Recent Discussions
Opinion on New Forums
It may just be unpopular opinion, but I find these new forums to be painstakingly difficult to read ,(text is tiny, and colors are blinding), follow thread, my hand hurts from scrolling through hundreds of post I already read since day one to get to current. Newest somehow works but requires a lot waiting of leg work too. Is it just me. Have I been put on a delay? It wont let me post to threads all the time for just no good reason. Notifications are not as clear and prompt as last forum. While I think it may need kinks worked out, I myself may have to take to another forum. I may check in periodically to see if they have improved it, but for now, I can't. Let me know is anyone if experiencing the same or if it's just me.
The new EA Sims Forum
I am a member of the soon to be Sims Forum. I have also raised my concern in the Forum and will repeat it here. Perhaps this debate has already started somewhere else, but forgive me for not seeing where. That is exactly the problem. I think everything new requires getting used to and I will probably spend some time getting to know the new EA Forum. However, there is one thing that immediately catches my eye and surprises me. How is it that almost everything is sorted by 'The most' such as Most Recent, Most Viewed, Most Replies, Most Likes. It is of course very nice for those who already have a lot of followers and likes, but for someone else it seems like a killer. On a forum like X, you're practically invisible and dead if you don't have a whole bunch of followers. I'm afraid the same thing is going to happen here. As I said, it may be because I can't find my way around yet, but I need to voice my concern out loud and hopefully become wiser. The best thing about the old Sims Forum is that it didn't try to look like a social media like any other social media where it's about scoring the highest rank and number of followers to get benefits. This applies in particular to the right to costume a personal avatar. I really hope the idea of earning enough rank to get a personal avatar is rethought. The existing Forum has been a sanctuary where you have been able to cultivate the special interest you have in the game with other Simmers regardless of their rank and general popularity. The entire structure of the forum has made it easy to navigate. I don't know how to navigate the EA Forum when it focuses on highlighting the most popular lore at the moment. This cultivation of elitism leaves me with a feeling of loneliness. For me it's a killer because I don't want to be in a Forum where I have to be confirmed daily that I'm invisible and therefore unimportant.
The Sims Community is Different
Okay, I’m not going to post about the glitches, missing features, and other problems in the forum itself. We all know what those are. I would just like to amplify something that maybe needs to be taken more seriously by those who decide these things, and that is this: the Sims game is completely different from the others here, and so is the Sims gaming community. I took some time to look at the boards for the other EA games on the forum, and we simmers are definitely having the most difficulty with the switch. My perspective is that forum interaction and community is directly related to the way the game is played, and the Sims is not like the others. This type of forum is fine when gameplay and community are centered around gaining levels, adding in-game allies or friends, getting performance tips, or raising gameplay related questions. Those types of interactions are the basis of the community for those types of games, because the game has structure. There’s only so much to discuss. A sandbox game like The Sims doesn’t fit in that box. The game itself is open ended. It can be anything we want it to be, and one person’s game is not like anyone else’s. That kind of player directed, open ended game requires a community format that is also open ended and user directed. It needs a loose structure that allows players to share the wide range of possibilities the game gives us. This forum cannot do this. Big, continuous topics with multiple people sharing stories and screenshots are a staple of the Sims community, and after a matter of only weeks, this forum is breaking under the weight of those long threads. On the old forum, we had topics that were years old, still going strong. Conversational topics, idea threads, creative threads and social threads are being buried under long loads, “see more” scrolling and nested replies that don’t allow a natural flow of ideas and communication. My own “Blue Moon” thread is becoming difficult to maintain because I can’t even tell where the new responses are, in order to respond back. While this forum seems to suit games like Star Wars, it is not functional for a game like the Sims and the community that plays it. The Sims is not Star Wars, and it requires a community format that recognizes the difference.
Feedback on new Sims forum
I want to offer some feedback... I've tried. I really have, but I don't think I can use these forums. They are cluttered, from the "sidebar" that occupies almost a third of the screen to the "preview" text, to the choice of glaringly bright colors. With so much being shoved at me at once, it becomes physically painful for me to try to read or post. I'm getting headaches trying to use them forums. They do not appear to be designed to support discussion, but rather tech support style question-and-answer posts. The way replies are sorted, and nested, and the lack of "page numbers" in favor of "show more" all combine to make it extremely difficult to follow a chronological progression of comments in a thread. I genuinely feel that these forums are the wrong tool for the job... they're like using a hammer to cut wood. You can do it, but you shouldn't.
New Sims Forum Feedback
Hi! This is for the team at EA who are hopefully picking up on feedback and looking to constantly improve these new forums. What I’d like to stress, and ask for from all us lovely Simmers, is that this isn’t a place for being overly negative, aggressive or angry towards the team or specific staff. I’ve seen quite a few reactions that are just that and if we want to improve things, while we don’t have to be overly positive either, we need to be constructive at least. Having been a member of the original Sims forums and the newer rendition in recent years, I think it’s fair to say what keeps the forums running is the sense of community. So a few things I think that would help this would be: customisation for profiles - avatars, signatures, adding social media links or blogs/websites so we can find each other elsewhere. Paying specific attention to each rendition of the game, the Sims 3 community is massive and has been around a lot longer. So please consider us when making changes! I can see the sims 4 forum/threads already have plenty more tags and options than ours do as well as sub forums that we haven’t been able to keep. We have a whole community of storytellers that benefitted from the stories and legacies subforum and whether the game is 15 years old or not it deserves to live on. Changes to the formatting of threads and replies. I’ve noticed it is already hiding multiple replies under a “show more” filter which limits conversation. Also nesting replies is confusing, the original board style was much easier to navigate and chat on, which is what these forums are all about. As already highlighted, changing the automatic filtering by likes to newest would make it feel more relevant and conversational as a quick fix in the mean time. I personally miss being able to bookmark threads, especially since the sims 3 forums have lost our sub forums and all the migrated ones are in the franchise discussion (please rectify this!). I can’t navigate to what I want to read and am losing track of what I’ve chatted on unless I get notified. Could we also have a list of the rankings just out of interest? I have no idea what a traveler is but apparently I am one 😂 As always, super grateful to the team for taking feedback on board and looking forward to improvements and developments as they come! Happy Simming! LizzieNew Sims forum: worries about creative corner
The new forum shows many new features, but as someone who spends most of her time around the old "challenges, stories and legacies" section, I cannot help but worry about the applicability of the new layout to this typology of content. In particular, I'm worried about the removal of threads' pages in favour of a "load more" and of a "sort by..." feature. This new layout seems suited for short threads made of short and quick responses, where missing some posts isn't a tragedy and that always gives you something to read. In the creative corner section, instead, we thrive with very long threads, that take years to be completed, our update posts tend to be long and detailed (i.e. the kind of posts we don't want to see getting lost among the newer or more liked posts), and we need the post to be displayed in chronological order. Similar comments can probably be made about the thread where the users showcase their custom saves update by update, or for some very ambitious build/buy mode project. To be less vague, I'd like to make an example, using the "Aliens stole my alien parents" challenge posted by @myghtysprite (sorry if I'm using your story as an example, it is the first one I could think of where the updates were made directly on the forum and not on an external blog!) The story thread on the old forum is here -> https://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/1003023/aliens-stole-my-alien-parents/p1 , while the same thread on the new forum is here -> Aliens Stole My Alien Parents | EA Forums - 377899 Now, I'd like you to try to find a specific update because it's the next one I want to read, let's say it's the one titled: "Act 2, Day 2" (hint: it's around the middle of the thread). With the old forum, you select page 5, scroll down a bit, and there you are. With the new forum instead, whether you choose to sort the posts by "Oldest first" or "Newest first", and whatever you know where the post is or not (more or less), you need to click on "load more" forever before finding the post you're looking for (and note that this is a quite short thread for that section!). Also, if you decide to sort by "Newest first" (for instance, because you're looking for a chapter close to the end), you must scroll through the most recent posts (which you haven't read yet), spoiling one or more chapters you haven't read yet. Summarising, stories and legacies are the kind of threads that users can access at any moment, even years after the posts were actually made. The posts have to be read in chronological order to make any sense, and the readers need an easy and quick way to navigate the thread in its whole length (for instance, when they return to the thread to read some other chapters another time). As a reminder, the old forum remembers the last posts you read, but I didn't notice the same feature in the new one (?) For the moment, the only two solutions I can think of to make stories and legacies easier to navigate (both not ideal) are: for the original poster, to make a very lengthy index with all the links to the chapters' posts in the opening comment of the thread (but the links can really be a lot. For instance, my current legacy has about 180 chapters for the moment. That's a lot of links!) for the reader, to save or copy somewhere the link of the last update they read, and use it as a "bookmark" to know where to continue from. I'm starting to worry about how this would affect this section of the forum, in its current form the navigation of long threads is way more tedious and I'm afraid it will push away both posters and readers. Is there some function I'm missing that could make the navigation easier? Is there some change that can be made to the forum to make it more SimLit-friendly? Is this forum just not meant for this kind of use? Any other thoughts on what I wrote? PS: I'd also like to point out that the creative corner section is being hit particularly hard by the issue with the migration of pictures' links, I guess that's quite evident. In addition, I think that other users from the creative corner have other perplexities about the new forum, so feel free to add your comments on the topic.
Can we have an updates on the forum-feedback?
This forum has been live for a while now, and at least from the Sims-community, the forum has gotten som harsh, but fair and well deserved, feedback by users. So my question is if we could get some updates about where we stand on those issues and when we can expect some improvements? Primarily I'd like updates on the following: Forum performance. What is being done to address the massive performance issues on the site? Pages not loading correctly, or at all, loading being slow, images not displaying as they should, the constant log outs and difficulty logging in... where do we stand on those issues? (Seriously EA cannot possibly be content with the performance) Personal avatars for all users. One of the major wishes from the community was personal avatars, to express our personality and recognise each other. Where do we stand on this? Page loading vs. pages - is there anyway to get pages back instead of infinit loading more on larger threads? Customisable feed so the thread starts in a logical way, and ways for the forum to remember where I left off instead of me having to start over each time I get back into a thread. This needs to be prioritized, longer threads are more or less unreadable at the moment. Spoiler tags on comments so to simplify loading times.
The workings of this forum....
I don't know if I am doing anything wrong (I am on a pc) but I was just reading a discussion with a lot of responses, and instead of taking me to page 2, 3 or whatever, it just asked me to 'show more' (I had to do this several times) - and then took me back to the very top to have to scroll down tons of responses to actually get to the last one. I find this really annoying. Am I doing something wrong or is this the way it works? Because that's going to be a nightmare when a post gets to 2000 responses or more. Why is there not a 'last page' or 'last post' option at least? Sigh...Show more button
When I click the Show more button when reading a thread, it reloads the page and then brings me back at the top of the page and then I need to scroll back down and find where I was and continue reading. Can you please make it so it just loads the next batch of posts without reloading the whole page? It's getting very tedious to read this way especially with all the nested replies and no pagination.This place feels like reddit but worse
I get that you need to start somewhere, but supposedly this place was worked on for months.And this is what we get? I go to reddit not for a community, but reading random comments on a single main image or link. This place has the same vibe. A forum is read chronologically without any nesting of comments and with pages. That's how everyone does it. I also saw someone calling twitter (elon has no say in what we call it) a forum. It's not. A forum, is a forum. with subsections, signiatures, profile walls, embedded quotes, chronological order. Not this, this feels like the wrong people got given the wrong task. It's feels as if you asked gen Z to recreate IRC for example, they sort of got it, but didn't actually know what it was like. The magic is gone. this feels like a off the shelf "forum" software package got bought and then bruteforced to work in ways it's not supposed to. Even AHQ feels more polished. If you want to make this place feel like an actual forum: go back to chronological order pages, no endless "show more" scrolling. proper quoting instead of this ugly nested behavior signiatures, no that isn't a "Security issue". it's a bit of text. Surely you can figure out proper regex and filtering to remove mallicious stuff. proper subsections instead of this large heap center formatting, lose the sidebar. nobody needs to know which tags are used elsewhere while reading a post whatever this broken formatting is...fix it. it can't even render a ampersand properly or show the whole description Set up a system so that you can have ghost users that can be used to migrate posts. because right now several guru's have left EA over the years, and therefore the simulation tech talk thread is unable to be migrated as they created it, and that's a shame. We're already losing so much, and we basically had to guess on wether or not the original posted had a account or even wanted to make one. notifications and messeges: a dropdown, don't make everythingload on a new page. this feels like a janky workarround inline editing, don't make me load into some editing page whenever i want to edit something. there's so many things at this early stage that feel like either the webdevs don't quite grasp what they're doing, they weren't given enough time, or somebody picked the wrong backend and now we have to make due, As a final note, Forcing the true forum to read only in the span of 5 days from forum announcement to now just because we refuse to use this place feels rude. I get that some staff members dislike the ancient and outdated old forum backend, but there's better ways to handle this.Progress?
I feel at this point that we've made out views pretty clear. The new forums have a number of serious issues - no avatars, no page numbers, no subforums, bad sorting, unstable logins, getting rerouted, long load times, etc. At this point, new feedback is just repeating the old. What I think we all want now is to hear from folks running this show. So, I'll ask the impertinent question... because it's what I do. What progress is being made to address the issues?
Please add page numbers
When a thread has many replies, it is very inconvenient to see the latest replies. There are nor page numbers, nor is there true incremental loading. You can click "show more," which adds a few replies, but instead of just expanding, it takes you back to the top of the page, which is extremely annoying. Please consider adding page number functionality so users can skip to any point in the replies. Chrome on android.Off Topic Channel Please
Can we please have an Off Topic Channel and move those posts there. ie the likes of "Change One Word Game", "Word Association Game", etc. Whilst I can't see what the guidelines are for posting in "The Sims 4 General Discussion" those posts don't really fall under that banner.
Does anyone actually think these forums are an improvement?
I honestly just don't see it, it's a big mess and I have to click many times to even see the newest comments on a thread. It's just a huge downgrade to me compared to the old Sims forums which where so much easier to navigate. It just makes me far less interested to really engage here. It just seems even worse than Discord. Maybe I'm getting old but I honestly feel like social media is often getting less social due to "improvements""Related Posts" sidebar on the forum encourages necroposting.
I don't want to necropost, but I find myself inadvertently doing that by clicking on the posts in the "Related Posts" sidebar on the forum. Most of the posts are nearly a decade old. To avoid necroposting, could the "Related Posts" only list posts that will not encourage necroposting? If a post is too old for people to add posts to, maybe it shouldn't appear there.
The new forum
As someone who has been active on the old forums I would like to share my feedback on this one. My first encounter with this forum was on my mobile because I was on holiday during the switch from the old to the new forum so I wanted to wait for a week or two before making this post. No avatars: this really hurts. Avatars gave us all faces on the old forum. With the limited selection I now have to share my picture with several others. This leads to confusion because I something think 'there is a reply I made' only to realise it was made by someone else. Not having a unique avatar also makes me feel anonymous. How are other simmers ever going to easily recognise me? On the old forum you had to promote from new member to member to get an avatar and I get that. I don't mind if it is tied to a rank, but that has to be a rank that everyone can reach. Currently only heroes are allowed an avatar, and thus the privilege to build up their own personality on the forum. But the info page about hero ranks also say not everyone can become a hero (which makes sense). But the combination of not everyone being able to become a hero and only heroes getting their own avatar means that some users of this forum will never get access to something that should be a basic feature. The heavy focus on 'most liked' posts makes this forum feel like a popularity contest. It is difficult to sort posts for long threads. Some discussions have been going for years with hundreds of posts. On the old forum we would automatically be taken to the last unread post and then see the subsequent posts in chronological order. This new forum however sorts by likes on default. You can switch to sort by oldest but can't set it to default. However for long threads setting it to oldest means I have to click 'load more' way too many times. Sorting by newest means I am reading backwards and on an active thread this can also mean clicking 'load more' The above point makes this forum not suitable for sharing long stories which is something me and other simmers love to do The extensive rank list is confusing. Every single level has new, rising and seasoned added to the title. For the higher ranks adding the word 'new' kind of takes away from the higher ranks. You already have to go searching for the ranks on this forum before you realise a new adventurer is higher than a seasoned traveler. Most users on this forum don't know that list by heart. Adding the word 'new' to high ranks feels confusing and not very intuitive. Sharing a forum with other games: we used to have a forum exclusively for sims and now we are just a small part of a forum for other games. That does take some time to get used to. But why do I get links to other game in 'related posts' when I am on the sims part of the forum. I accidentally stumbled into another game forum. Is it possible to restrict the related posts to the sub forum (game) we are currently browsing When creating a new discussion we can select different tags. I miss a tag for discussion (sometimes the purpose of a thread is just talking about the game) and a tag for speculation. The version of the site on my mobile doesn't shot a button to add a picture. I sometimes don't get a chance to post a picture when I am on my laptop. I upload them to a photo sharing website and then post them a few hours later. But this forum only shows the add photo option in the desktop version. I have a feeling that this forum was mainly created for short conversations with very few posts where chronology of posts is unimportant. It also feels more like a popularity contest with the heavy focus on getting likes for your posts, a competition on it's own which distracts from the topic itself. I want to give this forum a try and really want to make best of it. But the difficulty to read threads chronologically really makes it difficult. That's the part of this forum that needs improvement more than any others.
The new Sims forum isn't very easy to understand
I've seen a few posts about this, and I will try to give some feedback to what's bothering me with this new forum. It don't feel like a forum to be honest,The posts are all over the place, and I find it very confusing to find the posts I have previous seen, answered, or just the newest ones. I had to scroll in a post I had received answers in all the way back before I even found my answer in that post, and then the reply I got for it, which is just a hassle. I hope I don't sound to negative, but I really enjoyed how the old sims forum was, and I hope things will keep getting added here to make it more user friendlySims forum feedback
Thanks for getting notifications back up! Here is my feedback: Please give us the ability to change our avatars. We need subsections in the Sims 3 subforum, like how the Sims 4 subforum is arranged. Can we default to chronological order instead of 'most liked'? I don't want to see most liked. I want to see what everyone said in chronological order. Or at least be able to change MY default? Please give us a way to view pages on our old threads with thousands of posts. I HATE TAGS. Never used them and never will. 😉 That's all... for now.Necroposting not good - so why do the forum advertise 5 years old threads?
When in a thread I get a list of "related posts" to the right. Typically, those posts will be 5 or 7 years old. Recently I commenting in one of them, a thread about graveyards that I thought was highlighted this way due to the new pack. Old thread but very relevant these days thanks to the upcoming Life & Death pack. The result was that the thread got closed because it was considered necroposting. So - WHY do the forum list all those old threads if we can not post on them? My suggestion is that threads that are too old for commenting on, are automatically set to "read only" and NOT advertised as a "hey, come check out this necro-thread". Or, ther could at least be a gravestone/grim or similar symbol indicating the read-only status. I've been on all TS forums for 24(?) years (which is actually a quarter of a century!), but I still do not know what exact age makes a thread too old. A symbol or read-only status would be of great help.
