The Sims Online
Developer(s)	Maxis^[1]^[2]
Publisher(s)	EA Games
Producer(s)	Margaret Ng Virginia Ellen McArthur
Designer(s)	Will Wright Chris Trottier
Programmer(s)	Jeff Lind Greg Kearney
Artist(s)	Bob King
Composer(s)	Jerry Martin
Series	The Sims
Platform(s)	Microsoft Windows
Release	NA: December 17, 2002 JP: December 26, 2002^[3]^[4]
Genre(s)	Massively multiplayer online game
Mode(s)	Multiplayer

The Sims Online, also known as EA-Land was a massively multiplayer online variation on Maxis' computer gameThe Sims. It was published by Electronic Arts and released in December 2002 for Microsoft Windows. The game was sold in retail stores in North America and Japan and could also be downloaded worldwide through the EA.com online store, though the game was English-only and had no official translations. The game charged a subscription fee of US $9.99 per month. In March 2007, EA announced that the product would be re-branded as EA-Land and major enhancements would be made. About a year later, EA announced that the game would shut down all activity on August 1, 2008.^[5]

The Sims Bustin' Out featured a very similar and free online play exclusive to the PlayStation 2 version that allowed players to play online and chat with a USB keyboard. This game shut down the same day as The Sims Online on August 1, 2008. Sep 02, 2014 The fame and stardom mechanics are quite challenging to keep up with, especially if it’s your first Sim game. A great deal of micro-management is needed, so if you like to set your Sims free and just watch their lives go by, the fame rush may exhaust you. Aug 23, 2017 The Sims 4 is a life simulation, developed by Maxis and published by Electronic Arts. Antiguo gran casino ciudad real. Create and control a new generation of Sims, with endless possibilities to create stories that are rich. If you played The Sims Online before, we have played together and I would like you to rejoin us in the game: My avatar is MaxisLuc (yes, I work for Maxis/EA). At the beginning of last year I assembled a team to improve The Sims Online.

1Gameplay
2EA-Land

Gameplay[edit]

Four cities had special rules: Dragon's Cove was known as the 'hardcore city', as there were a number of harder game objectives to consider when playing here. For example, a Sim would lose energy when traveling long distances, and the virtual costs for items were doubled. Betaville was a city created for the purpose of testing new features. A few examples of these features were the ability to create a family of up to four adult Sims, with adjustable free will levels; bills and a repo man; and fires and firemen. Another was Test Center, where the player could never move out of the city. Test Center Sims also started with three times the start-up money.

Skills[edit]

Obtaining factual skills points was an important aspect of gameplay. They were necessary for receiving more money from paying objects and earning promotions in the offered career tracks. They were occasionally needed for special interactions with other players, such as serenading. A skill could be increased at rapidly, a faster rate when multiple Sims in the lot worked on the same skill simultaneously.

The game had six core skills: Mechanical, Cooking, Charisma, Body, Creativity, and Logic. Skill level ranged in number from 0 to 20.99.

In-game employment[edit]

There were four official jobs available in The Sims Online: Restaurant, Robot Factory, DJ, and Dancing.

The in-game jobs did not offer a large salary, causing many players to seek out other sources. Popular methods included opening item shops, offering services to users such as food and lodging, or using objects to create items such as pizza (pizza object), essays (typewriter), or paintings (easel).

Economy[edit]

The Sims Online simulated a working economy. It was completely run by players. The largest and most active market in the game was real estate: players would buy, sell, and rent property to other players. However, due to not having a proper deed trade system in place until the start of EA-Land, many players faced security issues such as scamming.

There were many categories for player's properties: Welcome, Money, Skills, Services, Entertainment, Romance, Shopping, Games, Offbeat, and Residence. Each of these categories had special items that could only be used in that specific category. For example, players who joined a lot under the Service category could use a workbench to craft items, which would then often be sold to a player who owns a lot in the Shopping category who would sell the items at a higher retail price.

In early 2005, The Sims Online faced a bug, which was discovered and quickly spread in use throughout the game. A clothing rack, that normally players would use to sell clothes to other players, duplicated the owner's profits several times with each use beyond what the other player actually paid. This exploit could be repeated as often as wanted until the bug was fixed. After a few days of this exploit in game, it was patched; however, the game's economy was completely destroyed, with massive amounts of inflation. Plenty of land and items lost value. This economic problem was not resolved for three years until late 2007 when EA-Land was formed and the game was wiped.

Once EA-Land was in place, the economy was fresh and, as before, completely player run. Players could additionally create custom content and sell these items to other players, and skills were a higher priority due to the requirement of in-game jobs and money objects.

EA-Land[edit]

The logo of EA-Land

In March 2007, an Electronic Arts employee Luc Barthelet, who served as General Manager of Maxis during the development of The Sims,^[6] stopped by the official forums after years of ignoring the game. Luc had left The Sims Online production team after the game went live and hadn't contributed to the game environment until March 2007. After no development of The Sims Online, he assembled a team of seventeen people to push significant updates to the game under a project titled 'TSO-E'.

A major update to the game was user custom content. The TSO-E developers were interested in any user-submitted ideas on how they could maintain a stable economy to negate the gains players made illegitimately through exploits.^[7] Custom objects were enabled within TSO in late 2007, allowing players to upload .bmp and .jpg images as well as .iff files. Furniture could be created and uploaded in the form of single-tiled chairs, sculptures, and decorations and multi-tiled tables.

Seeing as this was not enough, the TSO-E developers combined the game's cities together into two similar cities, re-branded the game as EA-Land, and wiped all player data. The Test Center 3 city was created freely accessible in hopes of expanding the game's userbase, and in-game ATMs were added, which could accept real money for Simoleons, in hopes of generating revenue. The system in which players could purchase properties and submit custom content was compared to Second Life.

Closure[edit]

In April 2008, four weeks after EA-Land was launched, it was announced that the development team had to disassemble, and that the game would shut down on August 1 the same year. This day of announcement was referred to as the 'EA-Land Sunset'. Maxis stated that the development team would be moving on to other projects.^[5]^[8]^[9]

Since 2002, EA Land / TSO has attracted a very special group of players and we certainly appreciate your participation in the community. The lifetime of the game has drawn t

Sims On Line For Free