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Virtual Simerica
Disoriented writes "A Time article speculates on where the Sims Online is going.
Interesting and scary to see what America would be like without our inhibitions." I've played a lot of the playtest, and can't wait for the final
version to come out.
Sounds just like the MetaVerse from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. A lot of the ideas in the book must have sounded far fetched when he wrote it, but sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. Who knows where this will all go.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
Been done already on UltimaOnline. Unfortunately, those people having some fun and doing this deliberately against administrator's planned excursions for the masses [frequently called "quests"] often got penalized by banning and deletion of characters.
Karma: NaN
I played the beta for about a week... this was a few weeks ago, like three I think. The experience of the Sims Online is going downhill fast. I realize it's still beta but Maxis seems to enjoy making the game harder and harder.
For those that aren't hip to the Sims, you have to build your Sim's skills up by doing a multitude of different things that increase one of 5 or 6 skills. Now, this idea isn't bad. But in the week that I played it, they made skills build slower and do I mean sloooower.
Now to get one point of a skill (say creativity by playing a guitar) I have to sit and watch my Sim play.. for an hour. AN HOUR. You can't do anything else with your Sim obviously while you're doing it so during that time, the Sims Online becomes pretty much a glorified chat room with annoying text bubbles and no scrollback.
Yes, you can get up and leave your computer while you're doing that but.. after 10-15 minutes of inactivity, you're kicked from the service. Great stuff.
And if that wasn't bad enough, skills ratings decay while you're offline, pretty severely too. Factor in that they keep up'ing the prices for all the items and the fact that once it goes live, you can expect to pay at least $9.95/mo to waste your life in their virtual world and have zero to show for it.
Rave on, raver. I think I'll stick to RCT2 if I really have to play a Sim game.
I just wasted your mod points! HA!
"To many of us, it is more than just a game. We don't just play The Sims; we express ourselves and our lives with real emotions, situations and interactions."
This woman is not the exception, she is the rule. When a user would download a bad object/skin/what have you, that would crash the game, there were three steps.
#1:Sim File Cop (a prog to find bad skins, etc...
#2:delete the house and the family within
uninstall the game completely and start from scratch
Suffice to say, 35% of the time, callers forced with #2 or #3 turned into supe calls. This prog really has turned into a replacement for life for a number of users.
Curse you Will Wright!
"Inattention makes clowns of us all" -Bean
The Three Stigmata Of Palmer Eldritch, to be exact.
Stephenson, Bah! Have you no sense of history, Man?!
In this case, it sounds like it might even be supported. According to the article, they seem to recognize a dicatorship as a valid form of government.