EA-Land Blog

We believe we’ve fixed the recent bugs involving login issues and disappearing custom content.  Please let us know if this is not the case.

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.

Today, we turned off dynamic object pricing on catalogue items.  We’ve also raised skilling speed to 148%.  These are permanent changes. 

Purportedly, a giant landfill has been found between the robot factories and the restaurants.  In the next few days, it will cause property values to plummet!  If you are thinking of buying property, we highly recommend that you wait for a bit.

 p.s. I have turned off comments for a bit as I directly help customers and moderating comments here was taking up a lot of  time better spent with direct help.

It is with mixed emotions that today we are announcing the EA-Land experiment will soon draw to a close. Since 2002, EA-Land / TSO has attracted a very special group of players (of which you are one) and we certainly appreciate your participation in the EA-Land community. The lifetime of the game has drawn to an end, and now we will be focusing on new ideas and other innovative concepts in the games arena. We’d like to thank everyone who has taken part in this online community as a unique experience in the virtual world.

Below are some facts about how the site and service will be closed. Please see also a special message from the team that maintained EA-Land, to the community that played it.

Key Facts:

• On August 1, 2008, the game EA-Land / TSO will no longer be in service and EA will focus these resources on future games

• Your subscription billing will end now, so that at least 60 days of your EA-Land experience will be at no cost to you

• You may cancel your account and subscription at any time by contacting customer service or by managing your EA account online. To do this, you must log on to EA-Land / TSO to cancel within the game

• Starting immediately PayPal cash-in will not be available anymore

• EA Customer Support at support.ea.com is available to help answer any questions you might have regarding your account

If you are a paying subscriber as of April 29th 2008, EA would like to offer you one of the following two gifts as a token of our appreciation:

• $15 off any game at the EA Store at www.eastore.ea.com, or

• Three months of Club POGO(tm) Subscription Time

Paying subscribers please insure your email contact information is up to date as details of this offer will be sent out to you within 30 days.

Again, thanks you to all of you.

Electronic Arts

We share the sadness of the entire community in writing this blog to announce that the EA-Land experiment is being brought to an end. Decisions such as these are never easy and the rationale for closing EA-Land is particularly complex. Regardless, it is hard to see the end of the collective investment of emotion, time and friendship.

This development team over the past year, in partnership with your amazing community contributions, worked to deliver a re-engineered TSO architecture ported to DirectX9, with a stable economy, variable pricing, the beginnings of custom content (bitmaps, chairs and sculptures, skinning), integrated web-services (enabling Facebook apps and user created widgets), and kept pace with new features pushed weekly (cash in, free play, across-world mini games, etc). The team is a very dedicated crew that spent many nights and week-ends making it all work.

We would like to thank the community for trusting us over the last 10 months and enabling this opportunity. A special thank you to the few thousand who have been with the game since the original beta! (A big thank you also to all the users who came back since December).

Thank you for uploading 30,000 pieces of custom content and proving again that development teams should build worlds involving their user communities. We are particularly proud that the top entrepreneurs in this new world are custom content makers. Personally, I have been most motivated by your participation in all stages (from design on the wiki to testing in TC3 and feedback all over). I think that this smart and well-connected community is one you should be proud of.

Thank you for helping us, pushing us and making us more flexible, wiser, and smarter!

The virtual worlds are still in their infancy, I sincerely hope we will have the opportunity to be creative together again.

We miss you already,

Luc,

(With the help of: Greg, Larry, Sarah, Uri, Cort, Randy, Parizad, Mark, Lee, Margaret, Paul, Michael, Audrey, Laurent, Alex, Minkz, Vishwa, Cindy and Bing)

Guys, we won’t be able to bring a patch to TC3 this week. However, I do have some fun facts about this blog!

Did you know…

…1603 users have posted on this blog?

…there are 11,965 comments made?

…including this blog entry, there are 1,146 blog entries?

Wowsers!!

Happy Wednesday, everyone!  I’ll keep this short and sweet.  We will not be able to do our weekly patch to TC3 today.

Wow!  In EA-Land, there have been over 21,500 custom content uploaded, and over 10,000 in Test Center 3. 

You guys are amazing!

Breaking news! TC3 inhabitants can now use those custom bitmaps they’ve been uploading to customize how their character looks when they (and others) examine the character details property page.

Place the skinnable painting portrait (only one portrait works, it has a funny face on it as shown in the top right of the first screen shot below. It costs about $1200) in your lot and upload a custom bitmap as you normally would:

Drop your custom bitmap onto the skinnable portrait:

Enjoy!

You can return to the 3D model view by ejecting the custom bitmap skin from the painting.

Hello Everyone,

Thanks for mounds of feedback you gave about the feature we’ve been testing on TC3 over the weekend. There was a lot to read through… In your feedback you’ve asked some excellent questions and improved our thinking on how to approach the problem of bot-like behavior. In particular, you’ve given us invaluable information about how this should be tuned. Tests over the weekend showed that what we were trying worked - we’ll relax the tuning with tomorrow’s push.
We’re not going to push anything like this to EA-Land anytime soon until it is properly tuned.

In the mean time we will try to not affect you (monetarily, emotionally, and otherwise!).