Forum Discussion
"Erpe;c-16252421" wrote:
I am not trying to insult anybody. But you will know what I mean when you get your own babies and they wake you up even in the middle of the night where you are trying to get some sleep. Being a new parent is extremely hard and alas it was even harder for my daughter’s mum than it is for most parents. She therefore got a depression and we haven’t lived together since those days even though we still are close friends.
TS1 originally was targeted at a different group who already played SimCity. This group was mainly males of different ages and in those days all games were targeted at males because there were very few females who were interested in PC games at all. But especially TS1 changed this and EA sure hadn’t expected this change.
Will Wright was mainly just a game designer with various ideas. He wasn’t interested in marketing at all which I also see as the main reason why Maxis got into so much trouble that it couldn’t survive on its own. The co-owner of Maxis was Jeff Baun and I think that he was more the one who was interested in marketing and economics. But he couldn’t get around the fact that only very few of Will Wright’s many games sold very well. Therefore Maxis was sold to EA in 1997 and EA most likely only accepted to develop TS1 for a low budget because it made it easier for EA to buy Maxis. It was the right to the SimCity series that EA wanted and EA had no plans about letting Will Wright make even more games like SimFarm, SimAnt etc.
My nephews have lived with me and woken me up in the middle of the night beyond just the baby stage. XD My niece will be doing it too since she is due this month. Sure it stinks I'm tired but my health tires me too, so I'm used to it. Sorry your daughter got depression with it. I just make sure to nap if I get too tired and still get to play for a little bit. I guess each person handles parenthood or just raising kids differently. My sister has bipolar so probably doesn't handle raising her kids well. She's had my mom and I basically raise her kids for her and we are just letting her finally handle it herself this year. Sims games have been like a haven for me for my down times. If I do have kids, I'll be adopting.
I was playing SimCity before I started Sims games. SimTower was a ton of fun too. I was into games back in SimCity days and I'm a girl, so yay for being apart of the very few females then. ;) My dad was a gamer, so my brother and I got into games too. My older sister not so much. I mean she enjoyed the Sims 2 and 3 and my brother enjoyed the Sims 1 and 2, but they both moved onto other games and sites by now."Scobre;c-16252527" wrote:
"Erpe;c-16252472" wrote:
It was my daughter’s mum who got a birth depression and not my daughter! ;)
When I wrote small kids I meant 0 to 5 yrs olds. Kids become easier and easier for their parents the older they get. But 0 to 5 yrs olds you can’t let out of your sight even for a few minutes. So you need to look after them all the time while you are trying to do something else too.
Yes there was a minority of girls and women who played PC games even back in the 1980s and 1990s. But while most boys were interested in those games I think that only maybe 10% of the girls were. All the other girls just made fun of boys who played games and called them “boring nerds” ;)
So seeing a girl in a game store wasn’t very common and she would usually be the only girl there. It was the release of TS1 that suddenly to everybody’s surprise changed that and it is amazing to see that there now are just as many female gamers as there are males! :)
Still sad about them and sorry about that. I know it was an incident that happened with a neighbor that triggered my sister's depression. One of my nephews does have autism and is in that age bracket. It is pretty cool he is learning sign language to help with his speech development skills now. I wish that was true about kids getting easier as they get older, but it isn't. Anyone who has had teens will tell you that is the hardest years to raise kids in with hormones and everything.
The problems with teens are much less general and of course different. All the mums to teens that I know tells everybody that it is teen daughters who are the problem while boys are much easier. (One of them is my brother’s wife. They have both a son and a daughter who are something like 20 and 18 years old now.) But even teen girls aren’t alike at all. Some get eating disorders and depressions while other teen girls don’t. But a 2-3 yrs old can put everything into the mouth and get suffocated or poisoned before you notice it if you don’t watch them all the time.Something that the Sims is a hit and miss in with simulating. Kids do take naps, so it is possible to play the Sims and watch kids and check on them every couple minutes. What the pause button is for and with the Sims 4 it is super easy because you can run the game on idle without anything bad happening to the Sims unlike the other versions of the game. Not like I'm one of those Farmville parents that neglects the child for days. Stats are meaningless to me unless backed up with real facts. In all reality it doesn't matter what Grant says about only releasing 1 EP per year with the Sims 3 or whatever target market someone says the game is supposed to be.
He was just describing the place where he works and not the game in general.What matters to me, is how am I going to get the Sims games to not only appeal to me as an adult, but also to people who are not me who are a different gender, a different age, a different religion or don't have a religion, live in a different part of the world, or a different playstyle. I guess in a way I like the Sims games to reflect things in my own life whether it is my pond with my pet fish with having a terrain tool, toddlers to reflect my nephew and future niece, both broken and unbroken families as reflected with my family, my cat and now my service dog, having Sims have consequences and failures which has helped me grow as a woman, and just so many of my surroundings reflected in the game whether it is a bookstore or buses or cars or drive thru coffee shops or diner movie theatres or farms or freeways. Then I like to mix all the reality stuff in my life with fantasy aspects whether it is supernaturals, MOO cheat, motherlode, silly NPCs, odd events, Smurf Sims, or cow plants. I guess I've never been just one thing, I'm many things and in a way that makes me a hybrid Simmer.
I like the life simulation part of the Sims games too. I am not really into playing with supernaturals. But I can do so anyway if they have some interesting gameplay.
What I don’t like with the way the Sims game have changed is instead that they have become more and more just about decorating the houses and dressing up the sims. This is completely worthless to me. So stuff and SPs interests me extremely little.One thing I do wonder is the effects of introducing more social media with this iteration. I mean we have a lot to deal with whether it is Twitter, Facebook, and reddit just to name a few and with studies about the harmful effects of them. Makes me wonder if there were not any sites like Twitter would people still have such a negative view towards Gurus and Simmers? I do wonder why do Simmers in general have to compare each other to themselves or other people? Does it make people happy? Because all I've seen it do in the past three years is split the community in two and it hasn't gone away. The community is so incredibly unhappy. Wish I could do something to fix it but I can't alone. It is going to have to be a community effort to have the community feel like a community again. It does in niche sites like Twitch and Discord I've noticed which I think offer a healthier environment and a few threads on here communities have formed like I still have friends from the family play thread. I think my biggest fear for the Sims future is that there still won't be a community when the next iteration comes out and then I'll have to accept that the Sims 4 was the iteration that killed the community for good. I know world events aren't making tolerating others any easier, but if we want the Sims games to remain our haven we are going to have to put our differences aside and build up our communities again and tolerate each other. Sure Simmers say it is impossible but pools and toddlers were considered impossible too. One valuable lesson I've learned from playing the Sims is that turns dreams into realities and makes the impossible possible again. Anyway I wish everyone a happy Simming day and life. Value each moment and make the most out of the time you have because life passes by fast.
For me to see the necative attitude to the gurus is caused by people blaming them for the way the game has changed. I don’t do that myself because I know that they are only employees who have to make the game like EA tells them to do. But the majority here seem to think that the developers can just make the game as they like and that EA doesn’t care even though it is EA who pays the bills. But I am quite sure that EA cares very much and that EA’s managers and marketing people uses a huge amount of time on market investigations which they analyze and use to discuss how to increase sales numbers and keep the expenses down.
People wants each new Sims game just to be an improved version of the previous one. But EA wants every new Sims game to really be a new game and different from all previous games. Also EA knows that the price can’t be increased without sales numbers going down. So therefore EA has to keep costs down and remove things from the game to be able to add new things. But simmers here just hates this and then blame the developers instead of EA who made the decision."Erpe;c-16252421" wrote:
"Scobre;c-16252262" wrote:
"Erpe;c-16250820" wrote:
"Scobre;c-16250781" wrote:
Yeah I don't understand how you can't play the Sims if you are an adult. I mean most Simmers on forums according to the poll started with the first Sims game, so I doubt they are teens. Anyways I actually had more time to play the Sims in my adult years than in the years I was attending college. I am able to work a full-time job and play more than one Sims game and post on forums, lurk Twitter, check the latest updates on discord, and watch Twitch streams. I guess I can multitask better than the Sims 4 Sims. ;)
Then you aren’t married and have just got one or two very small kids to to take care about too! ;)
Not sure if you are intentionally trying to insult adults and teens all in one go who play Sims games at this point. I may not be married yet, but I've raised both my nephews for 11 years with a niece on the way so not sure what your definition of small kids is when my nephew is taller than me now. I went to college for five years while raising my nephews. I think you are making a lot of assumptions about people you have no idea about both Guru and Simmer alike. But yeah I can play the Sims, take care of my mom's health problems, take care of my own health problems, and take care of my pets and my family. I know how to cook, how to play music, I can read real books, and do crafts. You may or may not have a life outside the Sims, but don't assume that people who play Sims don't have a life or friends or family to take care of because for some of us we do and able to manage it all and then some.
I am not trying to insult anybody. But you will know what I mean when you get your own babies and they wake you up even in the middle of the night where you are trying to get some sleep. Being a new parent is extremely hard and alas it was even harder for my daughter’s mum than it is for most parents. She therefore got a depression and we haven’t lived together since those days even though we still are close friends.
@Erpe - why do you constantly take your experiences in life and try to project them onto others? Do you not realise that not everyone is the same?
I've been simming since the beginning and I still Sim at any possible chance that I get, mostly on the weekends. I also have time for twitter, YT, watching a few streams, and discord. I do wonder what assumptions you could come up about me! That all really needs to stop because it's insulting to other people."JoAnne65;c-16251260" wrote:
"Cinebar;c-16251024" wrote:
"Erpe;c-16250877" wrote:
"JoAnne65;c-16250853" wrote:
"Scobre;c-16250781" wrote:
Yeah I don't understand how you can't play the Sims if you are an adult. I mean most Simmers on forums according to the poll started with the first Sims game, so I doubt they are teens. Anyways I actually had more time to play the Sims in my adult years than in the years I was attending college. I am able to work a full-time job and play more than one Sims game and post on forums, lurk Twitter, check the latest updates on discord, and watch Twitch streams. I guess I can multitask better than the Sims 4 Sims. ;)
There even was a poll asking for our age group and half of the simmers here was over 30. We established though that this could also be an indication of forum use, it’s not necessarily representive for all simmers. That being said, I’m convinced a whole new group of adults could join if the game became a bit more... less teen/YouYuber/weeweeee-OMGOMGawesome oriented.
I think that there are two main group who play the game:
1. 10 to (at most) 16 years olds who are the main customers but usually stop playing at latest when they start in highschool.
2. 30+ years old adults who either are without work, singles, retired from work or whos children now are so old that they aren’t home much anymore. But most adults still have too many other interests, work and different obligations which they prioritize more than playing such a game.
Even though group 2 clearly is the most active in the forum I think that the group actually is much smaller than group 1. EA of course knows much more about this from EA’s market investigations. We don’t know the results of those market investigations though. But we can see that they have had the effect that EA more and more has targeted the game only at group 1. Therefore group 1 must be much bigger and this also is something that is in line with my observations elsewhere.
The third group is older teens and young adults who still is under education or have just started a family. But this group I believe to be far the smallest group because they just don’t have much time at all for gaming.
They wouldn't know who is what age unless they ask and people do lie. It's just like their surveys, if you are past 40 it will say thanks, goodbye. So, people lie to be able to take it, so their numbers would be skewed. A person who lied to take the survey who is over 40 would be to EA a person who is at least under 40. (Targeted audences are below age 40 for surveys). But what they don't realize is people are tired of being locked out and say they are younger than what they are. They want the younger demographic, no doubt, but are they really acquiring them, and are they really maintaining them, and or is it adults who lie to take their survyes and participate in other things? Even at Sim Camp get togethers we don't see many 'teens' at all. Most are well past 25+.
Which is horrible horrible horrible. Can't express in words how that ****** me off.
It's like saying, you are too old, go away, though I wasn't this old when I spent all that money to help TS1 become a big hit. I was younger, and now I'm old and it's get out. :p"JoAnne65;c-16251822" wrote:
@Writin_Reg Maybe I'm confused (being not familiar with those surveys): are they meant to attract new players or are they meant to get feedback (genuinely not sure)? I was 44 by the way when I first was drawn into this franchise ;) We're old, not dead or completely blunted. And *cough* we often have money to spend :p
The EA surveys I have taken not necessarily TS4 ones, but I got them for awhile, too, were always for interest in new games and for feedback concerning TS4. TS4 surveys usually end if you click your correct age group. It's just the way it is. I can't hold them in contempt for that, but it sure makes those who have been with them for what seems forever, feel bad. We have your money and you sure helped us get rich, but now, we don't want your opinion anymore. That is what that says, and yes everyone does it, but the core demographic of the series is still old enough to be everyone's grandma.- EA_LannaCommunity ManagerIt appears that all that is to be said on the original matter has been said. It would not be productive for this to continue as the discussion lately has been off topic. Closing the thread now.
"@catloverplayer;c-16199174" wrote:
"jackjack_k;c-16199169" wrote:
"@Yoko2112;c-16199135" wrote:
>says we get awesome, free stuff
>mentions pools and toddlers as examples, failing to realize that they are core features for a Sims game
>says they used to do only one expansion per year and a few stuff packs during TS3 times
https://i.imgur.com/hm57sV5.png
>fails to mention ( although divisive ) frequent store sets
>says they avoid crunch ( which is healthy ) but when you look at the half baked content riddled with bugs that they release you wonder if they take 3 spa breaks a week and let their inexperienced interns handle the coding
>says how well packs work combined with each other and conveniently mentions retail as the only feature that heavily makes use of that ( because otherwise the feature would be useless )
>retail is still broken as of this moment
>other similarly combinable features like GT clubs have seen less and less support over the year
Golly gee, I can't wait to see what the future holds.
It’s clear that they’re making sure people realise they weren’t DLC. Press was reporting at launch that EA obmitted stuff just to sell it later.
The store sets were made by external teams, not EA.
They were still from EA but it was the Salt Lake Team who did Store Stuff. Remembers the awesome SimGuruCopeland.
That’s right. I knew they weren’t Redwood anyhow.
Grant seems to forget Salt Lake was there during The Sims 3.- Maybe we're not getting Seasons.
"aricarai;c-16199270" wrote:
"simgirl1010;c-16199268" wrote:
Maybe we're not getting Seasons.
Could you imagine the uproar?!
I'm sure there would be but for me it wouldn't be a game breaker. I know the game is supposed to be a life simulator and weather is part of life but after 2 versions of Seasons, both of which I still play, I'm really ready for something different. I would be okay with a game pack that provided a world with seasonal weather and seasonal activities. Similar to how weather is handled in Sims FreePlay. A seasonal world with ice skating, ice hockey, skiing, snowboarding.
The problem is would there be a game pack for the other seasons? :o- catloverplayerSeasoned Ace
"Yoko2112;c-16200943" wrote:
"catloverplayer;c-16200077" wrote:
"graventhe;c-16199654" wrote:
I don't think they'll patch in cars, that means reprogramming the moving decor cars in the background to make them usable by neighbors, and they won't re sctrach how cars are implemented for us..its EA and it's "too hard" for them ^_^
Don't put it past them. I still think cars are possible.
Why ? They would have to rework a bunch of neighborhoods and implement transportation methods other than cars for some of them for the whole thing to be cohesive, logical and high in quality. It would also have to have a decent pay off for them because developers working on games with expansion models usually tend to focus on adding new content instead of revisiting old stuff.
Besides, when asked about adding the ability to swim in bodies of water to the worlds of TS4, they already said it would be highly unlikely for them to retroactively make the water routable. Instead, they would rather do it with a new world where they could integrate it from the start.
Now unless you only want to use cars in worlds after Stuff/Game/Expansion Pack X, do you see how that wouldn't work ?
And if they were to do it, they would contradict their own excuses. Although it wouldn't be the first time, huh ?
All they would have to do is use the teleportation thing we have now but also they could still add animations to the car like chat,listen to radio,watch stars together,makeout,woohoo,try for a baby etc.
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