Animal Jam Classic (2014-present)

Animal Jam Classic (formerly Animal Jam) is a massively multiplayer online role-playing kid-friendly game developed and published by WildWorks on September 9, 2010, in association with the National Geographic Society.

Gameplay
You play as an animal (starter choices are rabbit, panda, koala, monkey, penguin, tiger, and wolf) that you can modify by changing its colors, dressing them up, etc. The game is set in a peaceful-looking land known as Jamaa, which has lots of lore surrounding it. You can explore Jamaa, play games, make friends and go on adventures.

Plot
Some heron bird named "Mira" disappeared into nothingness for some unexplained reason. Oh, and the animal shamans are battling these one-eyed, six-tentacled creatures called "phantoms." Nobody knows what they want.

Altogether

 * 1) The newspaper articles lack any sort of context.
 * 2) It cares little about the non-English servers. The languages are badly translated as if they were translated in Google Translate. This is further proven by the fact none of the non-English versions of the Daily Explorer (the official Animal Jam blog, basically) have been posted after November 2017.
 * 3) The default colors for the animals and the color schemes of some places are awfully rendered. The general color scheme of the game is unhappy and dreary, and the brighter colors still manage to look depressing.
 * 4) Similar to Roblox, it's a scheme for parents to feel that it's worth investing in for their children.
 * 5) The moderators are useless and practically non-existent. They do nothing to solve things like bullying and scamming, both of which are prevalent in the game. They are also shamelessly playing favorites with popular users, as they will only listen to them for ideas. This lead to normal users requesting popular users to send ideas to the moderators.
 * 6) *The report system is also quite the joke itself. It barely works unless you get about 30 people to report. But have fun doing that because it will take a few weeks and the reported player, if banned, can easily make a new account.
 * 7) Pretty much every mini-game in Animal Jam Classic is a cheap knockoff of a much better game, with almost no fun or difficulty whatsoever (for example, Swoopy Eagle is a ripoff of Flappy Bird). The only exception to this is Spot On, which is somewhat original, but also a boring game with a crappy concept. This makes the game an asset thief as they directly copy the controls used from the games they're ripping off.
 * 8) The adventures are extremely repetitive and boring. A good chunk of them are also simple and not as difficult as they're made out to be. There are also some plot holes in them, which brings us to our next point...
 * 9) *In particular, The Forgotten Desert and the seasonal adventures have tedious tasks where you explore a massive map trying to look for tiny objects, and once you find all of them, you rarely get anything good. Very rarely in TFD and Lucky Clovers will you get spiked collars (not even in TFD anymore as of 2021, but we’ll get to that in our "Nowadays" section).
 * 10) The "storyline" of Animal Jam is stupid and lazy. It has changed at least ten times because it can't keep consistency, which can lead to plot holes in both the lore and the adventures. Also, the way that they keep adding "backstory" without any planning, indication, or proper context just goes to show how lazy Animal Jam HQ is with this.
 * 11) Speaking of the story, it seems that the game actually supports discrimination. Multiple shorts show animals bullying Phantoms minding their own business. No wonder why they're the villains! The ads do not help either, as they have the same concept.
 * 12) The "safe chat" option is complete buffoonery, as you can say words like "Undertale", "Sans", "Bendy" (basically any word involving a popular PC game from this era), but you can't say words like "Dingo". That is the ironic part. You can't talk about Dingoes, which are animals, on an animal-oriented game. The "free chat" option is restricted to only players who are paying for membership unless the players had a membership and got free chat before.
 * 13) *The chat system is also so strict that you are restricted from saying minor words that aren't even inappropriate such as "dumb", "phone", "website", "electronic", "666"/"six hundred sixty-six", or even "what the hey".
 * 14) *As demonstrated by QuackityHQ’s raid, the very second you find a way to bypass the filter, your new combination gets censored.
 * 15) The trading system resulted in a mass corruption of the ‘’Animal Jam’’ society. This was never a problem in the first year or two of the game, but ever since headdresses were removed, the value of many items inflated. There are a few specific examples of this:
 * 16) *Players get jealous over not being "rare" like everybody else, which can lead to hacking and scamming.
 * 17) *Items are valued at ridiculously high worths due to inflation. The most egregious case is the most valuable item in-game, the light pink headdress (or you could even replace that with glitched magenta items), is worth 500 black longs. Who would spend thousands upon thousands of hours of grinding just to get virtual clothes? You could practically have completed a job to retirement by the time you finally get that junk.
 * 18) *When you trade somebody and it takes five minutes to load, only for them to decline. Just decline right away if you’re going to be picky!
 * 19) *Players in the server Aladin are especially toxic. That server is filled with extremely rare players who have the rarest items on the game. They crowd up Jamaa Township, Coral Canyons, and Brady’s Lab repeating the same thing over and over, constantly declining trade requests. If you go here, you’d think, what kind of person spends all their time on a dead kid’s game just to show off what they collected?
 * 20) *You think all of this is bad? What if we tell you that some people actually sell items on eBay for real money. How desperate do you have to be to be rare that you’re willing to spend hundreds of dollars on a virtual piece of clothing?
 * 21) The players who pay for membership are bratty kids and teenagers who make fun of you for being a non-member and not being as "rare" as them. If anything, they’re the losers who actually waste hundreds of their parents’ dollars into virtual avatars, not to mention wasting thousands of hours sitting in front of a screen, probably getting eye and hand damage in the process.
 * 22) The customer service is terrible. If you get scammed, they will send an automatic robot message asking for stuff (such as your username, the username of the scammer, what the items you lost are gone, and what time it happened). They don't even help solve the problem for scamming. It also is very hard to get AJHQ to answer the phone.
 * 23) The game barely has any non-mammals. Okay, while there are a few birds, the game only has four cold-blooded animals (three of them are exclusive to the ocean locations, which nobody even visits anyways). Might as well be renamed to Mammal Jam.
 * 24) *Speaking of the animals, there are some rather lazy animal choices in this game that are basically just the already-existing animals with patterns on them (such as the Spring Bunny and the Snowflake Arctic Wolf which is just a bunny with flowers on it and a arctic wolf with snowflakes).

Nowadays

 * 1) The game shifted from being about learning about animals and making friends to trying to be the rarest you can be.
 * 2) Animal Jam HQ sends advertisements that promote its products in your mailbox pretty much every day, and it's impossible to disable them. In 2017, it had also redesigned the weekly newspaper to make room for more advertisements. Ironically, it claims to be "advertising-free". The advertisements themselves are all boldfaced lies.
 * 3) Whenever new lands used to be added, they had a unique biome and theme to them, and also had at least two distinct buildings attached to it. They also had a “journey book”. (The journey book is a journal where you could look for different plants and animals on the land and it would pop up with animal facts when you clicked on them. The prize for finding all of the animals are unique furniture items that are related to the location in some way.) However, the same cannot be said for the Balloosh that was added in 2018. Despite seeming to be themed around a swamp, the place, for some reason, sells fossil-related furniture and the only building in that land is dedicated to extinct animals. Why does the game have playable sabertooths and direwolves in a game that’s supposed to teach kids about the modern world? And what’s your prize for finding all the animals in the journey book? A crescent moon window.
 * 4) Starting in 2016, art that you can make in your own time is being traded for spikes and other rare items. Lines on a screen? Really? If you’re that dexterous that you can draw amazing realistic art with a COMPUTER MOUSE, you should pursue a career in art! You could make good money selling art instead of a virtual collar!
 * 5) Various double standards, some of which add to the mountains of evidence that Animal Jam plays favourites with its more well-known players. In one instance, a user didn't get his art accepted to make into a poster for his den (even though it was appropriate and looked well), but a popular player just drew a scribble and it got accepted. How ironic is that?!
 * 6) The game is now so badly optimized that it lags extremely easily even with a few players on the map!
 * 7) As of August 2021, Rare Spiked Collars were not only removed from The Forgotten Desert, but from Lucky Clovers and Tiki Trouble, making there no way to earn them without trading. This caused a massive inflation of the more valuable items, such as headdresses and glitched magenta items.
 * 8) On the other hand, non-member items that used to be valuable, such as worn blankets and fox hats, are now easily obtainable and no longer worth what they used to be.
 * 9) The game became an archived "classic" game in favor of the mobile app Animal Jam: Play Wild (which got renamed to Animal Jam) as of April 2020. This caused an outrage in the community and caused many players to leave the game.

Back Then

 * 1) A lot of the more popular Animal Jam players (most of which are YouTubers) have behaved badly, and yet they were still allowed to represent Animal Jam and earn money.
 * 2) *Aparri: A 22-year-old who has hacked people, scammed people, deceived people, exploited the game for rare items, violated the rules of the game multiple times, and sold items for real money on a livestream. He is also rude, as he once threw away a piece of fan art that a young fan drew for him on another livestream. He has also been shown to be racist on a livestream once. Thankfully, he quit YouTube and the game for good on December 3, 2018, and has since given ownership of his account to his girlfriend.
 * 3) * Twinkle0122: Deleted another popular Animal Jam YouTuber's channel (Julian2, but later on, he got it back), emotionally manipulated his girlfriend (LilacPetal) and uses her Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (which has not been proven) as a shield from criticism and negativity.
 * 4) *Skorm (now Skrmm after his old account got deleted): Made fun of a sexual assault victim, sent porn to children, sold items for real money, and framed Aparri for something he didn't do. He is basically a pedophile. After AJHQ banned him, he briefly switched to Minecraft before returning back to the game as Skrmm.
 * 5) There were perverted players during the old days of the game who would hop on a sleeping player to simulate sex. There were also players who would spell out inappropriate messages with furniture in their dens.
 * 6) Non-members used to be treated unfairly. For example, they could only do a handful of adventures, wear two clothing items in the ocean, have a pet hamster, and couldn’t even change the color on clothing and furniture items. Even though treatment of them got better as time went on, they still can only have two animal slots, can’t do The Forgotten Desert, and can only buy one kind of den.
 * 7) Despite the chat being safe, you used to be able to type words that are inappropriate, such as "boobs", "dick" or even "shit" and "ass"! Not to mention this is a CHILDREN'S game. We are not joking about this.
 * 8) Though there are no role-players on the game anymore, there were a surplus back in the day. Usually with bunnies and arctic wolves, they would have weird "family" role plays or role plays that simulated ‘’Warrior Cats’’. As innocent as they sound, even they could grind your gears. For example, if you pretended to be someone bad in your roleplay such as a school bully or a bank robber, they would think you did it to be mean and report you.
 * 9) There used to be many hackers in the game. Also, if the hackers hacked every single item in your Inventory, it may have caused you to quit the game. Whenever a player gets banned, they create a new account and still continue to do so.
 * 10) Adding on to the above statement, there used to be an infamous hacker in the early days of the game called "Fman122" that would send you a weird message containing a gift, and when you opened the gift, your account would freeze and you would lose all items. Even with AJHQ’s lousy attempts at banning him, he would create new accounts to avoid these bans. Thankfully, he disappeared by 2014.
 * 11) There used to be a lot of scammers crawling around on Animal Jam. Some people may have had reasons to scam others because it takes ages to get things like a black long spiked collar in The Forgotten Desert and they don't want to do The Forgotten Desert or don't have enough time to, for an example. However, it is still no excuse to scam people. Thankfully, when Flash shut down in 2021, it became impossible to scam with two different tabs open, since you can only play on the application.

Redeeming Qualities

 * 1) Up until it started to go downhill in 2014, the game was decent.
 * 2) Non-members are actually treated fairly. Compare non-members here to non-members in Club Penguin Island or non-members in Mundo Gaturro. Non-members can own many clothing, many den items, can wear rare items (such as spikes), and got the right to do all land and ocean adventures a while back.
 * 3) The game is pretty good for children who want to learn about animals, as they are many educational fun facts in the game.
 * 4) The designs of the animals are cute to look at.
 * 5) Even though no new updates are coming anytime soon, at least it didn't just shut down cold-turkey.

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