Time of Transition

Hello everyone!

Well, it's been a pretty exciting week for me. Lots of things have happened, and a lot of them are related to what I am about to say in this post.

So, when I came back to WCC after my few months of absence, one of the first things I did was to put up a poll, which ten readers voted on (plus me, since I always vote on my own polls, since I'm cheap, so that I don't have to keep clicking "View Results" over and over... XD). The results were as follows:

Look for a new game to try!	6 (54%)
Party!	4 (36%)
Start a community story!	0 (0%)
You just go back to doing your update thing now! :D	1 (9%)

Minus my vote on the last choice, that's six out of ten (60%) that wanted to look for a new game to check out.

(As for the four of you that wanted to party, I'm still trying to find a place in my schedule that'll work. It might be a belated Fourth of July party on the 5th or something :D)

So you know what I did?
I looked for games, new and old, to check out.

And guess what I found?
Two really good ones.

One an old favorite...
 ...and one that's famous.

Let's get down to business.


The reason WCC was called WCC was that when it first started, it was intended to be about all kinds of games. I had started off with three, and quickly dropped the other two after the Fuzzy Crisis. Several months later in August of 2011, I did reviews of the three games I had originally started with: Animal Jam, Free Realms, and Wizard101. Out of those three, Free Realms, on the scale of 1-5 stars that I rated them, got a five.

It's been about two years now since I last played Free Realms.

With all of the stuff they've added and changed, today I would give ten stars out of five.

Why? Multiple reasons.

Thing one is that, even though I'm not a member on either game, Free Realm's membership is much less expensive than Animal Jam's (for their yearly membership prices, Animal Jam is $49.95... and Free Realms is $39.60, ten dollars cheaper per year) AND you can do much more with a Free Realms membership than you can with an Animal Jam one.
(Yes, Animal Jam is giving some percentage of membership money to a charity to help big cats, it isn't stated anywhere what percentage of it is going to the charity. For all we know, .5% of the money is going to the charity and the remaining 99.5% is going to overhead expenses and profit.)
With an Animal Jam membership you get to beta-test a lot of the cool new features, get extra animal characters, pets, etc., but you can do all that on Free Realms as well, along with doing members-only quests, buy pets that do multiple tricks, unlock all of the jobs, get a premium house for free, get item discounts and monthly reward packs, and get double coins for the first hour you log on every day.

If I haven't sold you yet on getting even just a Free Realms account, just wait. THERE'S MORE.

Within the past two years since I've last played, they've added a whole new expansion and new combat modes, as well as a huge new questline. The best part about all of this change, though? They gave their non-members more freedom in the process.
While you used to be able to only go up to level 5 on any job except Adventurer, now a non-member can go up to level 20 (the maximum level) on Adventurer and Brawler (one of the combat jobs). I'm not sure how many other jobs you can go this far with; I'm still leveling up my character.
Plus, that huge new questline I mentioned? Non-members can go all the way to the current end without having to pay a single cent.

Other pros for Free Realms include that it's got a massive playerbase (it's had over ten million players since it's first year, I'm pretty sure, while Animal Jam only just hit that mark a few months ago) and a massive world to match, with lots of neat areas to explore and secret things to find. It's so big that even I don't think I've explored all of it.

If I haven't sold you on Free Realms, you're almost a hopeless case. XD


And now, on to the second game. It's one I know a few of you know and love, and that I've used my brother's account on for a long time. Just last night, however, I was finally able to convince my mom to use her credit card to pay $26.95 to get my own account (I paid her back right afterward, and she got five extra cents to boot, because it's cheap to just count out 95 cents when you can fork over another dollar XP).

What is this game?

Minecraft.

For those of you that don't know, Minecraft is an insanely addicting block-based game where you can build anything you can imagine. Literally anything. If I wanted to build a giant sheep, I could build a giant sheep. If I wanted to make a huge castle with all sorts of secret entrances, I could do that, too.

The best part is that there's a large community that is determined to make the best of your experience. Minecraft supports the option for custom skins (infinite possibilities on what you can make your player look like), texture packs (to change what blocks, items, and mobs look like), and mods (to add or change functionality of different things). Also, Minecraft has thousands of multiplayer servers to play on, and on the Downloads page (where you can download Minecraft), you can get software to set up a server of your own. In fact, if we do choose to move our focus to Minecraft, I could even set up an official WCC server for us! :D

The thing that's both good and bad about this game, however, is that you have to pay for it. It's a one-time payment of $26.95 (far more affordable than having to pay for Animal Jam's or Free Realms' memberships for several years), and you get to keep the game and all of its updates forever. However, there is no free-to-play option for this game (well, there's Minecraft Classic; it's ancient and way out-of-date, but it's free).

So, my friends. We have now reached a point of decision.

Do we stick with Animal Jam, spread our focus over any combination of these three games, or move our focus to another game?

I'll put up a poll. Go vote!

Bye for now!

MERICA

Because AJ's having Fourth of July celebrations, sooooooo...

Quitting

Hey guys,
Wolbes here. I am officially quitting animal jam.
It is so stupid now.
Now that Im a non member, it seems like animal jam is disrespecting me.
Anyway.
I had a meltdown about it.
But.
Uh.
Yeah.
bye.

...immacurlupinaholeanddienow...

...hi everyone...

...anyway...

...adventures look super cool.

and now i'm sad.

because i can't beta test.

yes i am going to type like this until i can adventure because i am sad so you better just deal with it.

also look at this.

it makes me sad.

first to explore, which means that they're going to make nonmembers lag behind for ages and ages between adventures. not to mention that ajhq will probably never release the last few adventures to give players more reasons to upgrade to the club
and secret areas, which means rare loot and possibly even battles or bosses that i can't show you.

it's not like i didn't expect it, though, knowing ajhq.
i guess i'll just have to deal with it, since i have no way to pay for a membership.

there's no way you can tell that i have been looking forward to this for centuries.
that was so sarcastic i won't even comment on its sarcasticness, thus causing a sarcastic paradox.

also they have levels.

in other words, my guesses about general quests and experience gaining were correct.
probably.
i can't check.

anyway, the new dot on the left side of a player's nametag shows their level, and their rank.
circle is rank one, levels 1-4. star is rank two, probably 6-10, but the highest i've seen is a level 7, and since some person that i saw outside this picture was shouting about "how'd you get to level 7" or whatever i would assume that it's 'glitched' or cheated. perhaps if we are actually fighting phantoms, they simply ground the mobs for a few levels?

whatever.

there's a new mystery shop of mystery in the home base camp.
i think i know what it's for, but i don't really know what they are. perhaps if the tooltip is correct, they are weapons.
the clothing sort calls them items, though.

see that?
i wouldn't be surprised if soon they reveal that those swords you were equipping to your back before get moved to the item slot.
and get used as weapons.
they'll probably have magic wands or something too.
because they basically have to.

and so, since i have to end this thing somewhere, i have to end it.

this is much less hopeful than it seems on the surface.
let's take a look at another 'still-being-tested' feature.

when did that begin testing?
oh, just over a year ago.

in other words they didn't give us a set release time either.
so they've stuck us non-members in the same loop as they still have us snared in with writing personalized jam-a-grams.

so i think i'll end this overly depressing post with that.
see why this suddenly became the worst update ever for me?

bye for now.

WHAT SORCERY IS THIS?

Okay, is it just me, or was this practically the best update in all of AJ's history?

Let's see: The first page of the newspaper is kinda meh: Pet raccoons are on sale in the Diamond Shop. Kind of a bad first choice for the front page of the newspaper, since everything else is truly amazing.

Second page: Pet hamsters are for everyone. Not just members. ALL. JAMMERS.
Why isn't that on the front page? If there's one thing I have left to complain about, it's that AJ designs their newspapers badly XD

Third page: All Jammers can win Diamonds on the Daily Spin. We already knew that, but it's still good for confirmation. And there's the winner of the Summer Jam-A-Gram.

Fourth page: It's just some of the Diamonds information again.

Fifth page:

Just... Fifth page.

My theories were confirmed. QUESTS.

WHAT SORCERY IS THIS????????

Seriously. I mean, nonmembers get more freedom, everyone will get quests, everyone can get Diamonds... It's like all of my 'prayers' were answered in one update.

Well, the second one isn't confirmed... I'm getting scared now.

Anyway, this is probably the best update of all time, and the only better one will be the one where they add QUESTS!

Bye for now!

PS: Speaking of best-updates-of-all-time, maybe they're trying to trump this one by adding the NEW LAND AND QUESTS at the same time! :D

Raccoons, Hamsters and Adventure!

Hey Jammers! In today's update there are brand new Pet Raccoons only sold at the Diamond shop and currently on sale too!

Isn't it cute?

But that's not all! 

All jammers are now able to get a cute and cuddly Hamster just for 400 gems! Don't believe me? 

Well take a look at this:

And that's not even the most exciting part! On the last page of the Jamaa Journal you can see this image! 

What could this mean? Quests? Something else? Post what you think in the comments and who knows? Maybe you'll be right!

Bye for now!

AJ UPDATE: HELLO PAY STORE! NO ONE REALLY WANTS YOU

Hello everyone!

Well, sorry for the somewhat delayed update... but this update was huge.

Thing is, it wasn't the good kind of huge.

See, the thing is, AJ added a new currency to Jamaa - Diamonds. Hooray, it's a big feature for once in forever!

Wait a second, though. A new currency means that there are items that can be bought with that currency.

So what can be bought with Diamonds? Well, as the name suggests, Diamonds are rarer than Gems, just as in the real world.

So, thus, cool stuff.

But wait a second! If Diamonds are rare and they buy cool stuff... well, all the cool stuff is members only!

Well, not quite. You see, Diamonds are AJ's new equivalent of any sort of real-money currency. For instance, in Free Realms, there's Station Cash; Wizard101 has Crowns. I was actually expecting something like this for a long time, starting to truly suspect shortly after the first Monthly Gift came out, and even before that, too.

The thing with all of these real-money currencies is that nonmembers in all three games I've mentioned can get it elsewhere - in AJ you can get diamonds on the Daily Spin (based on the appearance of the wheel, it's got equal chance as getting 500 gems, but each of the wedges is probably 'weighted' differently (weighted in terms of probability) such that there's actually an extremely low probability of getting a diamond); in Free Realms you used to start with 250 SC (after a while it decreased to an allowance of 99, and now I'm pretty sure you don't start with any); in Wizard101 and its sister games (Pirate101) you start with a total of 75 crowns connected with your account, if I've done it right, that is.

So what's wrong with AJ's Diamonds?

Well, let's compare the currencies.

	Diamonds (AJ)	SC (SOE Games)	Crowns (101 Games)
How to Obtain?	Card, Daily Spin, Weekly (Members)	Card, Account allowance, Weekly (Members)	Card, Account allowance
Obtainable Without Paying?	Yes; Daily Spin	Yes; Allowance at account creation	Yes; Allowance at account creation
What Nonmembers Can Buy?	Diamond/Gem currency conversion	Everything not marked explicitly for members	Everything not marked explicitly for members

See that? If AJ is going to truly be successful with this new currency, they have to even the market first. Yes, they are allowing non-members to obtain Diamonds for free with the Daily Spin, but they could still even the market a bit and add a few things there that can be bought by non-members.

Then again, of course, the Diamonds were supposed to be a replacement for the Monthly Gift... so perhaps we should be thankful that non-members can now get in on the extra gems every now and then.

Well, bye for now!