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Friday 19 December 2014

#SaveTheClubPenguin - The Community speaks up!

Hello Penguins!
Throughout the past week or so, the community of the beloved game has slowly expressed their opinions in what the Club Penguin team is doing. Where did it all start? When V0rtex posted the following tweet, showing an Open Letter to Disney's Club Penguin current owner: Chris Heatherly, aka Spike Hike.
Before continuing reading, I'd recommend you to read the open letter slowly and carefully , it's worth it.

This woke up the community: Club Penguin is indeed falling. Most of veteran players are only here for the Twitter Community, I know this because I am one of them. The biggest concern is the lack of interaction between Mods and the Community, how they aren't listening to our ideas, our suggestions, what we want.

Yesterday the bomb exploded: when Club Penguin's website went down, and people saw what the Merry Walrus Party was all about, Twitter became chaos. The hashtag "#SaveTheClubPenguin" appeared everywhere and people started expresing their complains, worries and suggestions to the Club Penguin's Twitter account @clubpenguin and to Spike Hike himself.
After some research, I found three tweets that caught my attention:

I clearly remember it, and it is sad that the community isn't as important as it used to be, we never interact with the team other than Spike's fan art tweets which really don't do much other than showing the talent within the community. That's nice, but not something that will make Club Penguin get out of this pit.
Oh yes, the old days when getting into Sleet was hard, the first server page was always 100% FULL and I thought "Wow, people in Avalanche must have a blast!"
Those times in which bloggers struggled to get a picture of an empty room, those were the days in which we all knew that Club Penguin was huge.

Now, this tweet has many suggestions, I'll just say what I think about them one by one.

1. I'm ok with the apps, I find them great and a good step to modernize CP.
2. This is definetly needed, the Club Penguin Team must realize that by hearing the community, they will do things everyone will enjoy and the popularity will go up once again.
3. Maybe not complete, but just one or two. I realize that some players hate them, but others love them. I want to see new parties and old parties like the April Fools Party to return with their amazing crazy stories, like the million dimensions withing the Box Dimension. I'm sure none of the new players know that that rooms exists.
4. This is pretty much the same as N°2
5. Oh yes, Item Adders and Puffle Adders and many more adders are at anyones reach, it is ridiculous. Original Beta Testers are now confused with fakers and everything is a mess in the old items deparment. I myself haven't seen so many bullies, but I'm only on to get rewards (More on this a little bit further down), but players that actually stay on for more than 20 minutes may experience that, If it is happening, CP Team must make it stop.
6. The Buddy List was added 3 years ago and is full of bugs. 'Nuff said.
7. More Merchandise? Yes please! People loved those! I myself own three puffles and a couple of Mix-n-Match figures and a ton of CJ Cards. But they are all gone now.. As for the artwork, it's good in my opinion.
8. Some people replied to the tweet saying that Non-Member get a ton of benefits compared to before. Sorry to tell you, all we get is a ton of hats from parties, two puffles and that's it. CP did a good move though, all Card Jitsu games are now for everyone, which is nice. All of those who say that non-members get many benefits I challange you: Cancel your membership for 6 months, then come back and comment on what you could do in those 6 months.
9. Same as N°4 and N°2 really :P
10. Yes, the community knows what it wants, use it for your advantage Club Penguin Team!

Another open letter my the User @TheMrBiro popped up during this chaos.
Hello.
I really hope you pass that email to the rest of the team, it would show the community that you really hear the fans!
Well, I am an active member on the Club Penguin Twitter Community. So, I know what the players think about the game.
That's why I'm gonna tell you what they like, and what they don't like on the game and community.

What they like:
 - Events like the Funny Hat Week showed the players that the designers can still be creative!
 - Parties like Halloween 2014, because it was different than the other parties. Like... each day of the party was COMPLETELY different than the others. Exploring the giant puffle hotel was... AMAZING!
 - The Sasquatch Mystery. It showed that there are still mysteries to be solved in the island.
 - Expeditions to discover places and mysteries around the island (you guys should bring these back!).
 - New parties.

What they don't like:
 1. The thing they MOST dislike on the community is what happened to the interactions between the players and the staff. Before, they could talk with people like Polo Field by simply sending a tweet. Now, things are very more difficult.
 2. Before, the designers of the team used the CREATIVITY to make the players AMAZED with NEW things, things that they didn't expect. Do you remember these amazing and creative parties like the April Fools Parties?
 3. The goals of the current parties is to get rewards by doing things a random mascot asks. What people want is to have fun with THEIR FRIENDS, by playing games WITH THEIR FRIENDS at the party, not with random NPCs.
 4. Like I said before, the parties don't make the players surprised anymore. Basically most of the 2014 parties WERE EXACTLY THE SAME, with different rooms.
 5. Players don't play the parties to have fun anymore. They just play to get the rewards, and then log off.
 6. You guys don't decorate so many rooms to the parties anymore! Before, there were parties with 30 decorated rooms. Now, that number decreased to... 12 ?!?!?!
 7. The current items. Before, penguins could wear items they couldn't wear on the real life.
 8. They lost the surprise of the discovery of a new puffle. Before, discovering new puffles was a BIG surprise. The discovery event of the Brown Puffle is the biggest example of this. Now, you guys launch new puffles so often, that this surprise disappeared.

How can you solve each item above?
 1. Since you can't use tools like Twitter to communicate with the players, CP could have it's own social network! And this social network could be even In-Game! If you want some ideas, you can see that Open Letter made by a penguin called Vortex. http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=Cc84YWHf
 2. The biggest exception of what I said about the creativity is the Halloween Party 2014. In that party, people could have an experience they couldn't have in ANY other party. When making a party, you guys should think "Did we use that idea before?". And then, you should keep looking for creative ideas to give players experiences they never had before.
 3. People should be able to do the quests freely, when they want, with their friends. You guys should take inspiration from the Halloween 2014 quest (yeah, everyone LOVED that party) and the Medieval Party quests.
 4. You should create NEW experiences for the players in each party, not always the same quests.
 5. The parties should have new exclusive minigames, so the players can have fun while get the rewards. I would like to mention the minigames from the Marvel SuperHero Party and Monsters University Takeover.
 6. You need to decorate the internal rooms too (Pizza, Coffee Shop, etc.).
 7. Here's a tip to create items: To create an amazing item, you have to think on something a person would never wear, like a television. Then, you make a television hat! =D
 8. Discovering a new puffle is not so amazing anymore, because people already know about the existence of the puffle EVEN BEFORE the party actually starts. Also, puffles shouldn't be discovered so often. It's not a surprise anymore.

Other things I would like to suggest (and would make the game a lot better):
 - Ease the chat filter. It's very difficult to talk with a friend now. If the players can't talk to their friends using CP, they will opt to use social networks like Twitter. And that decreases very much the fun of the game. =( The player and blogger Ryita made a discussion about this. Please read that post made by him. http://clubpenguinspace.com/club-penguin-discussion-1117-should-cp-ease-their-chat-filter/
 - Avoid re-using rooms from older parties. Old players wouldn't have new experiences and would leave the game.
 - Avoid doing these "Mascot Meetup Times". Before that, players waddled the entire island looking for the mascots. And, trust me, doing that is really fun.
 - New stage plays. The stage plays are very important to the penguin culture. This is another point that would make the game REALLY better.
 - More plot twists like the "Popcorn Explosion" and the "Operation: Blackout". They are very important events, because penguins can create theories about the future of the game. And that is amazing!

If you guys solve every problem listed on that email, I PROMISE the game will return to be the number 1 social network for kids. A place where they can have fun, security and new experiences!

Thank you very much, and again, please pass that email to the rest of the team!
-Biro
What can I say? He is right. Items are always the same, you only change the colors. They aren't unique! Parties are now boring and repetitive and all I do is complete the daily quest and collect my reward, then log off. The player gives some nice suggestions too. The point I mostly agree on is Puffles (More on them after I finish with this letter). The final suggestions are great. Plot Twists are great (I actually loved the plot twist in October) Stage plays, the filter. Something that I hate is meet-up times. Before I went to 5 blogs, all with their different Xats and everyone looking and helping. Jumping from server to server, making a mental list of which rooms the mascot visited and only go there to make it quicker, finding the mascot and telling everyone on the 5 xats where it was and see the room be filled with people within the minute, I greatly miss it, it was my favorite activity during Parties..

Now onto puffles.

Last year we got the two most anitcipated Puffles: Rainbow and Gold, good move CP, good move. Our puffle count was on 12 by this time last year. This year we got TWENTY THREE new puffles, almost the double. This puts our count in THIRTY FIVE puffles. WHAT HAPPENED?! Discovering a puffle was soo exciting before! The Brown Puffle expedition, seeing the Orange Puffle pop up in the Box Dimension, the shy white puffle in the Dojo, the yellow puffle during the Halloween Party on the Ski Hill... Where has that gone? A new puffle is pointless nowadays! You don't have to take care of the new ones now... As @FrostyBadge said yesterday:
Here are some other tweets I found that make a reference to what was written above.




There you go, Club Penguin Team, this are our worries, concerns and suggestions, your move, you can't ignore this, I wish you good luck, and hope that the game rises again.
PS: Sorry for any grammar mistakes, English isn't my native language!
---
-King
@Kingkong06CP