Timed event quests are toxic, anti-consumer, and need to go.

First of all I apologize for what might seem an incendiary title for this post. I'm sure there's many reasons why events/quests work the way they do. However, in all my years playing this game since 2019, I've never encountered a system that makes me want to pack up, uninstall and never open the executable again quite as much as this one. Let me explain.

On the surface it seems fairly innocent. Doing tasks for rewards in a progression sandbox game all about task-reward cycles. One could argue that complaining about a system of free rewards is downright ungrateful. That would be true, were it not for the existence of SDX.

SDX drops have been a staple way of delivering small, free additions to the game for a while. I don't know if SDX is still around, the deliveries tend to get lost in the background noise of the game and updates. Regardless, SDX as a system fills the role of free content delivery: if the content is free, and the goal is to deliver it, there's no reason for a system other than SDX.

What this means is that the primary goal of timed event quests cannot simply be "to deliver free content".

Obviously I can't know what the purpose of the timed event quests are. I'm not an EA insider. However, I have a pretty good educated guess as to the purpose of the system. Live-service games based on DLC monetization are on the business of player engagement. The logic is that, the more people you can convince to play the game for as long as possible, the more likely it is that people will purchase content for the game. That's not necessarily true but it is a starting point for a live-service business model.

Looking at this model without any nuance whatsoever, one might conclude that more playtime per player equals more sales. Telemetry data (the kind of data The Sims 4 collects for stuff like the retrospectives in which the team tells us how many times the players as a collective did the woohoo or whatever) also seems to suggest that more playtime = more revenue. Looking at this, some upper management types might come up with the idea to artificially increase playtime. Get people on the grind whether they want to or not.

This doesn't work, obviously. The point of the correlation isn't that players who play the game are compelled to buy content from time alone, it's that people who love the game and play it every day are more likely to buy content for the game they like to play. But you need to be good at thinking about things to understand this, so it's largely ignored in the wider games industry as a whole in favor of FOMO-fueled battle pass reward tracks in things like Fortnite, and, indeed, The Sims 4.

As I see it, the timed quest events are a very clumsy, poorly-implemented managerial decision by someone higher up meant to inflate playtimes. Leaving aside all the UI woes I have with this system (which makes the game unpleasant on a near constant level), this system is a disruptive incentive to play the game so as to not Miss Out (FOMO stands for Fear of Missing Out) on "free" rewards in exchange for engagement. Under the same flawed premise that if people are compelled to play, they are then compelled to buy, which we debunked earlier.

In my six years of playing the game, no update, no system, no addition has driven me to chuck my near 2000 hours of playtime into the garbage harder than this one. It makes the game painful to engage with. Not just because the UI for it is terrible, but also because it's a shady trick that makes me feel like the game doesn't respect my time. I've lost count of how much money I've given to this game and by extension EA, it does not get to demand my time as well. Faced with the choice to tolerate this system or simply not play the game, I've chosen the latter and I can guarantee I'm not the only one.

Again, sorry for the tone of all this, but the only way to get people aware of all the problems with this is to make a fuss. I also want to thank the team at Maxis for all the work in The Sims 4. You made a great game that provided me with countless hours of entertainment, at least while it lasted.