Blah! Tried to play Sims 3 again; built my family and just clicked on their house to play, and it crashed on me! I defiantly do not miss that. I think I'll take Sims 4's lack of toddlers, dishwashers and open neighborhoods over a constant crash from the Sims 3.
Back to Sims 4!!
The woman plays her sims 3 a lot and I've never heard her complain about it crashing since I got a hold of her computers. What are you playing it on?
From my experience with Sims 3, crashes and memory dumps tend to occur most: A) when custom content is loaded (which most everyone has after some point, even with many expansions), B) the longer one's game is played (because the game tracks so many different NPC and settings simultaneously over the whole town, unlike Sims 4 which arbitrarily now limits the gameplay to instances) and C) when many expansions are added (each expansion adds many levels of overlaying gameplay funcationality...such as weather effects, moon phases, visiting foreign sims, tracking present/future changes, etc. which potentially makes data much more complex than the base-game.)
While Sims 4 is really still a bit limited by comparison (even with several new expansions already) I suspect EA at least got the clue and tried to make each save much less of a 'memory dump waiting to happen' by compartmentalising things a bit more into instances. People tended to dislike that as it limits the 'sandbox' quality Sims 3 had, but I find the stability much more appealing in spite of the now-necessary load-screens between instances.