If you're new to The Sims 4, or you're accustomed to playing games on your phone, there's a very important piece of information I want to get across. New paragraph for emphasis...
Do not remain connected to the internet when you play the game!
The game will make it sound like you're missing out on a world of socialisation and custom stuff from the community that you should want to be a part of... but that's the corporate feudal state talking. They just want you to stay connected so they can check your game for pirated content, monitor how long you play, and see what other programmes you have installed on your computer. You don't have pirated content, but you do have other security concerns. Seriously! It says right there in the EA App license agreement that you grant Electronic Arts a full profile of your computer by installing the software; the fact that they don't necessarily connect that profile to a username and thus to a specific person is irrelevant. You're entitled to privacy as a human being; EA doesn't need to know what the last file you had open in Microsoft WordPad was, or that you're running The Sims 4 at the same time as a minimised instance of Google Earth.
If you truly want to be part of a community of Sims players, that's why ModTheSims.info exists! That's why Simblr exists! That's why r/TheSims existed! That's why Neocities exists! There are other options apart from letting EA poke about your computer for stuff they can use to make extra money off your existence.
If you have a desktop computer that uses a USB WiFi dongle to connect to the internet, make sure you have that unplugged before you start The Sims 4, The Sims 3, or any other game, EA or not, that doesn't explicitly require an internet connection to play. Multiplayer games that you can't use a traditional LAN for, you'll need the internet. Just building a house in The Sims, you don't. Periodically, EA Desktop will refuse to run the game without an internet connection, but what you can do there is connect, then run only the EA App; allow it to see outside, as it were; then exit the app and disconnect. This should be adequate to get the game to run. If not, you can run the game with the connection established and then immediately airgap the computer as soon as it loads. It's not the ideal, I know; Origin was a lot easier to manipulate in this manner. I did a lot of kvetching about it, but Origin really was the best option. Oh well, it's gone now.
Another thing to do is, the next time you're running the EA App, say to install a new Game Pack or something, is to go into your settings and uncheck the bit where it says, "Keep EA Desktop up to date", or something like that. It's the option to automatically search for updates. Turn that off. We don't want EA Desktop to behave like Origin used to and refuse to play any games until you updated it.
An aside, if you do have pirated content and you get railroaded into updating the EA App, make sure to move all the files related to the piracy (including the ones you forgot about inside the EA Desktop directory) out of Program Files and onto your desktop. But, we're all on the level here, so we don't need to worry about that.
This is part of a larger discussion about privacy preservation that I think I'll want to add to the How to Use a Computer series at some point soon. But, as it is, my fish sticks are burning right now, so I've got to save this HTML document and bugger off.
--7 August 2023--