I'd better not post my opinions on necklacing. They would enrage you, this board, at least fourteen different organizations of angry mothers, and the entire Catholic church. I would be exiled.

Thanks once more, calalily. I am totally awesome at inadvertently pissing people off. I consider it a gift and a curse.

I never once mentioned the BBS. Don't go to the BBS, don't know anything about the BBS. I'm sure there are lots of great people there. I don't know them. Prior to your post, I'd never even heard of it. That's my point: there are people who play Sims who don't do the whole internet community thing. I would put money on this being a majority of the players--casual gamers who pop in the Sims, play a bit, scour a bit for some CC, and that's the extent of it. Internet communities are where people get their information on the game, and without that resource, people...don't get information on the game. It's not willful ignorance. People just assume that a game is a game and that there's not going to be huge drama flaring up behind the scenes. I was surprised as hell to learn of it myself and I'm not a stranger to fan communities and the game industry itself. The Sims is sort of a happy, wholesome game and no one's going to expect that EA is piggy-backing eerily 1984-esque software along with it.

Re: SecuROM--I don't know a single person who knows about it and says "YES PLZ VIOLATE MY PRIVACY AND BREAK MY COMPUTER." The problem comes in when people don't know about it. And a lot of people don't. Like I said above, if you're not active in the community, you're not going to hear about this stuff. I'd heard whispers that evil had a name and its name was SecuROM, but I didn't really know about it until the shit really hit the fan over Spore, where it was discovered that they were going to be forcibly installing malware on your computer that phones home every couple of days and locks down your game if it can't. I had no idea that BV was packaged with SecuROM or that it was causing such problems. I've actually got a game on my computer (NWN2) that came with SecuROM and I had no idea. I consider myself a relatively hardcore gamer and pride myself for being fairly up to date, and I'm much better informed than any given casual gamer; there are thousands and thousands of people out there right now who are sitting ducks.

I wasn't saying "people are sheep" like it's a bad thing, it's just the nature of people. We tend to trust that if there's something bad going down, someone will tell us. Companies like EA know this and therefore do everything they can to fuck us under the radar. That's all I'm saying.

EA is a gigantic entity that pretty much just consumes and devours. They ate up Maxis in 97, three years before The Sims first hit shelves. Maxis had been doing a bit of genre experimentation--which bombed to all hell--and pretty much erased the profit and success they met with SimCity, which made them take up EA on an acquisition offer.

I think there are a couple things to take into consideration:

1.) People are effectively sheep. They're very good at it. Most tend to make the right decision once they learn all the facts about something, but rarely do they seek these facts out. They are very content to do whatever until something is shoved into their face on a platter. EA, and corporations in general, know this and they capitalize on it. They purposefully obfuscate vital information in order to get away with whatever crap they want for as long as they possibly can. SecuROM is one example. Anybody in the know realizes that it's total bullshit that punishes legitimate consumers and doesn't do anything to the people they're trying to protect their game from. Of all the people who play games--especially the casual gaming crowd, which is exactly the target audience of the Sims--how many of them are in the know? Ask a ten year old kid or their mom what they think of SecuROM and you'll get blank stares. The vast majority of people who are going to buy Sims games are people who either can't or don't participate actively in fan communities; ignorance of SecuROM and paysites means they have a gigantic flock EA can just suck money out of. EA may lose one fan community by pulling the crap they do, but they can and will be replaced by newcomers and the mindless.

2.) You guys sound really surprised that a corporate entity is doing everything in their power to ostracize their fanbases in the process of making money. That's the business world. The bottom line is god. Shortsightedness rules in this arena; very few organizations can look beyond the immediate profits and recognize the impact of their actions on longterm business. (Just look at the US economy for an example of this.) They will do everything and anything they possibly can to maximize their profit and minimize the effort and energy spent. They will make stupid decisions just to make money. At the very worst, Sims 3 will only make a mediocre profit--note, profit, not loss--and they'll amputate this branch of the Sims name. As it stands, though, the Sims is one of their biggest moneymakers and franchises like that don't just disappear overnight. Saying Sims 3 is going to fail just because they aren't embracing one portion of the fan community is like saying the Final Fantasy XIII is going to crash and burn because the FFXI fans are tired of paying their monthly subscriptions.

I think the best outcome we can expect out of something like this is that EA will fully embrace paysites, but still allow free creators to do their own thing. There's no way they're not going to give their own paysite a shot; it's an opportunity to make some money and they're going to be all over it like a fat lady in a pie factory. There won't be anything we can do about it because it's their own crap that they have a right to sell. But completely preventing any and all content creation outside of this would be a monumentally stupid move (wouldn't doubt they'd do it, but it doesn't stop it from being monumentally stupid) since it not only ostracizes a fan community, but also turns off a casual playerbase (children and students) who get the vast majority of their CC for free but who may also shell out some money if they have the option.

Me? I'll be pirating the whole thing, and I'll be pirating whatever paid items they come out with on principle. You can't spell "EAT ME" without EA.

I was actually just about to chip in with the public broadcasting bit, celligirl; you beat me to it.

Basically, you don't donate to PBS because you really want that totebag. You donate to PBS because they do good stuff. A donation implies a free will choice with no ill effects if you don't do it. You can still watch everything PBS puts on air without having donated; you are not locked out of certain programming purely because you didn't empty your wallet onto their desks. In that way, donation packs are silly. It's nice to want to thank the people who've donated, but offering exclusive content is retardulous. If you want to offer special privileges, maybe offer donators access to the site sans advertisements, or maybe they can download from a faster server (assuming your site is big/popular enough to warrant multiple servers). For smaller sites, maybe offer donators the ability to request content tailored specifically for them (which would later be posted on the site--for free). There are lots of ways to give donators small, appreciative gifts that don't include paid content.