Now here are some words I never thought I'd say together in any imaginable context but 'in EA's defense' (WTFness), this game has been in development for 11 years, a lot of the stuff Maxis had planned to put into EP's is already complete or near completion. In that respect there's little or no advantage to holding back complete packs for any great length of time. I understand that the whole project ran massively over budget (not surprising being 3 years late), in that respect I can understand EA's keenness to claw back some of their investment early to help bolster their legal departments budget for dealing with the many class action lawsuits they are and will be facing over their illegal security protection.

Question away - slogging around the Galaxy doing the same old missions and trading/blowing things up gets really tired really quickly. I didn't say *all* achievements - but a lot of the speed challenge ones often don't work when logged off and the community sporecast/featured/make & publish X amount of whatever can't be done.

Playing devil's advocate for a moment, I will just point out that without connecting you don't get quite a lot of the achievements and without those the game is kinda dull!

Don't declare war on them and then they'll leave you alone. Turn off your auto-firing weapons before heading to the center of the Galaxy and run in as fast as you can without stopping. Even when you're at war with them, they'll only attack your planets one at a time and provided you don't show up to defend the planet, they don't do much in the way of damage if you've got an uber turret - they might take out a Colony but you can just place another one and replace your regular turrets periodically. They seem to like destroying the spice storage for some reason.

Or doing a change Archtype mission with a Trader Empire then you just sell any fecking spice you've got at whatever price they'll give you to save dying of boredom trying to shift 5000 units of the stuff... or is that just me?

<irrelevance>Well there you go. I have no idea MATY had a Spore section </irrelevance>

You can't have multiple accounts with the game, it advertises it as being possible in the game manual, but the DRM doesn't allow it. To 'fix' this, Maxis have done a botch-up job of introducing fake accounts tacked on to a master account for people accessing the official site. Afaik, it is possible that said, to clear up the Securerom hideousness, without destroying the DRM so entirely that it prevents you from accessing the online features (in truth, without the achievements it could reasonably be argued this game is shit).

WTF?? I've never sold a Sims download in my LIFE? Time you put away that crack pipe I think. Plus given at 5 of our resident artists have worked for EAxis over the past 4+ years I think its highly likely that we understand more about the intricacies of the Sims 2 EULA than you do Simsfreq. We are well aware of what it *actually* means.

JMP, I can see the advantages of keeping people away from the site, but we don't have any visitor involvement aside from our guest books, so it doesn't make any difference whether people are stupid and irritating or not. What does make a difference is if they view the pages they also view the ads so I'm more likely to get paid for the traffic, a lot of international traffic doesn't pay anything but some chance of getting something is still better than none at all! Unlike MTS2 we're not taking in $3000+ a month in subscriber fees, so its gotta come from somewhere.

I do agree that advertising is good up to a point - what I object to is someone ripping us to shreds AND stealing our bandwidth AND being fucking ignorant about it. And there isn't really any advantage to us in additional advertising *here* - because any visitors that do go to the site are likely to only visit once only just to gawp, so we're not picking up regular traffic from people who are going to  use the site for its intended purpose.  In that respect there's really no incentive for me to do anyone here a favour of allowing them to link to the pictures, since its done for the collective entertainment of MATY members and not for any purpose that might do us any good. All of that aside, if someone had *bothered* to ask then yeah, no problem, even if it is just to take the piss. I'm not a total bitch, but if someone treats me like a arsehole, I'm not going to do them any favours.


I do like your thinking JMP, we have just a regular epilepsy inducing gif that occurs for people direct linking to pictures in our download sections *if* I've decided that particular domain doesn't get the option to post our pictures *ever* - I think posting goatse would be a step too far personally, besides, I don't think most kids are that easily offended? Hot-linking to zips (which is the bigger problem, and accounts for most of the 25Gb), again where specified just brings people to the site front page.

A) I didn't say *just* images B) I'm going to assume you are joking about the 'astronomical' part or did you misread that and assume I meant terrabytes rather than gigabytes? Its about 5-15% of our daily usage between Parsimonious and the other Sims sites I provide hosting for, but regardless I still resent paying for it, it could be 0.0001% - still doesn't make it any more right, legal or reasonable.

Seriously? Next time you decide to steal a few things from your local store, try that argument on with the store security and see how they like it.
 
We're losing 25Gb + every day to people hot-linking without permission, that sort of bandwidth makes a real difference to some of the smaller sites I host, what exactly gives you the right to make that even just a little bit worse?

Gosh and yet again I find myself thrilled and delighted that you have honored us by putting us up there with the likes of Buntah and Fee Essen! How utterly marvelous

Ellatrue, it is very odd but I have scoured my guest book and my site emails and I can't find a single email from you requesting permission to use our bandwidth to post images here? Obviously the fact that you are indeed linking directly to our pictures means you must have received a reply to your request from me to say that you could hot-link to our server, I've clearly managed to misplace it, so perhaps you'd be kind enough to forward that back to me for my reference?

Omg, if one of our houses gets picked do we get like a flashy award banner to put on our site? Please say we do, that would be highly amusing!

Looking at our referrals list I'd say no but if there are any more problems then I'll let you know & thank you for taking care of this so efficiently - btw, I have no issue if someone wants to hot link for this or any other purpose to our stuffage as long as they ask me nicely first

Whilst I'm utterly thrilled and delighted that someone should consider many of my items fit to be nominated for this prestigious award (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,8245.msg229575.html#msg229575) I would generally appreciate it if people could not hot link to our previews - its not a huge amount of data but 4Mb a day does add up after a while and I need all my bandwidth so that people with no taste download my buttugly furniture

Ta!

Excellent, well that abundantly answered my question & some.
Thank you peeps!

Are there graphics for MATY links anywhere at this forum and if so could some kind soul please point me in the right direction. Ideally an 88x31 but anything in the same aspect ratio will do.
Much obliged

Awesome!! Thank you - its disrupting my Sim's businesses that they drop serving customers to watch every time a fight breaks out (which seems to be a lot!) and they have to be re-queued!

Thank you so much! Highly useful

The trouble is with Maxis, as far as I can tell, a guy in a suit at EA says 'You have 8 weeks to create this expansion pack... ready, steady... code!' and they throw themselves in to creating as much of their idea as possible, then at the deadline the man in the suit comes back and tells them to stop and whatever isn't finished stays that way, whatever they didn't have time for doesn't get done when its released.