Do I even need to say it?

So I have a worrying and confusing situation. My one fam has a problem. Last time I played em, I paused it. They were happy & healthy, plenty of food. Then today I come in to find an upset, tired, hungry, low-health family! And no food! And at the bottom of the screen, GAME PAUSED. This has left me confuzzled. They're better now, and that's good! But I think this is a problem. Maybe someone can figure out if it's a glitch or I'm just crazy! (Or both... ) It'd help me if I knew what might've caused this.

Hi txmom2! It seems that pause doesn't always work in the game...very unfortunate for us.

We're looking into this situation.

Yep, the pause doesn't work here as well.

But a funny thing happened though. I was playing my game in 2 different computers, so I always had a backup of the game on my pendrive. The thing is that I started playing in just one of them and one of these days, while browsing my pendrive files I bumped on this backup (from like 2 generations ago). I got curious to see if they died (it'd been about 3 weeks after I last played it).

I opened the game with these files and it turned out the peeps were fine!!!! They were old, but all alive!! The oldest son had not yet gone to college (!), the house was a mess (lots of loose socks and spots and weeds and wrappers *laughs*), the dad was about 57 (about the age I've left him with), just sneezing a bit, and hungry. But that was it.

Oh, and I didn't pause the game when I left, so it seemed the time has stopped there.

Did you try your backup game file to see if it was paused? If they are all better now, I don't think I would chance replacing the file, it's probably too late. But it's an idea to keep in mind in case it happens again before they can fix the problem.

This happens to me all the time when trying to collect the rare items. I will pause only to find that the game unpauses itself. I often cannot get multiples of a rare collectible. It also happened when I found my first rare butterfly. I paused to go find someone, and when I dragged them back, I saw the game had just unpaused itself and the butterfly faded away. Very irritating!

I don't think pausing the game has an effect on collectibles in VV. If you don't spot one quickly enough it will fade away, paused or not. I don't know about VF; I've never tried pausing while going after collectibles, but I shouldn't think there would be a difference.

In my experience, pausing the game in VF does seem to have an effect on the collectibles...which I love [I'm somewhat visually impaired due to early onset macular degeneration (the wet kind, for anyone who's familiar with the condition)]. Sometimes it seems like the moment I finally spot one of the rares I desperately need, all my peeps go into hiding. Pausing the game gives me time to go hunt for them while ensuring the collectible doesn't disappear before I get them there. If you look closely, you can even see that the little bubbles that rise up off the collectible pause as well when the game is in pause mode. Awesome improvement over past games....where I've missed more items than I care to think about.

I'm about 97% certain on this, but I have been known to be mistaken on occasion, so if someone "in the know" can verify for sure one way or the other, I'd appreciate it. There is that 3% chance that every one of the many times I've tried it, I've been extraordinarily lucky.

I've been lucky. I have 2 places I live and VF fams on both of my computers. Pause seems to work for me, but I hope that it will work long-term, as I'll be away from one of the computers for 10 weeks!!

I've never thought about pausing when I see a collectable. I just go to the "details" screen and find someone.

I'm fairly certain pausing does work for collectibles on VF as well. I remember reading a thread in which someone said they used that feature as a way to earn quick money in a first gen family. They would pause and place one person on the collectible, second peep near the collectible. As soon as they un-paused the game, they placed the second person on the collectible and got credit for it twice. I know it worked because I tried it just after reading it. That was back before I upgraded to .05 though, so I can't say that it hasn't changed since then.