I've played a couple of MMORPG's, and quite frankly, there's so, so, so much that can go wrong as far as the community goes that it's just not a good fit for this franchise. The Sims has always been about being master of your own world, telling your stories, developing your characters, building your own beautiful dream buildings and architectural monstrosities, being free to use mods and cheats to enhance your gameplay...but you can't do that if the game is online. They might give us a good building system and CAS, but the world will be out of your hands and in the hands of the devs and a gaggle of other players.
If you want to play your sim as a single sim who just chills and does their own thing alone, be prepared to be bombarded by people who all want to force your sim to be their friend, their lover, join their guild, whatever. Not to mention the trolls, the scammers, the botters trying to sell you simoleons for real money on their sketchy websites, and all of the other ills of online games. Oh, and don't forget the fact that there will be quests and in-game events that will require you to interact or party up with other players...which means random people running up to you trying to get their points when you just want to have your sim hang out at the park and fish all day. And you just know that those group quests are going to be linked to progression, so certain skills or careers won't be advanced if you don't complete them.
And, have I mentioned how awkward it is to get random guild and friend requests from other players who have never even talked to you before? I mean, come on! Try and have a conversation with someone before you toss them a random friend invite or try and get them in your guild! If we haven't had a nice conversation and been convinced that I might like to hang with you some more, I'm going to turn you down because I don't know you like that! It's annoying enough when you're playing an MMORPG and just running around mashing some monsters and enjoying the lone adventurer life, but in a Sims game...? Yeah, no. Random autonomous actions that don't turn off even when you have autonomy off (like, autonomous "Check Toddler," which makes your adult sim drop whatever they were doing to go check the kid and drops anything you had in the kid's action que disappear as a result, basically overriding everything you had set up because the game decided that this interaction makes the world stop...) are bad enough. We don't need randos trying to interact with us inserting their socials into our action ques to interrupt our flow.
So, no. Keep that online mess for spin-offs. Main series Sims titles should be offline, single-player experiences. If multi-player is ever a thing, it should be optional and invite-only, so people can play with those who want to tell the same story or work toward a common goal together and not be plagued by immature people (young and old alike) getting in their way or sabotaging their hard work.
