"Cute concept, but major flaws abound."

Social online games are nothing new. Sims Online tries to claim it's somehow doing something revolutionary, but it isn't. Talker MUDs and MUSHs have had the same interface for ages, and Furcadia (a graphical talker MUSH) has allowed you the ability to create your own worlds and add them to the main world for almost 6 years now. That said, Sims Online is a good concept: a social game in which you become a character, chat with people and basically mess around with each other in heavily interactive and social environments, while all the while trying to increase your personal skills so that you can make money performing jobs and eventually own your own property. Sounds like fun and, at first, it is. The system runs pretty smoothly and lag isn't too much of a problem. It's fun to interact with real people with all sorts of social abilities and activities. The big problem comes when you begin to understand the system by which you earn skills and make money is SORELY broken.
When you perform a job, say like making a wooden gnome, you can eventually get paid for that. However, you get paid more if your related skill (Mechanical, in this case) is leveled up. Makes sense. The problem is, it takes HOURS upon HOURS to level up a skill, which is done by performing repetitive tasks constantly until your Sim levels up. To make things worse, the only way to speed up this agonizingly slow process is to do it with other people at the same time. Great...except when there's no one around. Assuming you spend the time to level your Sim up to godly levels, performing jobs still takes a ridiculous amount of time. It takes roughly 5 minutes to manufacture a gnome, for which your reward, at max, would be something like $300-400. Sounds great, except buying and outfitting your own property (the biggest use for money in the game) is INCREDIBLY expensive. The game makes it sound like owning a property and having visitors is the best way to make money. But, with only $10,000 to start with, there's no way you can do this effectively. So, the only way to buildup your money to make a property is to literally spend HOURS and HOURS online doing incredibly boring activities to try and level your skills or make money on jobs. Keep in mind, while you can chat while doing these things, you can't do anything else. Need to take care of your sim by eating and bathing and all that? You have to stop what you're doing and come back, which of course, also brings down the learning/job rate for everyone else participating.
So, basically, what you have is a social environment for chatting that tries to add in some game-like aspects, but becomes a tedious chore. Additionally, tons of functions that Maxis make LOOK like they are in the game, actually aren't. No, you can;t play in a band, no you can't run a casino, or do many of things promised on the box. In fact, owning property or becoming a roomate is almost pointless given the people with no lives who have already amassed small fortunes and already run properties that everyone goes to. WHo will visit your $5000 house when everyone who lives on the game already has $500,000 properties with everything a Sim could want?
This wouldn't be fatal, except that if your property sucks because you have no money, you basically CAN'T hang out there with your friends, because you'll all get red status reports (your Sim's personal needs) because your house isn't up to speed with the more expensive ones.
Another gigantic error is the inability for you to set your idle/logoff times. Instead, all players get 15 minutes of idle before being logged off. Guess what? Learning most skill points, especially in the early levels, takes WAY more then 15 minutes, so if you're not chatting or doing anything interesting, you still have to click on something every now and then to maintain connection.
Bottom line....it's a clever concept that needs major fixing. Stuff costs too much, leveling takes WAY too long (dungeon crawlers have NOTHING on this one), performing jobs takes ridiculous amounts of time, and the property system only rewards the people who have days and days of their lives to devote to doing nothing but playing hte game all day. ANyone with a job or a normal life will find that it will take months to get to a point where you are making decent money/skills, unless you're somehow amazingly lucky to get accepted as a roomate in an already wealthy property.

Avoid this, and stick with free social MUDS and MUSHes that already offer half of this stuff. (Furcadia for sure).

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 01/09/03, Updated 01/09/03