German ToonTown closes and chars are deleted

[Mantees]

Official announcement

TT Germany closes, but instead than transfering the existing chars to the US servers, Disney deletes them because "the services are not identical".
From the note it is also clear that Toontown didn't met Disney expectations.

Who is your most hated publisher now?

[Rodent]

Who is your most hated publisher now?

EA still wins.

[schild]

Who is your most hated publisher now?

Well, let's see, did it have Starforce? That would make it, what, the ONE European release without Starforce. Obviously that's why it failed.

[Azazel]

Wow, classy move there by the Mouse.

Sadly, I'm not surprised for some reason.

[Xanthippe]

I am.  I'm surprised it didn't do well and surprised they deleted toons rather than figure out a way to migrate them to other servers.      :-(

[angry.bob]

I never played the game, but isn't it the one where you couldn't actually type text to say, you had to choose speech from menus? If so, I can't imagine a game easier to toss people from different countries together on a server and have it work.

And Disney is one of the most evil companies on the fucking planet. Fuck any of you who've given them a dime. Except for Pirate's of the Carribean. Everyone gets a free ride on that. Because, hey... Pirates.

[Xerapis]

Yeah, you couldn't just type stuff in unless the other person was your special buddy or whatever they called it.

You basically had to know the other person IRL before you would be chatting.

Understandable, when your community SHOULD be mostly children.

It's actually quite a fun game.  Guess the Germans don't think so.

Maybe if the toons were taking over Paris?

Or if they had a special Youth Toon Corps that had absolutley nothing to do with recruiting twinks for sadistic SS and Gestapo...err....hell, lost the snide comparison.

Oh well.

[Jimbo]

My son (who is 10) plays it with his cousin (she is 9) and I have an account too.  I enjoy it in that there is not the bullshit that you have to worry about in the other MMoGs when playing.  With school being out and the fact that I see adds for Toontown on Cartoon Network and other kid friendly tv programing (Discovery, Animal Planet, Nickelodeon, etc) I have noticed that there are tons of people running around on it.  Heck, they just added more content to it, plus they send you updates in the mail (usually free trading cards, posters, and mouse pads).  As to why it bombed in Germany, don't have a clue, but it seems to be doing pretty good here in the states.

[Xerapis]

And actually, I think that the limited conversation menu really helps when you're looking for a group.

Just run up, spew out your toontasks, and wait for the fellow toons to drag you through the den of happy sprockets or wherever you need to go.

I've had high level chars run through stuff with me just to be cool.

I like the fact that I can play it any time I want and just have fun for a while.  And if I don't play it for a while, I'm not horrifically crippled. 

Lack of loot still makes me sad.  But playing mini-games for game cash?  Genius.

[Xanthippe]

The in-game speedchat is the best.  I wish Nintendo had taken a page from Toontown and made the Animal Crossing DS chat similar - then the whole WiFi hookup could have been so much easier, instead of having to have friend codes and all that crap.

[Jimbo]

Lack of loot?  My goodness the collecting games is wicked!  Part of it is how you can decorate your house and what clothes you have and what doodle you have and how he is trained.  True you don't get these items from killing the cogs or finding them in the cog buildings, but by fishing and doing the mini-games you get some neat things to collect.  I guess most people don't think of it as the same, since it isn't found in a chest after you beat up the monster in his cave.

BTW, Toontown is about the only game I'll let my son play if I'm not playing with him or able to keep an eye on him as he is playing, WoW has way too many idiots, CoX seems a bit nicer but then you get some really freaks on it, and Battlefield 2 he just likes to fly around blowing stuff up in the helicopters (dont' ask...my 10 year old WFTPoownage! with the helio's and all dad does is crash them)--but he mostly does that on single player.

[Xerapis]

Right, speedchat.  Couldn't remember the name of it.

One negative thing about Toontown Online, though.

They're progressively adding the stereotypical end-game.

It's disturbing to watch...rather like seeing a priest sneak up on altar boys.

You just know that they're conditioning the Toontown kids to be the WOW 2.0 addicts of the future.

[Xerapis]

You are correct.  It is not the same.

True loot must be pried from your cold dead fingers, ripped out of your rapidly cooling corpse, or claimed from some container that you were willing to die to protect.

Or it just ain't loot.

It can be cool as hell.  But it ain't loot.