The Maxis Curation Guide

SimGuruKuxiku

SUL SUL SIMMERS!

A lot of things have happened since our last update to the Maxis Curation Guide – not only did we get configurable stairs, stackable windows, platforms, and hundreds of new Debug items, but also the Gallery finally came to console players (HOORAAAYY!), just to name a few alterations.

Based on this we felt like now is the perfect time to give our Curation Guide a general update and to enhance our Maxis Favorite nomination process. So bear with us, there are a few things we would like to cover.

But first, let us tell you how thankful we are for this incredibly creative, passionate, inclusive, and welcoming community. Seeing all these amazing creations uploaded to the Gallery and the Maxis Fav nominations on the forums reminds us of how outstanding this community is every single day. Thanks a bunch for your participation and your praise for “fav’d” creations – it warms our hearts and makes the curation process something truly special to our team.

Alright, enough of this cloying sentimentality! Let’s get down to the nitty-gritty:



ABOUT THIS GUIDE

You will notice that we added and clarified a few rules in the guide. We’ve created a separate forum post >here< where we explain why we decided to make those changes and to give you, our Simmers, an extended insight.

One thing that we want to point out is that these guidelines change and evolve as time passes, with or without notice. This may result in us breaking our own rules from time to time but this will have to be decided on a case by case basis. (One possible scenario for this could be, for example, special curation requests based on particular themes or occasions - just to give you a rough idea.)



NOMINATIONS

Let’s talk about how you can nominate another player’s creations for Maxis Favorites and what our criteria look like when checking those items. We would also like to increase everyone’s chances of receiving a Maxis Fav – but more on that later.

Most Maxis Favorite nominations usually have reached us through the forums (in addition to those creations that the SimGurus pass along or that we find on social media). That being said, when we look at the current forum nomination threads, the one for Lot nominations has reached 159 pages now. 159 PAGES!!! That is a lot so we figured that, while we’re already sharing these new Curation guidelines with you, it would make sense to have a fresh start for your nominations as well. You can find the new nomination forum threads where you can nominate creations for Maxis Fav right here (we check them on a daily basis, btw):

For Lots
For Rooms
For Households

We would also like to invite our amazing Twitter community to this process and enable you folks to nominate creations by tweeting about them. Use the hashtag #maxisfav and let us know why you think your nomination is special!

When you nominate a creation you can make our lives a bit easier and speed up the process by including the name of the creation, the creator’s Origin ID & the associated Gallery link in your tweet/post. This also leaves us with more time for testing them.



RULES & CRITERIA

There are certain criteria that creations need to fulfill in order to score a Maxis Fav; further, all nominations need to pass our internal checks & playtests. Before we dive into the specific checks for HOUSEHOLDS & BUILDS (including Lots & Rooms), there are also some GENERAL RULES that apply to all creations:

• We do not curate any content that violates our Terms of Service.
  • Item names, item descriptions, the player’s Origin ID & the Gallery page of nominated players should not contain any offensive and/or inappropriate content or language and/or alcohol/drug references.
  • Accounts of players who have been found to have violated EA’s Terms Of Service will not be considered for Maxis Favorites (we respect our player’s privacy so these decisions won’t be communicated or discussed).
• We will only curate original content and will not consider re-uploads from users other than the original creator (except for Shell challenges).
  
• We will not curate submissions for Spark’d challenges.
  The reason for this is that we don't want to influence the voting process in an unfair way.
  
• We will not curate content that contains Custom Content (CC) or requires the use of mods to be created.
  This includes:
  • Household outfits and their associated thumbnail pictures (custom poses)
  • Builds containing CC or which could only be made using mods
  • Custom paintings displaying content that cannot be found in the game

Now, let’s take a closer look at our specific checks for HOUSEHOLDS & BUILDS:

HOUSEHOLDS

• Each Sim of the household should have at least one designed outfit per outfit category.
• As mentioned above, we don’t curate households that use custom poses.
• Also, we don’t curate household compositions that are not possible without the use of cheats/mods.
  • For example, families that contain toddlers/children only (no teens/ young adults/ adults/ elder present)
• We don’t curate Sims who represent celebrities, public figures or copyrighted fictional characters (including characters from books, games, TV shows, movies etc.).
• Backstories aren’t a requirement for Maxis Fav, but if we need to decide between two households, and one of them has a backstory and one of them doesn’t, we tend to prefer the one that has a backstory.

LOTS & ROOMS

• We don’t consider Lots or Rooms for Maxis Curation that were created using Custom Content.
• We also don’t curate builds or rooms that resemble or mention copyrighted content.
• Lots and rooms should appear as they do in the thumbnail.
• We know that using the bb.moveobjects cheat (MOO) is very common among all Simmers (we’re guilty of using it ourselves) but we cannot assume that all players are familiar with this cheat. That’s why we will test every Lot & Room without enabling MOO. This can lead to different issues with those builds. Unfortunately, we can’t give a Maxis Favorite to items affected by the following:
  • "Flickering" - this is a visual glitch that appears on overlapping objects placed with MOO when rotating, moving or zooming the camera in & out. We see it a Lot on kitchen counters, tables & bookshelves.
  • Clutter is life! But be careful that we don’t run into any pathing issues when play-testing your build! (see what we did there? ) Make sure that your Sims can interact with items and that they can navigate to any room or area on your Lot, including gardens & pools.
  • When spreading clutter on kitchen counters, shelves & beds using MOO, also remember that those surfaces might disappear when being placed without MOO. As mentioned above, missing items could result in a build not exactly looking like what’s in the thumbnail picture which means it won’t be considered for Maxis Fav.
    • Keep in mind: holiday decorations placed using the “The Attic Stack Decoration Box” disappear when being placed from the Gallery, so try to decorate your house using the items available in the build/buy catalog if possible.
• We are truly impressed with what you can create using resized items. Just make sure that this doesn’t cause any of the issues mentioned for Rooms & Lots above.
• Complexity is not everything: We also accept base game builds, simple Rooms & starter Lots. You don’t need all the packs to land a Maxis Fav!
• We don’t look at the price of Rooms/Lots when selecting items for our checks. There is one exception: starter Lots should not cost more than 20k Simoleons.
• Houses should be fully furnished, but we’re also happy to curate Lots that leave some room for other player’s creativity by leaving one room unfurnished.
• Please only nominate Rooms that have been shared as Rooms on the Gallery. Nominations for Rooms which are only available as part of a Lot cannot be considered for a Maxis Favorite.
• We are happy to get hints about the specific Lot and the season in which the build was originally created, but this doesn't have any impact on the likelihood of selection.

MORE FAVS FOR EVERYONE!

We hope you didn’t forget that we talked about increasing your chances of receiving a Maxis Fav earlier. What do we mean by this? Let us explain:
As a rule of thumb we have tried to make sure that we do not give the same creators a Maxis Fav repeatedly in a short period of time. Once a Simmer received a Maxis Fav they were placed on a “hold list” for roughly 30 days. Within those 30 days we wouldn’t consider any other creations by this player. After the 30 days had passed we would remove the player from this “hold list” and include them in our curation checks again until they eventually receive another Maxis Fav. This system was a good start for giving different players a chance to be rewarded with a Maxis Fav, but there is also some room for improvement in the system.

To improve this system we’re splitting this “hold list” into categories for each type of item that can be curated. This means that once you receive a Maxis Fav, you are not automatically excluded from all Maxis Fav checks for the next 30 days.You will still have the chance to score a Maxis Fav in the other two categories.

Here is an example of what that could look like:

Player A received a Maxis Fav for an awesome Lot, but instead of being excluded from any further Maxis Fav selections for 30 days, Player A still has a chance to get a Maxis Fav for a Room and a Household. (We wouldn’t curate all three items by only one player in one day though!)
This means that you might score not only one or two, but three (three!!!) Maxis Favs within a 30-day time frame.
What a time to be alive!



ONE LAST THING

Well, actually two last things.

Here are two more tips from us on how you can ensure that you get the most out of your Maxis Fav and how you can increase your chances of scoring a Maxis Fav even more:

1. If you didn’t receive a Maxis Fav on one of your Lots, please don’t worry! There are an incredible amount of amazing creations out there! If you have not been lucky with scoring a Maxis Fav for your Lot so far, you can increase your chances of being selected by uploading single rooms of your build to the Gallery as well. This way you have the chance of scoring a Maxis Fav for your rooms even if you won’t score it for your Lot as a whole.
   
   
2. When nominating a creation for Maxis Fav always make sure to have a look at the Creation Date. As you might be aware curated items only show up for a certain period of time within the “Popular Now” filter section. We’re always trying to keep this section fresh to show our latest Favs to our Simmers, so we try to select items that will remain in this filter for a while.
   Even though we don’t exclude older items from the Maxis Fav process there might be times when we need to prioritize newer uploads to make sure our “Popular Now” section doesn’t empty out. Because of this we recommend getting your nominations out there as close to the date on which an item was shared/uploaded as possible.

We hope that you like this new approach and that you find this information helpful.
We are excited to see how this will bring some fresh air into the way that we choose our Maxis Favs and we’re looking forward to checking out even more of your beautiful creations!



Dag dag & Happy Simming!

- SimGuruKuxiku