For reasons best known to the folks at EA, they are no longer dishing out the Store content patches to anyone who is not running the current Origin version of the game. This would be mostly Steam and Mac players, but probably applies to those who are still using physical media installs, too. As best as I can tell from other players who have posted on the topic, the content patch stuff from a previous install can simply be copied into the \Documents\Electronic Arts\The Sims 3\ContentPatch folder to get around the issue. The link below is a .zip file containing the everything in the ContentPatch folder from an install of the game on my system before this became an issue. At the time the Store dished these out, I was playing a Steam installation on PC (Win10) and was patched to v1.67. I added them to my current Sims 3 installation (Win10, also) and have not experienced issues with them.
http://www.tesguides.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/ContentPatch.zip
Just unzip the contents, place them in the ContentPatch folder, and all should be well (or at least not completely broken). And thus players step up where developers won’t.
