With comments closed on the official EA-Land blog and the Stratic forums down until further notice, there seems no good way to reach the 1100+ dissatisfied subscribers of the former Sims Online MMO, and follow up on our promise to investigate claims of fraud. But there may be no further need to do so. Yesterday, EA announced that they will start issuing certain refunds automatically.
According to Parizad Parav, EA-Land Community Manager:
With the closing of EA-Land, one of the main questions that keeps surfacing is recent transactions of the ATM for in game money. EA will refund all (not only recent) ATM transactions automatically. Be on the lookout for your refund. Please note that if you have already reversed the payment for any ATM transactions you will not be receiving an additional refund.
The ATMs were a resource for players who wished to contribute real-life currency, through PayPal, in exchange for in-game Simoleans used for purchases. Players had complained that the ATMs were added to an already broken game economy right before the MMO gave notice that it would shut down for good, and suspected EA of trying to make a quick buck at their expense. We’re happy to hear this was not the case.
We’re still actively looking to hear from players about their memories of EA-Land — please send your stories to sean@gamecyte.com.
May 9th, 2008 at 11:57 am
To locate the TSO (The Sims Online) community, you can find us all working hard to save our beloved game. Come join us and see what we are trying to do.
http://www.playercampaigns.com
As for seeing any refunds, no one to date has received any. To date, even after announcing the closing of a very loved on line game, EA has also continued to charge their monthly subscriptions. For us to get our refunds, we need to call them to get it corrected. Due to many being out of the country, this adds more cost to the players. They talk a good game, but never do as they promise.
As a TSO player we have experienced promises after promises from EA always to be disappointed in the end. As with the promises of keeping The Sims Online - which could of become a very profitable game for them. The reasons for the failure is only on their heads. For not fixing issues, for making promises they never kept, for never giving updates to a game nor promoting it in any way to make others aware that THE SIMS was actually available online to play and become part of a virtual community of many other sims.
Yes the subscriptions decreased - since to no avail they never listened to their customer base. If you take a very good look at the way EA handled the actual game, you would see how EA sabotaged their own game from becoming as big as the other Sims PC games.
It takes to much on their end to sit down and actually listen to the people that buy the games and services they offer. For years on end the game had no updates - then we are told they were going to turn this around. Only to be lied to again. Yes they gave us updates and new things were in the works - but they never had any intention on keeping it going. The biggest concern it seems is how to close the program down without effecting the other THe Sims games. Well they sure came up with a good plan, by changing the name to EALand then within weeks announce that we were an experiment and it failed. Again the only failure of the game still goes back to the EA executives that mismanaged this game from day one of them having it to the present time.
We had a great Development team working hard to make this game turn around and they were doing this. A team of 19 individuals that actually were listening to the customers, that actually tried to fix the game but were limited due to the EA corporate heads that didn’t want the game to succeed. It took over 100 people to get the original game into production and out on beta… but yet they wanted these 19 individuals to have it done in less time then the original The Sims Online took to get functional. This group of 19 did some amazing things to the game from what they were working from. They worked hours on end to make our community thrive and grow. If given enough time, continued updates and EA actually advertising the game The Sims Online would not be closing due to increase in subscribers. (I refuse to call it EAland as it is nothing but a name chance to smoke screen there failure)
As you mentioned they closed down all communication for us to have about expressing our feeling on what they are doing. Why, they don’t want bad press. Well they should of thought about that before deciding to lie to the public. As we as a large community will not be censored. Which is the other things they have done on their blog by deleting many comments left by the game players. Electric Arts has put a nasty taste in many peoples mouths. From lies to killing off a game that was good for all ages to play. Its not like Second Life, which is full of porno … its a game that you can sit down and play with your child. It’s a game that you can say yes to your child in subscribing to. It was also posted on a news article where an EA executive actually said people don’t like to play with each other. Again showing the gaming world they have no idea what they are talking about. If this was the case, why is the porno infested game of Second Life succeeding with millions of subscribers or the very popular game put out by b blizzard, WOW. The reason those games succeed is very clear… They have cooperate heads that listen to there customer base. They don’t ignore the subscribers, they continue to improve and update their games.
Again, come find out the truth behind Electric Arts failure to The Sims Online community. Come see how we continue our efforts to save our beloved game.
Online game players… think how you would feel waking up one morning and seeing in black and white that you were an experiment and you will no longer be able to play your beloved game. Come join our fight to save our game.
http://www.playercampaigns.com
http://www.petitiononline.com/kt5892/petition.html