Op/Ed: The Stratics TSO Board – Ship of Fools
by Alphaville Herald on 17/04/04 at 5:59 pm
by Kiss
For those of us who remember the old TSO message board reading the Stratics board is downright depressing. Only God knows how many boards I have read over the years and I have never seen such a collection of inarticulate cheerleading, worthless fluff, and just plain wrong information. Based upon the total dearth of useful posts by these blithering idiots I have developed the following maxim:
The value of a message board poster is inversely proportional to the size and quality of their siggy.
With only a few exceptions these self-absorbed, cookie fixated, Tigger loving, EA butt kissing imbeciles are totally incapable of expressing anything even remotely insightful about TSO.
What little they do say about any subject of substance is usually partially or totally wrong. Part of this can be explained by the fact that most of the TSO Stratics posters are incredibly ignorant about online gaming, software development, and even message boards. But despite their ignorance, they choose to go headlong into the abyss and demonstrate their stupidity by espousing half-baked and uninformed opinions on subjects they don’t even remotely understand (bots, bot countermeasures, software development, testing, game theory, the purpose and legality of the ToS, etc.). If you’re ignorant at least have the intelligence to know when to keep your mouth shut.
I suspect that these people see TSO not as a game to be played, but as a vehicle to show others how wonderful and nice they are. To them TSO is never ending junior high school hallway popularity contest. These emotional basket cases blanche at the thought of anything smacking of angst or competition in “their” game because that doesn’t fit in with their use of TSO. They have succeeded in turning the TSO message board into a school pep rally/never ending campaign speech for class president and are endlessly making what they consider to be witty/cute comments to each other and their hall monitor/authority figure Tigger. Frankly, they’re nauseating.
I also suspect most of these posters are desktop The Sims players who thought playing their favorite game online with real people would be a hoot. To their horror they found many real life people are not as well behaved as their NPC sims, joined hands, and started demanding EA nerf the game to suit their desires. They screamed the loudest, EA stupidly complied, and the people who wanted TSO to be a game (goals, good things, bad things, crafting, etc.) have been leaving in droves ever since.
I’ll leave you with some common misconceptions these paragons of the Stratics board constantly are espousing:
•TSO has 100,000+ accounts (It’s 56,000 and has been falling steadily since topping out somewhere around 100,000+)
•Buying simoleans is against the ToS (Wrong, it is not)
•Constantly confusing griefers and exploiters as being the same thing (I am not aware of a single one who does both, or even plays the game for the reasons the other does. Strictly speaking, exploiters aren’t even playing the game.)
•The exploiters were beaten when they removed maze (Wrong, they just switched to pizza and code)
•It’s okay to use the “clothing patch” (Wrong, it’s a third party program and people have been banned for its use)
•People must be coming back to TSO, I am seeing cities being full for the first time in ages! (Wrong, EA simply lowered the maximum number of sims allowed in a city at the same time to help fight lag)
•Ban them! Banning gets rid of the bad people (It takes a banned player only a few minutes to set up a new account using different information. No, I’m not going to tell you how)
•When The Sims 2 comes out we will get a bunch of new players! (Almost without a doubt the release of The Sims 2 will be the final nail in TSO’s coffin as many of the remaining subscriber base runs off to play their new desktop game and cancel a month or two after the realize the are truly home again…off the internet.)
Ian
Apr 17th, 2004
WOW, well done..totally agreed upon
JC Soprano
Apr 17th, 2004
The old boards rocked. Hell if it wasn’t for the old boards the love of my life Tigger never would have called me to complain lolol
But they used to listen. I remember when I started the roomy build rights movement. Even something like that EA ended up censoring.. Now look, it’s implimented. I have seen countless times where players have submitted ideas or feedback and EA ends up censoring them or extending them all out long enough that they end up taking all the credit. With Stratics, it’s so much worse than it was.
I think a lot of EA’s problem is the players come up with such simple concepts to play the game and improve it, EA sits back and thinks, why didn’t we think of that? That’s when they censor, becuase they should have thought of that.
My opinion EA contracted Stratics so that someone could take the heat for running and censoring the boards.
JC Soprano
http://www.thesimmafia.com
Just my 2 cents.
TBT
Apr 17th, 2004
Agreed, very well said! Funny thibng is so many of these high school poopularity players that complsin about exploiters/griefers etc are also behind the scenes buying simoleans from those exploiters…
You’d be amazed at some of those “holier-then-thou-ers” ranting at stratics about this, but yet in the dark alleys of tso are benefiting from the fruits of the exploiters labors, DOH!
RB
Apr 17th, 2004
My god. So true, So true.
I think i can count on two hands the number of posters that are actually useful and not like this.
Not yet been there since i got back back from my 10 day trip about 3 days ago yet. But i can just imagine the garbage and propaghandic misinformation that’s gone on in my abscene. I have to correct alot. lol.
Add another misconception to the list. Running as many TSO’s as you like on 1 PC is a TOS(sser. ha.) document violation. It’s clearly not. Another one of EA’s make believe rules that the sheep fall for.
- RB
Dyerbrook
Apr 17th, 2004
Amen.
And I really am puzzled by this multiple games from one PC being a violation. How could Maxis possiby care if people are stupid enough to pay for more than one of their accounts? All you have to do is tab-alt out of your one game, go to run and type c:// and then find the folder with TSO client to run. I find after about 4 Sims it starts to lag tho’ even on DSL.
Jeremy- President of DG
Apr 18th, 2004
Agreed, those boards contain one of these most ignorant, and egomaniac people. False pretenses etc. I was banned for telling saying ” People have been harassing our GOV” -we do not tolerate that” because of “borderline trollling” LMAO. Stratics is a biased as well, no truth, i rather talk to people in game, then the boards
Dante Dracos
Apr 18th, 2004
Kiss…thank you for that article…you got it right on every point. The only time I go to Stratics anymore is to check for server problems when TSO starts causing errors. The boards have become like a school playground while the adults just drive on by without even a glance.
CherryBomb
Apr 18th, 2004
Hmmm, I have no siggy at all. By your rule of thumb I must be some kind of genius, and I know that ain’t right.
trailblazer
Apr 18th, 2004
I did have to laugh when the 56,000 subscribers was brought up from the NY times article and some there were convinced the NY times was lying, I mean jump on the reality train, no major paper is going to lie about info on a online game.
Facts can hit people in the head like a 2X4 and for some reason they still wont believe it even when it’s right in front of them amazing.
Gladys
Apr 18th, 2004
Question: Is the Sims2 an online game? I have heard it’s not, but then again I have also heard it was coming out this month!
trailblazer
Apr 18th, 2004
Sims2 is a offline game only..
Fans II
Apr 19th, 2004
w00t! Good job Uri! I hate Stratics…
-Lag
-Moderators are really annoying
-When setting up a account its confusing
lol, Good call, Uri!
Cody McBlack
Apr 21st, 2004
Well, I posted there and am trying to get others to post there to get an idea through to maxis that might keep me playing. I run the AWE, Alphaville Wrestling Entertainment. Sim Pro Wrestling was just starting to take off. But the new freindship web had the side effect of changing all the effects of the nasty interactions. As a resault, it was impossible to run matches that were entertaining, as they get repetitive. I have reccomended the creation of a new item to solve the problem, along with making Entertainment and Offbeat more useful for once. I hope they do, as I will be leaving TSO otherwise. Sim wrestling is the only thing that kept me playing really.
karst
Jul 12th, 2004
Completely agree on this issue, reading the various threads are somewhat akin to reading the end results of a teletypist’s visit to a kindergarden facility.