CRASH: Ingame advertisement

Update: EA has confirmed this issue and they hope they can fix it without a patch (which they should be able to if my theory is correct).

It seems the new ingame advertisement (read all about it here: 1.29 Patch Triggers In-Game Advertising/Purchasing and here: Discontinued Sets + Freebies in Buy Mode & CAS!) now makes many games crash.

What happens is, that the game downloads many pictures to a new folder called featuredItems. Those pictures are probably used to be displayed ingame and I suspect one or more of those are corrupted. When those pictures are downloaded to the folder, the game crashes. Once you do get your game to work (took 3 attempts for me until it would load), it will crash/freeze in buy mode (especially entertainment and electronics).

The best you can do for now is turn the ingame store off entirely. To do so, either go to your options and untick (if you can get in the game) or find the file options.ini in the User file directory. Open it with notepad and change to line enableingamestore = 1 to enableingamestore = 0. Save the file and try again.