As you already probably know if you've been reading my blog for any amount of time, Toontown is an incredibly sensitive subject with me.
I had played the game since its release, when I was about 9 years old.
My original toon was Miss Binky Octomuffin, a tall, electric green rabbit wearing a purple floral top and skirt. She was later deleted due to my obsession with cats, and remade.
My main Toon became renamed Miss Binky Octofish, and she was a tall, sand-colored cat. Her outfit has been through many iterations throughout the years. I have never held onto a character for even a fraction of the amount of times Miss Binky Octofish has been around.
My other primary character was a short black cat wearing a white top and skirt named Nobody. She is another long-existing character of mine.
I played before you could decorate your house, before fishing was actually a thing that you did to earn jellybeans, before racing, golfing, Cog HQs, accessories, doodles, black cats, the Silly Meter, moving fire hydrants and such on the streets, being able to type to other people. I played when they still sent out newsletters and collectible cards through the mail. I'm pretty sure I have a complete collection of the cards and newsletters.
Toontown was shut down on November 19th, 2013.
I think that part of the reason why it all ended up going wrong was because of open-chat: the ability to type to anyone.
Previously, we had to choose from a list of pre-defined phrases. You could buy new phrases and emotions. If you knew someone in real life, you could trade secret-friend codes, and then you could type them. No one else would be able to see what you typed, except for your secret friends. People found ways to trade codes with people they didn't know, but for the most part, it was a good system.
Has anyone ever heard of the experiment in which they placed a 14 year old boy in front of a game concept where they had a limited dictionary, but you could still type to each other? As in, the same system as is now used in many "child friendly" games?
Within a few minutes, the boy had come up with the phrase "I want to stick my long-necked Giraffe up your fluffy white bunny." (http://habitatchronicles.com/2007/03/the-untold-history-of-toontowns-speedchat-or-blockchattm-from-disney-finally-arrives/)
I still don't understand how, after that experiment, anyone thought that "Hey! Maybe we should let people type to each other using a limited-dictionary! Nothing could go wrong!"
Yeah, things did go wrong. Of course, if you give people the chance to talk on a game, they are going to talk. What used to be a perfectly "child friendly" game, turned into a chatroom where people talked about boyfriends/girlfriends, made rather obvious innuendo, and bypassed the filters in order to swear or tell people their age.
Were there some benefits with free-chat? Yes. It made battles such as the VP, CFO, CJ, and CEO much more streamlined, as you could now direct people in a simpler manner. Even bypassing the filter in order to say numbers had its benefits with directing people as to what cog they should hit. But, honestly, that's where the benefits ended.
Did people make friends? Yes. Were there plenty of nice people on the game who didn't abuse the chat system? Of course! But you didn't really notice them. You noticed the people that were abusing it. If I were a mother and my young child wanted to play this game, I would have said no after running around for a bit. It was hailed as "child friendly" even after free-chat went into place. When in actuality it had become a cesspool of worse behavior than I usually see on the other MMOs I play.
I know that the chat-system had its good points. My grandmother made a lot of friends through Toontown, that she still talks to. But for the most part, that wasn't the case, as far as I saw.
Today, I finally got into Toontown Rewritten, and I was disappointed. I was so happy to have gotten in, and I was so happy to be back in the game. It was all just as I remembered it, save for a few things that hadn't yet been implemented. I was disappointed that free-chat was still in the game. I knew it would be, but part of me was really, really disappointed.
I re-created Miss Binky Octofish and went into the game, only to witness things that I didn't really want to see. People getting angry because you defeated a cog that they needed (when they were way down the road where you couldn't see them, and they didn't ask you to wait or anything). People calling non-cats ugly. A whole lot of people getting upset with each other. I was left there thinking "Doesn't anyone here appreciate the fact that we are able to play this game again?" It certainly didn't seem like it. I didn't end up playing for my full three hours because it just started feeling sick to my stomach a bit.
Maybe I am just over-sensitive. Or, rather, I know I'm over-sensitive. It's kind of a thing with me. If someone's upset in the next room my stomach starts churning, even if it has literally nothing to do with me. I don't even have to know the person and I still get sick. I'm like allergic to negative emotions or something, I swear :P
This game is very much beloved by me, and I don't want to see it shut down again. I'm just worried that with free-chat still in place, the game will have harassment issues and will be forced down.
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