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Irreconcilable Differences
MVWdeZT
Posts: 3,267 Member
I think it's time to recognize that there are irreconcilable differences among those who play the Sims. I say this because some people are starting to complain about the new features like lifestyles and sentiments, and others are worried that these features will be weakened.
I'm not talking about Builders vs. Players. Generally, players are grateful to builders for coming up with nice lots for them to use, and builders are happy to have someone using their creations. No, I'm thinking of Total Control vs. Surprise Me; Unscripted vs. Quests; Occult vs. Realistic; Rotational vs. Story Progression; and Family vs. Single YA.
The area where we find the greatest disagreement is in Total Control vs. Surprise Me. It's not that Total Control players never give their Sims autonomy. The Autonomy button really is not the issue. Total Control players don't like it when their Sims don't fit the plan that they have for them. To give one example -- even though I'm not a Total Control player, I get annoyed because my Sim who is supposed to be an engineer and into robotics is always going outside to talk to his wife's basil plant. Total Control players generally don't like alien abductions, vampire visitations, and random romances. They're not happy with Neighborhood
Action Plans, and probably won't like Lifestyles and Sentiments.
Surprise Me players tend to talk about how much more fun TS2 was because their Sims seemed to have ideas of their own. They generally welcome things like alien abductions and Neighborhood Action Plans, and wish we had burglars. They like challenges like I'm Surrounded by Idiots and the Asylum Challenge, but wish that their uncontrolled Sims would do something more interesting on their own than play computer games.
Unscripted players don't like it that parties have goals; they don't even like the tasks for working from home. They complain that the Sims is becoming an RPG. Quest players loved Strangerville. They wish that every expansion added achievements to the ones we got with the base game.
Occult players want more life forms, and are unhappy because we don't have werewolves or fairies yet. Realistic players want a toggle for all occult forms. They don't like it that they have to put up with vampires or witches in order to get the cool furniture and clothing.
Rotational players don't like game mechanics that interfere with their households when they're playing somewhere different; story progression players wish the game would arrange marriages, jobs, and children for all the Sims that they're not playing.
Family players don't like it when new packs don't include clothing and activities for children; those who play Single YA Sims wish there was more for their Sims to do.
EA is never going to be able to satisfy these conflicting desires. I think they've made a heroic effort to make sure that everyone gets some of what they want.
I'm not talking about Builders vs. Players. Generally, players are grateful to builders for coming up with nice lots for them to use, and builders are happy to have someone using their creations. No, I'm thinking of Total Control vs. Surprise Me; Unscripted vs. Quests; Occult vs. Realistic; Rotational vs. Story Progression; and Family vs. Single YA.
The area where we find the greatest disagreement is in Total Control vs. Surprise Me. It's not that Total Control players never give their Sims autonomy. The Autonomy button really is not the issue. Total Control players don't like it when their Sims don't fit the plan that they have for them. To give one example -- even though I'm not a Total Control player, I get annoyed because my Sim who is supposed to be an engineer and into robotics is always going outside to talk to his wife's basil plant. Total Control players generally don't like alien abductions, vampire visitations, and random romances. They're not happy with Neighborhood
Action Plans, and probably won't like Lifestyles and Sentiments.
Surprise Me players tend to talk about how much more fun TS2 was because their Sims seemed to have ideas of their own. They generally welcome things like alien abductions and Neighborhood Action Plans, and wish we had burglars. They like challenges like I'm Surrounded by Idiots and the Asylum Challenge, but wish that their uncontrolled Sims would do something more interesting on their own than play computer games.
Unscripted players don't like it that parties have goals; they don't even like the tasks for working from home. They complain that the Sims is becoming an RPG. Quest players loved Strangerville. They wish that every expansion added achievements to the ones we got with the base game.
Occult players want more life forms, and are unhappy because we don't have werewolves or fairies yet. Realistic players want a toggle for all occult forms. They don't like it that they have to put up with vampires or witches in order to get the cool furniture and clothing.
Rotational players don't like game mechanics that interfere with their households when they're playing somewhere different; story progression players wish the game would arrange marriages, jobs, and children for all the Sims that they're not playing.
Family players don't like it when new packs don't include clothing and activities for children; those who play Single YA Sims wish there was more for their Sims to do.
EA is never going to be able to satisfy these conflicting desires. I think they've made a heroic effort to make sure that everyone gets some of what they want.
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Comments
I think the overall problem isn’t that the player base has divided into camps, but rather that the team hasn’t taken the consensus of the entire community, only one side of opinion. If that makes sense.
As I indicated in the “unpopular opinions” thread, I enjoy the random phone calls and texts and would want more of that in game. Some people are annoyed by the phone system entirely (which is valid. “you made friends with ______? That’s awesome!” at 3am is annoying for sure!)
But rather than consider a holistic opinion, the Sims team seemingly nerfed the phone calls entirely. Now the annoying parts remain, but the cool stuff they were doing is nowhere to be found. That’s unfortunate and I don’t like that!
I agree with the consensus in “Unpopular Opinion” thread, we need a menu that lets us pick and choose, rather than just having the team decide for us what we want. No player plays the same, and the game should be customizable to our needs, playstyles and interests!
I don't know if it's "irreconcilable differences" because that implies to me that a divorce is in progress. I'm hoping that there are ways that people can let others have what they want and still be given what they want.
I hope that EA/Maxis allows us to have various "toggles" so that we can have what we like to do in the game.
Personally I'm a "total control" person. I even turn off autonomy (and I *love* that they have that toggle.) I'm not at all fond of things like burglars, abductions and the like, nor do I want occults in my regular games. But I've found ways around most of those (except those blasted vampires! But they're much less annoying since we started getting the "send home" option even for ones we don't know.) (But I want "surprises" turned off, thank you!!!)
I don't mind the "quests" but I'm more likely to arrange my own "quests". The Aspirations and Careers I choose are what I base my "quests" on.
I do wish that they had story progression for the neighborhood Sims, but have some way to turn it off for Sims *I've* put in the game. (I haven't done "rotational play" since TS2. It didn't work for me for TS3 either. But then I find that there are so many wonderful things for my Sims to do that I don't have *time* to "rotate" between families.) I think it's so sad that families that are already in the game that I'm not playing never get to get married, have children and provide new Sims for *my* Sims to get to know. Instead, they only get new people with no connections to the familiar neighborhood Sims.
I do wish that we could get the clothes and build items without some of the other things in packs. (Especially Journey to Baatu. I thought I wouldn't want it but there are some cool parkas in there, especially when recolored. Toddler parkas! Yay, more stuff for toddlers! But I found a really good deal on it that made it not much more than having to pay for a single outfit in TS3's EA Store. I don't want anything to do with the Star Wars "play" though.)
All that being said, I *want* the "unscripted" people to have what they want too. I think with "toggles" for things (like they've done with whims, which I like in my game, and like what they did in TS3 with being able to toggle off the occults), that we can have it all ways.
One of the things I've always loved about The Sims is that there *are* so many widely different ways of playing the game. "How Do You Play?" from the old TS2 commercials is something I love!
Personality,depth,humor,consequences,lore,customization.
Some actions do need looking into like the
water drinking,
the plate cleaning,
constantly playing on the game mat,
constantly playing computer games,
trolling the forums,
nastily adding a mischief interaction in a pleasant conversation that is ongoing,
autonomously playing basketball which overrides your sim as they are cooking something that takes more time than usual,
your celebrity sim always going outside to get their picture taken,
the autonomy forcing conversations between your sim and another,
if you got at least 2 sims in your household and a pingpong table that is constantly being used.
the list goes on... when you got plenty of other things in the house your sim can interact with, they aren't used and it is totally out balance. The autonomy doesn't do the right things, it does the most absurd things.
I wish i could setup the autonomy system properly, because as it is? it isn't fit for purpose in my opinion.
Also don't mistake my utter distain for the autonomy as one that i hate the game or what the developers have done because i enjoy a lot of the other elements in this game, and with a few extra mods it has been a journey of 5,200 hours of play. i'd hardly call that a hate for the game or how bad the developers have been either.
Some things i have questioned in the past around one or two bits of their content, i was especially critical of their farce of an anniversary early in the year, but aside from that and the autonomy, it has been quite a reasonable year with content.
Yes, it may mean going without a feature or some build/buy items. Each individual player will need to make that call on their own. When it looked like Knitting was going to be an "Elders as defined by Stereotypes from 1950's TV" pack, I was debating on not getting it. I didn't want a knitting room that looked like it hadn't been updated since the turn of the last century, and was faded and musty. Fortunately (or not if you ask my wallet), the votes went a different way. The same thing if Happy Haunts Grim Reaper Career had won. I have no interest in a Grim Reaper Career. I wanted the Psychic career. I just could tell that the Psychic career didn't have the votes, because so many people posted about wanting the Grim Reaper Career (they said Happy Haunts with Grim Reaper was a close second) so I went with Knitting.
That, of course, brings up the other thing. The Sims Twittersphere/Forums/Simbler etc. have a lot more overlap with each other than it does with the full player base. This is simply a reality of any fandom, though as Social Media has become more common, the percentages of "active" vocal fans have been growing. But I still feel comfortable saying that it's probably less than half. So certain groups may feel that they are a larger percentage of the player base than they actually are. For example, I'm of the opinion that Realism Family Players only make up about 45% of the player base, but about 75% of the On-Line Fandom.
But back to my point. We need to be willing to allow other groups to have packs that appeal to their niches, and not insist that every pack appeal to the apparent majority on the Forums. Toggles would be a great way to allow that, but I think (from what I've read) that early on they worried about toggles introducing too much instability on the Sims 4 platform. After all, each toggle introduces an exponentially more number of combinations that would have to be tested. (and you think there are bugs now...) What worked on previous platforms is, honestly, irrelevant. They appear to be adding more toggles where they can, but it's too late to go back and add the toggles for other packs (or at least it would cause significant delays and, yes, more bugs.)
So without the toggles, we are left with needing to accept that sometimes, we may have to skip a pack or two. And we need to be okay with that. I think Batuu helped a lot of people reach that point, personally. Or at least realizing they'll sometimes need to skip a pack or two. They may not be okay with it. (Although I enjoyed my $20 advertisement for Galaxy's edge, even I don't see a lot of replay value. But I love the build/buy and CAS assets.)
Except I think there's two different categories of realism. I'd call them Mundane vs Occult and Realism vs Escapism. You can want to play non-magical sims and still want them to have lives that are different or easier than your own, or more like a soap opera. The realism group who demand free babies and cars and miss the good old days when you couldn't take a bubble bath without going to the store for soap have become very vocal lately and there is no category of player with whom I have less in common. They seem to think a life simulator has to be just like real life and I don't understand how a game like that would be in any way fun to play. I don't want to play a chore simulator, nor do I want my sims to have all the same challenges that my real life has, because then the game would cease to be an escape from real life. So I would really rather the devs not start catering to them more. Or that if they do it's in a pack that I can choose not to buy and not packaged with something I want or forced on me in a free update.
All of the other groups I can fully support getting more of what they want, because I don't fall all the way at one end of the other spectrums.
I prefer control, but I don't mind alien abductions or vampire visits. Most of my problems with surprises in game is because of some of the bad autonomy they already have programmed in.
For example: with sentiments now, background sims who flirt autonomously on a public lot will possibly develop a sentiment that makes it more likely that they would flirt again if they're on the same lot together again. That's great for making townies have their own stories. I could begrudgingly work with it if my single sims started flirting with people other than who I wanted them to end up with. But the game does not differentiate between single or married sims, so this is sure to negatively affect some of my happiest marriages while I'm playing other households. They don't need to change or dial down the sentiments to solve this, they just need to have autonomous flirting only happen with sims that are single. Also I'd prefer it if sentiments only developed when one of the sims involved is actively being played or both are completely unplayed.
Overall, I want total control over my sims' personalities, not their every action. I want to decide who will be a faithful spouse and who will not. I want the traits I give them to affect their autonomous actions when I'm playing other households as well as what types of lots they will randomly show up on (loners should not be at night clubs, lazy should not be at the gym, etc). I want to decide what their hobbies are. Lifestyles and Sentiments sound like they should give me more of that kind of control, but they will probably mess up parts of my current rotational save before I can get around to every household to make the most of them.
I want more occults but also want a toggle because I don't play with them exclusively and might want to not have them around in some saves.
The game has a pretty good mix of scripted and non-scripted for me. I like the occasional script but I also like having the freedom to do whatever I want in between checking off the boxes on their aspirations.
I wouldn't mind story progression if it was similar to aging in that you could set some parameters. There are some saves where I might want aging and story progression for all households, and others where I want to age the active household only and progress the other households myself in rotation. I find rotational play more addictive and stick with those saves for longer, but I don't play that way exclusively.
But I do get very irritated at things like autonomous NAPs, where if I engage with that gameplay at all with any of my households every single other household will also vote for a NAP that, as with the flirting, will have no basis on the personalities of the sims who would be voting and will just be randomly generated. Which will only be a problem if I visit those neighborhoods before I can get to those households and cheat out the NAPs, granted, but I do have a lot of neighborhoods with a combination of residential and community lots, and I don't want Sharing is Caring or the fighting NAP to randomly be in place when I visit. So I have to play with that feature off in my rotational saves, even though I think the challenge of trying to get the neighbors to vote for what I want would be fun to play some time.
I'm definitely a family player, but my YA sims are part of the family so I don't mind there being plenty of stuff for them. I just want more for kids and teens and elders to make these life stages more distinct. I don't want less for female sims but I do want more for the males.
I do think they've done a pretty good job of allowing for a lot of different play styles. They'll never please everyone. We all just need to accept that our personal preferences aren't going to be the only ones they cater to. People who are the farthest towards one end of some of those spectrums are probably the least happy with the game, because they can have long waits between the release of features that specifically cater to them.
but for the next sims games, devs should stick to an idea for the game instead of making thousands of them in such an incomplete way. they already have the base done with previous sims games. i don't know why do they think they need to innovate for this game, people fell in love with the sims but some devs seem to want to turn this game into a completely different one..
Why do some players buy a pack about occults if they don't want them in their game?? Don't want vampire break-ins? Well don't get a pack titled vampires. Don't like spellcasters? Don't buy Realm of Magic. They're easy enough to ignore, it's not like these occults were introduced in some random non-related pack, like aliens or even mermaids in which case I can understand being a little annoyed at the occult stuff you didn't buy the pack for. No they literally have their own dedicated pack. Why? Because occult players want occults that act like them, not nerfed occults to satisfy players that don't like them but for some reason still buy packs dedicated solely to them.
This will never cease to grind my gears. Never.
So I don't think that should be on this list because it will never be fair to occult players to ask for packs dedicated to their playstyle to be nerfed only because you want some victorian-style bed.
@SimTrippy Reminds me of when I watched the Vampires livestream and simmers were asking if Vampires could be turned off!
Why are these always considered at odds? No love for witchcore.
Anyway this is the 5 stages: https://www.psycom.net/depression.central.grief.html I think for me I'm at the point of acceptance with the Sims franchise. If it ends up like SimCity I'm ok with that just as much as if it does ok. There are a ton of games in the simulation genre now that I have been enjoying along with the Sims and much happier since discovering so many indie companies making amazing games.
Yes! Sort of like real life! Sometimes you have to put up with things you don't like in order to enjoy the things you do.
My Plumbob is GREEN today
Instead of pushing out a bare-bones base game, they should have focused more on what they wanted that base game to be. A base should be the foundation, not a single pillar that has to rely on expansion packs to keep itself from "failing"/"falling flat".
I kind of just feel like they had no idea what they wanted to do and basically relied on the feedback from the players. Now that they've listened to the most "vocal" players, the game-play is "confused".
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Heh. They're not at all at odds in my game. I was just looking for a word for players who want non-magical sims but not uber-realism. Like those who play soap operas or crime drama stories or just love the wacky parts of the game like building a rocket in your backyard but don't want aliens...
But my witches and vampires and aliens are all in the extended family of my mundane sims and everyone gets along fine.
I love playing spellcasters who straddle magic with mundane family lives. I think it comes from growing up on Bewitched reruns and the 90s Sabrina sitcom.
Some of these players bug me because they seem want everything to be super complicated and grindy just for the sake of it. Things like:
Needing a degree for careers. I know you can't become a doctor or whatever irl without a degree, but sometimes I just want to start a game and immediately become a scientist so my sims can investigate those sweet, sweet strange lights, and needing a degree would get in the way.
Having to buy groceries. I get using fresh garden ingredients in cooking, but I don't want to be punished for not buying eggs or whatever. I'd be fine with a "stock fridge" option that would make cooking free for a week or something, but anything beyond that would be tiring.
Having to buy clothes. When I buy a pack I expect to be able to use any non-unlock cas on whoever I decide, and needing to unlock it by buying it would be annoying.
Some of the ways turn-ons and turn-offs are described sound horrible. If I decide that two sims should be together then that's what's going to happen. I don't need any of this "he doesn't like muscular sims" getting in my way. I especially don't want zodiac symbols back since I think they're stupid and they might also get in the way. My matchmaking boils down to pushing two sims together and saying "now kiss" tbh.
Honestly, some of these players act like their way of playing is the only right one.
What do you feel about toggles or a "Storyteller Mode" for these kind of things?
Yes this one upset me the most, the vampire in this game is so tame and no longer a threat after the nerf thanks to the strictly family-oriented realism players, with this nerf also made braiding garlic and hanging them in front of the house rather pointless.
That’d be nice.
Anyway I won’t lie, it kind of annoys me that they made mermaids such a secretive thing. I don’t want to have to hunt down some magical conch and expose someone just so I can see mermaids swimming around in Sulani. This is definitely a situation where a toggle would have been better.