#simscourse

[veronavillequiltingbee]

Just here to add my own two-simoleons because I can’t shut up

this is my take on the paywall thing on that context. If you’re paywalling that content, I also want a cut of your profits 🤓 I won’t feel icky about it but if you want to profit off of my tutorial (if that was my work) or my resources, or my content, then give me money too. cost of doing business. Kind of like the difference between non-commercial and commercial licenses for art assets.

Personally if I were to monetize my content (which I won’t), I would go the commission route, with the expectation that the content will be shared free to all in the end but I don’t want to monetize because money is expectation, and expectations for me are what kills my drive to even enjoy the thing.

Again that’s MY personal take if it’s something of mine that’s being profited off of, assuming I’ve done everything from scratch or used assets that are explicitly cleared for commercial use.

But also what I don’t like about paywalls, at least historically within the sims context, as someone who has been in the community for a while since the late 2000s (the old sims2community forums before it merged with MTS, mainly, but I’ve been on a few smaller forums as well), is the culture it breeds, particularly on the spirit of collaboration, of accessibility, but also back then pay content was, save for some exceptions, quality-wise, sub-par in quality compared to similar free content.

The hustle culture within CC creation also breeds expectations, the need to produce month after month, as to maintain your subscriber base. In the long run it’s unsustainable, and, based on what I see of pay creators in TS4, the creators just put out filler sometimes to make the sub worth it.

And finally it’s the intersection of sims and influencer culture. I find that once money is involved, whether actual money or social currency, there’s more focus on maintaining your brand and accumulating monetary or social capital and less on being involved with the community, but again just an observation.

does anyone else really hate the new trend of patreon creators locking free content behind the membership feature so you have to "join" their patreon just to download stuff a piece of CC?

it's so obnoxious. why are you throwing extra hurdles in the way of people who want to download your stuff? i can't imagine it actually drives more people to sign up for paid tiers. I think most people will click the link, go "oh I guess it's paywalled" and then close the tab, and then the haters (me) will click the tab, go "oh, that's annoying, I'm not going to download it now" and then close the tab

all it's going to do is deter people who might otherwise have downloaded or reblogged your stuff. it makes no sense no matter how you slice it.

[veronavillequiltingbee]

first and hopefully last time I’ll say this on this blog. We can disagree on sims paywalls, and other simscourse but I don’t put human rights and dignity out for debate.

zionists, 👊🏼 supporters, and any supporters of genocide, fascism, eugenics, or other bigotry are not welcome in this space 😇

if I find out you are, I won’t even engage in debate. I will just block and move on.

[missbaphomet]

go through the notes of that sims post to see why people are happy about it. you may not care, but others do, and that's ok. there's no need to be so condescending.

I have gone through the notes, it's still just people excited about features that already existed within the base game. And I wasn't being condescending, I was stating a fact. These people have been duped. There is not functional change that has been made that could not have been made purely by player agency.

EA saw a way to make a quick buck and as evidenced by the post, many people fell for it and hard. EA doesn't give a fuck who you have sex with or how frequently you do. All they care about is your money. EA is not your friend. Sims devs are not your friends. They don't give a fuck about what you do with your digital barbies so long as it brings in money

[andreabandrea]

If I was a sim I would go on simblr and reblog simscourse posts like "smarp floopie in zul weanow" and send my simutual a funny post which is just a picture of a duck with a smiley face icon next to it and then I would log off and die on the floor

[asimplevampire]

Okay, so, like. A) You're correct in that you shouldn't blame individual people for this, especially the fucking SimGurus, they have nothing to do with development. but at the same time-

B) Developing around a modding community is a big task, but a lot of teams that are much smaller than the TS4 team pull it off successfully.

You ever heard of Rimworld? It's an indie game that's a bit like the Sims, if your Sims crashlanded on an alien planet and spent their time desperately trying to survive and committing war crimes. The studio behind Rimworld largely consists of one guy, Tynan Sylvester. But it's a solid game with a crazy active modding community, and it gets pretty consistent updates. Including big, system-level, under-the-hood stuff.

Tynan keeps track of most of the major mods in the community and does, in fact, try to maximize compatibility with the most popular ones. You'll see in the game's official patch notes, "hey, Doors Expanded broke with the latest patch, I've gone through and fixed things so it should work again." Heck, the guy's hired one of the biggest-name modders to freelance for him before (mostly with art). And every single time there's a big update? Tynan goes to the big names in the modding community and warns them.

It's not just Rimworld that does this, either. Off the top of my head: Crusader Kings 3, Stardew Valley, Cities: Skylines, and TES: Skyrim all have dev teams who keep in touch with modders to a greater or lesser extent.

EA could keep in touch with the person who runs MCCC and the person who runs Wonderful Whims and the people behind bigger trait/feature mods. They could go, "hey, jsyk, the werewolf pack is going to change ABCD and EFGH, you'll need to update your mod" a couple weeks before release. They could work to make the code easily parsed by modders, make sure things aren't hard-coded, and give the community tools to make modding easier and more intuitive.

EA has chosen not to do this. It is a choice that they have made. It might be the right choice- and, hell, they haven't been actively hostile to the modding community, they don't have to support us at all- but they have chosen not to welcome us or make life easier for us either.

I am once again reminding everyone that blaming ea or simgurus for cc or mods breaking is fucking stupid. Game developers are not going to make the game around people's mods. That's insane

[literalite]

simphobe is the url if u wanted to go off but like.... dont bother. u know. you cant reason with dumbasses

edit: its now simscourse... as if pure hatred can be masked with discourse of any kind

[missbaphomet]

who do you think you're helping? do you genuinely, truly think that it's better for people to stop being happy about this free update to their game that they already enjoy? yes, you could do these things before, but you would still have the occasional instance of a lesbian sim flirting with a man and vice versa. you couldn't get aromantic allosexual sims at all! yes, sims ARE like dolls, and folks like to be able to play with them however they want, including specifying their sexualities. it may not be to your tastes, but they're not asking for your permission to have fun. literally everyone knows EA is a horrible cash-grabbing company. you aren't breaking any boundaries by saying so. that doesn't mean people can't be happy to be represented however they damn well please.

My intent was not to "help", merely to point out blatant hypocrisy. You can't hate corporations for using LGBT symbols while also supporting them for doing it.

Full disclosure, I haven't played the sims in a long fucking time. However I have friends that do play currently, and I was informed that sims cannot choose to have sex, it must be initiated by the player. I was also told that your sims can have sex without being in a relationship. If my understanding of how the sims function is true, the same logic applies to flirting.

People (and supposedly sims) can also be flirtatious with people they aren't attracted to. I have flirted with many of my friends despite neither being attracted to the other. I genuinely don't get the issue. People are complex and do things that sometimes don't make sense with other personality traits that they have, that's just how life is.

I genuinely don't care if it makes someone happy, they can do whatever they want with their digital dolls. My problem is that LGBT people are touting this as being progressive and inclusive when it really isn't even a new feature, and also because supporting corporations that do this shows other corporations that it's ok and an easy way to make a few rainbow dollars because people on masse don't have the critical thinking skills to realize that they're being used.