Growtopia (2018-present)

Growtopia (2018-present)
The perfect visual of what not to do with your business: economic corruption and corporate greed at its finest.
Genre(s): MMO, sandbox Platform(s): iOS Android Windows MacOS Release Date: November 30, 2012 Developer(s): Robinson Technologies and Hamumu Software (until 2017) Ubisoft Abu Dhabi (since 2017) Publisher(s): Robinson Technologies (until 2017) Ubisoft (since 2017)

Growtopia, commonly abbrebiated as GT, is a massively multiplayer online sandbox game released on November 30, 2012, for Android and iOS. It was developed by Robinson Technologies and Hamumu Software until 2017, and Ubisoft Abu Dhabi since 2017.

The game was positively received during its first few years (2012-2015) and garnered mixed-to-positive reviews during 2016-2017, while it was developed by Seth Robinson and Mike Hommel (Hamumu). However, the Ubisoft years (2018-present) had been universally panned.

Why It Stunted Its Growth

Note: Some of the flaws before 2018 will also be noted.

1. Elephant out of the room: As a result of Ubisoft's acquisition, the game went from a great MMO with a decent community to a money hungry, socially isolated game with numerous issues that have never been fixed. Many of Ubisoft's ideas that were prevalent among their games were incorporated into Growtopia, irreversibly destroying the economy and its gameplay.
   • What caused the game to degrade at such an extremely high rate was the March 2017 addition of Item Of The Month. Not only they were imbalanced in functionality and power, they were essentially virtual NFTs. They were only available for a month for roughly $10 equivalent in gems, making them highly or infrequently sought for, manipulating the prices.
     • These items range from being virtually useless cosmetics to game-changing items, creating a cycle of deception within the economy and manipulating players into buying these items to raise their wealth-to mixed results.
   • To add on, the economy has been inflated at an unprecedented rate due to this manipulation and accumulation of rare items by whalers, making the game incredibly unbalanced.
   • The developers refuse to listen to any form of criticism fans or critics make towards the game and often resort to silencing their critics, leading to community distrust and dismay for the game and its developers.
2. The community has been derailed severely to the point of no return and has turned into a 4chan hangout thanks in part to the game's poor moderation, at times completely unmoderated.
   • The game allows players to bully, scam, gamble, and harass players with no punishment whatsoever, with the exception of if a moderator is present. This also means that racism and hate speech of all things is prevailing in the game scot-free.
     • The game has a poor filter that allows players to swear in foreign languages or hurl derogatory slurs at others easily and freely, essentially normalizing the behavior.
   • Countless inappropriate, adult-themed worlds and messages are circulating with a lack of moderation, especially if it's made in a language other than English.
   • Worse yet, this game has turned into a safe space for players to engage in illegal activity, such as writing terrorist threats, engaging in pornographic behavior, gambling, and buying/selling accounts or virtual items for real money, which is extremely concerning due to the game's young population that includes children.
3. The servers are incredibly unstable and poorly run such that hackers are dominating the game and limiting simple player functions.
   • Due to the immense number of bots that are present at once, the game has a deceptively high number of players online of up to 95,000, preventing real players from joining the game due to server overload.
   • Occasionally, the servers will disconnect you randomly, and at worst, shadowbanning you for hours or even forever.
   • These bots often resort to message spamming in private messages and global messages, encouraging players to engage in illegal activity.
4. Lousy attempts at curbing hackers and spam:
   • Raising the price of global broadcasts to egregiously high levels and removing the megaphones from the store.
   • Disabling private messages.

Redeeming Qualities

1. Despite its flaws, this game was much better from 2012-2017, making it even sadder for seasoned veteran players.
2. The base game has not changed significantly, meaning that older players can still relive their older years despite its massive downfall.

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