Free To Play means gameplay value has been deliberately sabotaged to create paywalls.

Instead of paying once and enjoying, you get nickled and dimed which sucks all the joy out of a game.

Reminder that the base game is always massively barebones and if you were only going to play that, you'd be better off playing an older sims game.

Like saving 60-100$ is nothing when the DLC usually totals in the 500s-1000s just to get a baseline experience. Pretty sure they rarely went on sale also.

So you get a barely working framework and pay for every gameplay feature that should be in by default...

Real cost will be in the thousands

I am not affected by this since I prefer more ... challenging games.
But this just reflects an overall strategy of EA towards a game as a service strategy.

now at least players can test before they put good money into the sinkhole. But my guess is that this will only scare those away who refused this from the beginning.

I am not happy about it, though there were rumors for a while now. Like, yes, I have spent an absurd amount on TS3/TS4 dlcs all in all, EA will probably get me for TS5 in whatever form that takes... but F2P always means worse monetization. I see it being like TS3 with a la carte buy mode stuff through premium currency, which is such a step back from expansion packs (as much as that got shrunk over time over game packs, stuff packs, and kits).