Alright, before we get to the main topic of this post, I learned some kinda interesting info!
Remember when the Spring Carnival was announced a couple of updates ago?
It said a rare carnival item would be released for one day, and the fact that the Spring Carnival was in the scheduled party list instead of being somewhere permanent made it hard to really check every day.
Every Spring Carnival, something similar happens (I think the 2017 rare was the NM recolored Feathered Mask and the 2018 one was a recolored nonmember Jester Hat– or was it the other way around?). The general idea is that the rare item is a recolored nonmember variant of a member item. It's a little different this time, though.
It was reeeeally hard to figure out what this years Carnival rare was, but I finally learned when I asked people in the Chicken Smoothie AJ thread.
And the rare is...
The Rare Butterfly Wristband!!! If you can believe it, this is the best image I could find.
It's pretty as a sunset, but as you can see it's a recolor of an already nonmember item, breaking the trend of member-to-nonmember Carnival rares. Honestly, though, I'm just happy that there was a Carnival rare at all– I was convinced that AJHQ forgot.
Which brings me to the main point of this post... what the heck is going on with AJHQ?
Now, I'm not one of the people who thinks that AJ is ~dying~– I think the majority of people who think that are just losing personal interest in the game or are upset by the YouTubers who have also lost personal interest in the game.
Still, the past couple years on AJ have been, er, annoyingly uneventful. We've just been cycling through routine seasonal updates without much new at all.
In contrast, I think 2017 was probably one of the MOST eventful years on AJ, especially in regards to lore events.
In 2017, we had...
- Message in a Bottle
- The Solar Eclipse event
- The opening of the Forgotten Archive, with new passages from books coming out every so often for a while
- The 'lines of power' thing
- The destruction of Club Geoz (not a fun event, but a very big change nonetheless)
- New adventures
And in 2018 and 2019, we've had...
- Nat Geo leaving
- Balloosh
- Sabretooth/Direwolf animals
- A couple of Forgotten Archives adventures
- My Shop
- ...and probably nothing else significant
It's funny, updates started getting really uneventful since AJ and Nat Geo parted ways. It's probably just a coincidence though.
In the quote above from Clark Stacey's Instagram 'Return of Animal Jam FAQ', he said that the reason why updates have been so sparse is because WildWorks is 'working hard on something that will be announced soon.'
That was posted in mid-December last year, and it's practically April and we still don't have the slightest clue about what AJHQ might be working on. Wouldn't they give us some sort of a hint?
I'm always researching news about Animal Jam in the hopes that I'll find some kind of explanation. A few weeks ago, I went on the WildWorks page of Glassdoor (a website where current/past employees of a company talk about their experiences working in a place) and while reviews were usually positive, a sizable amount of reviews mentioned creative stagnation, issues with different departments not having enough communication, among other problems.
Of course, people generally go on review sites if they have negative experiences, so the ratio of negative to positive reviews might not be an accurate representation. Still, it can make you anxious to realize that a game you love might be balancing on an unstable foundation.
I'm gonna try to be hopeful and positive, because it seems people at WildWorks are genuinely working hard. Though it would be nice to have more communication about what's going on. :T
Thanks for reading, and Jam on~
P.S. I messaged the CEO of Animal Jam on Instagram with a link to my 'Why AJ should be educational again' post. I don't think he's seen it yet cuz he probably has 100 messages already, but it's a start!
I've accidentally placed a portal at my den entrance and now it won't let me enter. Is there anything I can do?
ReplyDeleteSo when you go to your den you are immediately transported through the portal instead? If that's the case, the only thing I can think of is to trade away or recycle the portal and get a new one.
DeleteCould you do a nature post/rant about lil' cute innocent bettas? There are mistreated in the pet industry and often die
ReplyDelete-julieblap and Bubbles the betta fish
I would imagine they are. Honestly, the pet industry is entirely built off of the mistreatment of animals-- especially fish, considering there are far less regulations keeping them alive. I might make a post about this as it is a very important topic that I feel strongly about-- thanks for the idea!
Deletei actually have a few of the butterfly wristbands.
ReplyDeleteyou should post about that guy that has a full-black necklace on his animal
ReplyDeleteIts kinda sad to see actually how little new content has been added within like 1.5 years compared to 2 years..
ReplyDelete