I am at the belief that EA should make a offline and online version of The Sims 4 but here is the catch 22 for the online group that want the Sims 4 to go online

They should be paying a monthly fee

The fee will be set at $10-$18 a month that will go towards server maintenance and moderator hiring or salary,if the fee is not paid by the deadline no access to the server will be granted

I do not see why people who want offline gameplay should be penalized just because a online only group of simmers want their way

EA should have a budget for making the Sims 4 online and offline seperately

How many agree with this

Fee? I can barely afford a pack of gum how am I supposed pay a monthly fee?
It seems kind of like a waste of money for something that probably wont even work, remember SimCity 2013 servers?
So I don't agree.

Generally speaking, I'm against paying ANY fee to be able to play a game that you have already bought and paid for.

Easy solution, No Online features. Done.

I completely agree with you. They did exactly that with Sims 1 and it became the awesome Sims Online. Of course, EA being EA, they shut the servers down.

They got better though. The only time the servers were down for me was when they had update 5.0. Either that, or I have good internet.

Are there really people who want the game to go online? Wanting it, and deciding to support the franchise if it does are two very different things.

So you think people should pay up to $216 per year for a game they already paid for, for the privilege to play it? So if it lasted 5 years before the next version that would be up to $1080 dollars given to EA just to play online. O_o

When my daughter used the online feature for Animal Crossing: Wild World on her DS, she didn't have to pay for it. Of course, the AC:WW variation might be different from what EA envisioned. There are different versions of "online" play.

But here's the point ... no charge.

Now if EA wants something more elaborate, it may be costly. But I wouldn't be interested, then. $10 or more a month seems pretty steep!

World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XI - both great games - do exactly that. And no, they're not made by EA. WoW is Activision Blizzard and FFXI is Square Enix. For some reason, EA doesn't charge a monthly fee for their games anymore.

So you are perfectly fine with paying for the "privledge to play online" after you already bought a 60+ dollar game... and Expansion Packs... and perhaps Stuff Packs... Even maybe DLC, you see what I'm getting at. Minecraft and Garry's Mod did online play right. They gave people the option to host their own servers, and if someone wants to host a server, but doesn't have a machine they can keep online to run it, they can opt to rent some server space from the game devs. The only people who may have to pay are server hosters, and even then, only of they can't leave their server online all the time.

Remember, just because someone else does it, doesn't make it just.

Absolutely. I'm an MMO player; that's been par for the course for the genre for a long time. In fact, MMO games that did not charge a monthly fee were, until recently, considered to not be good games.

If TS goes online, the game will become limited and boring like Simcity 2013. Small maps, limited content [to force people to buy stuff], frequently save game failure because of the sync problems.

TS (TS1, to be specific) already went online in the form of Sims Online, but EA (being typical EA) shut down the servers. There was as much content as, if not more than, TS1 base game. And it kept me playing TS1 well into the TS2 era.

And there is the reason WHY it shouldn't have online capability, whether free or not. People can no longer play TSO, while they can still play Sims 1, 2, and 3. If I had to stop playing a game, it should be because I choose to, not the internet equivilent of "I'm talking my ball and going home."

The Sims (1) and The Sims Online are two completely different things.

I was under the impression that the OP recommended a Sims 4 game that can operate both offline with optional online features that can be used with a monthly fee.

$10 a month for those optional features seems steep, probably something like $2/month would be fine. Perhaps also a $0.50 fee for a 72-hour trial period for folks curious on how the online feature works, all this presuming that nothing new has to be installed to effect the way the game works (e.g. installing EPs and SPs changing the game's coding).

At least a small optional monthly fee will increase player's incentive for those looking to meet online in the Sims 4 game (instead of making an offline-only game), & increase EA's incentive to run the servers longer than if they ran it for free.

1. This was way back when EA at least pretended to care about the games they made and not just the money that comes with making them. I don't even wanna know what those greedy bastards would do with the Sim Online today

2. Sims Online came out when I was little and my parents didn't approve of me playing games with a bunch of weirdos I don't know (and from what I've heard, the Sims Online was FULL of the kinds of weirdos they were talking about) so I've never played it. But you're the first person I've ever met who played The Sims Online and didn't consider it an epic failure.

I posted a message on this yesterday, it's quite interesting what people have to say http://forum.thesims3.com/jforum/posts/list/697248.page

I'll be the second. Sims Online was a mixed bag. Like a lot of MMOs, much of the experience depended on the people you were playing with; if you met the fun, creative people, you had a great time and pretty much existed in the game as Will Wright envisioned. You could find a solid community in TSO for about four years.

But it was essentially boring. There was no fun, for instance, in watching your sim reading skill books or playing chess for hours of real time. Again, that was the sort of thing that could only be saved by competent people. By finding interesting conversation at a skill house, or generating your own.

That being said, as someone who liked TSO, I don't want an online component for my Sims 4. I think most of the charm and good humor has been crushed out of the game since the days of TSO and Sims 1, and it would lack the goofy fun that those two games offered.

For that matter, I think most of the charm and good humor has been crushed out of most people, and just don't want to be compelled to play with them.