Well said. I think that TSO will likely not be canned before TS2 is released for fear of negative impact on the brand “The Sims” (and you can bet that EA is planning on making bazillions of real world simoleans on TS2, the next best thing since delivery pizza). The only scenario I see where TSO survives much more than a few months beyond TS2 is if the newly invited Asian players take up the game in significant numbers, and add to the player base, making it economical to continue to offer the game. If that doesn’t happen, I just don’t see this one being continued for very much longer after the new offline game comes out … would be counter to what EA has publicly said about its online gaming business and what they recently did to Earth & Beyond, another “disappointing” game for EA.

B

Last summer, there was a pronounced decline in people playing TSO. Several accounts seemed to disappear, and the cities looked more like ghost towns.
I attributed this to normal summer activity, Vacations, outdoor activities, ETC. and i believe i am correct. After the summer, there was some recovery, but it seemed, not quiet to the pre summer levels. There WAS a spike in population after the release of the “New and Improved” package, but the decline seems to be happening again.
My observation is this;
If maxis begins losing accounts due to their removal of game features, couple this with the Looming summer months and the potential for another steep decline, CAN TSO survive past the middle of next summer?
I have my doubts.
I would be curious to see actual numbers for last summers play hours to verify or dispell the impression i got last year.

Maxis, Read your own boards, People want MORE form TSO, not Less.

Oh,, Uri chere,, I am afraid i have to agree with Coco on the “Board Ho” comment. Granting you didn’t intend to like her to a Prostitute, the term is still a dispariging one, and rather offensive. I had come to expect better of you than use of terms like this.
If there is issue with the ammount or content of her posts,(And i really can’t see a problem) surely there are better ways of expressing it than calling names.
Enough from me on that.

Maria.

coco

I’m really torn in regards to just how good the new relationships are for what they are, but I don’t think, in the long run, they’ll do any good for the good game. If anything, I think it takes something away from all those that use TSO as a medium for expressing their creativity, or as a venue for social gatherings with friends. However, it gives those driven by “winning”, or making it to the tops of the lists, a few more lists to macro their ways to the top of.

I have a feeling that most of the former group will forget friendship webs ever existed after the newness of it all wears off (in the past, it’s taken 1-2 weeks for most new content to become old news). Not many extremely creative people aren’t going to be over excited with spending endless amount of time needed for the upkeep of their friendships. These are the same people that had 1, maybe 2 fully worked skills before skill locks, max. Friendwebs are just another skill now, with no locks. You have to work just as hard to keep those interactions as you have to for interactions that come with skill points you can’t lock yet.

The mafias, griefers, etc., aren’t going to go away.. they’ll just find another way to bother people until that new method is taken away or changed so drastically it, too, becomes obsolete.

The latter group will make macros, buy friendships for more than they ever imagined paying, and make it to the top of another lame list, whoopee. Can you blame them? Not really, just like you can’t blame someone for throwing a brick on their keyboard and walking away during their daily/weekly skilling session. The game just isn’t fun anymore, and anything that is remotely fun for even a small group of people is taken away because it will almost certainly bother someone else, or because it was a bug to begin with.

New features to follow:

Roomie permissions for pet ownership, because dialing for the maid was bothering some owners after their roommate’s dog ruined the roomscore of the big box they call home.

Disabling of IMs because people don’t like having to close a spam IM every few hours/days.

Build mode disabled – all lots have identical houses, because some people had cooler looking houses than others. So unfair.

Mandatory profanity filters that filter out over 1/3 of the English language, because a few people wanted to find out exactly what “Adult convesation – Don’t not enter if easily offended” meant, enterted, were offended, and reported the entire lot.

About yet another way of removing rather than fixing things? We need more put in, not what’s there chopped and changed at will.

- RB

Furthermore, it is not my job to punish people for alleged breach of contracts with large corporations. I’m not a civil attorney nor an expert in contract law, nor am I myself a judge in a civil court of law, nor can I predict what a civil court would do if a pizza-bot case came before it, which it won’t, because EA doesn’t care enough to try and void such contracts and probably figures they would lose in any case. If you want to stick your nose in the contractual relations holding between others, well go ahead, but you have no business being there and any opinion you express on the matter has no authority whatsoever and is only so much noise.

Closer to home, it IS clear that the use of money generated by a pizza bot violates no terms of the contract whatsoever, so if people want to buy and sell simoleans so generated that is their business. If you don’t like it, well too bad for you. If you object that the practice is wrong you are advocating an alleged moral principle that is constructed out of thin air.

coco

coco