Hi @SimGuruMrE and thanks for responding. I'd love to hear more behind the scenes stuff (if that's what a dev diary entails?)
I do have twitter but use it mostly for work. For personal things and fun things I'm usually a late adopter, and comfortable being so. (Just tried monkfish for the first time the other night!) I would rather have a smaller amount of news that's high quality and well curated than bananas news asap all the time.
EA_Leeloo has left and she was the one who posted the Friday thread and most of the posts at the top, except for Patch notes. We don't appear to have her successor yet. (If we get one).
Forums are observed daily by most SimGurus...we like to observe discussions and will get involved when needed to answer questions and offer help.
These forums and twitter are both of equal use to us.
We post updates on the forum for things like the laundry list, patch notes, and general updates.
I'm not opposed to posting more here, dev diaries are always fun to make just usually hard to guage if there is interest in reading them.
Constructive discussions can really help us when people are able to feel safe in their discussions the feedback is always appreciated.
Not to be rude, I'm sure some of you are watching, and we can't reasonably expect you to participate constantly. It's just no feasible and you shouldn't be forced to. But as it stands, it doesn't feel like the forums are a top priority. Gurus may visit, but unless we actually see them post, we have no way of knowing that they're actually here or interested in what we're saying. Meanwhile, most Gurus post almost every day on Twitter. Yeah, Twitter is more appropriate for quick and casual posts, but fans still get more engagement and discussion with Gurus through Twitter - Hence why we have threads to catalogue things said by Gurus on Twitter.
Updates and laundry lists are good. But for those, Gurus just post them and that's it. The update tags on the top of the forum are all over a month old and can no longer be closed; meanwhile, we've gotten a ton of news that should have replaced them since then. The forums are infamously mod-free during weekends, and we used to have threads blow up into huge arguments that lasted days on end because of it. We usually see dev Gurus actively posting when it's time to hype up a new pack.
I gotta say thanks for the laundry list, though. You specifically mentioned looking into making them when asked on the feedback section last year.
The Sims 4 hasn't introduced a new musical instrument since 2017
@Gordy I can see what your saying and I can agree to some extent that forums have not been used to the full extent they could be.
We appreciate the discussion and I will look into what else we can bring to the forums, if nothing else maybe I will just post a weekly update of what I'm up to...it may be vague but we will see.
As for the Laundry List, I cant take credit for it, I just mention what I observe here to our leaders and thats all handled by @GrimSuruDoi and our QA team and they do a tremendous amount of forum surfing in addition to looking at our reported bugs for it.
Twitter is a much easier way to connect with the Sims community, post up-to-date information and answer quick questions. The Sims Twitter account has 2.3 million followers. I’m assuming only about 250 to maybe 400 Simmers visit the forum on a regular basis.
You don’t need a Twitter account to go on Twitter and read what the Sims' team and Gurus are posting. I don’t have a Twitter account but that doesn’t stop me from reading Sims 4 tweets on Twitter which is what I usually do.
Forums are observed daily by most SimGurus...we like to observe discussions and will get involved when needed to answer questions and offer help.
These forums and twitter are both of equal use to us.
We post updates on the forum for things like the laundry list, patch notes, and general updates.
I'm not opposed to posting more here, dev diaries are always fun to make just usually hard to guage if there is interest in reading them.
Constructive discussions can really help us when people are able to feel safe in their discussions the feedback is always appreciated.
If you compare the two audiences, I really don't know why they would come on the forum more than Twitter. The Gurus always come into the positive thread; so, I'm good with some things as they are.
One thing I will state is that ever since EA_LeeLoo switched positions, it appears to take much longer for the moderators to get to some of the reported toxic and/or off-topic post. I do understand it takes time to read through everything. Yet, I'm just hoping they are still moderating such activity. Thank you,
Frost became global CM in 2019. As recently as the start of June 2021, EA was actively advertising for one. That job listing is no longer present, so presumably they do have a hire. Whether from in-house, or elsewhere, I don't know. But the post was in fact vacant. I think Frost has moved on to other things.
Frost became global CM in 2019. As recently as the start of June 2021, EA was actively advertising for one. That job listing is no longer present, so presumably they do have a hire. Whether from in-house, or elsewhere, I don't know. But the post was in fact vacant. I think Frost has moved on to other things.
@Gordy I can see what your saying and I can agree to some extent that forums have not been used to the full extent they could be.
We appreciate the discussion and I will look into what else we can bring to the forums, if nothing else maybe I will just post a weekly update of what I'm up to...it may be vague but we will see.
As for the Laundry List, I cant take credit for it, I just mention what I observe here to our leaders and thats all handled by @GrimSuruDoi and our QA team and they do a tremendous amount of forum surfing in addition to looking at our reported bugs for it.
Can you address why there are no mods up here on the weekends? It is literally the Wild West up here from Friday at 5pm to Monday at 9am. People can say anything during those hours (and often do) and nothing is done about it. The rest of us just have to tolerate it until a mod can get around to addressing the offending comment days later.
If you say they are constantly seeing everything we have said and reported on a daily basis, then why does that take so long? It did not used to be like this at all.
@Gordy I can see what your saying and I can agree to some extent that forums have not been used to the full extent they could be.
We appreciate the discussion and I will look into what else we can bring to the forums, if nothing else maybe I will just post a weekly update of what I'm up to...it may be vague but we will see.
As for the Laundry List, I cant take credit for it, I just mention what I observe here to our leaders and thats all handled by @GrimSuruDoi and our QA team and they do a tremendous amount of forum surfing in addition to looking at our reported bugs for it.
Can you address why there are no mods up here on the weekends? It is literally the Wild West up here from Friday at 5pm to Monday at 9am. People can say anything during those hours (and often do) and nothing is done about it. The rest of us just have to tolerate it until a mod can get around to addressing the offending comment days later.
If you say they are constantly seeing everything we have said and reported on a daily basis, then why does that take so long? It did not used to be like this at all.
I actually haven't seen anything that wild?
It's always an argument over something here or there but nothing so extremely pressing that we can't stand to look at it until monday comes🤣🤣🤣
@Gordy I can see what your saying and I can agree to some extent that forums have not been used to the full extent they could be.
We appreciate the discussion and I will look into what else we can bring to the forums, if nothing else maybe I will just post a weekly update of what I'm up to...it may be vague but we will see.
As for the Laundry List, I cant take credit for it, I just mention what I observe here to our leaders and thats all handled by @GrimSuruDoi and our QA team and they do a tremendous amount of forum surfing in addition to looking at our reported bugs for it.
Can you address why there are no mods up here on the weekends? It is literally the Wild West up here from Friday at 5pm to Monday at 9am. People can say anything during those hours (and often do) and nothing is done about it. The rest of us just have to tolerate it until a mod can get around to addressing the offending comment days later.
If you say they are constantly seeing everything we have said and reported on a daily basis, then why does that take so long? It did not used to be like this at all.
I actually haven't seen anything that wild?
It's always an argument over something here or there but nothing so extremely pressing that we can't stand to look at it until monday comes🤣🤣🤣
There was an outrageous comment I wanna say about 2 weeks ago that remained for several weekdays even though numerous people reported it. Never seen anything like it. That’s what solidified for me that the mods weren’t here as often as they should be.
@Gordy I can see what your saying and I can agree to some extent that forums have not been used to the full extent they could be.
We appreciate the discussion and I will look into what else we can bring to the forums, if nothing else maybe I will just post a weekly update of what I'm up to...it may be vague but we will see.
As for the Laundry List, I cant take credit for it, I just mention what I observe here to our leaders and thats all handled by @GrimSuruDoi and our QA team and they do a tremendous amount of forum surfing in addition to looking at our reported bugs for it.
You STILL haven't answered why we can't close those month-old "updates" at the top of our forums, and they haven't been replaced by new ones. Can we have an answer on this, please? Or a fix? Really, looking at those every day irritates me.
@Gordy I can see what your saying and I can agree to some extent that forums have not been used to the full extent they could be.
We appreciate the discussion and I will look into what else we can bring to the forums, if nothing else maybe I will just post a weekly update of what I'm up to...it may be vague but we will see.
As for the Laundry List, I cant take credit for it, I just mention what I observe here to our leaders and thats all handled by @GrimSuruDoi and our QA team and they do a tremendous amount of forum surfing in addition to looking at our reported bugs for it.
You STILL haven't answered why we can't close those month-old "updates" at the top of our forums, and they haven't been replaced by new ones. Can we have an answer on this, please? Or a fix? Really, looking at those every day irritates me.
I'd like to know that too, and why they took away our ability to cross them out ourselves.
Some of those patch note comments are painful to get through. You've gotta look past all the muck to see what exactly has changed because it's not often clear!
I want to be fair... a lot of the decline has happened in the last year, and it's been a crummy year for everyone, so I think most of us have had a hard time being as eloquent as we normally might be. Aside from which, clever patch notes are just sort of a cherry on top, so it's not a huge deal either way. But I do remember a time when the patch notes were often truly amusing to read, and it was a fun little extra, so I can't help noticing the change.
@Gordy I can see what your saying and I can agree to some extent that forums have not been used to the full extent they could be.
We appreciate the discussion and I will look into what else we can bring to the forums, if nothing else maybe I will just post a weekly update of what I'm up to...it may be vague but we will see.
As for the Laundry List, I cant take credit for it, I just mention what I observe here to our leaders and thats all handled by @GrimSuruDoi and our QA team and they do a tremendous amount of forum surfing in addition to looking at our reported bugs for it.
You STILL haven't answered why we can't close those month-old "updates" at the top of our forums, and they haven't been replaced by new ones. Can we have an answer on this, please? Or a fix? Really, looking at those every day irritates me.
Right? At least turn them off until they can get someone to do regular updates again. It is not Friday, May 28th anymore!
@elanorbreton and @MiaSkywalker and anyone who else wants to know why we can't click the banners off of the top like we used to, here is an explanation from EA_Leeloo who made a comment in a thread over in the Forum Ideas and Feedback section...
@simgirl1010@CAPTAIN_NXR7 I double-checked and that is actually working as intended like this.
There was an issue before where the banner disappeared it didn't come back even when it was updated or when users logged out of the forum and back in. This has been fixed but this means that there is no option to click it away. Apologies for the inconvenience, I'm hoping it isn't too disruptive. And at least, no one is missing out on any news now.
First, I want to thank all of you users who are posting links to the twitter activity of the sim gurus. Not everyone has twitter, so it is great that you are sharing this information with the rest of us.
That leads me to my question. What is going on with the Forum? There appears to be no updating on news, patch notes, laundry list, etc. in weeks. From what I can tell Leeloo is no longer with Maxis and no one has taken over her responsibilities. It would be nice if Maxis would at least get someone to post news announcements such as the info about the in-game music festival running from 6/29 to 7/7.
It feels like those players like myself who are not on twitter have been abandoned without notice.
You get a notice in game so for people who don't have Twitter they can find out that way.
What is the point of this forum, I have to ask. This is where I come to learn what's new with the Sims. Yes, I see the 'ads' on the front page of my game, but generally, when I'm about to play, I don't like to veer off to another place just to read what's new. I come over here to do that. And while I do follow some modders on Twitter, I've never actually set up an entire account. For instance, I don't really post over there. I have better things to do with my time. Not to sound grouchy or anything, but I agree with the OP on this. This site was setup by EA/Maxis, presumably to keep the Community abreast of what's going on. It's a shame to have to look elsewhere.
I'll never understand why the Gurus favor Twitter over these forums. I get that this forum can get pretty toxic from time to time, but I've seen the Simmers on Twitter, we might as well be an army of Mr Rogers compared to those guys. The worst you get here are people just whining and whining about the game or whining about the people whining about the game, on Twitter you get them sending constant death threats to the Gurus, seen someone attempt to doxx them over something stupid.
Honestly, dump Twitter altogether. Your life expectancy will go up.
Both places can get toxic but I doubt that’s the reason. The more plausible reason they’re mostly on Twitter is because it reaches a much wider audience.
Both places can get toxic but I doubt that’s the reason. The more plausible reason they’re mostly on Twitter is because it reaches a much wider audience.
Phones play a big factor, I think (which relates to what you're saying about audience). Lot of people using websites like twitter through their phones. And I don't think smartphones were even a thing when forum tech like this was thought up. It's possible it's gotten some modernized updates to make it more phone browser friendly over the years, but I don't think there's an app for it.
And if there was, I find it doubtful it'd have anything like the appeal of twitter to people who use twitter on their phones if for no other reason than length. Twitter's character limit keeps things brief. Here you can write an essay without breaking a sweat. Threads are regularly filled with long, essay-like posts. It'd be a lot to trawl through on a phone.
Not to mention twitter seems to have been primarily designed with marketing in mind. Forums in my understanding come from the days when the internet was young, before everybody and their [every relation] was on it. I could be missing something in the history of it, but I don't think the original concept of forums was ever built for the kind of scale of something like twitter, where a post can go viral, or be sent out to a huge following, and reach hundreds of thousands of people within a few hours.
I'll never understand why the Gurus favor Twitter over these forums. I get that this forum can get pretty toxic from time to time, but I've seen the Simmers on Twitter, we might as well be an army of Mr Rogers compared to those guys. The worst you get here are people just whining and whining about the game or whining about the people whining about the game, on Twitter you get them sending constant death threats to the Gurus, seen someone attempt to doxx them over something stupid.
Honestly, dump Twitter altogether. Your life expectancy will go up.
Both places can get toxic but I doubt that’s the reason. The more plausible reason they’re mostly on Twitter is because it reaches a much wider audience.
Exactly and for them to drum up business as well by getting new customers and they may feel they can't on their own forums as majority of us are already customers.
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To me it feels like that don’t really take notice of the forums or Twitter. I hate to be negative but does it really matter when they don’t actually seem to listen or take notice of the feedback that is given anyway? So many things have been brought up time and time again over the years and still nothing is ever done about any of it.
It's nothing new, those top liner news blurbs with link was hardly used in the past either. There were several video streaming that I missed because they were not advertised on top of the forum, which I would find a rather obvious thing to do, especially when what IS posted there is old news.
I simply think EA lack a common and agreed way to inform simmers, it might be totally up to the one or two gurus "in charge" of an event. While I and probably many more have no idea where to look for news. They are sometimes here and sometimes there, and sometimes not posted at all.
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I do have twitter but use it mostly for work. For personal things and fun things I'm usually a late adopter, and comfortable being so. (Just tried monkfish for the first time the other night!) I would rather have a smaller amount of news that's high quality and well curated than bananas news asap all the time.
Updates and laundry lists are good. But for those, Gurus just post them and that's it. The update tags on the top of the forum are all over a month old and can no longer be closed; meanwhile, we've gotten a ton of news that should have replaced them since then. The forums are infamously mod-free during weekends, and we used to have threads blow up into huge arguments that lasted days on end because of it. We usually see dev Gurus actively posting when it's time to hype up a new pack.
I gotta say thanks for the laundry list, though. You specifically mentioned looking into making them when asked on the feedback section last year.
The Sims 4 hasn't introduced a new musical instrument since 2017
We appreciate the discussion and I will look into what else we can bring to the forums, if nothing else maybe I will just post a weekly update of what I'm up to...it may be vague but we will see.
As for the Laundry List, I cant take credit for it, I just mention what I observe here to our leaders and thats all handled by @GrimSuruDoi and our QA team and they do a tremendous amount of forum surfing in addition to looking at our reported bugs for it.
You don’t need a Twitter account to go on Twitter and read what the Sims' team and Gurus are posting. I don’t have a Twitter account but that doesn’t stop me from reading Sims 4 tweets on Twitter which is what I usually do.
Happy for the reply below.
If you compare the two audiences, I really don't know why they would come on the forum more than Twitter. The Gurus always come into the positive thread; so, I'm good with some things as they are.
One thing I will state is that ever since EA_LeeLoo switched positions, it appears to take much longer for the moderators to get to some of the reported toxic and/or off-topic post. I do understand it takes time to read through everything. Yet, I'm just hoping they are still moderating such activity. Thank you,
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SimGuruFrost is still Global Community Manager.
Can you address why there are no mods up here on the weekends? It is literally the Wild West up here from Friday at 5pm to Monday at 9am. People can say anything during those hours (and often do) and nothing is done about it. The rest of us just have to tolerate it until a mod can get around to addressing the offending comment days later.
If you say they are constantly seeing everything we have said and reported on a daily basis, then why does that take so long? It did not used to be like this at all.
I actually haven't seen anything that wild?
It's always an argument over something here or there but nothing so extremely pressing that we can't stand to look at it until monday comes🤣🤣🤣
There was an outrageous comment I wanna say about 2 weeks ago that remained for several weekdays even though numerous people reported it. Never seen anything like it. That’s what solidified for me that the mods weren’t here as often as they should be.
You STILL haven't answered why we can't close those month-old "updates" at the top of our forums, and they haven't been replaced by new ones. Can we have an answer on this, please? Or a fix? Really, looking at those every day irritates me.
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I'd like to know that too, and why they took away our ability to cross them out ourselves.
I want to be fair... a lot of the decline has happened in the last year, and it's been a crummy year for everyone, so I think most of us have had a hard time being as eloquent as we normally might be. Aside from which, clever patch notes are just sort of a cherry on top, so it's not a huge deal either way. But I do remember a time when the patch notes were often truly amusing to read, and it was a fun little extra, so I can't help noticing the change.
Right? At least turn them off until they can get someone to do regular updates again. It is not Friday, May 28th anymore!
@elanorbreton and @MiaSkywalker and anyone who else wants to know why we can't click the banners off of the top like we used to, here is an explanation from EA_Leeloo who made a comment in a thread over in the Forum Ideas and Feedback section...
https://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/982227/friday-highlights-banner/p1
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My stories on this site:
https://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/991317/my-sims-stories/p1?new=1
What is the point of this forum, I have to ask. This is where I come to learn what's new with the Sims. Yes, I see the 'ads' on the front page of my game, but generally, when I'm about to play, I don't like to veer off to another place just to read what's new. I come over here to do that. And while I do follow some modders on Twitter, I've never actually set up an entire account. For instance, I don't really post over there. I have better things to do with my time. Not to sound grouchy or anything, but I agree with the OP on this. This site was setup by EA/Maxis, presumably to keep the Community abreast of what's going on. It's a shame to have to look elsewhere.
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Both places can get toxic but I doubt that’s the reason. The more plausible reason they’re mostly on Twitter is because it reaches a much wider audience.
Phones play a big factor, I think (which relates to what you're saying about audience). Lot of people using websites like twitter through their phones. And I don't think smartphones were even a thing when forum tech like this was thought up. It's possible it's gotten some modernized updates to make it more phone browser friendly over the years, but I don't think there's an app for it.
And if there was, I find it doubtful it'd have anything like the appeal of twitter to people who use twitter on their phones if for no other reason than length. Twitter's character limit keeps things brief. Here you can write an essay without breaking a sweat. Threads are regularly filled with long, essay-like posts. It'd be a lot to trawl through on a phone.
Not to mention twitter seems to have been primarily designed with marketing in mind. Forums in my understanding come from the days when the internet was young, before everybody and their [every relation] was on it. I could be missing something in the history of it, but I don't think the original concept of forums was ever built for the kind of scale of something like twitter, where a post can go viral, or be sent out to a huge following, and reach hundreds of thousands of people within a few hours.
Exactly and for them to drum up business as well by getting new customers and they may feel they can't on their own forums as majority of us are already customers.
I simply think EA lack a common and agreed way to inform simmers, it might be totally up to the one or two gurus "in charge" of an event. While I and probably many more have no idea where to look for news. They are sometimes here and sometimes there, and sometimes not posted at all.