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Sim-Dud?
Lumpish Scholar writes ""The Sims Online" was one of the most anticipated releases of 2002; but (according to this Los Angeles Times story in the Baltimore Sun, "'The Sims Online' sold 105,000 copies, or only about a quarter of the initial shipment in December," and (as quoted in this article in the New York Times), "the company's president, John S. Riccitiello, said the number of subscribers was half what Electronic Arts expected." (Check out Google News for more articles, and a registration-free partner link to the New York Times story.) Meanwhile, the game's customer reviews at Amazon.com have an average rating of only two (out of five) stars."
was I the ONLY one who never played the darn thing in the first place?
Maybe they should have simulated the release of the game in The Sims to see what the outcome would have been. :-)
Maybe it's because no one wants to pay what you'd expect to pay for a full-fledged RPG when all you get is IRC and a set of meaningless stats that don't actually effect gameplay?
They should be trying to get sales, not subscriptions. If it were like Battle.net, people would be stepping over eachother to get a copy. Pay for Chat? Not bloody likely. Remember Alpha World?
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
When I told him about "The Sims":
"Great, a simulated life for people with no real life."
Kinda summed it all up right then and there.
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
I think EA (and Microsoft) probably overestimated the number of broadband users.
At 40 bucks a month (at a minimum), Broadband ain't cheap. And though Sims Online is quite fun, it would suck without a highspeed connection. And anyway, The Sims is pretty fun on its own... without dealing with virtual SimTrolls.
-Anthony
When you play "The Sims" you get multiple people you control, and a whole environment you have a decent amount of control over. You garner people, make two seperate people and make them fall in love, introduce a third to start a fight.
When you add the 'multiplayer' experience, you add in two things that are negative to this style of game.
Loss of Control
and Competition
Now this simple game has become Everquest when that isn't the whole point of the game.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Interact with thousands of real people, doing everyday, real life things.
If I wanted to do that, I would go to work. And then Dinner and a movie.
You say you want a revolution....
This game is fun for about 10 minutes. With the orignal (offline) Sims, the novelty aspect of the game was great. It was new, it was unseen before.
With The Sims Online, you basically end up with a graphical chat room. The tasks you perform are repetitive and dull. Each involves clicking on something and staring at the screen until that task finishes or your happiness levels go down far enough to finish it for you. Fix that up, rinse and repeat. All in all, the game ends up being a glorified IRC chat room that you pay for.
The only partly redeemed quality is that you can build your own houses and have people come over, but that is severely hampered by a silly limit on the number of objects you can put in your house, so in the end you end up with lots of money you can't spend after doing all those boring tasks.
Finally, the biggest pet peeve I have with Maxis over this one is the fact that instead of fixing the bugs and finding ways to increase the limits and make things more interesting, they take a sack full o' money from McDonald's to advertise their products and waste development time throwing it in.
That being said, all MMORPG's have problems at startup, and hopefully they can get their act together and make it a decent product. As it is now, I'll stick to IRC.
...Because you had to Pay to Play. Especially when McDonalds and Pepsi was Buying Ad's on it.
If they would have made the thing free but then used the sims game design to sell product placements they probably would have been more sucessful and probably could have demanded more money from advertisers because of the huge turnout of players to the game.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
Why should I pay $10 a month for something I do now in real life for free? And I can even get laid in the real world!
www.lonseidman.com
I downloaded the free public beta version of Sims Online a few months ago for my wife as she was an avid Sims player but was becoming bored with the offline versions. After a couple of days of Sims Online, she just stopped playing the Online version because there really was no new concept to the game. It was basically the same offline version with the added chat features, and the chat features really added nothing to gameplay and certainly aren't worth a montly fee.
How do you kill people and steal all their stuff in the Sims online again?
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
"Deer Hunter" comes pre-installed on computers? God help us all.
Why pay $30, $40, or even $50 for a game which you then have to start paying for monthly? I don't have anything against subscription-based games, but I would think that the continuous payments might somehow offset the initial purchase price of the product.
I know most of these MMORPG games give you X months free, but that price sticker on the box in the store contributes a lot to their purchasing decision. It'd be a great deal if they charged $200 for the game and gave you 40 months free, but do you think that such a package would sell?
The cost of entry for an MMORPG should be low-to-free. What about development costs, you say? Raise the monthly rate a dollar or two. Yeesh.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
The directors of the firm hired to continue the marketing after the other people had been sacked, wish it to be known that they have just been sacked. The marketing has now been completed in an entirely different style at great expense and at the last minute.
My sister loves The Sims. She returned The Sims online when she got it for christmas though. She said "I can play the sims and run instant messanger for free. I don't need another bill to pay".
She just hits Alt-Tab like she's flipping through TV stations.
All I have to say is I hope this pay-to-play trend ends quickly. The initial cost of games is already high. I have no desire to pay per month to have access to something I don't know how often I'll have the free time to use. If Battle.net can be free, why can't The Sims online be free?
EA, sadly, has a history of trying to make MMOG and failing. UO is the exception, but then again, EA bought Origin after UO was in production.
Just look at the last two MMOG's they tried to make work: Majestic (dead) and Earth and Beyond (Life support). Granted they were good ideas, but EA can't make the shift in thinking from producing box games to MMOG's. Farming out their jobs to a contractor in india effectively allowed them to get rid of a collective 150 years of online gaming knowledge (Kesmai Studios).
I just don't think they'll get it right any time soon.
You've gotten better at reading inane comments (300)!
That being said, I do play MMOGs as I said above. Yes there's a socializing aspect there, but it's a hell of a lot more fun to battle mutants and warbots in a post-apocalyptic wasteland with Deux Ex style character management than go to the gym in the game and pedal my ass off to up stats. Better to do that IRL than in game anyway.
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
You must be one seriously boring dude. :)
Given that "death by Ebola virus" would probably average two stars in Amazon reviews, that's not very promising.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
i think that about sums it up. the people who play everquest do so to escape what they perceive as a boring and repetitive life, so of course a simulation of the same will be found equally boring. for those of us who enjoy real life and all that goes with it, the idea of paying for a simulation of something we already enjoy seems incredibly redundant.
so essentially, there is really no market for TSO. those who like their MMORPGs want fantasy, and those who like real life... already have it.
It is not the business model, it is that the game just sucks. MMORPGs like everquest and doac are making a killing using the same business model because their games are mildly interesting.
First, I don't have hours and hours to play games in the first place. I've got homework to do, college to pay for, and then afterwards a little time to unwind. Even at say $10 a month for a single online subscription game I might play at most a few hours of it a month. That's about all the more I get to play most games now. The hourly cost isn't that high, but the total cost over a year is obscene, $170 including purchase cost for maybe 36 hours of gameplay. Sorry.
Second, I can find an abundance of quality entertainment, online multiplayer even, other places for free, or included in the purchase cost of the game. Battle.Net seems to be working out alright, though I'm not a huge fan of playing with some of the jerks on there. I'd rather set up a LAN and play that way, or prearrange an Battle.Net room. Otherwise there are tons of MUDs and other free games out there as well. Those have kept me entertained for longer periods of time than some games I've purchased.
Maybe when I'm making more money than I currently am trapped in college I'll feel differently. Right now, however, I don't even toss subscription games a second look. For some reason I don't think I'm going to change my mind lightly either.
If not now, when?
The only person I know who plays the Sims is my mother. I remember mentioning Sims Online to her, and she didnt get the point. She didnt see why she needed to 'compete' against other people to see whos the best person. She kills her sims probably a half hour after bringing them to life, she just enjoys watching them run around and make toast and whatnot. She does ICQ and chats online with people who play scrabble and other mom-type stuff. She just doesnt get the point of Sims Online.
My point is, this game is popular because it's merely a good old distraction. It's completely uncompetitive and not really goal-oriented, at least to most who play it. You just screw around and watch the people do stuff. It just doesnt fit into the MMORPG genre.
Add that to the fact that it just comes off like another in the long line of Sims cash grabs (they have a whole new game/expansion pack bi-weekly it seems). After plunking down $50 on "The Sims get New Pants(tm)" people get wary. The dead horse has been beaten beyond recognition.
Plus it's just a boring game to most traditional 'gamers' in the first place.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Why?
Because they knew they would have to pay per month for it. Everytime I talk abotu EverQuest, they go off saying i'm an idiot for paying for a game I already payed for. They however, don't know what goes into making a MASSIVE online game and the monthly costs the developers and publishers have to keep paying to keep the servers and bandwidth alive. They could care less, they would just play it if it was free and that is it.
I have concluded that the type of people who play the Sim games, or Myst, or other simple yet addicting games are just the wrong type of people who will simply NOT pay to play these online games. MMORPGs like EverQuest, DAOC, etc have a very technical and geeky and hardcore following who will stop at nothing to slay dragons all day long. To them 10 bux is NOTHING to be a hero with a bunch of other people. Simtype people could care less, they will play a game between watching TV shows, where EQ junkies will just not ever watch TV ever again. They might even be embarrased to be seen online, where the RPG people who dress up in costumes for fan faires feel they are having a blast living their lives.
I expect to see Star Wars Galaxies to be a mixed bag. I think it will be popular because those some AD&D RPG junkies will dig into it, and that alone will be enough to support it, but on the other hand, I think overall the typical "Yah, star wars rox" people who don get into RPGs will stay very far away from it. (Also have 2 die hard Star Wars fans who refuse to even try SWG when it ships, they love online games, but again, they dont get into techincal RPG details, and most importantly, THEY REFUSE TO PAY FOR A GAME MORE THAN THE INITIAL COST.) Sales will probably be about half of what they exepect with that as well, but it will STILL be a success with the geek clubs subscribing.
BUYER BEWARE, I purchased the Sim's online under the notion that I could try it out, cancel my account, and sell the game used on ebay or amazon. Even after canceling my account, the person who bought the game told me that EA said the game was registered to another user. EA is trying to strongarm the used market, and force everyone to buy the game new.
Maxis managed to take the few things that were fun about the original game, (customizability, being able to wreak havok with a large group of Sims 'lives'), and remove any trace of them from the Sims online. A game where you have to spend days of real-world time doing telemarketing and making pizzas to try and save up to buy a virtual refrigerator? This game isn't just dumb or boring, it's sadistic.
Execellent point. Alpha world blew because you had to walk around to find someone to chat with (more work than IRC) and there wasn't any interesting or useful interaction with the world around you. Sims Online seems to be just a better implementation of the same sucky idea.
And yes, I'm bitter that no one ever enjoyed the house I had built out of rectangular blue blocks.
We had a devloper Chat over on www.warcry.com You can find the transcript right here.
For the amount of people that attended it they did ask some good questions and the team that's working on SO are a good fun bunch and answered a lot of questions I was surprised they skipped over like other publishers tend to do. Ala Microsoft on any hard question about Asheron's Call or Asheron's Call 2 during their dev chats.
I dunno. A lot of people pay $23 per month just to use AOL's chat rooms, and $5-$15 fees for online dating services. If Sims Online gets big enough for a lot of people to forge relationships, they will maintain a subsistance subscription level. The "boring" skill system would be less boring if you're chatting while doing it (think online spelling bee). And it might entice people to get an alternate internet provider...$10 for juno and then $10 for Sims Online is still less than $23 for AOL. EA should forge a relationship with one of the sub-$20 providers and offer a "sims internet service," the Sims being a more successful franchise than even AOL last year.
It seems like Sims Online's biggest mistake isn't the online engine so much as the speed. You can build a sim up really quickly in the original game, getting a two or more promotions in an hour and plenty of dough. If I had to take a few days to do the same...well, I wouldn't.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Sure we can attribute the Sims' decline to the pay-for-play model or the lack of any moderation in a game played largely by teens, but I think there is a greater, overarching reason for this:
EA simply doesnt care about their customers, and they have no interest in maintaining the loyalty of them.
Anyone who has ever played one of their games knows this. They destroy every multiplayer enviroment by allowing cheats to be used, thus ruining the integrity and playability of their games. They refuse to do anything about cheats, thus cheating paying customers out of money. They outright refuse to help customers who have problems with their software. Many of their gaming environments have been taken over by hackers to which they REFUSE TO RESPOND! (In fact when logging on to multiplayer Red Alert one is met with a hacked ad for the site www.fuckea.com, set up by disgruntled players). They have discontinued the Westwood branch of their corporation in order stop maintainence of their games. Basically they simply refuse to help their paying customers enjoy their game, and in some cases ruin it for them.
I'm not surprised TSO failed, not am I that they used false advertising tactics in order to sell the game (apparently some features such as running a business or a casino are not available to users, yet this is advertised on the game box). This Christmas cash grab just goes on to prove to me how poor the company is, and I for one will not be supporting them at all in the future.
I demand morals and integrity from people, so why should I expect any less from a group of people?
-- "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." Jean Jacques Rousseau
You aren't limited to 36 hours of gameplay. And in EQ, that wouldn't get you very far, in any case..
;)
Consider tho, that $170 for 36 hours of gameplay is ~$4.72/hour. Pretty cheap compared to many alternatives. If you play 100 hours in that year, there ya go, $1.70/hour. Gets better the more you play!!
It seems that the Sims online missed out on the advancement to create those bonds. Many of the things I heard from players were along the lines of, "well, when you play the sims you have to keep all your sims happy, alive, etc. When you play the sims online you can just live in other people's houses, you don't really have to work to keep your sim alive and happy, and there's really no reward for keeping them alive and happy." I think the sims needs a much more interesting beginning and a much more challenging middle so that, by the end, players who may have become uninterested and less challenged have formed bonds that cause them to stay in the game.
I do security
Since when can't "offline" titles get new content added to make a game more fun. I bought Neverwinter Nights about 6 months ago and I'm still getting new content.
- Sil
"He was a wise man who invented beer." -- Plato
One year ago, I probably would have posted something almost exactly identical to what you posted. I was a college student, and $10 a month to play a game was ridiculous. I couldn't afford it, and I didn't have the time to get my money's worth. I swore that I would never play an MMORPG.
Fast forward to 1-2 months after graduation. I was bored senseless in my after-work hours, and I remembered that an old friend had been trying to convince me to play Dark Age of Camelot.
I now own two DAoC accounts and find it worth every penny. Once you're in the working world, $10/month isn't that much. The cost of buying the game covers development costs, and the monthly fee covers the massive costs of big servers, lots of bandwidth, and (attempting) to provide customer service. It also pays for development of additional content. (Both EQ and DAoC have expansion packs, but they have plenty of content and cool things that have been added to the game even for non-expansion users.) In MMORPGs, patches aren't just bugfixes. They bring new monsters, new merchants, and changes in the gameplaye which are USUALLY neat improvements. (For example, the implementation of in-realm dueling in DAoC.) This is drastically different to most pay-once games where patches are merely for critical bugfixes and rarely add any new content.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Is that in the Sims you can fast-forward through the boring parts. Okay, you're tired and you have to pee.. tell your dude to sleep, tell him to pee, and then fast forward until it's done and you can get back to doing what you want to do.
In the Sims Online, you have to sit there and watch while your avatar naps, showers, eats, etc. For me, anyway, that's what made it not fun.
- Steve
It's a thought that The Sims Online shows us how far we've got to go to accept a true virtual world, in which the point is simply to exist.
The projection of avatars and worlds of Stephenson and Gibson weren't based as a game of any sort, but an environment, and The Sims Online might be trying too hard to be both. As The Sims alone...it's not really a game as much as a management simulator for life. And existing in multiplayer mode, I'm surprised people expected a lot more out of it that a graphical chat environment.
If you read the Amazon reviews, they're split with people either loving it or completely hating it. I'd guess the ones who enjoy it are also the ones who find minutes and hours slipping away in AOL chat rooms. It's not necessarily the same people who play Everquest or any other MMORPG.
I'm not sure The Sims Online is supposed to be a fanatic success to the level everyone expected, but I wouldn't count it completely out yet. It's possible that it holds early groundwork towards a universal, easy-access virtual environment...kinda like AOL back in the early 90s.
-Barkeep, a draft of your most hazardous brew, for the world is slowly stepping into focus, and I don't like what I see.
I purchased the game for my kids for xmas, they seem to like it ok and I figgered I'd give it a try, I popped in the CD and installed, but they wouldn't set me up a new account because the serial number had already been used. I called them on the phone and they will not even sell me a new serial number, all I can do is buy a new CD.
This is poor marketing, and they just lost a potential customer. I'm not shelling out another 50 bucks for something I already have.
Ah. Counter Troll. Now you're getting double points. Nice.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
1) Maxis SEVERELY over-estimated the demand. Because of this, there are too many shards and not enough players.
2) Skills dominate the game too much. Everyone has got to keep their skills up, the skills houses dominate the game, to the detriment of other types.
3) The economy was crippled from the get-go. The only real way to make money with a property is to be a money, skill, or cybersex property. Selling isn't implemented, so sales properties are useless. Casino games have been on the back burner forever, so games properties are useless.
4) Wrong priorities. Instead of getting out fixes that can make the other property types useful or fixing the bugs, they spend time on their corporate sponsorships. The ads don't work if there's no players to see them.
5) Ignoring the core audience. Everyone loved the Sims because you got your own house to mess around with. The fact Sims Online is specifically geared AGAINST that model is insane. All the newbies try to start up their own property, so you get UO all over again. The bar for property ownership needs to be much higer. What is needed is a core group of houses and services, instead of thousands of closed or abandoned houses.
"Enough of this wretched, whining monkey life." -- Marcus Aurelius, _Meditations_, Book 9, 37
This article gave me the same feeling as that article, as I see two reasons to create an online game:
1. The game will be fun and engaging, people will want to try their skill at playing against/with other people.
2. Why sell a game once when you can sell it over and over again? (The same philosophy behind the original Divx, "Why sell a DVD once when you can sell it over and over again to the same person?")
Well, I think Sims Online falls into the latter category. I also have to wonder who they think plays online game? When I was heavily into MUCKing, I had no social life at all outside of the MUCKs I was on. (My life basically sucked.) If I had had to pay to MUCK, I might have (though I was making pitiful money at my K-Mart and Winn Dixie jobs.) My life was not even close to "mainstream" though, and I think if the majority of people had lives like that then suicide/killing spree statistics would reflect it.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
Wrote this in an email to a non-gaming friend this morning (so excuse the lack of proper grammer) and thought I'd share it here as well since I think someone who's reading here who doesn't have a background in gaming might find some nugget of info in it...
--------------
kind of a bad article i think. it makes the bad estimates of EA look like
the industry doesn't have a market...
"...many in the video game industry wonder whether online games will ever
find a large following."
a large following isn't the question, it's finding the right game to tap
into it. there's over 400k people playing EQ alone. there's probably 10
others that have 250k each. all of those people play at least $10/month
to play. the market is there, EA is just having a hard time compelling
people to play online. here's the thing... EA has "the Sims" that is
competing with "the Sims: Online" at the same time. people aren't signing
up to play online when the non-MMO (Massive Multiplayer Online) version is
just about as fun. EA keeps releasing new content for the single player
version, so there's really no need, if you're a fan, to play the online
version. they kinda messed up i think.
most other MMO games, you can *only* get the experience online. not so
with the sims. not only that, but the whole genre of what the Sims is
trying to do online is brand new. it's not a "questing" game. it's just
like a large graphical chatroom where you can do other stuff.
the market for online version is odd too. other games (like EQ and such)
try and grab the hardcore gamers. basically, young males that are into
gaming. the sims market is much more broad, lots of ladies, housewives,
casual gamers. these aren't the typical people who are going to start
spending $$ and hours online.
the last thing is probably that the game in itself is kind of flawed. not
flawed really, but maybe it doesn't suit itself to longterm play. they've
sold a lot of copies of the game and the expansions because it's *really*
fun to play for a short amount of time, then it gets old. people pick up
the expansions because they're really fun. this makes the sales numbers
look good and tricks EA into thinking that everyone out there is playing
the game nonstop anyway. the truth is that people have put the game away
on the shelf for the last three months and haven't given it a second
thought. it's not that it wasn't fun, but the longevity isn't there.
but, people get excited for some new content and go pick up the expansion
to get a quick fun hit of the game again. then, after they've seen all
the new widgets and whatnots, they shelve it again.
what EA is going to end up doing is having to add content all the time to
the online version. give people a new fix every month of new graphics,
new items, new functionality. that's one of the advantages of being
online anyway, and most games are moving to that model (Asheron's Call was
the first to do it) once they start doing that, people will stick around,
or at least come back every couple of months to renew their account to see
what's changed.
The problem here is that you are assuming that it is the monthly fee keeping people out. That is simply not true for most people.
The real problem is that the game is boring. And this is coming from someone who not only played The Sims for two years, and bought every expansion pack (I don't have "Unleashed" as I stopped playing after "Vacation" came out) and even ran a popular (and expensive) website for two years! While The Sims is boring to a lot of people, The Sims Online is boring to almost everybody! I don't know of ANY of my The Sims friends (real one, you know, meatsacks) who even care about TSO.
Making it cheaper by stuffing it full of ads (Sweet Merciful Jesus! Is there anywhere we can escape the endless onslaught of advertisers?) will not solve anything.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
I Beta Tested the Sims Online and didn't think it was anything special.
Here are my comments:
- I spent over 60% of my time downloading updates. There were always updates I had to download. At one time Players had to download a 70MB update. This update came from one source (EA). When updates come out
- The Sims world seems to be too homoginized, too politically correct. If you want to add some fun, let players choose if they want to be crime lords. Let players be whomever they want to be.
- The UI isn't too intuitive. People who don't play the Sims have a huge learning curve.
- Finding a place to start isn't easy. There should be some sort of 'want ads' or gathering place for new people.
- Their monthly prices are not worth the minimal gameplay you get in return.
- The game can consume too much of your time. This can become very adicitve for some people.
- What am I working towards? Nirvana? CEO? President? Playing this game is like a cross between watching fish in an aquarium and watching grass grow.
- If this game is to be a Simulation of real life why can't there be variables to have sucess and failures? I'm not able to gather a bunch of investors for a business venture and see if I can used the pooled money to become a mega conglomerate. I want to sell stock! I want to sell junk bonds!
Dolemite
Save the World! Use a Quote!
That's realistic. I've been involved in local politics for years, and all those experiences sound familiar.
EA has a history of stopping services of an online game community when a new verison of a given game has been released to the masses.
For example, I used to play NHL 2002 pretty religiously. However, when NHL 2003 came out, all Online methods (within the game) for NHL 2002 players to play against each other stopped and EA focused on NHL 2003 MP efforts. In addition, all other game updates stopped as well.
Fortunately, there is a Huge community of NHL 2002 players that took it upon themselves to produce up-to-date roster lists, uniform updates, and other tweaks for each season. I also saw that someone created their own Online program to connect players together for NHL 2002 from scratch.
Ever since, I've not been able to play NHL 2002 online (within the game). After seeing EA's stance on producing new games every year and seeing EA screw owners of previous versions of a given game out of being able to play MP Games, I haven't been a fan or bought any more of their sports products ever since.
I'm also investigating something in Battlefield 1942 (another EA game) as well. On the bottom back of the box, there is a blurb that says something to the effect that there will be no more Multi-player support after September 3, 2003.
I'm wondering if this is a NHL MP ploy being used on another product. I've been hesitating buying BF 1942 for this reason. There is a huge community in BF 1942 that is continually growing and will probably be pretty hacked off if EA yanks the BF 1942 master MP servers.
Dolemite
Save the World! Use a Quote!
I'm a veteran of Planetarion, another web-based strategy game. Like you, the advantage to me in college was that it was played in 5-10 minute chunks. Each hour I'd quickly "check planet" then go back to what I was doing. Such games are definately more appropriate for college students due to the way their time is structured.
:)
Once you're in the working world, 9-5 is dedicated to work, after that is completely free. In this case, games that take your attention for an hour or so at a time are more practicable and appropriate. (Planetarion and to some degree Utopia, which I played for a little bit, required you to check your account pretty regularly to react to current events.)
Some MMORPGS are definately better than others... EQ was a pioneer, but it has since been eclipsed with much better and well-thought-out games. (Dark Age of Camelot has a lot of similarities to EQ, but differs from EQ drastically in the areas where EQ was weakest, such as economics. DAoC also provides a common goal for each realm, that of battling the other two realms on a given server, whereas EQ has no apparent common unifying goal that I can see.)
That said, coming from a DAoC player - STAY THE HELL AWAY until after you graduate! But it already (fortunately) looks like that was your plan.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
This is a copy of a letter I sent to ID and Activision a few months ago. These companies are loosing players in droves and the companies don't even care. Check out the PB forums and see the comments from all the irate players:
What happened to the Quake (2/3) Series?
This is basically an open letter to id Software and how little importance they place in their products. They are loosing players in drovers and their reputation is going down the toilet.
But first a little intro.
I began playing Quake 2 in 95 when some friends at work were having a DM/CTF LAN party. Needles to say I was hooked. I went out and bought the game and downloaded Map after Map. I Became pretty good and eventually became one of the best Q2 CTF players around .
The Q2 CTF MOD was, at the time one of the most innovative MOD's around and pretty much dictated what a Capture the flag Mod should be like. I enjoyed playing on the old YYZ CTF servers and testing new maps from some of the most awesome mappers at the time (Hafhead and gizm0 to name a few). Everyone was into the games, teamplay was amazing and cheaters were nonexistent because Id was on top of various hacks (wallhacking excluded).
Eventually, my scores started to go down and I was ending up at the middle of the pack at the end of rounds. I began spectating people and noticed that people were gibbing enemies from the side and from behind them and discovered the world of bots.
What is a bot?
Some n00bs may get confused by the definition.
There are two types of bots. 1) Used as an AI opponent on various servers to fill empty spaces on servers. These AI players have incredible aim. These bots are good if you want to practice aiming on the run. On Half-Life Servers you can tell bots by their ping. (They all have a ping of 5)
2) Players use the bot components noted in #1 and integrates the auto aim features into their character and play on servers with the auto-aim components. I'm not going to post any of the bot links but they are out there. The people who started using the bots to enhance their own playing experience were mostly pretty stupid. They usually configured their bots to cover auto aiming in a filed of vision of 180 degrees or more around them. What this means is that if a player with a bot is looking forward and they hit fire, the bot will hit anything 180 degrees or more around them without turning. Secondly, they will usually just (if playing a CTF map) shoot and kill people and not work on any of the team objectives.
One more thing to note is one other problem with Quake 2 was that Q2 Servers were susceptible to IP Ping Floods and could take down a given server.
ID Software has a practice of Stopping builds and not releasing any further upgrades or practices. Not long after this, I started to loose interest in this game.
This was about time that the Q3 Arena Demos started to Circulate around. I began playing this game and reading the advanced press from various sources.
When I learned that CTF would loose all the cool components that made Q2 CTF a classic, it was time for me to find a new on-line game to play.
I wasn't drawn to this game very much. Sure there were some cool things about it but I wouldn't buy it ($59.99 was the price I believe) when Q3 Arena came out.
I chose to buy Half-Life and still play it to this day. It's an amazing game and Awesome Mods are still coming out to this day.
In my opinion, if a company can't take what made a given game famous and remove some or all components in a multiplayer game in the next release of a game, the company looses face in the gaming community. No One Lives Forever 2 is a good example of this. No One Lives Forever 2 was initially released without a DM or CTF mod (DM were later added with the first Service Pack after MANY irate customer complaints) the MODs that made NOLF1 a classic (running over people with snowmobiles rock!!!).
Bought Q3 Gold
I was at a Wal-Mart one day and noted Quake 3: Gold for $19.99 and bought it for the heck of it. I was interested in seeing what became of the game and was looking at what it took to map CTF maps. I've been looking into getting into mapping and wanted to do some research into what is needed to create Maps. I soon learned this was a kettle of workms that I probably should not have opened. Install a pain on XP Long story short, Quake 3: Gold has to be installed in a specific manner (it has to be a complete install) on the primary partition, in the default 'suggested' path (XP Pro) (this information was found on the Planequake forums ).
I soon found out that this install was to be the source of some of the issues I've been receiving.
I also use The All Seeing Eye to connect to games and because Q3 wouldn't work in the manner I wanted to install the game in, ASE wouldn't work.
PlanetQuake, Fileplanet other quake related files
Ok, when I played Quake2, planetquake.com was the place to go for all information, patches, maps, etc. I went back to this site and went to the Quake 3 section and began researching what would be needed to update my installation. The planetquake site was slow (I'm on a Cable Modem) to load and took a good 2 minutes to load a page. When I found a given page on maps or mapping, the links that were available were outdated or didn't work. There was no definitive 'manual' on how to find different mods or what programs are needed to map and which files were the most up to date. The links they provided (when they worked...which was about 10% of the time) were anything but helpful. I found four different mapping programs, none of which I've gotten to work correctly yet.
Planetquake has gotten lazy in their old age.
I found the Q3 MODS and patches on fileplanet but due to the new structure of the site (wait in line?!?!?...LAME!!!) I would have had to wait 4-5 days just to download a few files. I searched all over the net for the files I needed on other sites and was able to finish the download in a day.
Once I got some semblance of a Q3 install completed, I connected to a Q3 Server through ASE.
I remembered in the Q3 Install and patch that a program called Punkbuster which is a program that would detect cheaters and bot users. I thought 'cool' Id is doing something about bots and cheaters!'
Punkbuster a nightmare to upgrade
When installing and upgrading Punkbuster to current Standards I was not able to either through the game or using the command line update util. I found out that the problem with the PB (again on XP Pro in Non-Domain mode patched to current standards) is two fold:
1) The Quake Final Patch Release does not install a couple of key files for some reason or another (I found this out on the Planetquake forums ).
2) XP has a default behavior in that all system directories are 'read-only' and cannot be changed no matter what you try (Group Policies, ACLS, command line attributes, removing simple file sharing, etc.). In the case of Quake 3: Gold on XP, the default install dir is 'Program files' directory. Punkbuster needs to convert a couple of HTML files to binary and since the Read-Only Attributes are pushed from the Root Level of the primary partition, PB can't make the conversion.
New Cheats out that render Punkbuster Useless
I'm not going to go in depth about this but there are a couple of serious issues with some cheats out in the wild that PB can't handle at the moment. One issue seems to be addressed. The other is a bot that is undetectable by PB and is being used more and more on Q3 servers.
Players are furious that this issue isn't being addressed (myself included) by ID.
Read the Punkbuster Forums . Just about every single post is a rant about when/how is ID/Punkbuster will be addressing the current hacking issues and how ticked they are on how this issue isn't being addressed. (Side note: as of approx 27.Jan.2003 Punkbuster's forums have been removed and this site is taking the brunt of the PB issues.
I played on some of ThreeWave's CTF Servers (A killer MOD by the way)the other day and played against bot users. Some of these players are so stupid they turned their bot settings to 180 degrees or more and all players on my team wereable to spot this immediately.
Before I wrote this article I played a Vanilla CTF Game on a Q3 Server and there were a couple of players who were killing players in midair with weapons with the littlest fire power or hitting people in midair (from long distances) so they fell and cratered.
Needless to say, the team that I was on were trying and were winning in caps for a while (but not gibs) slowly left the server after many of the players on my team left (we started with 8 and when I left there were 3 versus 7 on the other team).
What's going on ID?!?!?
You're loosing players that used to be hardcore Q2/Q3 players in droves and they probably won't buy any more of your games due to the lack of attention you're giving to the cheaters and hackers.
Also, as a result of my experiences, I have since turned my mapping interests to the Half-Life Mod 'Day of Defeat' and the new James Bond Game '007: NightFire'.
I tell you one thing, I'll never buy another ID product again.
Software is easy to fix, reputations are next to impossible to fix. Get with the program ID!!!
Dolemite
Save the World! Use a Quote!
Yeah, when I first got it, I screwed up about 5 cities in a row, and it sucked hardcore. Then I figured out how to play, and it's pretty sweet once you get going.
As for the things you brought up:
Reconcile edges- do all your terraforming, reconcile the edges and just accept any undesirable areas. Then name the city and start it. If you still have a problem, reconcile the empty neighboring landmasses to your existing city, or just ignore it altogether. Honestly, I've covered about 1/4 of the region, and it hasn't really been a problem. Also, i've noticed that cities with neighbors do better, especially the commericial sector, than stand alone cities.
Power from a neighbor- could be better, I agree. You need empty space next to the edge of the map with the plant, and you need to run the otherwise unneeded powerlines to the edge of the map, then approve a connection. Go to the map where you want to buy the power, and find the power lines. Zone next to them, do not zone on top of them. Go to neighbor deals in the budget panel and make the deal. Yes, it could be better.
Local funding- keep it simple to start- only build a power plant. (and maybe a fire station after 500-1000 people) Spread over the map. You should be able to get to 3000 people or so by just giving them electricity, and nothing else. Build low density residential, med density business, and med density industry, or farms. Farms get you some neat gifts, and make the map pretty, but don't give you any revenue, so keep that in mind.
You'll be raking in the cash if you follow that plan, and then growth will start to slow. At this point, add water to the entire map, and businesses and industry will pick up a little again. Now that you've got the map laid out, start adding academic institutions and health facilities. Position them for maximum coverage, as either of them are only good for residential areas. Then adjust the funding for a 50% buffer over whatever their users are. Keep an eye on the funding; every few years go back and adjust it on all the structures to make sure the capacity isn't overflowed and the workers strike.
Don't reduce the fire fighting budget, because even a small change reduces their radius and competency significantly. Police are okay to take to 80% funding. They won't like it, but they won't strike either.
But if you try and give them all the services right from the start, you'll drive the city into the ground. Add services slowly.
After things get rolling, go over the map and raise everything to high-density, then keep an eye on all funding levels as the city grows.
Changing cities is slower then hell. agreed.
If you get the hang of it, it really is fun to play, and i've had three hours pass on me while I was perfecting a city- and I didn't notice.
my 2 cents anyway.
(Also, introducing individual sims into the city is cute- for about 15 minutes. Then their status updates just clutter all the other news in the ticker box, and you'll want to kick them out.)
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
The Sims franchise has been made successful by a demographic of people that want a simple game where they interact with little people under their own control. It's not really a social game. It's more like an advanced game of Solitaire. There are the few that bought it that want the social experience added to the game, but many are content with the "anti-social" aspect of having your own world, with your own people, and no one else to intrude and take the fun out of it.
Games like Team Fortress, Counter Strike, the team variants of UT and Q3, are all social games with an established base of organized groups. The Sims community probably wasn't ready for the jump yet. Given time, they may.
Then again, maybe they should have eased them into it by letting people create small dedicated world servers for their friends to Sim on, building a social structure that way before implementing it as massively multiplayer.
Time will tell.