Friday, April 27, 2012

Known issues with Facebook Sims Social: the disocialization

A screen shot of my Sims main home in Sims Social in Facebook
Hello and welcome to another edition of your favorite blog. This time I will go off topic with the blog and will let you learn a little bit more about me. When I made the blog was for inspirational purposes and also sometimes express myself.
I love to read from great personalities like Les Brown, JC Maxwell, and others, but another thing that you guys didn't know about me is that I'm a gamer. I mostly play call of duty, any sport game like NBA 2K12. When I'm not playing on the Play Station I'm playing on Facebook.
Undeniably the most captivating game of the decade is The Sims. One thing that make the Sims appealing is the fact that you can basically create a fictitious life. On August 2011 The Sims social was launched for Facebook. I immediately jumped into this game. I liked playing this game early on, I still like it. But I have been noticing a decline and there's no mystery on why.
Just like anything EA put it hands into. Perhaps the most successful series they had was NBA Street. This was the game to play back in 2002-04. But EA messing things up destroyed the franchise releasing "NBA homecourt) The game seemed to be the same old street ball game but was all cartoon. EA is also behind the Sims and the Sims social. I have noticed great changes in the game. Now I can invite people to my house, starting in February 2012. Is great because it sucks to have a great house and you can't see how others interact in your house. However I can only do limited stuff with the visiting Sim. If you notice the picture above I don't have a sofa, I chose to have two seats in front of my TV. The visiting Sim can't sit because I'm using the seat. After continuous failures I came to realize that my Sim only use one. I removed the other seat via "Shop" and I get the message "I need somewhere to sit". But that's not all.
The biggest frustration of this game is the famous quests. They give you weekly sometimes biweekly challenges for you to accomplish within certain period of times. Sure you should have some challenges but some challenges are ridiculous. Let's start for the ones that have frustrated me and other players the most.
Since Myspace years is known that people don't look at others people's profiles. Some of the frustrations that people have is that to complete a quest you must post it on your wall and pray for friends to click on your links and help you out. I have come to the desperation point sometimes commenting on my own postings and tagging other Sims players. Trying to be a good neighbor I also created a special list in my Facebook where I list all of my fellow Sims players so I can see when they post on their wall. Still the whole "Sims neighborhood" end up with uncompleted quests. Another issue that result in uncompleted quests. Some ridiculous requests that can never be completed no matter what. I recall one for the month of February for some reason the French week was also the sexual week. Here's the problem with that quest. I had to contact couple of female players and agree to start a romantic relationship with my Sim in order to complete the quest even though my Sim is in a happy relationship with the Sim of my real life girlfriend.
I needed to woohoo (Sim for have sex) with 3 different Sims. My friends agreed. Here is the problem, in order to start a romantic relationship with another Sim I had to break up with my girlfriend. Out of every relationships in the Sims the most complicated to develop and I wasn't breaking it for the sake of a quest. More problems. Note the four heads on the left side of the screen with a red text under. If you haven't play the Sims social I have to explain to you that this represent active quests. The one in the bottom is the relaxation week, I have to deal with relaxation week and they start with another quest right away give me a break EA.
Relaxation week also had it issues. Can you explain me how relaxation and kissing are related? For the second stage of the quest they asked me to kiss 3 different Sims. I said this is given, one of my Sim quality is "great kisser" so he has "steamy make out" I just kiss my girl, go out flirt with couple of sims, make out with them, then to avoid romantic relationship get them upset and destroy the romantic momentum. That sounds like a fantastic. NO is not. It happens that make out don't count as kissing in the Sims social. They had "romantic kiss" and "shy kiss" for people I don't have a romantic relationship with  and "kiss" for romantic relationship. Here's the problem, in order to kiss another Sim I was required to break up with my girlfriend.
WTF EA? can you do one thing right someday in your life? Is bad enough that people spend time on your stupid game time that we could have spend doing productive stuff like reading a book, learning a new trade, actually working. I think I have spend around 15 hours of my weeks on your game and this is what I get? Then to make it worse the game gets discriminative and impossible to complete for certain groups. Then to make it even worse I get so frustrated that I wanted to make my voice be heard at EA and there's no way of reaching the studio. No wonder 2K whooped your behind last year with the release of NBA 2K11 and now NBA 2k12 where did NBA Live go? even with the endorsement of ESPN 2K took you down. True, MLB 2K is not their best game because their MLB development team tend to ignore the fans but NBA 2K listen. Anyway EA continue this road since the destruction of NBA street. To me the best game of the Franchise was Street V2 after the destruction of that franchise I love EA as much as I love my headaches and tooth aches.
I think I will definitely stop playing this game and go with the flock to play Angry Birds, seem more exciting than this game that just keep frustrating everybody. How in the F$#$ world cleaning have to do with greek week? This game is getting stupid by the day.

Major pluses for this game
  • Truly create an empire by working out all your skills and earning money in everything, build a wonderful house.
  • Major big plus. Since we are rich, it sucks staying all year long in the same house. As of March now we can build a house in the beach that gets dirty by beach garbage way too quick by the way.
  • Ability to invite friends into the house
  • Massive storage room
  • Careers, now the Sims can earn extra points when they do tasks related to their career. It focus on four major careers Rock Stars (earn extra points in music) Artist (earn points in painting, writing), cook (earn points in cooking) Athlete (earn extra points in athletic activities)

Big cons
  • Trouble with the quests
  • Inability to identify that there's two chairs not one sofa
  • Windows is the most used operating system in the world. Since the failure of Windows vista people are cautious to move into Windows 7 still and since Windows 8 was announce some people are waiting for Windows 8. This leave people using Windows XP in computers that have similar power to that of my cellphone. Sims social tend to freeze on those computers. It uses too much flash memory
  • Discriminate players due to their relationship status catering more to single 


Question I can answer
How can I make people to visit me? My friends complain that my house is too crowded and freeze their system
Here's the thing my friend, when you load a Sims house you load the items present in the house. So this steal more flash memory and force your friend's browser to crash. You have a massive storage room, let's call it the attic. You can store all items you are not currently using into the storage room, this make your house look a bit more loose and is easier for you and your friends to navigate. Placing an item in the storage room will not deplete your house worth. Is items you bought that's your.

Thanks for reading Victor Space followers, we will be back to the regular program shortly

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