It does sound extremely fishy, I do feel really bad though if they were actually good people.... who knows maybe Bill Gates is a closet simmer XDXD

He'd make a great computer whiz sim. :P

I fall a little more in love with Princess Leia every day. Also, "Kerby & Alex" kinda sounds like a videogame title. Bring back Kerby & Alex, EA! And include ponies, this time.

Mostly, though, I feel obliged to point out that EA can run their forums however they want. "Free speech" is not a right on a forum hosted on someone else's server. You want free speech? Step away from the computer and head to your local park. People who don't like the way EA runs their forum need to NOT PARTICIPATE IN EA'S FORUMS.

Oooh, I guess I have a little caps terrorist in me, too.

This is pretty intense. Haha.

EA just technically banned many, many of their customers since Kerby & Alex alone are equivalent to that number. Haha. I hope they have a good reason for doing so and enraging their online community. It's understandable if they don't though. After all they've been so efficient at failing to communicate with their gaming communities for so many games. Almost like a tradition. I think it's their secret company motto or something.

Well, I've gotten in on the gift-giving sort of thing, too. I've never gifted anyone anything, but I have been gifted before. I would be more than willing to gift, though, if I had any money at all to buy simpoints. And they don't gift sets, except in rare cases and BB. They gift small items from the sets, everywhere from just 25 points to 100 points gifts. That way, their money goes farther. There are entire gifting threads set up for people to post their wishlist and then someone may or may not gift them. But full sets are rarely gifted. There are a lot of people out there who are just giving people. They find joy in giving to other people what those people cannot obtain themselves. And it's not as though they don't buy stuff for themselves or are not gifted in return. There might be some people who do it for an ulterior motive, but most of them are just plain good people who get joy from giving. I should know, my best friend is exactly like that and it drives me insane.

Obviously, these two big gifters were banned for something and if EA is not telling then EA is not telling. It might not have anything to do at all with their gifting practices but it could also be due to inappropriate posts or spam or any of the number of reasons EA bans people.

This is actually the real problem in the end: Did you know that when someone is banned on the Sims site they lose anything that they have bought from the Sims store? All items, sets, and remaining simpoints. No refund. That alone is robbery.

Join the boycott. This is what we're fighting now. They mistreat their customers (remember SecuRom and the fact that they put Spyware in Ambitions?) and they take our money without letting us keep our products.

Plain and simple. These people were banned without cause (if they were, they were never told for what cause), and blocked from using anything they had purchased. Anyone who's banned for any reason, can't access anything they've spent their money on. That should NOT be legal.

Ah, okay. Well, as someone who has never bought anything from the Store and relies solely on community-generated custom content, I... s'pose you can say I've been boycotting all this time? WOO YAY I DON'T KNOW WHAT I'M YELLING ABOUT CAPS LOCK TERRORISM AND SUCH

I've never actually heard the issue of "Spyware in Ambitions" before. What's that all about? (Tried a Google search, but I can't find any info. Maybe I just suck at searching? XD)

Edit: Also, I personally never had problems with SecuRom, but I got freaked out hearing all the issues others had. Do they still include it in the new games EA releases, or did they actually listen to the consumers (HA HA HA) and take it out?

Spyware in the game. http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/s...p?topic=18840.0

SecuRom did break my computer's disc drive.

They took it out after enough people complained but it took a few expansion packs of the Sims 2 for them to finally do something about it.

Frankly I never knew the Store actually HAD enough merchandise to spend thousands on... Hundreds maybe.... :/

So they're banning people that use a feature they put in? It's like inviting someone inside your house, only to have the doorknob shock them when they try to turn it, then laugh and shut the door in their face.

EDIT: Oh mah gawd, it's teh EAxis of Evil! o 3o
But is that serious? Eh, don't matter. Gotta have my AwesomeMod.

To start, you DONT have the right to free speech on a private owned and operated internet forum.

That right only applies to the government and to public spaces and of course ONLY when it exists.

EA have the right to alter and delete posts, you should have known that if you have read the Terms of Service when you registered the account, also the same applies here and you might not like it and feel its wrong when it happens but there is no question, they have the right to do so.

I only point this out because there are FAR too many people under the illusion they have the " right of free speech" when posting on a Internet Forum.

Ok everybody, Alexis and Kerby were two of the most nicest simmers on earth. I never really knew Kerby, but Alex was an angel. She gifted everybody in her thread, unless they made a ludicris demand. If they wanted a set or Barnacle bay, she would skip them. The reason why she spent so much money is because she ran a business, probably a very successful one, and she liked to brighten up people's days. When she became "evil", she would "rob" people's wishlists, meaning she would gift everything on their list. Also, she never illegally bought simpoints. She mostly got simpoints by buying those Simpoint cards you can get at the store. Some people may think "oh, she stole the cards and redeemed them at home", but this is untrue, since you need to register the cards at the cash register in order for them to work. So before you say anything, I just want to make it clear that neither of them did anything shady.

you do realize that once you download a store item...you just go into the download folder...and move it somewhere else on your computer....

if they lost all there boughten/gifted GAME items...its no ones fault but their own....

But if their game file becomes corrupted or they have to remove it, and didn't save backups of the items, then they won't be able to get it back.

welp theres one thing i have never had happen...a corrupt store file....

What if your computer crashes (which does happen to plenty of people)? Then you can't get anything you purchased back.

FINE....then....if they were only banned...say...THIS MORNING......

they should have had there stuffed backed-up on there computer!!!...or dare i say a disk

Settled!!

True, they are connected to the account that if deleted is no longer available as linked.

I was looking at the TS3 Store Digital Services Agreement and here is what it says.



Their Terms of Service is on its own page, includes the usual landry list of what might be a violation of the Terms of Service.

Now talking about it on a message forum is not going do change a damn thing, this is up to the user to bring up with EA support and even consider taking the case to court, virtual goods have few, if any, legislation that is why I despise virtual good as a consumer I have little, if any, protection.

So they are "rental" purchases also? That sucks.

To be honest - and I'm not saying this because I agree with EA's decision to ban them prematurely but so you understand why most of us weren't too eager to, um, support the cause - I think the biggest issue here is that... even if they were innocent and EA banned them out of paranoia, I'm betting that most of us don't really know what to do about this. Yeah, yeah, "boycott". Boycott what? Late Night? That's pretty much the only EA product we're waiting on. I'd say the majority of MTS users don't use the Store at all (save for free items and small impulse buys) or only use it to make big purchases like worlds, and I'm betting that an even larger number of MTS users disapprove of the Store concept in the first place. That's why we're at MTS and not the official forums, right? I personally don't even remember my login information. I pretty much just registered my game in June 2009, said "Wham bam thanks for Riverview!" and never used it again.

It's more like even if we did boycott, it's not going to change a thing. It's kind of like those online petition things people try to do: no offense to those who make them, because at least you're trying, but the companies never look at them. Even if they cared, there'd be no way to tell that the number of people who signed weren't just one person signing over and over using different names. Boycotting is not going to do anything, even if there were something to boycott. Late Night's not even out yet, so we can't boycott that, and this whole thing will blow over by the time it does come out. It's sad that they lost all of their stuff, especially in case they eventually suffer from a computer crash, but EA doesn't usually arbitrarily ban people: there's usually a reason, even if it's not one that they're willing to tell.

Put me in the group that worries about anybody spending "thousands of dollars" that way in the first place.

If you have that kind of cash to give away, give it to people who need it for stuff they need. Down at your local homeless shelter for instance. Or to flood victims in Pakistan. Or whatever comports with your ethics.

Spending a lot of real money giving virtual items to strangers on a game forum is not "nice"... it is crazy, in my view. I do have to suspect in this case that there's some issue EA became aware of... illicitly accessed credit card numbers seems like a likely candidate (mom's is one possibility but there are plenty of others... identity theft for instance?)

I'm not letting EA off the hook, mind: the whole forum gifting system is meant to exploit people who have the means and the desire to buy popularity, so in a way they created these monsters. They set up a social network popularity "game" where the people with most cash can win.

And I'm all in favor of boycotting their forums, but the reason would be primarily that they're badly run and technically shoddy (down a lot and slow when up and appallingly unevenly moderated, to say nothing of the tenor of the discussion there). Since there are so many other competently managed Sims forums, why does anybody go there in the first place? *scratches head*

Whew. Thank God I got AwesomeMod. Pescado really is a genius.

It's suspicious. Several months ago someone hacked into my EA account. I had some unspent simspoints in the store. The thief made a number of gifts.

Normal people typically do not give thousands of dollars away to strangers. It is possible it is legit, but highly improbable.

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As far as free speech on these forums, there is none. You pretty much have to follow the forum owners roolz.

That being said, it's why I set up my own blog. I can pretty much post whatever I want there, because Blogger generally does not care.

I only post at the Sims 3 site on very rare occasions, and I post here far more than I should.