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1  The Pirate Ship / ARR! / Re: Ea makes statement March 2 making paysites ok? on: 2009 March 03, 01:51:05
 Why do so many of them still think that a Maxiod=EA?  Why are they so convinced that a moderator of a forum board for 12's had the ability to speak on behalf of a multi-million dollar company.  It is just absurd.  Maxiod's are nothing more than glorified mods with no real contact with EA at all.  Everytime that Drea comes in and makes a statement and the sheeple go looking for clarification there is never anyone around.  If EA had sent her to make the statement (anyone see anything wrong with that chain of events) why wouldn't EA or "the sim's team" be there to back it up?
I'm assuming MaxoidDrea is Andrea Wendland (who introduces herself on the Sims 3 site as a "Community Team Manager"); if that's the case, it is her job to (mis)manage the community with statements on behalf of her division of EA. It's still an open question in my mind whether Drea is just bad, or following orders from someone within EA, or she's trying to play both sides.
2  The Pirate Ship / ARR! / Re: TSR Sharing your infomation! on: 2009 February 03, 23:02:44
Drea has posted now so unless she's blind as a bat, she'll see the uproar and send the janitors to clean up the mess. Sad Recess is over soon, folks.
And the press release got re-posted, without the contact information for EA's public relations people this time. I wonder if any of the sheeple sent them a nasty e-mail.   Grin
3  The Pirate Ship / ARR! / EA and paysite! :( on: 2007 December 23, 08:45:47
I know Sim Masters are volunteer BBS moderators, but I don't really have much of an idea as to the extent of their powers or access to confidential information. I believe they're responsible to MaxoidDrea but I'm not 100% sure about that.

On one hand, I'm surprised that EA still uses volunteers to moderate their forums, since it's potentially a legal issue and Ultima Online got sued over something similar years ago; on the other hand, I'd be surprised if they let a volunteer forum ban accounts but not have access to some account history (to figure out who's a repeat offender) or be able to remove MySims pages and uploaded content as well; on a third hand, if it does have to be deleted by a Maxoid, it's quite likely that they just haven't gotten around to it yet.

I do know that I've had a link to Money Better Spent in my BBS signature for months now, and never gotten hassled about it; while I'm a very occasional poster over there, I've poked at MaxoidSam in the (now-removed) SecuROM forum a few times, so I can't really say I've been flying under the radar. The booty is also often-mentioned by others on the BBS, and doesn't seem to be an instant ban target either.....

I'm confused. Maybe rum will help.
4  The Pirate Ship / ARR! / Maxoid Sam on: 2007 October 12, 02:42:44
Quote from: "Petunia"
Quote from: "fourohfourerror"


Yea..they are basically saying that we are liars since only 41 people called to complain.

So if your having problems you better call and file a complaint with the FTC if your in the US.

It's fun to get statistics to say what you want!

The way it's phrased is that 41 people called (not e-mailed, sent a letter, chatted with a representative) and specifically asked if their problems were caused by SecuROM (as opposed to people who may be having problems with SecuROM that are being blamed on something else by EA tech support, or just didn't know enough to ask specifically about SecuROM). That also doesn't include anyone with SecuROM problems that didn't bring it up with tech support, and it doesn't address people who may not be having a specific problem now, but just not wanting risky programs installed on their computers without their consent.

I know that when I had a problem re-installing Hot Date back in Sims 1 days, EA Tech Support blamed it on a variety of things and finally declared that I had a unsupported CD-ROM drive, and it took the Sims community to tell me that SafeDisc was the reason the installer was asking for a file that didn't exist.

I did find the discussion on how apparently there couldn't be a disclaimer in the Bon Voyage EULA because there is no Bon Voyage EULA interesting, though. No wonder I couldn't find it....
5  The Pirate Ship / ARR! / Maxoid Sam on: 2007 October 12, 01:27:12
Like we didn't see this coming....
Quote
All,
Burpie will no longer be a SimMaster/moderator for this community. She was a SimMaster for many years and is truly one of our best players. We wish her all the best.
6  The Pirate Ship / ARR! / Well, I don't know how much clearer it can get... on: 2007 July 29, 01:30:14
Quote from: "motorcitymaven"
Let me start by saying, I am not an owner, admin, mod or creator.  I am a Simmer.  I appreciate the creations and tools that have been made available to the Sims Community by all creators, owners etc.  One question.  Who made you EA’s guard dogs?

I am a Simmer who is not impressed with your tactics.  Your actions are not about free sites vs paysites or any other such lofty notions.  They are about your monumental egos and the desire to dominate the Sims Community.  You proved that when you took the files from the pay sites and made them available to all for free.  Not only that, you published them on a server located in Malaysia, a country which not only does not recognize copyright laws but is a safe haven for terrorists.  Rather ironic given your methods.

Do you not understand what you’ve done?  I’m sure your intent was to hurt the owners of the paysites.  Why?  Because they have different opinions and operate differently from you.  There again, your monumental egos couldn’t handle the competition when people didn’t bow to your demands.  As if that’s not bad enough, you’ve hurt the 1000’s of Simmers who subscribed to those sites.  They freely subscribed to gain those files.  Nullifying those subscriptions by stealing the files was not your decision to make.  

Stealing is not something the Sims Community has ever taken lightly and they shouldn’t now either.  Keep in mind, every creator that stops creating and every site that closes because of your actions, is one more thing you’ve stolen from the Community.

What’s next?  A set of garden gnomes with your names on them that run around deleting files you disapprove of in people’s games?

If paysite owners want to take their toys and go home, that's just fine. There are many good, free creators. There are also creators who have gone free, that can't get their earlier files off of paysites despite their wishes.

You are not any more representative of "the Sims community" than I am. I think it's fair to say that there's a lot of people in the Sims community that are sick of the dishonest business of Sims paysites.

Yes, EA fails at community management. That's why some players have taken matters into their own hands. And since EA is trying to keep both paysites and pirates, it's very unlikely that they're going to attempt to make PMBD go away either.
7  The Pirate Ship / ARR! / To Those with Legal Understanding, or Even an Opinion.. on: 2007 July 27, 22:22:46
My opinion, and it's not worth any more than that:
EA is trying to launch a competitor to World of Warcraft, called Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, in the near future. Massively multiplayer online games tend to have a lot of under-the-table selling of gold, characters, and items in game, which many players consider to be outright cheating. Companies who make these games often spend a lot of time and effort keeping the real-money trade business at bay, or at least doing well enough so that they can show their players that they're trying to stop the evil gold farmers. (That, or they decide to go into the business for themselves, like Sony Online Entertainment did with Station Exchange). Mythic, the development studio EA bought out that is making Warhammer Online, has made it pretty clear that they consider gold farmers to be scum.

What does any of this have to do with The Sims? Maybe nothing. But I half suspect that EA's suddenly taken an interest in Sims paysites, because tolerance of them implies that EA doesn't care about their items being sold for money. While selling custom content downloads for a single-player game is a different matter than selling EA's content on EA's servers for money, the whole virtual property issue is a very thorny one, and not one where there's a lot of precedent. My guess is that with Warhammer Online being heavily hyped by EA at the moment, it's become in EA's interest to oppose all forms of money being exchanged for stuff in any of their games, whether they actually seriously enforce it or not.
8  The Pirate Ship / ARR! / Question on: 2007 June 29, 00:01:06
EA is involved whether they want to be or not. They got involved when they made the game. Their views on paysites (though it could be very much debated how much of this is Maxis and how much is EA, or how the heck we started with a game made by Maxis and ended up with the Sims Division of EA to begin with) have changed from moderately supportive of paysites in the Sims 1 days, to ambivalent, to moderately disapproving of paysites these days. Why they've changed their mind, I couldn't tell you, but I could make a few guesses.
As for "OMG EA's going to go after SimPE!", I also doubt it because of how much custom content helps sales of Sims games, but I don't know how EA feels about the program. The object creator for Sims 1, Transmogrifier, wasn't made by Maxis, but was approved by them and had their terms of use attached. Even if EA does have some grudge against SimPE, at this point they certainly couldn't stop custom object creation in Sims 2 even if they wanted to do so.
9  The Pirate Ship / ARR! / Question on: 2007 June 25, 01:32:38
Quote from: "JFederated"
The whole "EA has paysites on their fansite list so they must approve" thing is a crock.  Clicked any of those links on that list lately?  It's obviously not a maintained listing; several I tried were dead or non-functional.

I think there are worse paysites (those that charge per item, for instance), but TSR would be a nice fat target.  Spanking TSR would really say something.

There's also some links on there that are to questionable content. EA can't run their own site, as usual, and MaxoidDramaLlama's said that cleaning up the fansite list is something she plans to do in the future but hasn't gotten to yet. Whether paysites remain on there should be interesting. Then again, her position on paysites is basically "it's EA Legal's problem, don't bug me about it", and the last time I saw the drama llama she was running from some bratty teenagers who were spamming her guestbook because a story got deleted off the exchange..... :roll:
10  The Pirate Ship / ARR! / Why does fun things have to turn nasty? on: 2007 May 13, 23:17:33
Quote from: "Nina"

I know this is a bit different but lets start selling WoW/any other game -POSTCARDS- printed from the game and see what happens. lol.

Too bad EA is lazy... I'll laugh the day EA decides to put a stop to them.

Just to get more off-topic....
I've seen quite a few pictures of items of questionable origin (bootleg DVDs and fireworks come to mind) that have WoW promotional artwork on them, even though the actual product has nothing to do with WoW. Blizzard (the company that runs WoW) does have a legal team that has sent people cease-and-desist orders for much less, and been known to sue, but short of nuking China I don't think they can stop every misuse of their work.

EA, on the other hand, is just lazy.
11  The Pirate Ship / ARR! / XSS phpbb prior on: 2007 April 21, 22:33:49
Quote from: "Rat"
Quote from: "prattle"
Quote from: "Rat"

old enough to not steal stuff that you didn't make. If you want to use it for free, you can also ASK the person who had made it. No respect for the peoples work.

I am old enough to not steal stuff. EA made the Sims 2 and it's their code that makes any custom content work, yet pay sites steal from them and break their terms of use all the time. That's disrespectful.
It's also quite disrespectful to threaten to hack someone's forum, even if you're incapable of actually making good on that threat.


nice reply, if you have problems that the people do that. Be a man or a girl and don't use the stuff. Using it, doesnt make you a better person.

And the people i know, are not making profit of it, they only do that to share it with the whole world. But the datatrafficcost must be paid by someone and if one person have to pay that, that is impossible.

What do you people find about the idea that no one share their stuffs anymore? Will you be happy then?

If you were making this argument to me several years ago when the dot-com industry had just crashed, and we were still playing Sims 1, and a lot of creators were legitimately worried about how they could afford to host their content, I would agree with you. However, I am a reformed ex-paysite supporter gone pirate. Smiley

Too many paysites have abused "we need money to pay for bandwidth", and it's not as hard for a site to stay afloat as it used to be, and EA's Exchange hosts a wide variety of custom content for free. If creators don't want to share their custom content, they don't have to, either.

In the meantime, filesharing only helps reduce those expensive bandwidth bills, right?
12  The Pirate Ship / ARR! / XSS phpbb prior on: 2007 April 21, 22:21:29
Quote from: "Rat"

old enough to not steal stuff that you didn't make. If you want to use it for free, you can also ASK the person who had made it. No respect for the peoples work.

I am old enough to not steal stuff. EA made the Sims 2 and it's their code that makes any custom content work, yet pay sites steal from them and break their terms of use all the time. That's disrespectful.
It's also quite disrespectful to threaten to hack someone's forum, even if you're incapable of actually making good on that threat.
13  The Pirate Ship / ARR! / Carla Niven must be destroyed! on: 2007 April 13, 18:37:04
Quote from: "Hecubus"

oh...so if the Carla Niven site is specifically FOR Sims to shop in, why isn't the common currency simoleans?

Yeah...

...words....fail.

That was my thought as well. I'm all for a little role-play fun, but if there's Paypal buttons involved we've left RP long ago.
14  The Pirate Ship / ARR! / TS2 Enhancer 1.4 on: 2007 April 09, 23:49:35
Quote from: "KikiGo"
well i just read this entire thread hoping to figure out exactly TS2Enhancer was..then i got distracted by the stupidity..so yea i say we just move on...

TS2Enhancer is a pay program that lets you edit your sims and neighborhoods while outside the game. It's not the uber custom content creation program that SimPE is, but there would probably be a place for it if it didn't suck and if it didn't cost money.
15  The Pirate Ship / ARR! / Re: Huzzah! New Killmark coming? on: 2007 April 09, 21:37:15
Quote from: "Mufushu"
Quote from: "Pescado"


I can't tell if that guy is making fun of pro-paysite arguments or is serious.  :roll:

That's Greg's sense of humor. :?
I remember when he was starting up SimsHost back in the Sims 1 days, and he believed (or at least said in public) that he was doing a service to the Sims community, by helping sites that needed assistance to pay the hosting bills. It didn't exactly work out that way.
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