Cinder

 Hey Jammers,

I know I said I was abandoning the blog, and I see no future in which I’ll be returning to regular updates, but I thought I’d say some quick words about the whole situation regarding Fer.al, Cinder, and Wildworks as a company. I still have no way to access my main AJ account, and as I said in my last post I’ve pretty much given up trying, but here we go.

To preface: My feelings regarding NFTs can’t be properly expressed if I want to keep this blog PG.

With that out of the way, I’m assuming the few (if any) people reading this already know the main details of the situation, so I’ll spare you guys from another explanation. I was there for pretty much the whole thing: I was online when the announcement was sent out in the official Fer.al discord, I was there waiting for the 30 minute slowmode to end so I could send another message, I was there when there was zero communication for months, I was there at roughly 3:17 pm (EST) yesterday when the game finally closed for good.

It’s hard to believe I used to look up to Wildworks and Clark Stacey. I’ve been playing Animal Jam for more than half my life, and I’ve spent more money that I’d like to admit on memberships and the like. Frankly, I’m appalled by just about everything Wildworks has done lately. They made a terrible decision and handled the fallout extremely poorly—that is to say, they didn’t bother to handle it at all. My appreciation for the natural world and my passion for animals was cultivated in large part by Animal Jam, and to have the company behind it participating in a fad that actively participates in harming our world is devastating. I regret spending as much money as I did on a company that not only supports but actively participates in NFTs, not to mention the abysmal communication. 

I spent Fer.al’s final minutes in an acquaintance’s sanctuary with a few others, lined up next to her on the spawn pad for screenshots because the game didn’t allow her to move her character. We spoke in Discord only because in-game chat was gone. There was no goodbye message, no send-off, not even a tailored closing message—all we got was the update notification and then if that was ignored, a message telling us we lost connection to the server. And then it was over.

I don’t really have an overarching point to all this. Frankly, I only just remembered I had this blog in the first place and thought I ought to write something out. But here it is. Maybe someday I’ll throw something else out there, but I don’t see that happening at this point in time.

Once again, thank you for reading and feel free to ask for my Discord or Tumblr if you want to talk.

- Amhdolphin