Well, since he's spatting with MTS2 again, he's got to get free advertising for his crap someplace, or no new people will become enlightened to his modding genius.  Wonder if he realizes that TSR might let him get mad and go home, but he'll have to leave his appples behind.

That's the thing.  The recent discussion at the sims 2 community proved that many people still believe that the "donations" go to help sites pay for "bandwidth."  And most paysite owners are keeping damn quiet about how much money really is or is not involved.  I see this as deliberately misleading people.

If all the paysite owners would be completely honest about the financial end of their websites, I wonder how many people would still fork over the cash.

TSR is a slow, ugly, ad-infested mess.  And sometimes the ads are virus invested.  Thank GOD PMBD doesn't offer any of that.


You're joking, right?  The only convenient thing about TSR is how easy it is to not go there.

Is that what they're telling you, or did you come up with such a blanket statement all by yourself?  It's incorrect. Firstly, it would be easier/quicker/more convenient/less annoying to download something here and view it on my own comp than to fight the ads and try and find it on TSR to view it first.  Secondly, it's not as if the pictures on TSR are any real indication of what something will look like ingame anyway--so why bother looking at them there? Waste of time.


I don't think anyone here cares if TSR charges for that stuff, though I'm not sure why anyone wants most of it.


The censorship at TSR is interesting to say the least.  We know that the boards must be kept happy-smiley-pro-tsr, and that ostensibly the content is censored--like no nipples on skintones (which is idiotic, but nm.) Then again, you have the results you get from certain searches of the content, such as the phrase "sexy teen."  Marketing indeed. It's called hypocrisy, among other things.  :wink:  


Now here is a case of a sheep pulling the wool over her OWN eyes.  Would you like to know why they don't like "business" being discussed?  I'll bet in your heart of hearts you DON'T want to know why. Ignorance is bliss and you seem really happy.  And yet, you seem to realize that it IS a business, and that they are hiding things purposely, and attempting to control the spread of information. Doesn't this tell you anything?  C'mon, think hard now...


That would be MTS2 and it's been done already--except much better than TSR, because MTS2 isn't full of ads, doesn't have 200 recolors of the same damn thing to wade through, shows actual ingame screenshots in most cases, has larger pictures so that quality (or lack thereof) isn't hidden, and, oh yeah, is free.


If the features and whatnot that TSR has are as good as you think, then they ought to be able to stay afloat simply by taking freely-given donations and charging subscription for the extra features, while making the downloads free-for-all then, right? Nope, probably not.  So yes, call it what you like, but it's an issue of selling custom content.  Period.

All the legal crap has been discussed to death, and most people simply believe whatever they came to the table believing in the first place, or believing whatever is most beneficial for themselves.  Personally, I don't care.

The fact is that user-made content for computer games has traditionally been a community thing, freely given, freely shared, and some thanks, admiration, and appreciation has been the only payment sought.  Gamers take inspiration (and help) from modders and learn to mod themselves, and on it goes.  

Then the sims came along and some scum-of-the-earth saw an opportunity to make some cash, and took it.  And it needs to be stopped because it's a disease that could possibly spread to the gaming community at large.

I really don't know about the legal end of it.  Honestly, from my reading of the EULA, for what it's worth, the moment any user-made content becomes "commercial," that is, sold for money, all other arguments about copyright cease, because the EULA has been violated.  But I'm no more a lawyer than all the other people commenting--so my opinion flies well with me, but may not fly at for you.  But it doesn't matter.

The FIRST wrong was done when money was charged for user-made content in the first place.  Whether or not the second wrong (sharing "pay" content freely) is even wrong at all is irrelevant to me--it would have never been an issue had the first wrong not been commited.

Personally, I don't beleive what this site is doing IS wrong, nor do I believe it's illegal--or, if it is, EA themselves have been committing the same crime with the Exchange.  You'd think their lawyers would have already told them to stop it if there was a possible problem, but hey, who knows.

On another note, I'm a little confused on the issue of TSR FA's, so maybe someone can help me out here.
If they are NOT making decent money from being TSR FA's, then why ARE they TSR FA's?  Doesn't it bother them that certain other people ARE making a good chunk of change off their creations?  There's got to be some kind of perks involved somehow that are more than "oh I like the people," because that's just dumb, and the FA's strike me as smarter than that.

Of course--now that they ARE FA's they might as well stay there, really.  TSR is like Hotel California--you can check out anytime you like but TSR is gonna keep your creations and continue to make money of 'em.  Can you choose to stay at TSR (since the "community" is what you're there for right) and just not be an FA?  If I saw an FA do that, I might start to really beleive the "I'm not there for the money" bit.  Til then, I want to believe, but I'm just not convinced.

I love Christmas.  But, my family all gets along, and my boyfriend's family all get along, so there's no drama--not bad drama anyway--and there's the food, and at my mom's house there's booze.  There's no booze at the bf's family home, but they give GREAT gifts, so it's all good.

Maybe people who don't like Christmas just need to adopt new families.  :idea:

Knowing what I know about Google Adsense and their rules, and knowing what I know about some of the supposedly kid-friendly content that is on TSR, I'm kind of surprised they've managed to keep the Google ads on their own site.  

As for the amount it costs them to have a Google Adwords ad of their own, that only depends on how much it gets clicked compared to how many of those clickers either turn into paying customers, or generate some money for the site by clicking on the google ads or other ads there.

Edited to add: If anyone has a sims2 site with google ads on it, hopefully they realize that they CAN block TSR's (or any other site's) ads from showing on their own site.  They may not want to--the TSR ads might pay well heh, but I thought I'd point out that they CAN choose to do so if they wanna.

If I "click that" I see, simply, "the archive", which includes everythigng by everyone.

 What I'm talking about is the stuff that is currently listed as "Creator: TSR_Archive" rather than as the actual creators.  Basically, if you want to see what FA items are currently free, check out that "creator's" page (http://www.thesimsresource.com/artists/TSR_Archive/)  rather than using the filter.  

It strikes me as shady because #1, they don't exactly tell you about it, and #2, if TSR can temporarily claim FA's work for a fictional creator, what's to stop them from permanently claiming anyone else's work under a fictional creator's tag?  

It would not surprise me if, instead of removing a banned user's items, they simply gave them a new creator name and let them get lost in the vast and smelly heap.  And after seeing the turn this thread has taken--that TSR claims ownership of everything uploaded to it, and that people can't remove their own uploads, it seems even more shady.

Aside from crappy, evil, etc., TSR is also a damn weirdly designed site, apparently.  I commented yesterday (I think) in the "I Smell Bullshit" thread on the amount of FA content that was free.  But everything isn't as it first appears.

If I go to their front page now and use the filter to find downloads that are ONLY by FA's and are free, it finds 20 files.

However, if I go to http://www.thesimsresource.com/artists/TSR_Archive/downloads/sims2/ I find lots of downloads that are free, and are by FA's.  The difference is that they are credited to the artist "TSR_Archive," instead of their actual creators.  So of course the filter didn't find them when looking for FA's.  

What's up with this?  I guess it can just be a way to make sure the FA's don't make any money for their items that are currently free, maybe. I only found this "archive" by accident though--I might be blind and simply overlooking it but I don't see any link to this archive of stuff at all from the front page.  It might be some new thing they are in the middle of implementing or something but it seemed kind of shady to me.

 :roll:

Are you sure?  Her words, "To help promote subscription, free rotation of our creations is limited or even completely stopped by now. It's hard to say what will it be in the future. But I support this move..." make it SEEM as if the decision to 'limit or completely stop' the free rotation is a decision made by someone other than her, and as a means to hopefully increase subscriptions in general, rather than a decision made by herself to increase her own commissions.  She seems to be trying to sound a little regretful (heh) but, well, she's working for TSR, so I'm not really buying it.

I did see where Thomas originally said that the FA's themselves would decide which of their items would be on free rotation and that the FA's would be in control of this--which agrees with what you said.

So either TSR is at least advising the FA's to be a bit stingy with putting items on free rotation to try and drive up subscriptions, or the FA's themselves are being a little stingy to drive up commisions, or some of both.

I just went over to TSR and set the filter thingy to show me downloads that are both FREE and by FA's.  There were 96 files.  (And I didn't like any of them, unsurprisingly.) Thomas did originally say "a handful" of free FA items each week.  The hand is simply getting smaller, I reckon.

I played an online rpg (Dragonrealms) for years and I'm no more insane than I was before I played it.  My little brother, who is 20 years younger than I am, played it from the time he was 12 or so, and still reopens his account to play from time to time.  DR is a totally text-based game, and can move pretty fast at times, so he became a deadly-fast typist.  That's about the only lasting effect it seems to have had on him.


I followed that 'chick tract' link and read the thing.  How can these people not realize how stupid they appear?  (Answering my own question--because they ARE as stupid as they appear, I guess.)  When I read things like that it becomes easy to believe that they are purposely and specifically trying to lure in  idiots while repelling anyone with any sense at all...and I guess there'd be a good reason for that, too.

All three are ugly but that first one is possibly the most stupid-looking thing I've ever seen.  But then, I'm not really into "fashion."  Are flare-legged legwarmers "in" this year?

Our cat is also named Cat.  Now that he's grown up and trying to be dignified, we call him Mister Cat a lot.  We tell people that his NAME is actually "Catastrophe" and we just call him Cat for short, but that's not true.  His name is Cat.

We're thinking of getting a second cat, and I've already prenamed her "Other Cat."  We'll call her O.C.

For some it as someone else has already posted--they just can't have a civil disagreement without going into seahag mode and pitching a fit.  For others, I think it's different reasons--or additional ones.

The paysite owners have found a way to make some cash--maybe a little, but in some cases I think it's Quite A Lot of money--and it's not only easy but it's fun. Not like work at all, really.  Now someone wants to interfere with that and the paysite owners don't like it.  Of course they take it personally because, for some of them at least, it means that if they lose this fight they might have to get off their personal asses and find themselves some real jobs.

Of course, some people are simply assholes and no other explanation for their behavior is really needed.

Most of the thread is typical for TSR these days.  Post #6, however, surprised me quite a bit, coming as it did from a TSR moderator.

Wait, I'm confused.  Is she back before she was supposed to be gone in the first place?