The current virtual world consists of two planets, Azeroth and Draenor (also known as "Outland"). Azeroth consists of two main continents, the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor. Located to the northwest of Kalimdor are the Azuremyst and Bloodmyst Isles, and Teldrassil. Kalimdor contains the starting areas for the Orc, Troll, and Tauren races of the Horde. The Night Elves and Draenei of the Alliance both begin in areas off the coast of Kalimdor (Teldrassil and Azuremyst and Bloodmyst Isles respectively). The Night Elves have the capability to move to the mainland fairly early as well. The Eastern Kingdoms contain the beginning areas for the Undead and Blood Elves of the Horde, as well as the Humans, Dwarves and Gnomes of the Alliance.

The plan seems to me like it was to make EA-Land as much like Second Life as possible, but given the original platform and game design to start with, that was pretty much impossible, IMO. And yes, it is my understanding that Luc Barthelet has moved on. We know exactly why EA is shutting down EA-Land: it cost a huge amount to make, squandered the online portion of the Sims franchise for years, has never been close to profitable, is not making significant revenue now, and shows no sign of ever doing so. In a market that has exploded (including in the more casual space The Sims occupies), TSO/EA-Land was expensive to develop and withered in commercial terms almost immediately.

It was from reading the list of design references to the original. The Sims that I picked up A Pattern Language by Alexander et al. While I wouldn't care to have some of the social engineering assumptions in APL applied in my real-world neighborhood (they're a bit too Berkeley-think for me), they might have been very useful concepts for a designed social/game world like TSO. Did the team that designed The Sims Online consider APL and the other architectural/community inspirations for The Sims to be irrelevant to a massively multiplayer online space? Or were they a goal for which time and/or money just weren't available? Looking in the other direction, are there any lessons in online community design that can be drawn from the demise of TSO/EAL?

The brief way to say this is that there were more than a few people who tried very hard to get things like this -- to say nothing of actual gameplay, community structures, etc. -- into what became TSO. Very little of this met with success, despite strenuous efforts. What we have now is the result. I wondered if it might have been something like that. Thanks Mike. Here's looking forward to a full Gamasutra post-mortem on this saga. :-) The Sims Online failed simply because the players’ wants were consistently ignored by the developers since the very beginning. What started out with thousands of true Sims fans who excitedly joined the beta testing ended with very few die hard fans by the time the game went prematurely live.

In offline Sims we could put it in fast forward during skilling, yet TSO revolved around the mind numbing boredom of needing to skill. They made one wrong choice after another, for example, adding more cities to an already too spread out player base rather than actual content everyone could enjoy in the game. Considering this company knows the importance of added expansion packs to keep their games going, I can't help but wonder why on earth they chose to not bother adding more to the online version. They stopped promoting it, no advertising. Stopped updating completely, stopped all communication, it was no wonder the subscription rates declined.

Many players left once again in disgust. I think he did make some good choices, like merging the cities so that we were all on one map and saving our old sims and properties, had he forced us all to start over, even more would have quit. But the whole idea of "cash in/cash out" should have been put on hold until the game was stable. Also, in my opinion, there should have never been unlimited free play, anywhere. The game needed subscribers, not freeloaders. The game had potential, it could have grown to be a great game, if it had continued to be updated in ways that would improve the game play and advertised. EA did not give it long enough to grow with Luc's teams updates, and I feel that is a huge mistake, it's truly a shame they don't see how unique this game is, and how big it could be.