.

I deleted that save. Lesson Learned: Be super careful for your clicks. Because some things, no matter how much you click the little X, are still gonna happen, like death, try for baby, and vomit.

[ToniSimbot]

I had my five-star musician, fully-leveled-in-every-instrument-skill, wealthy, married with several kids, prized-possession Sim walk across the road, remembering that cars go right through Sims. What I failed to remember was that I had a mod where Sims were able to be hit by cars and killed by them. Six life stages of success only to end up a flattened ghost.

I laughed so hard, I scared my dog! Wow!

[MoMoll]

Guess my greatest mistake was choice of traits! Since University, I made a female sim with the following traits: irresitable, flirty, avant garde, virtuoso, artist. She gained points and I gave her "Master of seduction", and "attractive".
She cannot go anywhere in town without being harrassed!

[Skilletnap]

Bahaha, some of these stories are hilarious. Especially:

I had my five-star musician, fully-leveled-in-every-instrument-skill, wealthy, married with several kids, prized-possession Sim walk across the road, remembering that cars go right through Sims. What I failed to remember was that I had a mod where Sims were able to be hit by cars and killed by them. Six life stages of success only to end up a flattened ghost.

Wow. That was gold.  XD

My mistakes usually involve me forgetting when the last time I saved was, and having my game crash, then reloading only to find out i now have to replay the last hour or so, my newest teen sim and his girlfriend got to go to prom 3 times. >.<

I also have a tendency to let all my sims do what they want, and I focus only on the skills of the sim i'm controlling currently, which causes me to scramble in legacy families to replace my family gardener, etc. I'm getting better, I've started making them work on skills as early as possible, but it's shameful that i'm 4 generations into my rainbow-legacy family and I still don't have Omni-Plants. :'D

[Matthew]

I wonder where's a car hit mod?

[Audren]

Most recently, I had decided to start a Who's Your Daddy project, so I made my starting Sim and placed her in Lucky Palms. I played through with her a while, raising some of her skills, getting her to meet some people, and eventually becoming pregnant with the first baby. That baby was eventually born and later aged up to a toddler. I gave the toddler a makeover, then went to exit. (I had a lot of time on my hands, apparently) Unfortunately, I accidently hit "Exit" instead of "Save and Exit." Now, a pop-up showed up at this point, asking me if I wanted to save. I wasn't paying much attention, clicked "No" and lost all of my progress. I had forgotten to save even once in this timespan. 

[Magpie2012]

In all my years of playing Sims 1 and 2 I never, and I mean NEVER, played with ageing on... My biggest mistake in Sims 3 was to continue that tradition, along with the tradition of cheating with funds to build my sims huge houses fully loaded with all skilling objects etc... When a friend suggested a legacy type game my first reaction was "OMG that's going to suck" but I have found I can't imagine playing sims any other way now... Starting from scratch and building up your funds gradually and watching generation after generation grow up in a much beloved family is (almost) worth the loss of other beloved family members... But that's why you save them to the bin and start new games with them!

[rarespawn]

I would say my biggest mistake would be in trying to control my sims too much. 

My husband used to call my nursery the baby barracks, because once my sims aged up to toddler it was a regimented schedule of learning to walk, talk, and be potty trained, and then playing with the peg box and musical toys for advantage in skills.

I would control every interaction, which is both time consuming and annoying.

I'm still learning how to just relax and let my sims have their own personality...but I've gotten a lot better. If you control sims lives with military precision, you end up missing most of the fun and unique things that make the game a real blast!

[iKevinSwift]

Just yesterday, I'm done teaching my toddler sim how to walk, talk, etc. So I thought it'd be wise to age him up using the cake so I wouldn't have to spend another $75 for the nanny service that night (both of his parents have to wake up at 7 AM the next day to work and they can't be bothered to wake up to take care of crying toddlers).
So I bought the cake and I placed it on the dining table, and got the father to light the cake up.

Big mistake.

A fire started, and it spread through the room really really quickly. I've played Sims for years and I never knew birthday cakes could start fires. I then quickly made the father, who's carrying the toddler, to run to the bedroom for safety. I made the mother run there as well, but she kept on coming back to freak out over the fire so I got her to run to a nearby community lot.

About one sim hour later, the firefighters finally came. There was like, two or three of them because the fire got so big. They took forever to come and they took forever to extinguish those fires. The fire started at around 1:30 AM and they're only done by 4 AM. By that time, literally my whole kitchen and half of my living room was burnt down. It costed me about $10,000 simoleons in total, which hurts the family really bad because they're still rather poor at that time and I had to save every penny.

So my effort to save $75 ended up costing me almost $10,000.. how nice. Took me more than a sim week to actually recover.
I got so traumatized I actually got the mother to buy the Fireproof Homestead lifetime reward two days later lmao.


Protip: Don't light birthday cakes when your sim's needs are low.