Kate answers:-

How important are collection files to you?

February 2008

The short answer is No!

Out of around 100,000 or so messages we receive every month only 1 or 2 at most are from players asking us for collection files. In a poll we ran in 2006 only 25% of responders told us they use collection files at all and a further 44% had no idea what a collection file is.

The biggest issue with collections is that since we have several thousand Sims 2 downloads we would logically need to provide collection files for all our existing material. Since this is a huge and unreasonably boring task it is not something I would contemplate asking our Resident Artists to do, so therefore it is something I would have to find time to do myself and since I already spend over 60 hours a week managing this site and creating for it, finding the time to make collection files would be a huge challenge.

The second issue is the matter of how those collection files would be organized. In chatting to some of the people who've contacted us about this it seems there is wide disagreement amongst players who want this feature, as to the scope and nature of collections. Should we have a single collection that features everything on the site, would it be better if we had collections organized by theme/style, do players really want individual collections which contain single sets, would it be necessary to split up walls, floors, clothes and furniture into separate collections or would people prefer to have items of a similar style all bundled together regardless of what type of items were included? Those who do care about collection files seem to have strong opinions on how their collections are organized and it seems to me that we could put ourselves in a situation where we would have to spend a lot of time making all sorts of different collections to try and suit as many people as possible. Either that or it would be a waste of time if most people who wanted collections found our collections unsuitable.

There are other side issues which make collection files a problem. Even if we find the time to create the collection files we still have to find ways of presenting them on the site - all of which would require a ridiculous amount of time and effort. A collection file wouldn't be much use if no one knows what is in it, so a 'shopping list' of included items would be required and putting web pages together takes a long time! Putting together 2 or 3 collection files plus their corresponding web pages could easily take more time than producing a new set of downloads. Which would you rather have? New content or collection files for stuff that is already on the site?

Technical support issues cannot be ignored either. With so many players not knowing what a collection file is, we would inevitably get more questions and complaints and support issues from people who were confused by collections. I strongly believe that we would get a lot of messages from people telling us they couldn't find advertised items because they didn't appreciate the collection file is just an index and doesn't contain the files. Either that or we're back to spending a lot of time presenting pages with download links and all the item information so people can download items along with the collection files!

So basically you're saying Collections are too much of a pain and we'll not be seeing them on Parsimonious ever?

Previously I had made an 'executive' decision not to have collections, however we're always collectively mindful of things that visitors want and we do periodically look at ways to make such features available.

This should not be considered a promise that we'll have collections at any point because of the reasons I've given above, but it is an issue we'll continue to look at and in that respect there is a small possibility that we may introduce some limited collections in the future.

The most likely area where we may contemplate posting collection files is in our Sims 2 Fashion Themes section, since all the items in a theme are already available for download on each Theme collection page and the section itself is not updated very often, less than once a month on average which would reduce the headache of constantly updating collections.

We may consider offering collections for our Furniture Sets which bundle items of a particular style together with their coordinating walls & floors but as yet we haven't been able to find the time to do this or find a sensible way of updating our Furniture page templates to include them. You might think its easy enough to create a collection, but from the web administration side there are all sorts of headaches of how to automate and store collection file information, how to make updating the files accessible to our Resident Artists, how to notify visitors about collection updates and how to present them on the page in a format that requires no words so that our very mixed international audience can readily appreciate what they are and how to use them.

It is extremely unlikely (like Lottery win unlikely!) we'll be making Wall & Floor collections. With over 3000 items in our Sims 2 Decorating section it is just too big a job considering very few players are interested in Walls & Floors, the section is the 5th busiest on the site out of 7 sections so it really can't be considered a priority. In 3 years no one has asked us yet to create a Themes section for our Homecrafter items, we only introduced the sets feature because it was requested by a member of staff (who has since left!) so there seems to be virtually no need or interest and therefore no point in us wasting our time on something no one wants.