Their servers have absolutely nothing to do with the chosen direction. Having 80 Sims or 32 Sims reflects only in the save game files that are uploaded to the cloud. Even that is questionable as a reason. A house filled with 256 objects makes a save game file considerably bigger than the 48 extra Sims.Jan_S wrote:It is a cynical update, because the baby glitch was not cheating, but FM or EA have decided that because so many (apparently, or otherwise why would they bother) have used the baby glitch to create double and sometimes triple the the 32 sim limit, they are determined to kill off those extra sims. It may be because their servers are having a hard time trying to cope with the extra sims.
For a commercial point of view, they should be happy with these large towns. Resetting ageing timers cost LPs (same as not advancing in age), so a large town owner might be spending more LPs on keeping their favourite Sims around. In any case, this doesn't look like a big town owners witch hunt.
Sadly they just want us to pay more and earn less. No real surprise there...They are also apparently targeting the deer farms and pet farms people have created, again because they don't want those types of anomalies to occur in their game.
This is basically a clean up operation targeting the multiplication of sims and pets in order to force players to get back to the original level limits they believe the game should have.
You're right in that. You can decide to hold off on this update, but eventually there comes a point that playing on the 'old' version becomes impossible. A lot of players who postponed updating will make a decision to continue or abandon the game at that point.Whether people can avoid this by not updating is questionable. Every update that I have experienced (and I'm an original player from day 1) has eventually been mandatory and you are forced to update whether you like it or not.
I have only updated two test games in order to make a relatively educated opinion about the new features. I'm far from positive about it. They only added features that cost more, earn less and make it overall a lot harder to progress. New hobbies have 10 mins or 1 hour options and contain a lot more to collect: 18 and 1 even 24 items! To make things even worse, the Shell Collecting (needs 24 items and is for toddlers) works only on certain times in a day. (There are shells for noon, dusk, night and dawn). The only upside of these hobbies is that there isn't any levelling involved.
Ageing is one of those features that a lot of people are upset about and I wholly agree. Aside the sentimental aspect of getting an attachment to the little lives (and Sims) and the associated pains of losing them, the game is becoming a Sims Farm.
Some seem to consider the attachment unnatural, which isn't. Painters gets attached to their paintings, writers to their stories and we wouldn't be human if we wouldn't create attachments to many things in our life. Not doing so means being cold hearted. Just because the impact of the digital world isn't fully understood by 'those who seem to know everything about attachments', it is considered 'unnatural'. Again it isn't. I was very attached to my characters in the world of text adventures and certainly felt a loss when my character died after sometimes hundreds of hours playing. Having a visual aspect added to this phenomenon makes things only worse, especially considering the new ageing process. Spending a lot of time with something you like does create a bond (or attachment).
A lifespan of 42 days (of activities, not idling) is short, too short if you consider the amount of work that is needed to fill up the Life Dream Orb bar. The orbs themselves serve hardly any purpose once you've built the Beach and Arcade and the associated hobbies. Pausing the life timer costs an orb, but ... it lasts only 7 days for a silver orb. This is in stark contrast with the cost of LPs to reset the timer. Even more so if you consider the conversion on the Beach or Arcade building (300 LPs/4 orbs and 150 LPs/2 orbs).
Life Dream tasks are boring, there is only one task per life phase that needs to be repeated over and over to make any progress. So far it looks like that about 3 hours of doing the life dream task yields 1%. What was shown in the quest about additional action is just a nicety, these special actions do NOT count against filling the orb, they are just an extra.
Then there are a few more changes to the existing parts of the games. Most hobbies moved from 4 mins to 10 mins as the minimum and the maximum was cut in half. The Senior hobbies' times have been cut in half. Nice, but it hardly makes up for the other changes, these (Senior ones) should have been implemented from the introduction. And there are changes in career times, I haven't fully examined them, but I did notice that a level 1 Athlete needs to start working at 6am. Incidentally this was a life dream for my 'Sporty' Sim ("I want to go to work at the Stadium").
They certainly managed to suck the fun out of the game and slap the long time players in the face with the meagre rewards added to the game on top of the horrible ageing process. Anybody on level 53 isn't going to be interested in the 'bonus' XP for doing the life dream task. I wrote 'bonus', since I don't consider a small percentage (a completed Bronze orb gives 2% extra XP) a real bonus. They're worse than the monuments.
Considering everything they did to the game, it is not surprising to see a major buzz of people annoyed with this update all over the internet.