SimGuruGraham over De Sims 3: 3 delige post op officiële Sims 3 forum

De laatste tijd is er in de Sims Community nogal wat onrust ontstaan over de manier waarop EA en The Sims Studio met De Sims 3 omgaat.

SimGuruGraham heeft op het officiële Amerikaanse De Sims 3 forum inmiddels gereageerd op een aantal zaken en het zijn 3 interessante post geworden.

Het zijn flinke lappen tekst maar wel leuk om te lezen; want het er worden ook enkele punten besproken die ook de reden waren voor de De Sims 3 boycot die onlangs is georganiseerd.

Hey everyone,

Some interesting posts in this thread… I thought I’d jump in and give my own personal perspective on a few things, although I can’t respond to everything for what I hope are obvious reasons. The other challenging thing to address is that people always want answers about why certain things are the way they are, and there’s no all encompassing answer I can give you; for every compliment or complaint you can levy at the game, there’s a unique reason why each aspect of it is the way it is.

First off, people shouldn’t think of the Ideas & Feedback section as some corner of our forum that never gets read. It’s one of my favorite places to check, the name alone is indicative of exactly the type of posts I find helpful to read around here. Just to give people a general idea of what I personally do, I browse through the forums at least once a day. I like to read this board, the board of the most recently announced product to see people’s reactions (aka Sweet Treats), and the board of the most recently released product to see what parts of it people enjoy or what they’re struggling with(aka Showtime). On a less frequent basis I also check out the General board, the Technical Discussion board, and the boards that focus on player creations.

That being said, I don’t post here too often. It isn’t that I want to avoid chatting with Sims fans as that couldn’t be further from the truth; it just isn’t practical a lot of the time. As some in here have pointed out, I (along with other gurus) enjoy using Twitter to chat with fans. Ultimately, it’s just much easier for me to see a tweet notification pop up with a quick comment, and immediately write a short reply to it. Those tweets can be anything from chatting about the game, trying to help someone who is having trouble, talking about upcoming Sims stuff, or just discussing various aspects of game design and development. Alternatively, it’s a much larger time commitment to come and post on the forums. Coming hear means looking at the different boards, sifting through the various topics, determining what’s new and what I’ve read before… and then if I want to respond it means writing a somewhat substantial post; and making the commitment to respond to the inevitable ten additional questions that will get posted in response to what I say. Then people wonder why I respond to some posts and not others, or misinterpret what I say, and it can all get to be a bit much All of that eats into my time, and I don’t get a break from my development responsibilities to come post on here. What I’ve come to learn is I can’t do everyone’s job, but when you’re a more public figure for the game people will throw every manner of topic at you and expect you to respond. For example, when people have a problem with the game… I’d love to help, but I just don’t have that level of understanding of the game. I’m not a programmer, so I don’t know what might be going wrong in the code – but I can recognize a problem and bring it to others attention to make sure it gets addressed.

I find it difficult to respond when people say that we don’t listen to the fans. When we talk about the “fans” and “community”, a lot of the time that’s in direct reference to the people who frequently post on these forums; you’re our most vocal subset of fans. In reality though the forums are a fraction of our overall fan base, and we have to take everyone into account when we develop products and respond to consumers. Even within these forums there may be a majority consensus, but that doesn’t mean it’s what everyone wants for the franchise. You can look at our most popular expansions – Pets is always a theme that tons of people want – and you’ll find those who have absolutely no interest in adding that to their Sims games. Quite frankly I think that’s perfectly alright. The Sims encompasses a ton of diverse themes, and each one will appeal to people in different ways. When we announced a pack like Pets, nobody says… “oh, they’re listening to what the fans what”, they say “oh well that was their plan all along”. The truth lies somewhere in the middle. There are a lot of different things that impact the decision of what to make and when to make it, far too many to go into detail within this post, but everything is done for a reason; we don’t haphazardly decide on things. Over the course of Sims 3, we knew there were some things we wanted to do like Pets… other expansions were more of a direct response to player feedback. We knew Pets was a theme that everyone wanted, yet it ended up being the 5th expansion, and people say… why did we have to wait so long? To be honest, it would have been impossible to do Pets as the first expansion, it had significant technical hurdles to overcome for that expansion to exist. And that’s just an example of one expansion; each one we release has its own challenges or oddities that made it make sense to release when it did. Look at Generations… it was made directly in response to a lot of what the community was asking for with more social interactions, more emphasis on families, more content across all age ranges, etc. That one was a challenge for our marketing team, but we were really happy to get to do that theme for our fans. Look at the most recent release of Showtime, it’s packed with a lot of fun interactive objects that fans have been asking for for a long time. Elements of fan requests show up in every single game that we release. Anavastia mentioned how you haven’t seen many new rabbitholes lately. She’s right, that’s a direct response to fan feedback, and I do hope we’ll have the chance to open up more of them. We have to walk a fine line sometimes though. A lot of people here really love Sims 2 (and that’s awesome if you do!), but we’re not trying to release the exact same game with Sims 3. We incorporate elements from the past, but we’ll continue to evolve and refine them, and hopefully add fun new aspects to them in the process. We’ll do familiar themes like Pets, and brand new things that you’ve never played in The Sims before like World Adventures.

In response to those who want changes to already released expansions, and to have more changed based on your feedback… well, it’s something I’m pushing for. I have my own list of things that I take directly from these forums, and when we have small gaps in our schedule or a little extra time, I try and get some of those things in there. It’s an ongoing process and it won’t happen all at once, but over time I hope you’ll see more things get addressed. Things on my list range all the way from adding new options to opt out of the celebrity system, to something as mundane as tweaking the ice cream truck so it doesn’t show up at 3am. We don’t go out and talk about this sort of stuff commonly, because as soon as we say something about it there’s an implied expectation that we will change it, and I can’t promise you that. Sk8rblaze you mentioned Vampires previously… it’s another thing that’s on my list, but I honestly can’t tell you what will happen with it. It’s something that we technically can change, but I don’t know when we’ll have the chance to change it, and that’s why you don’t specifically hear about it. It’s the same reason we don’t talk about patches in advance; game development in the Sims Studio is a very fast paced and fluid environment. Plans can and will change, and we don’t like to discuss things until we’re 100% sure we’re going to deliver on it; you’d be amazed at some of the last minute emergencies that can disrupt the best plans at times I can assure you that myself and others are paying attention though and do what we can to improve the game while creating great new content as well.

It’s also difficult because people have the expectation that something should be a simple change or an easy fix, and that often isn’t true or we would have done it. The mod community can skew these perceptions as well… people think, well if a modder can do it, why can’t EA? Ultimately, someone creating a mod doesn’t have the same responsibility that we do when it comes to implementing and testing changes, and doesn’t have to deal with scheduling, budgeting, and the wide variety of people’s work that is impacted by any change we decide to make. That’s not an excuse, but it is a reality of what we do. In a perfect world, I’d love if people felt they only needed to get mods to add content to their game, and not need to get mods that changed aspects of the game we created that they don’t like. It’s something I think about often when we’re implementing new designs (what can we do to provide players options where they feel they don’t need to go get a mod to change it).

It’s always interesting to me when people say that we don’t care, or that we’re only out to get your money. I really have to thank SimGuruShannon, because she was one of the first to step up and get more actively involved in reaching out to the community directly, and that came from a desire to open more communication with fans like the Sims team has had in the past. It sparked my interest in it as well, and I love interacting with the community. Personally I love to see our games sell well because I’m proud of the products we put out – there are a lot of talented people on the team who go above and beyond with personal effort to do amazing things. I think many devs who are used to traditional game development would find it very challenging to put out the amount of content we do at the pace we do to keep up with continued demand for more things from awesome fans like all of you. As Jarsie so aptly pointed out, there’s nowhere in my job description that says I need to interact with the community or post on the forums; it’s my own personal choice to get involved (along with the other gurus you see on the forums and twitter) because it’s something we enjoy. I wouldn’t be reading these forums and writing a long post on a Sunday if I didn’t have an interest in what I do that goes beyond my paycheck. I make games because it’s something I’m passionate about, and I want to make games that people are thrilled with – and that’s a sentiment shared by many members of the team.

I know this post is long, but hopefully it didn’t ramble too much. What I really enjoy is being able to have conversations with Sims fans, and openly discuss some of the things that are interesting to you all… not just as a company rep with an official response, but as people who enjoy the Sims and want to know more about what goes into it. At Gamescom this past year I had the great chance to just converse with some Sims fans at a party, and it was really nice just having a frank discussion about the game. I like that about twitter as well, where we can be a bit more casual. So please… come talk to me on there, I respond all the time. You’ll see me on the forums as well, just less frequently. And I can’t prove it to you, but I promise myself and many others on the team are reading your posts here as well

One final note; I’m totally welcoming of constructive criticism. It’s an opportunity for us to learn as developers and make better products before we release them, as well as improve the games that have already come out. As players of our game, I feel like all of you have every right to voice your opinions of the game. Thank you to those of you who take the time to write posts that go beyond saying you do or don’t like something, but also explain why you feel that way.

-Graham

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I don’t want to get in a tit for tat exchange; but I will talk about some of the broader topics that people have brought up in response to my post.

Perhaps most importantly is this perception that we pay more attention to the people on Twitter and Facebook than those of you on the forums. That simply isn’t true. Twitter is a great tool for quick communication and interaction with fans; it lets me chat with people and get immediate feedback, even have a real time conversation at times. What Twitter isn’t good for is getting in-depth information – for that I come to the forums. If I tried to talk to people on the forums the same way I do on Twitter, I simply wouldn’t get any work done. The talk about Facebook is intriguing as well; I have absolutely no idea where the perception comes from that we value our fans on there more than the ones here. Do people assume we implemented the new My Page and the in-game social stuff due to requests from Sims fans on Facebook? Realistically it’s something that EA is interested in implementing across all of our games. There’s stuff like Autolog in Need for Speed, Battlelog in Battlefield, and the new social features that got introduced in Showtime are part of that whole movement. It’s an effort to emphasize and build communities, connect people with their friends, and ultimately provide deeper game play experiences. Outside of our main Sims 3 Facebook page, there isn’t any direct developer interaction there that I know of, in contrast with how we have our own individual Twitter accounts. On another note, I don’t point out that it isn’t my job to be on the forums with the idea that people should be grateful that I post here, I just want people to see that those of us who get involved with the community do so because it’s something we genuinely want to do.

We have community managers who interact with the community here on the forums, on the official Sims Twitter, on our Sims Facebook page, and our Sims Youtube channel. One of the aspects of their job is to gather feedback from fans in all of those locations, and compile it in reports that get sent out to everyone else, to draw our attention to hot button issues. If you think the forums are intimidating for a dev, imagine trying to sift through thousands of comments within a single thread on some random Facebook topic. That’s what’s great about the forums, due to their format they’re the absolute best place to read topics about serious issues; to see others respond and contribute to those topics, and to get an overall sense of the state of the hardcore community.

It’s interesting seeing people bring up other game developers and directly compare them to us. I have the utmost respect for other studios throughout the industry, but the idea of the perfect game, the perfect dev team, or the perfect community management… it’s a fallacy. There are always things that can be improved, mistakes are made and then learned from. Evil_One, you mentioned Bethesda and Epic. Speaking strictly as a gamer for a moment, I think Skyrim is an absolute achievement in gaming, but have you payed attention to what many of their customers who purchased the game on the PS3 are saying? They’re none too happy with some of the problems they’re experiencing. Epic is a studio whose games I’ve played for many years now, but they’re constantly accused of being sellouts to Microsoft for developing console exclusives and abandoning the fanbase on the PC who built them into the studio they are today. Is that a fair criticism? What about their loyal long time fans?

I don’t want anyone to think I’m making light of the amazing work that modders in the community do. I have a long history of working on mods for popular games as well; and I know how much hard work people pour into them for nothing in return other than the enjoyment of seeing others use it. I started out scripting my own mods for the original Rainbow Six, adding new competitive multiplayer modes for the game. I’ve worked on all sorts of mod teams for first person shooters over the years as a level designer; most notably I was part of the original Counter-Strike team before it was purchased and released commercially by Valve. A healthy mod community is not only great for players; I think it’s great for us as a business as well. Its been shown time and again that games that have good community tools and an active mod community extend the shelf life of a game and give people reasons to keep coming back. What disappoints me is when people feel they have to make mods that fix something that’s bothering them about the game… be it an invasive design flaw or a bug; either way I wish it wasn’t necessary. Having worked on mods before though, I know the benefits of mod development that let them get to things more quickly than we can patch them as a studio. A mod developer doesn’t really have to be accountable to anyone… they work when they want, they test as much as they want, and they release when they want. If something goes wrong, they can immediately fix it and release again, or if they want they can just leave things as they are. In a development studio, there’s just tons more that goes into any “simple” fix. To give a very rough idea of the process, we first have to find someone that can fix it who has time in their schedule to work on it… if they’re currently committed elsewhere, any time they take to fix an issue is time lost or delayed somewhere else. Depending on what we’re changing, that can mean any number of programmers, modelers, animators, UI artists, etc working on something. They can’t just make a change and add it to the game either, we have different code channels that developers work out of depending on the work they’re doing, and each new update means a new code channel. QA has to go in and test the changes they made, and not just those changes, but to try and determine if anything else broke due to the change that was made – sometimes they cause something to break that you’d think would be completely unrelated. Each change goes through multiple rounds of testing… alpha, beta, and final release. The code channel then has to be integrated back into our main “retail” code channel, the one that you all play on when you launch the game. That code integration has to be tested. There are variations for each update we release as well… we have to do one update for disc versions, one for players who purchased on Steam, one for people who play on Macs. We have a patch matrix that we test against that accounts for the different versions of the game a player may be updating from to get to the most recent version… do they need the full patch that contains every update we’ve ever done, or do they need an incremental patch that only contains the most recent changes? The store and web team have to prep the website for release. Patch notes have to go out to Europe and Asia for translations. Once all of that is accomplished (and the hundred other little steps in between) we can release an update. As I’m sure you can imagine, that all takes time – it’s a significant commitment each time we release an update Postet bilde That doesn’t dissuade us from making updates to the game, it just means that we can’t always immediately change things that on the surface seem like a simple fix. We’ll continue to support products we release post launch – you saw some updates for Showtime that had very quick turn around times to address issues ASAP that we felt were vital for player’s experiences.

People wonder if I truthfully enjoy talking to Sims fans; and why I’d want to come here and throw myself into the fire on various occasions Postet bilde I can honestly say it’s one of my favorite aspects of my job. First and foremost I’m a gamer; I have been for a really long time. I understand what people express on this forum because I’ve been in your shoes doing the exact same thing with games I’m passionate about over the past 15 years. The first online game I played was Interstate ’76, a great old auto-combat simulation game. It was right around the time when message boards were starting to become more common on the internet, and there was a very healthy community around that game. The devs would talk to us, we’d give feedback, they’d do cool things for us… it was a great time, and it was how I formed some of my very first contacts within the industry. Eventually those devs released a sequel called Interstate ’82; there was a lot about that game that upset many long time fans. When I look back on that now, I think about the perspective that I lacked… as fans there were things that mattered to our community; and as paying customers that was our right to voice our concerns. But the reality of game development went beyond just us, and there were all sorts of factors that go into the final game that makes it to store shelves. Seeing things from both sides gives me a really unique perspective; I can look at other games and think, “huh, that seems odd… but I bet I know why they did it”.

All of that leads to me wanting to chat with fans and pull back the curtains where I can to give you a better perspective on why we do some of the things that you ultimately see when you play the games. Ironically the majority of my posts in the forum are when I jump into a delicate situation and try and let people know what’s going on; I care about our players and don’t like to see anyone feel like they’re intentionally being left in the dark. I have absolutely never lied or purposely misled fans of this game. If anyone asked me to do that at work, it’s something I would have a serious grievance with. Thankfully I’ve never been placed in that situation; I don’t think anyone on the team is interesting in deceiving fans to make a quick buck. Unfortunately there have been a couple of situations where the information I shared ended up being incorrect, and all I can tell you is that I felt absolutely awful about it. I want to be both an advocate for the community within the team, but also someone that Sims fans can trust to give them the straight truth when you get an answer from me. In the instances where I’ve been wrong, I’ve done everything I could to track down the people who I gave bad info to, personally apologize, and do what I can to set things right.

Not everyone is going to trust me or even like me, and that’s fine. I’ll admit I roll my eyes at the conspiracy theories that crop up, some of it can get a bit outlandish. The live chats are one example… people post their criticisms and then get upset when it doesn’t get commented on in our own chat that we’re producing. Do you really expect us to blindside our own devs on our own broadcast? That’s what game journalists are for Postet bilde The live chats are a chance to get a look at upcoming games and learn more about them. I push for as much openness and transparency in those chats as we can provide, and I gather questions beforehand so I can be sure that we address some serious ones (the people on camera don’t get to select the questions from the live chat themselves – the chat window moves by FAR too quickly for us to both be on camera and keep up with everyone’s comments), but that isn’t the time and place to try and grill us. I’ll keep interacting with the community in one form or another Postet bilde I hope that overall I can have a positive impact and share some unique nuggets of info about what goes into each game that you wouldn’t normally hear without talking to a dev.

One final note; I saw a few people making an assumption that I’m the lead producer. That’s not the case… I’m one of approximately 15 or so producers that are actively working on Sims 3. There are many people on the team who have years of seniority within the Sims and years of experience with the game industry as a whole on me. SimGuruMeatball talked about it before, but for those of you wanting Maxis back… it’s really the same people who have been working on The Sims for years that are still here Postet bilde I wasn’t around during that period of time, but the team used to operate out of the Maxis studio on the other side of the San Francisco Bay. EA has a great campus that houses their headquarters and multiple game studios, and the team that was working on The Sims moved over to this newer location, and the growing team that was working on Spore stayed at the old location. So we got a new studio name, and a somewhat new location, but the people are the same. Other than natural attrition and new hires (like me!), there are people in our studio who have been with the franchise since the beginning.

Whew! Definitely time to catch some sleep after all that, goodnight.

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I get the sense that people think I would slam EA if I got the opportunity to, but as a whole EA is quite supportive of The Sims. The Sims Studio has been a real highlight for EA over the years, and with that comes more trust from executives and upper management. Nobody here is forced to work extended hours for weeks on end, in fact I don’t recall anyone ever telling me that I had to work late or come in on a weekend. Generally speaking people are very self sufficient here. They know what work they’re responsible for and when they need to get it done by, and they’re trusted to manage their time in the way that works best for them. SimGuruMeatball mentioned how there are hundreds of people across different teams within The Sims Studio. I don’t have any hard numbers in front of me, but I’d say that the amount of people actively working on The Sims 3 at the moment is about the same if not more than what we had from the time we started making expansions with World Adventures. Regarding customer service, I’ve seen a couple of notes from them before that made me shake my head, but I think it’s really impressive that at pretty much any time you can almost instantly be speaking with a live person who will try and help you. I don’t know of any other company in the industry that provides that service for comparable products. I’m sure they’ll continue to improve through additional training and knowledge transfers with dev teams.

I’ll actually share a personal anecdote about myself and EA that maybe people will appreciate and get a laugh out of. When I was finishing college, I’d already known for years that I wanted to work in the game industry as it has always been a passion of mine. With EA being such a large publisher and having a presence in Florida which is where I was at the time, it had long been my assumption that I would probably get my first job in the industry at EA. The problem was, this was a period of time when I really disliked EA; I disagreed with some of their business practices and didn’t care for their titles that were being released. I saw EA as a stepping stone for my career, and that’s something I heard from other people as well at the time. EA would snatch people up out of college, and I could spend a few years here building my resume, then move on to where I really wanted to be.

Well… that didn’t happen. I spent my first couple of years in the industry working for THQ; and when it came time for me to go job hunting again due to unforeseen circumstances, my perception of EA had already started to change. I didn’t know a lot about how they operated internally, but as a gamer I saw how they were investing in new IP, putting a much greater emphasis on quality, and I’d heard about how they were improving the work/live balance for their employees. It was really encouraging, and these were all things spearheaded by our current CEO, John Riccitiello. So I ended up getting hired here, and it has been a fantastic experience. During my time here I’ve been presented numerous opportunities for career growth, I constantly feel challenged and engaged by the work that I’m doing, and I take pride in both The Sims and many of the other games that EA puts out each year.

So the funny part is, I told everything I just mentioned to John Riccitiello’s face. At our company holiday party two years ago, he came over to me and asked if I was enjoying myself, and we just struck up a conversation where I started spilling all of this Thankfully he didn’t fire me on the spot when I told him there was awhile when I boycotted purchasing anything from EA I have a ton of respect for what he’s done to turn EA around since those days.

If anything, I think EA makes a lot of forward thinking moves in how our products impact consumers, and our approach to game development. People may question some of those things in the present, but I believe it will be looked back on favorably years down the road as they become standards in the industry.

Anavastia wrote:
If I remember they are working on something for the vampires and maybe celebrity take overs that occur in town. I know what was mentioned somewhere in this thread.

I hope you won’t mind me using your post Anavastia, but this is an example of why we don’t typically talk about work going into upcoming patches. Earlier in the thread I mentioned how I keep my own list of issues that I see the community talking about… not just technical problems, but design tweaks that would improve the game. I gave the celebrity system and vampires as an example of the type of stuff I track, and talk about how I want to try and get those things changed. Unfortunately when we say stuff like that though, too often the message gets changed as it’s discussed. The goal posts get moved from being something we acknowledge is important to the community, to a misunderstanding that it’s being actively worked on. Then the next update comes out and people are upset because they remember hearing about it in some context, and they feel like they were lied to when it isn’t changed. That isn’t anyone’s fault, it’s just the nature of the internet when information is passed second hand through lots of different people. It’s why we feel like we have to be careful in what we say, because we don’t want to set unrealistic expectations for things we can’t promise will happen. I’ll keep pushing for us to make updates to those sorts of things, but I can’t guarantee you’ll get them until that work is actually scheduled and completed.

Marzupial wrote:
Somthing doesn’t ad up here:

In your first post, you talked about your development responsibilies and then a bit further, you say “I’m not a programmer, so I don’t know what might be going wrong in the code”. In your post we’re discussing, you said “I don’t want anyone to think I’m making light of the amazing work that modders in the community do. I have a long history of working on mods for popular games as well; and I know how much hard work people pour into them for nothing in return other than the enjoyment of seeing others use it. I started out scripting my own mods for the original Rainbow Six, adding new competitive multiplayer modes for the game. I’ve worked on all sorts of mod teams for first person shooters over the years as a level designer; most notably I was part of the original Counter-Strike team before it was purchased and released commercially by Valve. A healthy mod community is not only great for players; I think it’s great for us as a business as well.”

That tells me that you seen to have a lot of experience with development and programming. Can you explain this to me because the statements above seem (keyword here: seem) contradictory.

As for modders, they have great life and career reponsibilities of their own: They perhaps study, have full time jobs, families… It’s not their responsibility to fix errors in the code. It’s EA’s! If I want a mod from a third party, it’s not so it fixes my game: I only seek those mods to give a whole new dimension to my game play. I hope EA has the guts to give the best modders out there some kind of perk! As it is, the modders are fixing The Sims 3 bugs for free on top of greatly enhancing the game replay value!

Trust me, I couldn’t write code to save my life A lot of the work I did in the mod scene over the years was as a level designer. It’s work along the same line of someone downloading Create a World for The Sims 3 and creating brand new environments to play in. I’d typically work within a mod team – a group of people working towards a common design goal, and some of them would be programmers. The one game play mod I completed on my own for Rainbow Six is what I would call scripting, but not in the modern programming sense that people refer to scripting as. It involved tweaking a lot of values in .ini files to change rules, win conditions, object locations, etc. As for your other point, I completely agree with you that the mod community shouldn’t feel the need to spend their time correcting any issues with the game. I hope that as we continue to update the game, that people will feel less of a need to get mods that help them with issues they may have, and can concentrate on the creative content that mod communities are always so great at making.

Anyway, a few more random thoughts… a high-five for Pepperbutt; I was born and raised in Miami as well I haven’t been back since Hurricane Andrew slammed through our neighborhood, but it’ll always be home. Unfortunately (and I saw Maripy mention it as well), I don’t speak a lick of Spanish. Maripy; glad to hear you enjoy the humor in the past games. Trying to find the right balance between humor and simulation can be a bit tricky at times. That’s generally more of a design thing, but whenever I’m writing text for the game I generally try to either be clever or be funny. Who knows, maybe it’s just funny to me Do people out there actually take the time to read stuff like the object descriptions in the catalog?