User blog:LostInRiverview/The Sims Wiki News - 1st August 2013

 Welcome to August, everybody! There's quite a bit going on in The Sims universe and on The Sims Wiki, so let's get started!

The Sims News

 * New Surfing DLC. The "Surf's Up Sun & Fun Wave Station" is set to release this week. Now, I'm not saying that this content doesn't look great, but shouldn't it have been a part of The Sims 3: Island Paradise? In any case, you can check out the original forum thread here (Courtesy of BeyondSims for the original link).
 * Live Broadcast replay. If, like me, you missed the July 30th Live Broadcast, fear not! You can check out a video of the broadcast here.

The Sims Wiki News

 * New Administrator nomination. Pidgeoraptor7 has been nominated for Administrator on The Sims Wiki. If you want to weigh in on this nomination, please go here. If you wish to nominate someone else for administrator, or wish to apply yourself, please add your name to the list on the RfA page.
 * July Project of the Month Recap. I want to thank everyone who took some time to participate in last month's project. Thanks to you, it was a successful month for us! Be sure to check in later as I go into detail on the July project, and reveal the August project of the month (link will be provided here when I write the blog).
 * Community Discussions. We're talking about a couple important things right now on the community discussions forum right now - be sure to check out these threads:
 * Male or female? - Some Sims appear as a particular gender, while the game recognizes them as being of the opposite gender; help us resolve how to display this information in our articles.
 * "Too many X" responses in RfX - There is a discussion about whether the rationale of "we have too many" of a particular position type is a good reason to oppose a user's promotion in a user rights request.
 * Late 2013 theme discussion - Discussion has started on if we should remove the Island Paradise wiki theme, whether we want to return to the old wiki theme or not, and whether we want to create a new theme for late 2013.
 * Some issues with Featured Editor - We are still working on resolving a problem with Featured Editor nominations; please weigh in!

Question of the week
Today marks the 5th anniversary of the shutdown of The Sims Online (later EA Land). TSO was the first attempt at moving The Sims to an online environment, and it struggled to succeed. The internet has come a long way since TSO was released, however. The big question that surrounded The Sims 4 prior to its announcement was whether it would follow in the footsteps of SimCity and force an online multiplayer component. Though Maxis chose not to take the game in that direction (largely due to SimCity's poor initial reception), it's curious to wonder whether another online Sims game would take off nowadays, and to what degree the game would be integrated with the online multiplayer aspect of TSO and others.

How would you react to a more online-focused TS4? Let us know in the comments below!

--  LostInRiverview talk ~ blog 17:33, August 1, 2013 (UTC)