TSO Restoration

TSO Restoration (October 18, 2010 to September 21, 2011) is considered to be the first large-scale project assembled to restore The Sims Online. It is predominantly known for connecting a thousand people together in the TSO community years after the game ended.

The coordinator of the project, Ghost, shut down the project months after reportedly receiving a takedown notice by EA in June, as losing the court case would create profound implications for other projects aiming to create a private server for commercial video games; and while winning would allow TSOR to continue operation, because very little code was produced during the term the project was active, he did not want to open the possibility of losing when it appeared TSOR might never become playable.

The programmers of TSOR, Fatbag (then X-Fi6) and Afr0, continued their work anyway by branching the code into Niotso and Project Dollhouse, respectively. They now work independently.

Controversy
While the project was active, news updates were posted only to the forums, which were administered solely by Ghost and made viewable only to freely registered members. Ghost informed the public that only those that paid $50 with PayPal would be eligible to test the game, though partial installments were accepted. Over six months, $2400 had been raised by roughly 100 people into Ghost's account, which roused suspicion in former developers that had been terminated and banned from the project for forbidden communication with other banned forum members; at no point did the project have any visible progress beyond basic OpenGL and XNA lesson demos and format readers, whatsoever. In less than a year past its inception, with no progress, Ghost closed the website and ceased the hosting contracts, leaving a goodbye message for a few weeks. None of the donated money was returned, and the takedown notice was never posted. Thus, many believe the takedown notice was faked.

In addition, passwords may have been recorded on the website in plaintext, compromising 4,000 registered accounts that may be subject to password reuse.