Dear Habbo Developers & Sulake,
As many of us have witnessed recently, the Habbo2020 Beta launched across all hotels. Instead of positive reviews and reactions, the reception was overwhelmingly negative. The vast majority of the Habbo community is deeply disappointed with the poor performance, lack of features and functions, and the complete disregard of their thoughts and opinions.
The Habbo2020 Beta has proven to be detrimental for hotels of all different languages simply by prohibiting us from accessing some of the most basic daily functions we relied on. With Flash officially ending on December 31, you have less than a week to fix the thousands of bugs prior to launch which we are sure will not be accomplished.
Throughout the entire past year, the new Unity client has been in development with little to no information being given until the very final quarter of 2020. As the Beta phase began opening up, players began expressing their dissatisfaction with how bare and raw the game felt. Week after week, you began releasing more information which confirmed you chose to focus more on maximizing profits than building a client that focuses on the user’s experience. By choosing to focus on the mobile market, you have neglected the majority of users that play via PC.
This is completely unacceptable. The stance Habbo has taken towards these ridiculous and redundant changes is abhorrent and does not represent the game we’ve grown to love and appreciate over the years. We’re being introduced to the era of taxation and microtransactions instead of revolutionizing the Habbo experience to become the primary social hub on the internet, where kids and teens alike can hang out and make friends. Habbo has always been a social and trading game yet now its future legacy is being tarnished by poor decision making from individuals that do not understand Habbo or its community. It is clear by now that the Habbo2020 change is here to stay, and the current Flash hotel will become obsolete. This does not change the fact the new hotel needs a lot of necessary changes to become feasible to work with.
Outlined below are some incredibly poor decisions that will make or break Habbo as a game and brand. We call upon the developers and their management team to reconsider the decisions made so far and commit to a major form of compromise in the interest of Habbo’s health and longevity:
We are calling on you to implement and/or fix the following:
Group Badges: Groups badge limits are now determined based on each user and their level. Agencies, Fansites, Game Hosts, Builders, etc. all rely on group badges to be the identifying factor of their organizations, organizing room builds, maintaining team members in specific groups for long-term projects and more. **This must be reverted. **
Group Badges will now be forced to be renewed on a monthly basis as not every user that joins a badge will commit to raising their level. You are punishing group badge owners for the actions of others by setting a limit, preventing new users from joining. This also means you have taken Agencies, Builders and Game Hosts hostage by requiring them to create new groups very frequently and having all its members rejoin every badge. Such tedious and unprofessional practices must not reach the live game, lest the intentions behind this change backfires and renders group badges ineffective completely. This is important and must be reversed.
Room Moderation: Currently, only the room owner is capable of kicking, muting, or banning others. Large agencies rely on active rights on a daily basis to moderate their rooms. It will now become impossible when the room owner is offline. Keep in mind most rooms on Habbo do not have group badges connected to them. By forcing this change to moderation, you put rooms at risk for vandalism and trashing. Developers must restore the room rights functions to room settings without badges immediately as only the owner should be capable of distributing rights and managing bans. Room Rights holders must be able to kick, mute for 2mins/5mins/10mins and ban for 1hour/1day/Permanently.
Donation Cap: The current feature limits you at 9c with a 1c tax (a total of 10c). With concepts such as paying agency members, hosting competitions and game rooms, the limit must be raised. Coins are the primary currency of Habbo and with private trading unfinished, this amount is preposterous and only serves to maximize the amount of coins spent via tax.
Client Optimization: The current state of the Unity client is unplayable. The hotel is riddled with bugs that render the game non-functional, especially for users with low-end devices. The client must be tweaked and adjusted for all users without sacrificing the quality of gameplay to ensure an enjoyable gaming experience.
Tax System: Taxes on the Marketplace and the Vault are not feasible. Trading will no longer function properly when you attempt to perfect an imperfect economy. The Vault currently offers no benefits other than being a pay-to-play feature which takes your coins hostage should you go beyond the 500c limit. It does not offer any form of security such as a PIN system, nor does it give any benefit to the user. You must reconsider this approach before you destroy the economy of Habbo.
Account Security & 2FA: Instead of improving user security, you decided to discontinue the password reset service. There is no logical reason that you chose to do so when no single modern gaming company has made such a poor decision. Instead, you offer one-time login codes which are just as insecure when the password associated with the account is now outdated and prone to vulnerabilities. This change is an attempt to shift your responsibility to email providers to rely on account security from. 2FA is more cost effective, raises awareness for users and offers optimal security for Habbos. You must revise the security protocols of Habbo before launch as any breach will be catastrophic.
Room Limits & Doorbell: On other hotels such as .fr, a lot of their rooms are spread out among different accounts. Since users can no longer transfer their furniture between accounts whenever they desire, they are now forced to buy the same furniture repeatedly. Given the current room limit is at 100, it should be expanded to 200 to facilitate the needs of each hotel and its community.
Additionally, the choice to remove the doorbell is a poor one. Many users rely on this feature to allow selective entrance into rooms. Password-locking these rooms is not feasible as many rooms are used by specific users. By sharing a password, this means it would constantly have to be changed multiple times depending on room usage. It also means a password must be remembered for each room. Simply put: a tedious process that is not in the best interests of the community. These issues should be immediately reviewed and fixed.
In the end, our communities are not demanding the impossible. We are not asking to scrap an update after resources have been clearly dedicated to it. What we are asking is that you compromise and work with the community that inhabits Habbo. Players understand you have a roadmap and list of priorities, but your order of operation does not match with ours. The community will not stick around for unscheduled release dates for functions they’ve had for over 10 years. The community is demanding what they already had, nothing more or less. A timeline should be published with clear expectations for each update.
#SaveHabbo Shutdown
Despite our best efforts for the past few months, we have not yet been able to elicit a direction that takes what we consider to be a functional platform for all communities - including a satisfactory user experience. At every turn, compromise has been shot down without any justified reason or purpose. Instead, the focus of the FAQs published purely focus on telling users how to play Habbo while attempting to credit themselves as part of the solution by combating non-existent and fictional issues that allegedly plague the community.
As a result, all organizations signed below will be participating in a global shutdown which will begin on 03 JAN 21 at 11:59 PM UTC. In essence, this means that all parties that have signed this statement have agreed to protest the Habbo2020 update by suspending their operations and closing their rooms/headquarters to display what the game will look like when you stand by your unreasonable stance. We'd strongly encourage and recommend that all Habbos do NOT log into the hotel during the shutdown as well. Furthermore, we acknowledge the published statement by Global Manager “Alyx”, however it simply brushes over the issues we are protesting against by referring us to pointless and tone deaf statements made in a series of FAQs. These decisions will effectively destroy Habbo as we know it before there are any chances to fix high-priority issues and bugs. There should be no higher priority than the users.
Until then, room names have been changed to reflect our stand against the negative aspects of this update. Our hope by initiating this agency-wide shutdown is that it empowers you to take our concerns more seriously, while providing much needed solutions to mitigate current issues you chose to ignore and dismiss.
Check out #SaveHabbo on Twitter and follow @Puhekupla or our Discord to stay up-to-date. Read our statement in the comments below.