SimGuruDrake is the Global Community Manager for The Sims franchise and she has been under a lot of scrutiny for quite some time. Her situation with some members of the Sims community finally reached a boiling point after sending some emails and making a post on the official forums.
The new torrid controversy began with an information leak for a The Sims 4 expansion titled City Living. A person going by the name of Sim Nonymous emailed an unknown number of fansites claiming that he or she is a member of the team working on The Sims 4. They reported that the next expansion will be called City Life and provided a detailed list of the features it will bring. This news began to spread as both media sites and fans alike shared the leaked details. It wasn’t long until Electronic Arts, the game’s publisher, was forced to announce the new expansion officially.
Upon her return from a vacation, SimGuruDrake wrote a forum post which addressed the leaked information and Sims team communication going forward. She stated that she was disappointed with the mystery employee, the Sim-related fansites, and the Sim community for spreading the information. She also went on to say that it is very likely that there will be stricter rules in regards to employees interacting with fans in the future. The news from this post was not taken well by some fansites and at least one news blog has since gone on hiatus until SimGuruDrake is no longer Community Manager. The damage went on further after SimGuruDrake emailed and directly tweeted simscommunity.info, and continued further still when it was revealed that only Sim-related YouTube channels were contacted by The Sims developers with pre-release information.
Not everyone is casting SimGuruDrake in a negative light, however. Some of the official forum users have been creating Sim Guru appreciation threads, many of which get hijacked with more negative posts. There are also conversations on Reddit and Tumblr regarding the Guru in which some posters are commending her on running a “tighter ship”. They stated that the community has gone running rampant for long enough and that someone really needed to step up. “Ruffling some feathers” is simply bound to happen when someone comes in and begins to make changes not everyone agrees with.
Do you think SimGuruDrake is behaving unprofessionally? Is she doing the right thing with tighter rules and instating less SimGuru communication with fans? Let us know your thoughts when you share this post on your favourite social media site!
