Comic Sans gets all the fuss!

The font used in the official EA-Land website (Comic Sans) gets all the fuss from various sites on their reviews and articles.

We bring you some of the quotes from these various reviews:

Needs less Comic Sans.

You can read about all the new changes (in Comic Sans!) at the official site or read further for official word from the dev team.

Well, it sure do needs less of Comic Sans and a little more professional design that would tell the customers that it doesn’t only target the teen market.

www.ea-land.ea.com

The Amnesty Program

An email has been sent to all the former Sims Online subscribers informing them that if they return before the end of the month (Feb.) they are to receive all the gifts and skill locks according to their account’s age and not sim age, this shall happen as the Amnesty Program is likely to start running at the end of the month.

Some might believe that this email has been sent too early since the game has many bugs and is still in the early stages of development, keeping returning people discouraged about staying, however, it is known (as you login also) that EA Land is in Beta period, making people more excited to try it out and be part of the testing period. Let’s hope that this would bring a bunch of former players back to the game, making it more busy, more fun and of course having a better “testing”

The email is found on the homepage of the EA-Land website , however we copied it for you…:

All production cities are now offline, forever!

The production cities (AV, BF, CC , JP, DG, DC, MD, IH, EJ, FF) have just went offline, permanently. We shall see them back into ea-land by hopefully the beginning of April.This is the post made in the TSO-E blog regarding the merge…:

We’ve got a bunch of stuff to talk about regarding cities shutting down, moves (a.k.a. bullet trains), and merges. We figure you need this infomation to make informed decisions about managing your sims and their data. First, let’s go over (the important stuff) the schedule over the next few days:

• AV, BF, CC, DG, EJ, FF, IH, JP, MF, DC will be shutting down permanently today (February 21, 2008) at 2 P.M. PST.
• Monday or Tuesday (February 25 or 26, 2008) we will perform the first city merge. However, it may NOT be East Jerome (as previously decided). Instead, it will be Dragon’s Cove. (see background below).
  • Merges will continue until all cities are completed. There will be a pause for other work.
  • As you might have guessed, the order of merges may need to be adjusted slightly.
• Betaville Sims may be eligible to move shortly, however, it might be sims only (no objects, houses, or simoleans). We will be running tests internally over the next few days.
• Monday, March 3, 2008 at 8:00 A.M. PST. Test Center 3 will go offline for a data center migration. We expect the down to be between 2-4 hours.
• Tuesday, March 4, 2008 at 8:00 A.M. PST. EA-Land will go offline for a data center migration. This will happen only if the data migration for Test Center 3 is okay.

Background

The cities for EA-Land and TSO are divided into two data centers: one located on the U.S. east coast and the other on the U.S. west coast. The cities are currently divided as follows:

• East Coast: AV, BF, CC, DG, EJ, FF, BV (and the original TC)
• West Coast: IH, JP, DC, MF, EA-Land, and TC3.

Without going into the “why’s” and the “what for’s,” by April 1, 2008 we need to look like this:

• East Coast: EA-Land, Test Center3
• West Coast: none.

Merges

Mark, Paul, and others on the team have been working very hard to get the merges working. We think we are ready. However, in final tests we discovered data transfers between East Jerome (currently on the east coast) and EA-Land (currently on the west coast) took 8-10 times our internal testing timings. We think this is because of the need to transfer the data across the country. What should take less than a few hours, is 8-10 times slower per city. To put this in perspective, biggers cities would be measured in 5-10 days. Today we are running tests between Dragon’s Cove (west coast) to EA-Land (west coast), if our timing tests match our previous good tests then we will proceed with Dragon’s Cove.

If you recall the previous order of merges was:

• EJ, DG, CC, AV, DC, IH, FF, JP, BF, MF, BV (bolded cities are west coast)

Instead next week, and next week only, we will merge the west coast cities (DC, IH, JP, and MF). However, we will merge only one city at time and make sure evertything is okay before proceeding to the next. That means we may only get Dragon’s Cove done and no other west coast city.

We then begin the migration of Test Center 3 and EA-Land to the east coast. During this time, behind the scenes we are migrating the other west coast cities (DC, IH, JP, and MF) to the East Coast.

Once EA-Land is safely in it’s new home, we will resume the merges. Only then we will be on the east coast so we will go back to the original list, i.e., East Jerome will be first up.

While all the above is happening, one or two members of the team will be walking around mumbling, writing on white-boards, occasionally typing code and running tests regarding the Betaville sims. Meaning, they will be trying to figure out why we got Sim guy heads stuck on pets or Sim gals without heads at all, and figuring out how to fix it.

The minimum we will provide for Betaville is Sim only moves. We will be looking at the move and merge code to see if there are ways of modifying it for Betaville. Hopefully more to come regarding that.

Conclusion

• TSO legacy cities will be shutting down at 2:oo P.M. PST today permanantly. Trains will resume after this time.
• Until we have EA-Land safely in its new east coast home, we will proceed to merge west coast cities in the following order: DC, IH, JP, MF
• Once EA-Land is transfered to the east coast, the original randomized merge order will be resumed.
• Betaville remains a work in progress, and we are doing everything possible to merge as much as possible to EA-Land.

Free Players: Access Granted!

What a happy day for free subscribers: you have been granted access into EA-Land! Make sure to login and create a sim in EAL for you not to miss the extra fun and all the news happening there! Believe me, you won’t regret it. However, at the moment, free players will only have access into residence lots, cannot earn simoleans, skill, trade or own houses. The issue of restriction is currently debated at many various threads and websites, we hope to see changes soon. This does not seem boring as you might now think, you will get to meet new people in a green-free lot, enjoy all the transaction, check out custom objects created by other members at their lots and stores. Enjoy your time with subscribers, see what they can do and make sure to subscribe for it’s a world of endless possibilities out there!

Cyano Acrilyc: The new Bug-Fixing-Wizard!

The new wizard modeled by The Sims Resource (and found in their stores) is a class 5 ploymerizator! Meaning? If you put him out on your lot, he’ll get on his in-built telepathic telephone once you are offline and call the real repair wizard to come by as soon as possible to fix any broken objects found. This new fantastic creation would soon result in the elimination of any broken objects in EA-Land and Test Center 3, after having the developers working for hours in order to visit each house and make sure that any broken objects are to be fixed soon. “However, we do realize that an object here and there may still break on occassion, as you may have seen in the old cities.”

This new invention could be bought at “TSR Custom One” shop in EA-Land for as low as $150 simoleans.

Bug: Broken Items

EA Land and Test Center 3 are now facing an awkward bug that causes the objects to break (as shown left). This tricky bug has kept the developers to stay working on weekends. It has been announced on the TSO-E blog that they are planning to visit all those closed lots in Test Center 3 and fix any broken objects found. A message would be sent informing the people what they believe was fixed. Not to forget that any fixed objects would be brought back into the inventory of the owner (of the object). The developer team is planning to fix these objects in Test Center 3 first, however, if everything goes really well and they get to fix the objects in Test Center 3, they are to go to EA Land and fix any broken objects there too. Please remember that the developer team has never done anything like this before (as announced on the blog by Sarah), meaning that this would take a few days, if not more, so please be patient. The picture available above only shows an example of the broken objects in EA Land.

Gone Forever!

According to a post on TSO-E Blog, all production cities would go offline on the 21st of February, permanently.
This means that the merges would start a few weeks after that and we can never enter those production cities again. Meanwhile, all users are able to play in Test Center 3 and EA-Land.

“ The update will provide eight (8) available slots for EA-Land. Characters from ALL cities (except Test Center 3) will be filling those slots. (Important Note: if you have more total characters than eight (8) in those cities some of characters will no longer be available so make room for all your characters).“
- Quote from the TSO-E Blog by Greg

Upload that Sculpture!

This game is improving weekly, with almost new features and updates every Wednesday, staying dedicated and hard working. Lately, the developers have enabled users to upload new sculptures. This has been published with a warning to the community of not uploading copy-righted content, specially the work of other people. If any copy-righted material have been uploaded, it would not be accepted and your money would go as a waste … therefore, beware.

These new sculptures would add a lot to the game, giving the community another method to express their imagination and talents. People are now more able to decorate their houses in different styles and themes. Moreover, new businesses (shops) could start operating selling only decorative items or custom content, the same as our own lot in EA-Land: T’s Custom Shop.

Uploading sculptures is just another step into a world of customized objects, filled with new ideas, creativity and a wide imagination, which makes this game even more fun that it already is. The imagination and creativity of this community is endless, proving that by the massive collection of different chairs and signs, where users have used them cleverly to produce, such as, cars (by Thrill), bear chairs, mushroom chairs, fire chairs, tree chairs and lot logos & names, and much more… . Therefore, we all can’t wait to see what the community would come up with these uploaded sculptures (an example has been shown above).

In order to be able to upload sculptures to the game using the workbench in service lots, please place all the files (sculptures) you want to upload in the current folder…
“My Documents > EA Games > EA-Land > Uploads > Sculptures”

We will be providing several posts every now and then to show you many creative custom uploads out there.

New EA-Land website!

EA-Land now has a whole new website. You can check it by visiting www.ea-land.com . The site might need a whole makeover since it looks slightly unprofessional, but at least a site is found for all former and new users to visit, find out more about the game and join. Finally, something that would make many people happy, is that Luc is asking us (the community) to build the website and add contents to it, so make sure to contribute and add new pages and ideas using the wiki.

There is currently many empty pages, however, most of the basic and important pages have been already done. I bet that Luc and the other developers would not mind us suggesting any new designs to the website, letting this creative community to contribute in any possible way.

Some interesting and useful pages have been added, such as, the history of TSO and the key differences between TSO and EA-Land. Don’t wait any longer, visit the website now.