April 2008 News Archive - The Sims Online Mania

Month:

Wednesday April 30, 2008
Object Prices and Skilling Speed

Source: http://www.ea-land.ea.com/blog/?p=1161

Today, we turned off dynamic object pricing on catalogue items. We've also raised skilling speed to 148%. These are permanent changes.

Purportedly, a giant landfill has been found between the robot factories and the restaurants. In the next few days, it will cause property values to plummet! If you are thinking of buying property, we highly recommend that you wait for a bit.

Posted by: Matt

Tuesday April 29, 2008
EA-Land Drawing To A Close On August 1, 2008

Source: http://www.ea-land.ea.com/blog/?p=1156

Bye EA-Land!

It is with mixed emotions that today we are announcing the EA-Land experiment will soon draw to a close. Since 2002, EA-Land / TSO has attracted a very special group of players (of which you are one) and we certainly appreciate your participation in the EA-Land community. The lifetime of the game has drawn to an end, and now we will be focusing on new ideas and other innovative concepts in the games arena. We’d like to thank everyone who has taken part in this online community as a unique experience in the virtual world.

Below are some facts about how the site and service will be closed. Please see also a special message from the team that maintained EA-Land, to the community that played it.

Key Facts:

On August 1, 2008, the game EA-Land / TSO will no longer be in service and EA will focus these resources on future games
Your subscription billing will end now, so that at least 60 days of your EA-Land experience will be at no cost to you
You may cancel your account and subscription at any time by contacting customer service or by managing your EA account online. To do this, you must log on to EA-Land / TSO to cancel within the game
Starting immediately PayPal cash-in will not be available anymore
EA Customer Support at support.ea.com is available to help answer any questions you might have regarding your account

If you are a paying subscriber as of April 29th 2008, EA would like to offer you one of the following two gifts as a token of our appreciation:

$15 off any game at the EA Store at www.eastore.ea.com, or
Three months of Club POGO(tm) Subscription Time

Paying subscribers please insure your email contact information is up to date as details of this offer will be sent out to you within 30 days.

Again, thanks you to all of you.

Electronic Arts

Update: Click here for some frequently asked questions related to the closing of EA-Land / TSO.

Posted by: Matt

Tuesday April 29, 2008
A SPECIAL MESSAGE FROM LUC AND THE EA-LAND TEAM:

Source: http://www.ea-land.ea.com/blog/?p=1151

We share the sadness of the entire community in writing this blog to announce that the EA-Land experiment is being brought to an end. Decisions such as these are never easy and the rationale for closing EA-Land is particularly complex. Regardless, it is hard to see the end of the collective investment of emotion, time and friendship.

This development team over the past year, in partnership with your amazing community contributions, worked to deliver a re-engineered TSO architecture ported to DirectX9, with a stable economy, variable pricing, the beginnings of custom content (bitmaps, chairs and sculptures, skinning), integrated web-services (enabling Facebook apps and user created widgets), and kept pace with new features pushed weekly (cash in, free play, across-world mini games, etc). The team is a very dedicated crew that spent many nights and week-ends making it all work.

We would like to thank the community for trusting us over the last 10 months and enabling this opportunity. A special thank you to the few thousand who have been with the game since the original beta! (A big thank you also to all the users who came back since December).

Thank you for uploading 30,000 pieces of custom content and proving again that development teams should build worlds involving their user communities. We are particularly proud that the top entrepreneurs in this new world are custom content makers. Personally, I have been most motivated by your participation in all stages (from design on the wiki to testing in TC3 and feedback all over). I think that this smart and well-connected community is one you should be proud of.

Thank you for helping us, pushing us and making us more flexible, wiser, and smarter!

The virtual worlds are still in their infancy, I sincerely hope we will have the opportunity to be creative together again.

We miss you already,

Luc,

(With the help of: Greg, Larry, Sarah, Uri, Cort, Randy, Parizad, Mark, Lee, Margaret, Paul, Michael, Audrey, Laurent, Alex, Minkz, Vishwa, Cindy and Bing)

Posted by: Matt

Monday April 28, 2008
Custom Content Statue Awards

Source: http://eal.friend-space.profusehost.net/

EA-Land Statue Competition

Avid EA-Land player Avyi Zenith has organized a Custom Content Statue Award Competition and Ceremony to showcase and celebrate the hard work players have put into creating custom content for EA-Land.

EA has donated grand prizes that will be given out during the awards ceremony. The prizes include Simmy's and Garden Gnomes. There are also several money related prizes for those who qualify for the grand prize.

Do not miss this awesome opportunity to showcase your custom content and have a chance to win the great prizes offered. To learn more about this exciting competition, take a look at the EA-Land Custom Content Statue Awards website or the discussion on the EAL/TSO Stratics message boards.

Posted by: Matt

Saturday April 5, 2008
Currency Voting Cancelled

Source: http://www.ea-land.ea.com/blog/?p=1011

From Sarah:

We have heard your various cries regarding this vote so we’re going to call it off and go back to the drawing board on the issue of how to change the name of the currency. Thanks for understanding!

You can delete the cards as you wish from now - we’re not going to remove them from the world - maybe some day they might be worth something on the open market!

We have gifted 5,000 each to 13 people for suggesting suitable names from the 770 nominations we were delighted to have received!

Posted by: Indigo

Saturday April 5, 2008
Anti-Bot Measures

Source: http://www.ea-land.ea.com/blog/?p=545

We're starting to test a feature on TC3 that aims to help us to crack down on bot AND bot-like behavior, while not affecting the vast vast majority of players in any way.

Here's how it works:

Summary

Each account can only earn a ‘reasonable' sum of money from us (and you can earn as much as you want from other players).

What's ‘reasonable'?

Well, we consider that 98% of the populations of EA-Land and TC3 have been earning a very reasonable amount but that some of the remaining 2% are suspicious. Others in that 2% are simply draining money through Pizza, and the like, and not engaging in other aspects of the game.

We will give users an initial credit for what they can earn, then we'll give them an additional credit each week and the users themselves can accumulate credit by contributing to the game through activities such as buying objects, uploading custom content, buying a lot, etc. Activities such as using money objects and getting kickbacks from others using your money objects will reduce your credit. If the credit ever gets very low (and for most people it should never) you will get increasingly reduced payouts until you accumulate more credit, through your own activity or through that weekly boost.

Again, we've been keeping track and had we turned this on when we first opened EA-Land, it would not have affected 98% of players in any way at all and we'll work to keep it that way.

Details From Your Perspective:

Your account (set of characters) has a “Payout Pool” associated with it.

Your Payout Pool is given an initial credit of 3,000

This is how much money your characters can earn until you or we contribute back to that pool.

We will give every account some amount of credit per week into their Payout Pool. It's 500 for now but we'll be keeping a eye on what it should be so that people essentially do not need to be concerned about their Payout Pool at all. You will not be able to access your Payout Pool balance and we may turn on/off this feature (during events, etc.).

You credit your Payout Pool through activities such as buying objects, uploading custom content, buying a lot, etc.

You debit your Payout Pool through activities such as jobs, using money objects, and getting kickbacks from others using your money objects.

Player to player activities such as using tip jars, secure trade, the interaction “Give Money”, door charges, selling items from stores, etc., do not contribute to, or deduct from, your Payout Pool.

If your Payout Pool ever gets very low your payouts will decrease slowly until its balance is increased again through either your activities or the credits mentioned above.

Overall this feature is intended to safeguard us, and you, from the effect of bot-like activity in the game, and it will act as a safety net, allowing us to experiment more (with our dynamic market and payouts, for example).

Posted by: Matt

Friday April 4, 2008
Version 2.1667.5.0 in EA-Land

Source: http://www.ea-land.ea.com/blog/?p=1016

Hello,

Few bug fixes for EA-Land today:

Fix for crash when -r800×600 used. You can add this back to your command lines.
Few more code fixes for Lag. We are still working on Lag and expect this change to make it “better” but not remove it.

Cheers,
Lee

Added by Parizad: Fixed bug! Subscribing players in EA-Land and TC3 can now go to work! We’re working on letting the free TC3 players back in also.

Posted by: Matt

Thursday April 3, 2008
Version 2.1683.0.0 in Test Center, Version 2.1667.3.0 in EA-Land

Source: http://www.ea-land.ea.com/blog/?p=1006

Test Center 3 - 2.1683.0.0 and 2.1683.0.0

lag fix. memory leak fixes.
lag fix. data service bug fix regarding proxy creation and metrics messaging.
lag fix. reduction in skill data requests by dataservice
tradelog update
Various city-from and gifts updates
systems updates in prep for character system update. low level.
Known bug: crash at near zoom. No work-around
Know bug: hang at 100% entering city. Workaround - delete contents of userdata directory
Free players limited to 1 avatar enforced

EA-Land - 2.1667.3.0

lag fix. memory leak fixes.
lag fix. data service bug fix regarding proxy creation and metrics
messaging.
lag fix. reduction in skill data requests by dataservice
Primary avatar selection
update lot sell back dialog to indicate no refund
added 2 skinable rugs 1×3 and 2×3
added ability to pick up objects that are out of bounds

Regards,

Greg

Posted by: Indigo

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