I have a really weird problem. For the record, I always run Error Trap, Master Controller (+ Cheats), Overwatch, Register, Story Progression (+ Expanded/Extra) and Traveler, and this first happened with patch 1.39 and continues in the current 1.42.
When I got Supernatural, I immediately fell in love with Moonlight Falls but decided to go over all the lots and make some adjustments before actually starting to play. I always do that with any town since I'm a bit of a perfectionist.
Must have pet supplies in the homes, proper mixology bars in the supernatural hangouts, more fun things to do at the beach, and so on. So after much work, I finally had a save file where I never had any active household but all the Edit Town stuff is done. I then made a test household to fiddle with the new life stages, and very quickly noticed that the playable ghosts from the Roommates Supernatural and Goth households were no longer in the game. I had evicted those households (like all others) during the renovation process but plonked them back into their homes as soon as those were done, with no editing of the Sims themselves. And the game did not throw me any nor script error logs or in-game notifications/error messages.
So I got rid of all my mods and re-did my town editing with a new, "clean" game. The ghosts were still there. I added all the mods back and started a game from that modified-town-save. Now the ghosts were gone again. They still show on the household popup before I actually activate any household, and if I select the ghosts' own household they stick around just fine as well. But once I activate a household that is not their own, they are gone.
I took away the mods once more and added them back one by one to test which one is the culprit. As I half-expected, it's Overwatch that's nuking those ghosts whether I run it alone or with the other mods. But I can't find anything in its documentation to hint at what could be causing it to do so. If I start a new game from scratch with Overwatch instead of loading my modified-but-still-unplayed-town-save, everything is fine.
I decided to run two more tests on the situation:
1) Started a brand-new game again with Overwatch running. Didn't activate any household, but immediately went into Edit Town, moved Roommates Supernatural out, made a token edit to their home, and moved them back in. The Goth household remained untouched, as did everything and everyone else. I moved one of my bin households into an empty lot and activated them. The result? Violet Slymer was gone from Roommates Supernatural, but the Goths were still around.
2) Same as above, only this time I activated my own household
first and
then went into Edit Town to evict the Roommates Supernatural and put them back again. This worked just fine and did
not cause Violet to vanish. Unsurprisingly, the Goths were still around too.
Long story short: if the first thing you do in a brand-new game is go into Edit Town and evict and re-place a household with a playable ghost in it, Overwatch will nuke that ghost once you actually start playing a household (unless you pick that ghost's household) -- and this will happen regardless of whether or not you were even using Overwatch while doing this.
How is that for obscure?
