Last night saw the latest Inside Maxis livestream on Twitch, hosted by SimGuruSalo and SimGuruPopcorn.

Their agenda was simple.  Update us on a couple of features from the latest patch that went live yesterday – we covered that here – look at a few things on our minds and a sneak peek of some stuff coming up soon.

The Patch

One of the main features was the revamp of two of the hair styles, which have improved textures and silhouettes, and are now available for all ages and genders.

Sims 411

The biggest hot topic was an issue a lot of people have reported around autonomy and lag – sims taking too long to do things, or standing doing noting instead of queued actions.  It’s not something I’ve personally noticed (yet?) but as far as I can tell, if you’re affected, you’ll know!

You can send affected game files to help them find causes, as per SimGuruNick’s tweet, and meantime, they suggested a few things as a workaround

• Empty sims’ inventories
• Use less objects on the lot, esp clutter
• Play on smaller lots

They assured us that even if you don’t see any response to posts and tickets, they reply to everyone but are watching and reading all the posts.  They said that AHQ is the best place to post, and encouraged us to post there and use the “Me Too!” button to help show how widespread an issue is.  They also gave a big shout out to all the helpers on AHQ.

They revisited the personality tweaks from the previous patch, and gave a couple of their favourites.

SimGuruSalo uses the Slob and Goofball traits a lot.  Slobs will now mock Neat Sims for cleaning, and goofballs are more likely to choose mischief-based activities.

SimGuruPopcorn uses the clumsy trait a lot, so her sim, like her, are more likely now to fail at sports, stumble or break objects.

I do like that the changes seem to be small tweaks with a big impact on making sims feel more rounded!

They also want to know what’s on people’s minds, so on May 6th, from 6am PST, there will be a specific forum thread for posting feedback.  This will be open for 24 hours.  The idea is to keep everything in one place to make it easier to read!

They stressed that this IS a place to allow them to access player feedback directly, but reminded us to keep posting withing the forum guidelines.  It’s NOT designed to be a content wish list, a guarantee that the issue you raise will make it onto the next 411, or for reporting bugs.  We’ll make sure to share the link next week when it goes live.

What’s next?

We got a sneak peak at next month’s patch.  Another 2 hair styles are getting revamped, including the large afro and a short afro with fade, and we’re getting 6 – count ’em, SIX! – new hair colours!  We’re also getting 16 new Asian eye pre-sets.

They also ended with a hook and tease, telling us that the new Kit and Game pack are both around the corner, so watch this space!  The new kit in particular, they describes as “amazing” and “pretty”

You can rewatch the stream here.