Hi! Thank you for letting us talk to you directly here. I have one question, one concern, and one request that have been on my mind a lot lately.
Question: Would you be willing to create more behind-the-scenes threads similar to the one that was done for the Nifty Knitting pack which show us the process of how the packs are made? I found this fascinating, and it also actually made me more excited about the pack. So it's good advertising (at least for nerds like me). :smiley:
Concern: Lately you have been adding or changing a lot of gameplay features through base game patches, and not giving us a way to opt out. A good example of this is the "sentiments" feature. This was added through a base game patch with no option for us to turn it off. Many players like it, but not everyone does. And even those of us who do like it don't necessarily want to use it all the time or in every save that we play. The Snowy Escape pack (which we had the option to buy or not as we wished) gave us a way of turning off the lifestyles feature. But the base game patch (which is mandatory) that came out at the same time did not give us a way to turn off the sentiments feature. I don't understand the inconsistency in this decision. Also you made changes to the personality traits and to the speed of eating and drinking (also through unavoidable base game updates) without giving us any way to keep things the way they were if we didn't want the changes. In my opinion, features which change the way the gameplay functions should always come with an off switch or some form of customization in the settings menu. I think that should just be standard practice for a game like this.
Request: I'd be very interested in seeing more customization options in the setting menu (examples: the ability to turn on or off specific types of deaths; the ability to customize what types of behaviors are autonomous for specific sim traits; the ability to choose whether our sims start off the game poor, middle class, or rich; the ability to change the length of the in-game day; the ability to set how likely it is for specific types of random events to occur, and many other choices we'd like to make for ourselves when we play...) Sims 4 is a game where players like to play in all kinds of different ways, and it draws in a lot of highly creative players with many different visions about how they would like to experience or use the game. It is not possible to please all of us all the time, of course, but I think giving more settings controls directly to the players would go a long ways towards pleasing most of us most of the time. Can this be done more?
EA Staff (Retired)