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The Sims 3 Community - Possibly the best ever?;)
Jassieteacake
Posts: 237 Member
Hey guys and gals,
I just wanted to get your opinions on what you all make of the online community we have on here. Would love to hear from loyal old-timers as well as newcomers to these forums...
Sum up your thoughts on what makes this forum community awesome (or not so awesome?)
Do you think our voices get heard?
What's the best thing about the community, in your opinion?
I personally find it fantastic how everyone is constantly sharing with everyone, from game experiences to game content, to ideas and solutions, it's simply brilliant. Also, I feel like The Sims producers/designers really have taken a lot of our suggestions into consideration - finally, we've got the Seasons expansion pack!!!
I just wanted to get your opinions on what you all make of the online community we have on here. Would love to hear from loyal old-timers as well as newcomers to these forums...
Sum up your thoughts on what makes this forum community awesome (or not so awesome?)
Do you think our voices get heard?
What's the best thing about the community, in your opinion?
I personally find it fantastic how everyone is constantly sharing with everyone, from game experiences to game content, to ideas and solutions, it's simply brilliant. Also, I feel like The Sims producers/designers really have taken a lot of our suggestions into consideration - finally, we've got the Seasons expansion pack!!!
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Comments
Pretty much, though, the community is decaying. Mainly because, really, there isn't much of a community at all. While the trolls here are far nicer than you'll see in just about any other major gaming site (the one who posted adult pics was a major problem here and would be considered a minor amusement elsewhere), the problem is that EA itself has gone out of its way to discourage a true community feel to the site. One has sprung up despite them, but it's always been rocky and recent blows to it are leaving questions as to if there will even be one left by the time Sims 4 rolls around.
So, pretty much, the true answer might be "questions moot; no community exists" if you use the standards of what normally makes up a video game community.
I'm curious, how do you feel EA has purposely gone out of its way to discourage a community feel? When I think of a community I think about all the sharing that takes place on these forums, where Simmers are sharing stories from their gameplay experiences, and their helpfulness to give answers when other Simmers raise questions. Surely we can't ignore these aspects?
Would love to hear other Simmers' thoughts? I have to admit, when I'm not playing the Sims I'm usually happily posting on here! So that has to mean something? If the community was so 'bad' then why are there over 100k people online each day?
I have to say that I love visiting the forums, I love hearing everyone's ideas and opinions and I like it when people have a bit of a joke with each other. You get one or two disruptive people but on the whole everyone is pretty awesome.
It's interesting that when people ring customer support, the advisors often direct people to post in the forums for help. I think it's a lovely thing to see people helping fellow simmers who don't know where else to turn.
I'm not a regular visitor to the gifting forum (can't afford to, wish I could) but when I do pop in I'm impressed with how generous people can be. And I'm lucky enough to have been surprised myself several times. I think the community here are very kind, helpful and supportive.
I agree so much with Cinderellimouse. People taking their time to help other simmers, I find that so awesome! The community is very kind, helpful and supportive.
http://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/758083/petition-to-add-optional-co-op-feature-to-ts4-122-372-signatures/p1
I like the community feel and creativity in this section is outstanding and I really love discussions that are going on right now
Multiple ways.
First, they actively try to prevent any conversation within the official forums outside of talk about the game and have, in the past, actively killed social threads for being off-topic.
Secondly, there's been the recent issues gifting has been having.
Thirdly, they have repeatedly used the Ideas and Feedback forum as a dumping ground for topics they wish to kill, hoping to use the naturally-contentious nature of the forum to destroy those topics with infighting. They're also using Tech for that. And they have actively tried to squash community efforts to fight serious trolls, even going as far as to ban the people fighting the trolls without actually banning the trolls. Admittedly, since IP bans are useless against any troll who knows the basics of what they're doing, there may be at least some basis for EA having trouble.
And Fourthly... Well, I'm not going into fourthly here. Besides, people won't like that information, and I don't feel like starting an open revolt against EA today.
Fourth even though dev's do stalk this forums they hardly say anything, or make new posts. We'd like them to talk to us more, be more educational and close that gap, a few attempts have been made but nothing ever truly connective.
Fifth where is PR support for the forums. If anyone has ever notice in live chats they endorse facebook and twitter more than they do anything else. PR usually calms down groups when their is trouble brewing, but for all of EA's game their non existant. Even when fans tried to get EA's attention by voting them the worst company EA eliminated any conversation about such and laughed it under the rug. Instead of heading the warning for it. Yet still they report even more loss in sales and wonder why.
Anyway i'm on the fence honestly about the community. If it complies and acts like a tween at a Justin Bieber concert doped up on rainbow feremones than EA gladly supports it because you can't go wrong with yesman. The great thing about this forum is the player base is a bit of both. We tend to challenge EA and demand better of the dev team. This forum is more active and the least silent when it comes to certain topics. I'm not sure they want to squash us out just yet. After all majority of our ideas in this section have boost their sales back up, they find us good for something.
But back to my original thread's topic, I was more looking to find out what everyone thinks about the general Sims community and everyone's experiences interacting with other Simmers
The innovation some simmers display through their own creativity is simply fantastic, I find it awesome how we have the forum and exchange as a platform to share all sorts of content.
Apart from that, it's also great how vocal everyone is about their own ideas and opinions. Different perspectives mean greater value and more insight for everyone, we don't always have to agree!
There are tons of people, and sure they can't memorize everybody, just a few of whole community. Maybe it's easier for them to speak generally instead of responding to everybody in threads? God knows.. maybe they read what we are saying now but they don't feel like commenting.
I feel like gurus do care about our opinions. I've had Graham respond to me on Twitter about my concerns and he was very friendly to everybody he talks to. Sarah and Lisa are very actively involved as well.
Anyway, reason they are producers is because they make games. I think EA should get more gurus whose purpose is to be a community correspondent. That's a good solution
In the end, members of the community are what makes it so nice, not gurus and their talk. At least that's how I find it. :XD:
^this
Admittedly I enjoy trolling. I only do it to the rage topics tho and in the nicest of ways
I like the Ideas and Feedback section, but my favorite is the stories and legacies! I love reading other peoples stories. I get plenty of ideas to implement in my own game that way. I like to see other peoples creativity and even if I've only recently registered my game I've been reading the stories for a long time.
The sims 3 community is a pretty good one, maybe not as awesome as the ESPN college football blogs. But still a good one.
Just so you know, you just gave yourself away as an EA plant, either directly working for them or working for them on a contract basis. Part of why I don't like it when amateurs play this game; back when I was acting as their plant, you had no clue I was actually working for them. If you want a few tips on how to act the part properly (hint: it involves not dismissing social conversation as brand-damaging; that is marketing-speak that people on these forums don't use and which you should have been trained to avoid).
Also, note everything both Anavastia and I said relate to simmers interacting with each other. Dismissing that as off-topic, combined with your comments afterwards, show an attempt at manipulating the conversation to be purely about praising EA. Given how you're doing this on one of the forums with the biggest supply of people who criticize EA on the site, you pretty much painted a giant bullseye on yourself. I expect this thread to go downhill and get closed quickly.
Haha! You've really made me chuckle.
Apart from that, I genuinely love The Sims games and its community. I've been playing since I was 11 years old and 12 years on here I am, still a hardcore fan.
P.S. Marketing speak is my language as that also happens to be my degree, sorry if it offends!
Well, crap. And I set that trap for nothing
Well, I'm glad you got the laugh
Alright, here is a positive comment you can definitely include:
Despite any faults the community has, it actually has the least amount of serious trolling that I have ever seen on a gaming community, with the serious trolls here being mild elsewhere. Overall, the community itself is one of the nicest on the internet, with it building an entire section of itself purely around gifting other people. And many of the spin-off sites exist to be even less negative than the officials, making them even nicer. Overall, this is quite possibly the friendliest gaming community you'll ever find.
OUCH! :P
guess i should work on improving my trolling skillz.
It's awesome getting a good mix of views.
On gaming however negative reaction still suggest strong interest in the game. It's the no reactions you have to worry about generally when i fan no longer shows any interest in the game they turn away from the forums all together. The forums are usually area of gold mines for gaming companies as they can find newly innovative ideas, and generally why the game is losing popularity. In marketing they learn what not to do and what to do, so as to appease a wider audience, rather than statistic focus. Which in gaming usually when marketing focuses on statistic marketing they cause the game to lose loyal customers. Especially in sims as certain areas of the game start to lack. Which has happened and cause a lot of drop in some of sims sales on expansions and stuff packs.
In that event the forums are great because EA hasn't deleted a thread on here that criticizes it. Only time they delete them is when they to turn them in to flame wars. Or just have too much vulgarity in them. So they come to read our forums both negative and positive. Both sides of commenting are welcome.
What i'd like to see is dev's communicate more to the people on here. Or not even a dev but marketing should invest in pr. Sort of like some do on a blog spot. Whether its opening a topic and talking about how they play. Communicating to troubleshoot problems like they do for the store products. Helping players to understand what goes into putting out a game. Being honest about what is possible and what isn't, what they're learning as we're learning etc. EA takes a don't talk to much approach with the fanbase but i feel that really isn't good in the age of socializing and communication. Of course they can't say things that shoot themselves in the foot but generally speaking giving some friendly talk doesn't hurt anyone. An example is for a long time I've wanted a dev to actually have a tutorial thread open up and show how to play or build certain things. Using tips and tricks they use whether that is for CAW or CAS, or in game. You see a lot of players do this but i feel when players see they play their own games, it opens up a door that marketing just hasn't touched yet with us.
Anyway you'll find on this forum you can't direct the conversation too much in your favor best to let it flow and take it course.
They also seem to be more willing to share with one another on a daily basis, I once joined an event in another game and although I gave about 6 different people items I myself received nothing, though I didnt care I was shocked to see that on the snowflake day event, not one but two simmers gave me something off my wishlist.
Now they have an entire topic dedicated to it.
As for EA and staff I honestly think they do what they can with the time they are given, do I think more could be done? well yes but im a nitpicker more could always be done to fix or change something but the bottom line is no 100 people are going to be equally happy with the results.
How I would change this slighty: Off topic but I agree with the flow aspect, I think it would be amazing if before creating each new expansion or stuff pack, the guru's opened up a topic forum dedicated to hearing what we wanted. But I guess thats what Ideas and feedback is for πΈπΈπΈπΈ so maybe a live event or a voting system based off what the community wants.
I like how our ideas are taken into account, because I've seen them clearly given attention in EPs, store sets, etc. However, I wish that they would let us know that we're being heard.
I like posting here because ideas can be talked about, seen by EA, and polished by the input of others. However, I hate how everyone has to start a new thread for every little detail of the game. No one seems capable of simply bumping a thread. No, they have to post their own with some tiny comment as an original post. I was sick to death of weather and pets threads. I wanted to strangle half the forum.
That being said, I think that whoever created the boards shot themselves in the foot by not allowing the merging of threads.
If your idea of community is all the sharing that goes on here, that's fine, but if you wanted an in-depth overall feeling of genuine community, The Sims 2 BBS was it...and this despite the fact that we didn't have any way to send each other private messages on that board. Now, people use the My Page function...but it still doesn't serve the purpose as there is simply too much spam to make it useful.
The problem is that EA has neglected these forums. The moderation is next to no-existent having been placed in the hands of Customer Service which has *no* idea how a Sims community works or any concept of what players want from the game. EA's SimGurus have distanced themselves from these forums because they quickly find out that everytime they stick their noses in the forums and make even the tamest post, they get jumped on by frustrated players all demanding answers to their questions, or attacking EA for making a shoddy product, etc. etc...in short, they get dumped on. That's why they stick with Facebook and Twitter.
One of the biggest mistakes EA has made in my opinion was removing forum moderation from the players and placing it in the hands of an entity that flat doesn't care. Yes, there's some sharing going on here...but not to the extent that we had in the old Sims 2 where players could really feel that EA valued their input and would even have times of actually talking to Maxoids and the SimMasters/Moderators who gave everyone a sense of unity, more or less. I just don't get the "family" feel here that I got over there.
"We Don't Care If You LIKE The Game, Just As Long As You BUY The Game!"
I Disapprove (Naturally)
I Took The Pledge!