EA is running a The Sims 4 based competition called “The Sims Spark’d” and it really bugs me how little effort they’ve put into this

The Sims Spark'd is a Sims 4 TV show where community's favorite influencers are competing for 100k $ prize. The issue is, that with all of the things that EA has done so far, EA did not care to put in the effort.

It is a creative idea, but EA being EA has really gone the lazy route. So, there's two issues. First is the show itself. Someone cared so little that for example, it's not surprising to see a mouse left on screen in the middle of an elimination challenge during the show that was good enough to air on TV: https://youtu.be/-u5y7WkEkZw?t=1884 . . From the same episode, there's briefly a period of time when there's two mice on screen and one time when windows player controller flashes up.

Secondly, the judging is so arbitrary that you're going to see the same sentiment echoed throughout the whole community. It feels like if the judge that day has liked the colour red, then whoever made a thing incorporating that colour will win.

Then we have the player side of this whole thing – community members can participate in challenges in order to attempt to win a spot on Season 2 of The Sims Spark'd, exciting, isn't it? Except that The Sims team does not care to even run their competition. The first submission window has already passed.

First, the submission itself bugged out and locked a lot of simmers from being able to submit: https://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/979438/storyteller-submission-error

Then, EA didn't even display those competing. They programmed in a lazy button that does a youtube search instead: https://www.ea.com/games/the-sims/sparkd/storyteller . There's no reliable way for simmers to even see each other creations!

Well, outside of the storyteller side, the builder and stylist side went for submission through EA's own Gallery. That should go smoother, right? Wrong! Only the top 100 most popular submissions will be looked at by the judges and have a chance to win, however the whole challenge side was absolutely spammed with submissions not following the rules, off topic ones, or ripped submissions. https://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/979066/sparkd-gallery-needs-way-better-moderation

As someone that keeps on coming back to The Sims 4 and tried to muster the enthusiasm here, watch the show and participate in the challenge, it's so utterly frustrating, how EA can invest more than 100 000$ into something and still completely fail to put in the effort. Who runs a competition in a way where you can't even see all the submissions, because they couldn't be bothered to embed peoples videos into the site? WHO LEAVES MICE ON SCREEN ON LIVE TV?