This Land Is Your Land, This Land is EA-Land

Home!

Well, not exactly, because they're moving everything.

I got a tip-off in SL from an avatar who said he was Celeste Sim in the old days in The Sims Online. He said that the Electronic Arts people were merging all the cities and overhauling the game, and making something with real money trade (RMT). He wasn't sure if our stuff would be deleted or not.

Meanwhile, I got a notice from EA.com merely saying my billing was out of order -- but in fact it was tied to a good card, so it seemed like an SL-like problem. I went to the website and found it was demanding that I re-register, which I did. Then I caught up with the blog. (There's also a site www.ea-land.com but it's down now).

I was amazed to discover that Luc and other developers were still there and talking intensively to the customers, providing normal, letter-length replies on their blog. This was so unlike their past years of silence and impassivity that I nearly fell out of my chair -- of course it contrasted with the recent Linden wagon-circling as well.

Apparently the plan is to move all the servers in TSO -- Alphaville, Jolly Pines, etc. -- all on to one server farm visible on one map spread, which they said even required developing a new zoom level. While this is happening -- and it apparently involves physical movement from the West Coast to the East Coast in real life as well for some unfathomable reason -- you can opt to ask that your sim be moved by logging on with your regular account by March.

At first, even allowing for all kinds of fiddling in my inner computer folders which I hadn't done since the last time I played the Sims (they're good at making you do that), I couldn't get it working. I got a strange error but that was because I was trying to back into the patching in a strange way.

Necessity is the mother of invention, so I got it working finally after a long hour wait for the patch to process. TSO has LOTS of new stuff in it. And -- get this -- it has user-generated content now!

There are objects inworld that enable you to view the content, and go to that person's page. They've also added links to Facebook for all the avatars.

Of course, being in isometric 2-D view, a lot of this looks pretty bad. Few of the makers I saw were as good as the EA staff. It will get better, however. It was gratifying to see some of our old brand-name favourites like The Sims Resource. I remember them way back even from my offline Sim days as having some of the greatest, most good-looking 3-Dish stuff.

And here they are, first off the boat into the new version, selling content. I saw a mushroom chair that I sat on to learn cooking (shown here above), and lots of other stuff. Some other people's efforts at using the Transmogrifier, as we used to call the PSP like thing used to make sim stuff, was pretty awful -- I saw a giant china cat that I used to have in offline -- many of the self-created things looked 1-d instead of 2-d, and didn't fit with the world.

Now people have stores you can visit to buy the regular game goods, and their new home-created stuff, which gives the whole place a kind of excitement, like a tag sale. I stopped at a guy's store, among the first on one of the sections of the new world. He had made some gas station pumps, so I bought one of those for $450 simoleons (everything seemed to cost that), vaguely intending to recreate my Flamingo Court Motel and gas station and ice cream parlour again -- until I caught site of the prices on the new parcels: $23,000 something, and I had only $500 to start.

I had landed in Test City -- that's all that's working now as they do the migration. I stopped at a few cooking skill joints and skilled. Many of the profiles I reviewed said they were people like me -- long-time players, though perhaps not with 1,872 days on them like me! -- who were coming back for a look-see.

There is something about the TSO round that induces greater friendliness in people and just sheer niceness. Will Wright really knew what he was doing when he created a) routines that helped organize people b) collaborative job objects that helped people work together to their individual and group advantage c) goals like having the more expensive goods or even being the "meanest" on the leader board. He had it all very efficiently worked out, and it seems Luc and these others that remained when Will went off to work on Spore or whatever have continued on that spirit.

All three things are missing in SL, of course, because it's not a game. But even worlds need a frame, a sense of beginning, middle, and end. And lacking an immediate thing to do or a way to skill or make money, many people flounder in SL. It's a shame that human beings are like that, that most aren't more resourceful, but there it is, that's how they are, and it's better if you save wear and tear on other people trying to endlessly hold their hand, and introduce game mechanics that themselves help them overcome that initial step.

I don't know if it would be good then to have an interoperable TSO-like session in SL, having people preserve for a few hours and socialize around the library book shelves learning to cook until they had Lindens, a few friends, and some clue about what to do LOL -- it seems funny to contemplate. And yet, the things the Lindens come up with, like driving vehicles, aren't what works.

I realized why my inventory may seemed to have been missing in TSO a few months ago -- I believe that items can now only be purchased in stores. And of course they wear out, and need fixing by various magic actions. I believe the items can be broken up for parts now, and used to make new items on workbenches.

There are a lot of new items -- trees, a garden hose, stuff. There is nothing that satisfies the suburban soul of many Americans than seeing all that 1950s dream stuff.

One of the posts seemed to talk about giving the oldbies who had stuck it out a change to grab the first parcels -- that seemed fair, especially given that they are losing their builds in this migration, although apparently not money and goods.

But the EA.com people may have really struck gold with a simple concept: having free accounts, encouraging free accounts, but not giving them the right to cash out more money than they put in. Apparently there will be purchase of the simoleons directly from the company, and the ability to cash out.

WOOT and ARMPUMP! That just seems very sound to me. That is, I'm glad the Lindens don't do it, because it adds to that challenge of that gritty and rugged Strategic TSO that we all know and love *cough*. But won't it be interesting to see how the EA.com folks do this?

It has caused some forums bitching, but most seem to relish the idea that new accounts can't be endessly created and be used for gold-farming and griefing. That is, if you are a newbie, you'll be able to come in and make stuff and sell it in a store, but you can't cash out until you go premium (and provide ID and pay a subscription fee of $9.99 a month). You can also accept cash from oldbies who want to give it away (there are likely to be the sort of camping lots in TSO that there are in SL and it will be more of a natural, due to the need to skill up), or earn cash by doing stuff for people -- you could clean up the tables in a skill lot, for example, as a roomie.

In case you're wondering how the game gods could justify you skilling and making simoleons from jam preservers and then pay you for these fake game jobs and not real work making content, I think that what they've done is lowered the payout. I made only $5 for a jar of jam that took half an hour to make with no skills -- wasn't it $20 in the old days of Dragon's Cove? Somebody help me out here!

So you're a long way from that $23,000 beach-front palace at that rate! The game gods may be willing to pay their customers just to spend hours on the game to oil the economy at first.

The fanboyz on the forums are awful, bitching about others as "whining" when they are merely asking the legitimate customer question "are you going to delete my stuff?!), fauning all over the EA.com staff -- far worse than SL. You realize what a gulf there is just by contrasting the two.

Most of the fans seem relieved the game is getting new content and changing, as they say it was boring. And it *is* boring to sit and skill a sim all night and only say WOOT and "can you cook?" to your fellow human beings online. The key to making these lots richer, we found, was to try to get the group to maximize the greening capacity with very good green routes (I saw lots of lousy ones from newbies) and also very good job object management, so that you were free to keep the routine going as a kind of unconscious mantra while you focused on making some other thing -- another game, a theater production, a discussion, whatever.

The way to approach TSO is not to get hung up on 2-Dness, on lameness of Hallmark and Hello Kitty culture content, on the idiocy of going to the bathroom online in pixels. The way to approach EA-Land is to understand that this is a fresh, clean world that has some basic ideas in it that many people have talked about testing but never tested. And here it is, you can test it for free.

Look me up there under the name "Iambic Pentameter".

The last moment of TSO in Alphaville -- yes, we missed it! -- captured by the last remaining citizens.

Comments

[Alex]

Nice review. Thank you, Prokofy.
Also, I have a feeling that Raph's Metaplace will be pretty much like that too. However, there will be an option to build many interesting things on top of their platform.
Please report more on RMT and cashing the sallaries out as soon as you find out. Economy is something that makes all VW take-off and sometimes fly. :)
Basically the main moto of all newcommers is: "I will do something there and earn enough to play the way I want." Take that away and the VW is DEAD.

[Desmond Shang]

>>"real money trade (RMT)"

Real Money Trade!

So THAT is what "RMT" means!

I've seen that acronym flying all over the place, had a vague contextual sense of what it meant, and actually tried to find out what it meant a few times (without success).

And here I've been doing real money trade myself since 2005 - you'd think I'd know that PA by now (PA as in: Pundit Acronym - an acronym I just invented).

I could care less about Sims Online except in perhaps a philosophic way, but thank you, thank you, thank you for spelling out one of the dreaded PA's I had wondered about for a long, long time...

* * * * *

I wonder if there should be a scale. The PAU scale. For "Pundit Acronym Use."

For instance, Joe Average isn't going to use an acronym like "RMT" or "DMCA" (Digital Millenium Copyright Act).

Sometimes these are verbed, such as "Jack copied someone's content and got DMCA'd" (meaning: the original artist pressed for the copied content's removal from Jack).

Then there are phrases that qualify.

Such as "inworld government" - typically meaning some kind of clumsy tribal "law" within a game usually about things that have less value than a vending machine's contents in a superior court lobby.

Or "magic circle" - that suspension of disbelief one must have to recognise and deal with orcs, wizards, spells, game "economies" and that sort of thing.

I propose that all of us that regularly show up on blogs have some kind of PAU score - how many pundit acronyms used per post, or suchlike.

Say hypothetically, Pundit X writes this:

"Fred's Digital Content* broke the Magic Circle* of his favourite 3D world, but he didn't care because he was interested in RMT*. However, his hegemony didn't last long because he was DMCA'd* and also brought before Virtual Lawyers* and served some Virtual Justice*."

That scores a 6, or six usages of acronymical punditspeak that a regular person would almost never use.

Are such posts insightful? Or indicative of people that have long left the worlds they talk about, for the aether of forums and blogs?

An open question.

* * * * *

And yes, I was once known for surreptitiously putting a stack of these out next to all the other 'big meeting' corporate handouts:

http://www.bullshitbingo.net/cards/bullshit

Deeply, deeply insightful game, in a way.

[Prokofy Neva]

Yes, I have the non-profit home edition of Bullshit Bingo and it has these terms:

toolkit
stakeholders
sustainable [sustainability]
going forward
bluesky the numbers
mindshare
market [as v. about things not for sale]

[Tammy Nowotny]

I skipped right over TSO... but I have been reading about it in a book by someone who may not necessarily be one of Prok's favorite people... Peter Ludlow, aka Urizenus Sklar. EA's community relations seem to be even more bungling than Linden's. Ludlow is a person of some influence in the real world... aside from being a senior professor at one of the most famous universities on the planet (the University of Michigan) he is also a high-profile expert on virtual worlds.

But EA cut him off abruptly (for publishing a newsletter about TSO) with no explanation, just like he was just some teen-aged griefer kiddie. This led to him using his influence to get many scathing articles (and now a book) published.

LL may not be great at PR, but the company has been fairly adept at cultivating real life opinion influencers. Even when those personages get fed up and leave (e.g., Adam Curry, Cory Linden, American Apparel, AOL etc.) they tend to go away quietly.

BTW, I used to enjoy the single player SimCity... except I would often get bored after an hour or six and start griefing my own city. I would plop down a few extra nuclear power plants, send in a couple of prehistoric monsters and the burn the whole place down and maybe start over.

[Prokofy Neva]

Well, "favourite" isn't the word I would use about my former TSO roomie and partner in crime. For a time, we had a pet refuge to prevent the horrendous scourge of "culling" for rares. We would take in people's pets and try to keep them and resell them if they were discovered not to be "rares".

I was St. Frank of Assissi and Uri was Mrs President Chomsky. She never did her part to clean up the picnics, I have to say, because she was always off speaking on pet rights at all sorts of women's luncheons and club seminars, it was awful.

For a time, as Sir Lagalot, I was also Uri's roomie at his Knights Templar lot where he was mainly AFK ah interviewing underage girls.

So I feel about Uri like I might feel like one of those alcoholic uncles you're afraid to invite to the family wedding, but if you don't, and make sure they're passed out before the bride goes down the aisle, they may lurch in with a bar buddy just as she is saying her vows. That kind of thing. Still, they might leave you in their will, or mention you in their book.

The University of Michigan is one of the most famous universities on the planet? Did I miss something here? Hmm. We're a Michigan State family ourselves...In any event, Uri is at my old alma mater now, the University of Toronto.

The story of Uri needs to be told from other participants besides Uri.

He was not banned for a newsletter or a website. I ran a much more critical website and newsletter inworld than he, and was never even warned or disciplined.

Contrary to popular rumour, I was only banned one for a day or two for swearing, i.e. as in SL "swearing in PG" when someone force-married me in a grief action -- it was a typical grief incitement to get someone to react and then abuse report them for doing something 'wrong' they wouldn't have done if they hadn't been griefed. Classic method.

Uri's banning was more complicated. In SL terms, you could say he was banned for persistent disclosure. He insisted on trying to get to the bottom of several stories of sims (residents) who claimed they were underage, and engaged in criminal activity (in one case, a kid who said he had broken his sister's arm, in another, this Evangeline who was supposedly a cyber prostitute).

I had a completely different take on all this, and will write it up some day.

Uri wasn't a high-profile expert on virtual worlds, really, although he had written on cyberspace and MUDs I believe, because they didn't exist back in the day that TSO started and when he was in it -- you could call TSO a virtual world but mainly it was viewed as a game.

He became one later when he began to dine out on being banned. This sparked a lot of criticism from some of us that didn't feel he was a journalist. In fact, I set him up with a fake story which he dutifully published, to prove my point about irresponsible tabloid journalism.

There are a few idiots who so constantly bloviate about *me* allegedly being an irresponsible tabloid journalism merely because of 2 critical stories about the Electric Sheep, which cried out for critical coverage, but I don't get to be called an expert on virtual worlds and dine out with venture capitalists merely because I don't have the title "professor" in front of my name. Uri is a professor of linguistics, which nowadays can get you a ticket to being a professor of "communications".

EA was not great at community communications, no. LL is much better. But such community as there was, was a nicer place. Far less mean and nasty than the people in SL. For all kinds of reasons, in part because of the game god structure laid down.

American Apparel and Adam Curry left quietly because if they left publicly complaining, it would only show how miserably they had failed themselves at understanding what to do in SL. Adam Curry becomes like one of those old sad vaudeville acts in the 30s that didn't make it into the 40s movies unless they were Bing Crosby or Fred Astair. It's a medium change that is just too abrupt for some to "Kos-over" as I said about the Daily Kos.

American Apparel was just lame, never providing normal clothes to click on and buy for your avatar, and thinking tying everything to Aimee Weber was a recipe for success (it wasn't, obviously).

Your impulse to grief your world is one that the Lindens shared, and built into the world, and never got rid of.

[Tammy Nowotny]

LOL. I haven't done anything comparable in SL. I doubt I would ever want to... I am rather attached to the place.

SL doesn't wreck very picturesquely anyway: all you can really do by way of destruction is to leave litter all over the place. (On the other hand, SimCity was the most fun when the city fell apart, even though the ostensible point of the game was to create a stable city which ran smoothly with little or no intervention.)

I know Peter from RL; we went to Columbia around the same time. We were both part of many rambling discussions in the back room of the West End Bar. I think he was a bigger part of them than I was.

[Prokofy Neva]

The West End Bar isn't what it used to be. I was there the other night. If you thought there were fascinating little discussions over the Chianti bottles with boys in berets and girls with long straight blonde hair, it's now half turned into some sort of Mexican tortilla joint with REALLY HUGEY LOUD DJ'd music, although the chorizos are passable.

[vince]

here's another online game you can check out (since you mentioned hello kitty). click on my name.

[Tim]

Ahhhhhh... yes. The Sims. The good ole days of no virtual stock exchanges, banking bans, land bots, or insane immersionist fanboys intent on ruining the game for casual users.

Thanks for the wonderful post, Prok. Now that I have been out of SL for a while it might be fun to check in on The Sims.

Xavier Mohr

[Prokofy Neva]

Xavier, come and help my poor immigrant sim Vikrem Kalcentra at his Call Center. He lost all his telemarketing machines on the bullet train ride from the old country. He's currently skilling creative to be able to serenade when he opens up again next week, poor, but honest.

[Frankie Antonioni]

I have played the Sims, and the Sims 2. But I haven't played TSO.What is it like, do you move by using the arrows, or the mouse. I did read about it in the Alphaville Herald.I have been reading the Herald since 2004, so I read a lot about SL, and TSO.In TSO, can you go afk?Do you have to pay for food?And if you want to start your own casino, how much would that cost?
When I played the Sims, what I did a few times was to create a family of 8, and then take them to a lot where I had a swimming pool with no ladder, and then drown them.That was so fun, but I would do that about 3 times, each time it woukd be 6 adults and 2 children.After that I would create a family of 3, and then remove the swimming pool, and build a house. The graves would be set to one side, that way I would have a cemeterry.Some of the houses would also be shaped like the spaceship on Star Trek, these only had 5 adults and no children.On board the spaceship I had a Hal 9000 computer,and hibernation pods.I also had gold bricks that cost 0, but when you pick them up or deleted them they cost more.

So is it free for 30 days, or is the basic free?

[Macphisto Angelus]

I just downloaded it and got my free account. I thought I would try TSO again. They seem to be limiting free accounts to only be able to go to residential homes. I couldn't skill when I landed, but got a pop up to go to a residential home.
I hope that will be changing as TSO without skilling just doesn't seem right. :)

[Prokofy Neva]

They seem to have more rigged in the game than they used to, because I think they were trying to prevent all the cheating and hacking of the economy, because it was totally broken. I haven't figured it all out yet, but I think you can't make money until you pay for the account. The money now cashes out for real, you can sell custom content. So that means that the skills that also you use to craft stuff are locked out so that all the freebie accounts won't invade it.

It's like the dream come true that all the SLers always whine for -- and now let's see what it really brings about. That is, supposedly you can do custom content and sell it but you can't cash out the proceeds.

[Niki King]

Great article, thanks!

I'd like to welcome new and returning players to EA Land, Look me up in game sometime and if you have any questions feel free to ask. Another excellent source of information is the Town Hall in EA Land or the Community Pub in TC3. These lots are run by the devs. The schedule is posted at TSO-e.com.

Niki King

[Prokofy Neva]

Yes, I fell out of my chair when I saw that they had a town hall, and that devs were actually inworld. They never came there when I was there 2002-2004.

[Macphisto Angelus]

I had a little more time to play around today. It looks like in the beta test areas you can skill. EA Land is where you have to be a paying subscriber. It will be fun to beta test TSO again, I just wish my old friends from there were still around.
Thanks for writing on this Prokofy so that we would know it was available to try. :)

[Prokofy Neva]

Well, I'm in the beta area with the name Vikrem Kalcentra so look me up, hope to get on later tonight.

[Macphisto Angelus]

Sounds fun. :) I will try to get on this evening and find you.