hearing that a game shut down overnight (while its community imploded) and got replaced by an NFT-based knockoff was just the tip of the iceberg filled me with dread
Yeah they shut down the game with no warning, although many people saw it comming Due to some pointing out this was a breech of their TOS they gave us one day, 30 days out Then they pushed it back a couple days and gave us 3 hours...
@@starchild8822 WildWorks didn't like that Fer.al's community flat told them they weren't spending any money anymore, so they threw the community to the side and tried to push it to any Cryptobro that found it like a desperate MLM Hun.
"The tip of the iceberg" was about the cons of NFTs, that’s why she shouted out Dan Olson's video on NFTs right after that comment. It wasn’t about the game.
I'm here from the "future" to let you all know that Cinder has been unceremoniously shut down in February 2023. It was not announced really, there are no big statements apparently but the servers are shut off and the whole team has apparently been let go. So much for that dream of big money, I guess.
They really shut down a really well loved game for a NFT game, only for them to shut down the NFT game not even a year later. I cant believe they waste everything for nothing 💀
The irony of a team that partnered with National geographic to make an online kids game to teach kids about animals getting in to NFTs cannot be understated.
@@s0up_1223they laid off their last writers back in June, stopping publication as an educational magazine and are now pushing garbage techbro articles online. They’ve taken pretty much the same route as Feral, actually.
The final day was awful. We were only given 3 hours and they had disabled text and voice chat so nobody could even say their goodbyes to each other in the game. They shut the severs down half an hour after the scheduled time and simply put a “sever has been updated” error. No goodbyes, no special party in the game, nothing. I jumped on the game and supported the game via the season pass and buying avatars and it hurts seeing how they pushed it to the side for an NFT reskin of the game with no compensation or warning of it shutting down. Thanks to wildworks, I now have little trust in any future social MMOs that pop up.
i didn't even know they were giving us only 3 hours, i thought it would at least be 24. i never got to play for the last time because i was busy that entire day, so later that day whenever i tried to log on the game had already been shut down :( that's so awful that they didn't even allow you to talk to people in those last few hours.. like wth
The Animal Jam to Fer.al to Cinder pipeline really is just the embodiment of "you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain"
One thing I don't see much talk about is the lore of the world. It isn't anything... technically special, but I thought it was interesting as all hell. Early on in development quests were tied to weekly rotations (there wasn't any way to replay quests, you just had to log in each week and run around doing what was available) and there ended up being a really intriguing mystery about my favorite zone, the Blood Tundra, and how it... well, became the Blood Tundra. There were ghosts and lowkey a cult of albino kolbolds and one of the devs later confirmed that two of the major ones were supposed to have an "ambiguous relationship" and... Man. I just wish the game had lived to thrive as everyone hoped it would.
@@yin9008 well said. I played since closed beta and i really thought this game was going to have a huge epic backstory, lore, quests etc. but it turned out to be very empty
@@thiswillnotdo6027 yeah!! it's a real shame tbh. i was part of the discord and got a full pdf of the whole lore/game backstory (one of the mods shared it with us just before the closure) and it's exactly the kind of thing that i know i would've loved to discover and learn about over the course of years and years. really sad it ended like this.
That memory of telling people that certain items I had was not for trade on aj stuck with me so much that when the nfts became a thing, at first I genuinely thought that's what it still meant
Not that wildworks guy saying turning the lights on in your house is the same as investing in a frivolous and ugly icon that produces massive amounts of carbon emissions 💀
@@M00m00chi3 Blockchain (server) load (the amount of energy it takes to run servers). The blockchain stores the receipt of ownership for each NFT and a link to the asset. There are alternatives that are ultimately way cleaner for the environment that wouldn't require servers to hold receipts but since the same people invested in NFTs/crypto are also invested in the blockchain there's no incentive to develop cleaner technology. It's really just an indicator of how big of a scam NFTs are.
@@M00m00chi3 basically the energy needed to power the servers that host the blockchain, as well as the energy needed to power the actual transactions that take place. I remember hearing about an artist who tried to get into NFT art, but immediately quit when she found out that the energy needed to process a single NFT transaction was equal to the energy needed to power her entire art studio for 24hrs.
This whole situation is literally so ironic because animal jam, their first neglected game was a game all about saving the environment but fast forward 2 years later... and Cinder pops up, a game about NFTs right after they neglect another game of theirs that had so much potential
most likely higher ups or sumn the employees working on early feral were very happy to be working their i think the higher ups just ruined it and clark
Animal Jam seems less about saving animals and more about cool features. Ever since NatGeo stopped funding, a lot of the educational bits disappeared. The only notable thing I can think of is the donation spot in the Conservation Museum if that's still even there. I used to love reading the lil animal facts scattered around and looking for the animals in each area.
@@fayolahh in both games there are still the little yellow paw educational pop ups, as well as the jamaa journal in classic. the conservation museum did come to play wild, however nobody (and i mean nobody) goes there. the movie theaters in the aquarium and in serapia forest are still there, but no new content has been made in like.... 6 years lol.
Animal Jam in ITSELF isn't even 'about' saving the animals anymore. The most it is focusing on right now is quick cash grabs, and screwing over nonmembers.
The decal system was so fun. There were so many things you could make in it, from beautiful and graceful, aesthetically pleasing creatures, to a realistic finger dragon. I personally really enjoyed making pre-existing characters on my creatures (we called them cosplays lol). Such a shame that all that expression is gone now. I’ll miss it.
@@sadtoasties I'll miss it too, even if most of what I did was make Fire Emblem cosplays on all of my 5 or so accounts (most being backups specifically for that)
Ex Moderator here, and I sneakily contributed some images which I was happy to see here. On behalf of the moderators who did not have the time to share added perspectives, it's very relieving to see your recognition of our blood sweat and tears during this terrible event. It's been difficult to even see this ourselves, while we were literally gaslighted in areas to feel "okay" about it, or being told "everything will be fine." While WW ghosted our concerns for announcements, concerns for community awareness, (It has been 7+ days since our messages were "passed down" and still left in the dark) WW has additionally failed to communicate to us on the many friendships we've created. On an emotional perspective, we were also greatly affected. From admins banning innocent members in front of us, having another WW administrator telling us to grow up, (literal evidence we have) we had to sit and watch most of the time. Some of us were vocal about it and addressing our points directly to staff with some avail to none. This was more than just an "unpopular business decision," it was punishment honestly
Never was in the Feral community but as an ex-discord mod myself I can strongly empathize. Moderation work is usually a thankless and unpaid job that you do out of passion and clear joy for the work itself, while when things go wrong with either discord or the topic at hand (in this case Feral) mods are the ones who take most of the vocal backlash like a meat shield. Dealing with apathetic higher-ups just deals even more emotional damage on top of that, ya’ll really were given a horrid hand and I’m sorry you had such a bad experience with WW 😔
Didn't realize fer.al had actually shut down until I saw this a month later. My dad and I always played together, as well as animal jam, and when I shared this with him (after keeping him updated on prior controversy), I am pleased to announce that on behalf of my father, Clark Stacey is now a professional "slimy jerkbag". (I'm pretty sure he would have said more choice words if my mom wasn't in the next room over)
I grew up playing games with my mother and honestly to this day we still hang out online. She pretty much wishes Clark Stacey would fall in a rancid hole right now and she has every right. Cheers to parents who not only pay attention to their children but bond with them and enjoy their interests with a fiery passion. 💕
@@skykidsbugnpoppy man i remember when my mom and I would play zombie farm then they had taken it off ios. kinda sad but i’m glad for those memories, no where else to have been made and no else.
@@juliusevola4135 All that matters is that you enjoyed playing it together, and there are lots of other games to enjoy! We love Moms and Dads bonding with their kids.
@@cyonu5675 They got investments. That's how every NFT scam starts. They make a demonstration product, look for investors, throw in the "we can put nfts in this for $$$", investor gets rock solid, they pretend to make a game for as long as they legally have to, then bail.
I was a Feral beta tester, and, like stated in the video, the way they handled feedback was outrageous. Players in the discord were always throwing ideas for things in the game that they WOULD be willing to spend money on (avatars, sanctuaries and building things, gardening/fishing and other features, ect.), and yet Wildworks still just continuously neglected that for shitty season passes.
Completely unrelated especially since Feral is now gone, but for some reason the word "avatar" in your comment sparked this idea: first, context, I very strongly wanted aj's masterpiece system in feral - I think it would have been really cool if we could set these "masterpieces" as sort of profile pictures especially since the game was supposedly suppose to seem like social media (i.e. "likes" as currency)
Oh god. I have a friend who was a beta tester on this. I don't know if she has a Discord account or if she goes by the same names there, but she goes by Takumi in the socials i know her from
Currently experiencing the final hours of Fer.al. Despite chat being taken away, a group of players have all just kinda agreed to sit around the fire at the kobold camp in mugmyre swamp. It's oddly comforting. To those who couldn't make it whether it be schedule or bad device, I am sorry. Waddle on, guys, waddle on.
I was unaware how recent it was shut down, I just went to play it after remembering the nostalgia of Animal Jam cause I remembered that it was in development. But I was too late :(
@@Winter0721 personally It gave me the vibes of a group of homeless people huddled around one of those metal can fires, having been reduced to nothing but still finding joy in huddling up together and just comforting one another. I personally sat with them for about 30 or so minutes and it truly felt comforting, almost as though everything would be alright.
@@theonlyshinyumbreon Yeaa kinda like that too! :)! And that’s cool! I wish I could of joined, but I wanted to try and find things before it all ended.
Ex- Server Helper here. I believe that if they had listened to the amazing community feedback and ideas and actually communicated in the last year of the game, it could have been saved from failure and dare I say it might have become profitable. It certainly had potential; a big and active community, players willing to engage in the game, it just didn't have the substance to keep players engaged.
I literally would have paid money for some of the stuff that was already in the game had I not been so wary of spending money at all based on the painful grind and the subpar rewards for completing season passes. I bought the dragon! I bought the first season pass! All they had to do was make the game a little more fun.
@@Cathowl For sure! Stuff like that was incredibly creative (of course, dizzywing dispatch was pretty much candy crush, but the others were creative). Alone those gave a large amount of the substance the game already had.
I would’ve played the crap out of this. I’ve so desperately yearned for “high fantasy 3D neon dog game” since I was, like, ten, and this looks as close to what I want as could reasonably be hosted on a web browser. If I win the lottery, or get stupid rich somehow, I’m going to finance “high fantasy 3D neon dog game” so that the clearly popular niche can finally be filled with a proper long standing sparkleanimal RP-MMO.
Werent really dogs involved but it was enjoyable while it lasted, still had a ton of frustrating stuff about it. To glitches, bugs and just horrible update choices by Wildworks
i don't know if it's high fantasy, but someone in another comment thread recommended feralheart unleashed, which opens in 5 days!!! it's definitely 3d neon dog game, that's for sure
@@felixt808 I think is all apart of the hustle in their minds "haha all the non believers will leave, but no matter, we'll be rich by this same time next year! What can possibly go wrong?" And how a bunch of other cryptoshiters promore the thing too "a bunch of outsiders might hate you for this but hey, you'll get the last laugh and anyways OUR community will always be behind you :)"
I'm pretty sure they all started their projects around the same time, and by the time other companies started failing they had sunk too much money in to cancel their plans
I think either they're in an echochamber and don't realise just how much gamers despise NFTs or they all hope the NFT buyers will pick up the slack and replace the lost revenue from actual gamers tenfold.
NFTs take enough energy to power a small country to make one. The idea that someone who's against that must use no energy is fucking absurd. The epitome of "yet you participate in society"
people say that they don't even realize how recent its been since snow storms in the southern united states absolutely ruined people's lives for a bit, even with heating systems. energy isn't just television and phone chargers, it's expected for people to pay electric bills for a reason???
literally. like electricity is practically essential for humans to live but NFTs aren't essential nor a practial need! The admin gave a horrible analogy lmao
People who resort to massive leaps of logic are almost always using this tactic as a cop-out to avoid justifying all their crappy takes. Like if the LGBTQ+ community says "Love is love" and opposers respond with "So you approve of ped*philia". NFTs, at the end of the day, are unnecessary. To compare using a source of electricity for using your computer to do work or schooling, heat up/cool down a home, keep food fresh, etc...it's pathetic. :/
Fun fact. Today, the cheapest avatars for Cinder are at 14 cents price. And the entire volume of NFTs they have is just 800€ Which most certainly makes this decision to get into the NFT sphere about the worst one in their history. They went from a project, that only made a few tens of thousands a month, to a game, that sold about that much in its entirety, and now has a potential of 2 weeks salary for a minimum wage worker.
I've never played a game that had such a creative character builder, the decal system and the ability to switch characters any time you liked were things I've never seen elsewhere and the things players did with them were phenomenal. You could see a TARDIS against a starry sky or a fox in full naval uniform or a cat that looked like a beautiful china plate. Never before have I taken screenshots of other people's avatars in a game to simply look at later and admire the craftsmanship. What a loss. :(
@@theopatrick2961 oh man, sadly I don't at the moment... I'll see if I can put some in a tumblr photoset later or something. If I do I will let you know!
I had the Kirin for my first season pass. I loved it honestly. I also had a cool Senri with Red and Black accessories and grey with grey stripes named Versailles. He was so cool.
I miss seeing a bunch of beautifully designed characters and then a giant headed Senri with Joe Biden’s face on it in the middle of it all. Those people were always the most creative out of the bunch to me
I was so heartbroken when the cinder site was found. The thing about "we've been building and testing the platform for Cinder for over two years already" was just the final straw really
i remember the whole community felt so betrayed that basically all their money had gone to cinder instead of fer.al. They just shoved fer.al to the side like it was some beta test for cinder instead of its own thing.
@@sejsuper4660 The sounds exactly like the hiveswap king's quest thing. A bunch of die hard fans invest a lot of time and money into bringing a project to fruition that they think they'll love and then some scumbag CEO decides that they're going to spend all the money on something else instead.
Chill out, what ya yellin' for? Lay back, it's all been done before. And if you could only let it be, you will see that I am the funniest YouT*ber of all time. Admit it, my dear follow*r hen
No idea why Wildworks ever thought their audience of LGBT+ neurodivergent kids would ever like the idea of an NFT game, or even have the money to support it in the first place. Sad to see this company fall from grace so tragically... Edit: For all the replies saying 'I'm not LGBT or neurodivergent!!' good for you, I don't need to hear about it. And yes, I did watch the video. I know they were not trying to captivate their audience with whatever they decided to do with NFTS. My comment was saying this was a very strange idea BECAUSE of their fanbase, who typically would not run in with the NFT crowd. And their choice to go against their fanbase clearly did not go well as their NFT game was a failure.
Cinder is a betrayal of what AJ and Fer.al stood for, it's very disappointing. They teach kids and teens how to protect the environment and then go on to create and support NFTs. Yikes! I played since Day 1 of Early Access, but because they shut down the game without much notice and on short time I didn't know it was closing until a friend told me a while after. So I didn't even have a chance to say goodbye to the friends I made over the years. (If anyone from The Bone Council reads this, I hope you're well!) It always bothered me that we only got updates and info through Discord, it was chaotic and overwhelming so I had it on mute and most of the friends I made in game weren't on Discord anyway. I wonder if they even know what happened. I'm sad I couldn't say goodbye or keep in contact with them.
this enviroment damage misinformation bs needs to stop. blockchains use less energy than the traditional banking system. there is a reason both mastercard and visa are looking into blockchain tech. the enviroment damage misinformation bs is similar to how the oil industry spent trillions trying to convince people that it was better than alternatives. old energy inefficient, slow, and expensive transaction banking system sees efficient, instant, and zero fee blockchain tech and is afraid of being replaced
Imagine destroying an entire community, throwing away countless hours and years of work, dragging your company through a latrine. just to chase a dying pyramid scheme / scam. I've heard of a shooting oneself in the foot. But this is sawing off the dam leg.
Honestly as someone who was *really* into Fer.al its just... Absolutely insane how fast this game fell. Weeks. Not months, or even years like most games of similar backgrounds, w e e k s
11:50 "Shinigami remains in T-pose in Character Creator even after leaving decal menu" "Shinigami cannot do the stanky leg" Best bug report of all time
Cool, but cruel, update for y’all: Cinder has shut down quietly after WW was bought by Nazara Tech when Cinder’s team split from WW. So they kinda just ran with the money
I've said it before many times but I really do think that WildWorks losing their partnership with NatGeo in 2017 caused the main downfall of the company. I mean, with as big of a company as NatGeo is, they probably got desperate for money. And since NFTs and crypto junk was marketed as a "get rich quick" scheme they latched on to that thinking it would save them.
@@Zenocius They actually implemented gacha mechanics in their mobile version of Animal Jam. Edit: wanted to add how it's also scummy considering how the economy there is set on rare pets with particular traits
I was thinking why they wouldn’t use their reputation with Animal Jam to make a deal with a bigger game publisher for Feral (which could potentially lead down a slippery slope depending on how greedy the publisher is, but it’s better than leaving your game stale for years)
As an original player of the game, seeing how the game fell so SO fast- I honesty just kinda sat back and watched everything play through. I feel kinda sad though,,, we were so sure it could work out but then wildworks just kinda made it into a money maker..
Wilworks was already making games into money making machines by exploiting their audience.... First by adding trades and rares, now this. Such disgusting practices. If someone is reading this comment, please spread the word. Artificial scarcity + trading is very harmful towards players, ESPECIALLY if the players are children and teens. It forces minors to ""work hard"" by grinding for inhumane amount of hours. I have seen people spend more than 5 years to get rares. Minors should not be encouraged to spend inhumane amounts of hours to get useless pixles. This is parasitic. WW does this solely for money gain. Children should not be messing around with ""economies"". This is really bad because it can get addicting, as children can't control themselves. I remember getting big dopamine rushes that would last around 1 minute just by getting rarer. Its addicting, and WildWorks know this. They ignore the fact that worth is stupidly high, because they know they'll gain money. By spreading about the harmful consequences of this cruel game design, you are bringing light to something that is unfortunately swept under the rug. What WW (and other multiple MMO rpg devs) is doing is exploitation. TO elaborate on the trading part: remove items on purpose for eternity > said item is deemed rare by the community > its worth skyrockets (and WW does nothing to balance worth) = children wasting hours on inhumane grinding for pixels. Because kids spend too much time on the game, theres a chance they'll spend money on it. WW needs to stop.
On behalf of the family if KitSenDragn, we would like to thank many of you for the kind words you left after her passing. We are sad to, belatedly, hear about the end of Fer.al as it and it's family of players meant a lot to her.
@@fierceloyalist KitSenDragn shared her mother's love for books and games. She was a gamer all her life whether it was video games or table top. I can remember hearing her and her mother squabbling over how long she had been playing her game on the PC and thinking it was really her mother who wanted her daughter to get off so she could play, too. When she was a teen, her uncle introduced her and her boyfriend (who later became husband) to Dungeons & Dragons. They used to sit at our dining room table rolling dice while her uncle was the Dungeon Master. She was highly artistic and covered her walls with artwork of her own or from others. We parted ways when she stayed in California to go to college while most of the immediate family moved to Arizona. Unfortunately, that was also when we began to lose touch. I think without family support she sort of lost her way at first, but eventually she did very well and lived a comfortable life. We were surprised and very happy for her when she got a job at Electronic Arts and continued getting jobs in a field that she loved. Unfortunately, like many artistic types, she was easily swayed by her own emotions or those of others. It was a horrible "perfect storm" of circumstances that caused her passing. We cannot blame any one factor without blaming them all so we blame no one.
@@fierceloyalist KitSenDragn's father died before she did. And her mother has not gotten over the death of her only child. I'm sorry, but because of this It WOULD be an invasion of privacy to give you her true name. She has no cemetery location, but her mother has her ashes.
@@Tokuijin A creative mind in the hands of an incompetent corporation. KitSenDragn is in a more creative world than the one we inhabit. She smiles upon us all.
As an ex-feral discord mod this whole situation is just wild. I became a trial moderator mere weeks before all of this went down (and was still a trial mod when the announcement came). I remember first joining the game back in 2020 during the first few months of early access and being so excited about it's concept. Ignoring all the obvious flaws with the game such as no gameplay loop/barely any content, the content that is available being very grindy, the bugs, the lack of communication or meaningful updates or changes, what it had going for it was truly astonishing. It's avatar editor is still my favorite in any game I've ever played, and it's a shame that all the hours spent designing avatars, crafting items, buying season passes, and trading clothing and furniture are now pretty much meaningless. Now like the other mods even though I truly believe this was a last resort and they had no ill intentions with fer.al at the start, WildWorks still handled this situation extremely poorly. From being passive aggressive with users, to not communicating with the mods with the original Cinder announcement (and of course basically no communication in every other aspect), choosing style and graphics over any substance or long-term gameplay, etc. WW really shot themselves in the leg with how they handled the game, a game that had a LOT going for it, from it's avatar customization and sanctuaries and harvesting and more. I really hope that those that have been working on fer.al these past few years, such as the artists and coders and devs, I hope they are able to get new jobs now that fer.al is no more. And to all of the friends I made on the game, and to anyone that was actively into fer.al when it shut down really, I hope you'll be able to find other games that can bring the same or similar amounts of joy that fer.al once did. RIP fer.al.
I played during the closed beta and absolutely loved it! It seemed it peaked in that time and early access, which is really sad. I would've loved to see it keep going because I felt like it could've been something really special.
Yeah, I only played at the beginning as I use Linux for school, and having to switch operating systems just to play wasn't really practical for me. Especially when FeralHeart still exists and was fairly similar at the start. I really wanted to see the adventure aspect go further with more lore, but perhaps we as a community can learn, and create something better. I focus on web development or else I'd want to help to make something like what it could have been.
I'm really confused why they didn't just start selling merch? Literally could've used preexisting art for the game and thrown it on stickers and t-shirts with some drop-shipping company. Enamel pins and prints too! That could've been a really simple way to earn a hell of a lot of money without alienating the fanbase. I feel like the whole money problem became such a stressor, they could no longer enjoy making the game and being a part of the community. That might've been what caused some of the rushed, unrequested, and glitchy updates. Everything became hyperfocused on money.
And honestly? They could've asked for donations. People LOVE this game, and if you were to, in a non-obnoxious way, have a button or something that was like "Hey! We're struggling to keep the game open and financially self-sustaining. Could you spare a couple bucks?" Five dollars from hundreds of people can add up to a fair amount. I dunno how much running a game costs, but I'm sure the community would have done their best to help.
They did consider merch as an idea. And honestly, it wouldn’t be that bad. They literally had a bunch of plushie items of beloved avatars/NPCs that they could’ve used. The furniture items for Feral could’ve been an actual reality. Man.
@@Woolykins_Clubhouse That sounds utterly stupid. Almost like an outright lie? I've done a quick search. It's only illegal if you're using it for criminal activity. So unless wild works were planning on shipping weed they've could have totally taken donations. But it would be taxed. So the only motivator to not take donations was money. SURPRISE!
honestly that's kind of genius, it's what neopets really dug into around 2002-2007 and it massively boosted their profits. the customization factor would be a massive incentive to buy, if you could get an exact replica of your designed creature as a plush or even just a nicely printed poster - i can see people going nuts for that. such a shame the community was screwed when the company had so much opportunity to thrive.
All I remember of my time with Fer.al was a “cult” of people crowding around that one tooth-talking npc, going on about the wonders of good dental care and brushing your teeth. Good times
what makes me sad is this game looks absolutely gorgeous, if I didn't know that the game was basically unplayable and then got deleted I would honestly check it out because the character and environment designs look beautiful
It was very playable. I personally never had much trouble with it. And the game was gorgeous. It’s had amazing customization, beautiful lands, deep lore and fun and interesting quests. I also loved the games sense of humor. So sad it’s gone
Wow, that admin's bad-faith take was upsetting. Just because we are already hurting the environment doesn't make it okay to add more fuel to the fire. And when one NFT takes more power than a whole house, you just can't compare the two.
Also, the biggest difference is that NFTs are fucking worthless. At least when I’m wasting electricity by playing video games I’m using it for a specific purpose and having fun. Or when I’m using electricity to cook my food I’m doing it to eat something. NFTs take up way more energy than they’re worth.
yeah I can't believe they were doing the unironic mudhut argument. Like that's the point where it's so obviously wrong that you just gotta sit them down and ask "ok so what is this really about?" because holy shit they might as well have just said they want the money and don't have a good excuse for it.
iirc, in new york prices skyrocketed so high that it was incredibly difficult for a lot of the population to pay, literally at the peak of winter (aka when people need indoor heating the most). the difference between basic household electronics and nfts is that one is necessary for most peoples' day to day survival and the other is worthless garbage that means nothing and is only meant for the wealthy to be purposefully wasteful.
I just realized the painful irony that it was the same guys that made Animal Jam, a game to teach kids about the world and environment, went down the NFT path. That's just twisted.
It seems this great idea from clark ended how we all expected: cinder seems to be dead as far as I can see. Their twitter stopped posting months ago, and seeing as no one talks about it, Cinder wasnt very popular and died how most nft scams do, in a pathetic whimper. Love poetic justice
the game was shut down without notice as well, and the discord server has been on read-only since february. seems like they were so ashamed of their nft """game""" they ended up swipping it under the rug without telling anyone.
As someone who has played Animal Jam since childhood, I feel betrayed. I basically played Animal Jam almost every day since I was a kid, and I would sometimes spend money on Animal Jam merchandise. I also liked playing Fer.al too, but I slowly lost interest in playing it over time. Then the whole NFT thing happened, and I was betrayed when I realized that Fer.al was a playtest server for an NFT game all along. This also made me feel like Animal Jam lost its main purpose to teach kids about the importance of the environment and how to protect it.
Same here. This stuff really leaves a bad taste in ones mouth. I also spent money on Animal Jam.. an embarassing amount.. and I don't want to know where it went.. I have a scummy feeling about it.
Dude same, I found the game with my best friend in Cali when I was 9-10. Got addicted to just playing the claw machine and so that sound of hitting a plushie is forever embedded in my psyche. A year later I got into it more than just the claw and got a membership. Was addicted until I turned, idk, 16. Went back to it a few times since then. Might go back to it again for nostalgia sake.
what’s most upsetting to me is that fer.al served as a safe haven for many lgbtq+ and neurodivergent young people. i’m not sure why, exactly, but for many (myself included) it was a fundamental and welcome safe place to see like-minded and accepting people. the game itself had multiple trans, lesbian, gay, nonbinary, and other lgbtq+ npcs that worked as positive representation. sucks to see that fall away so quickly
Ik! I'm heavily neurodivergent, and the aesthetic of "You can collect resources or complete quests, or you can lay down in a warmly lighted room." Even if you don't do anything in it, living in an alternative world is... nice.
Im queer and nuerodivergent and yeah its really sad to see it go i stopped playing it for a while (i remember when the dragons came out so around the closed beta period?) its a shame it all went to waste i loved the maps in the game and the player base was amazing i wish i got to see more of it before the whole train wreck happened :(
Yes, even in this video, I saw a character with an asexual flag as a tail! It was a place to chill and not worry about gender or ADHD, I could just run around as a cat-like creature enjoying the unique environments and trying to get some cool accessories for the character.
I'm still pissed that I've lost the characters I worked to make in that game, and all the money I spent. And then it was used to fuel an NFT project. How lovely.
The art style is so aesthetically pleasing that it saddens me to know this game has fallen to the end of NFTs. Hopefully a similar looking project might arise from a honest and respectable game development studio.
I'm still bitter about this. I fell head over heels for this game last year and hell, I even made my late cat Dagger in the game to cope with his death. So hearing what they were doing, making Cinder, and killing Feral entirely? Yeah I legit cried. No joke. I cried my heart out. They suck Edit: It was a good, calming game for my anxiety and the repetitiveness didn't even bother me because as someone with Autism, I find such things comforting. I even played it a bit with a group of friends in my discord. I want this back...at the very least so I can see my kitty again. Also yeah the bugs were crazy, qn example being that the sky jellies almost never produced anything and twice I got an item from rare chests that resembled black spiky eyes/glasses and it was just called "Item Missing" It was pretty cool and freaked me out when it happened.
Might I recommend you a game called Wildcraft? It's a hunting based RPG sort of thing with highly customizable animals and possible roleplay, although the game wasn't really made with that in mind, pretty sure the devs had never even heard of it xD. It's game play is addmitedly more bare bones and most items need to be unlocked, but the randomized chest system for this is pretty fun and it's maps+ graphics are really cool to play in while you earn coins, I've also found it's repetition comforting as a fellow autistic myself. Idk, maybe give it a go lol :)
I noticed you like repetitiveness and calming games and if you’re looking for a game similar to that I’d recommend Sky:Children Of The Light 🥺 it’s a game you can play and chill out with friends and you can collect candles and visuals are stunning; there’s also a lot of customization options available too but you play as a little light person 🥺 not rlly animal based creation sadly
I’m also autistic and this game was also really great and calming for me. I was so excited when it first came out and I couldn’t wait to see what it would be like once out of beta. Sadly that never happened and now it’s shutting down ): I don’t even know if I’m going to be able to play one final time ):
@@gwenl1451 I played WIldcraft before. The customization isnt really that great: the animals and skins are all blocked by a paywall. I remember watching ads just to get a box and I would gain almost nothing. When I would get an Epic or Legend custom, it wasnt usable. From what I remember you can buy loot boxes? Its almost like gambling... Please correct me on this last part. I wouldnt say its a highly customizable game because of this issue but its a good game nevertheless. It has a high emphasis on roleplay which is a thing a lot of people like.
It will never stop surprising me how often crypto/nft-related projects emphasize virtual world/building community/MMO etc. but if you look at nft enthusiasts' accounts or their discords, they don't seem like people who want to socialize and make friendly communities. Most of their conversations are 1) showing their financial status 2) promoting their investion 3) looking for new investions. I can't really understand why companies are pushing this social aspect, when just these ugly pictures are better at fulfilling the premise (buying something expensive to show off and maybe sell at higher price in the future)
I think they want to show it as something fun and exciting you miss on if you don't have NFTs, you know, making the ads that appeal for crypto enthusiasts (since they will buy anything that's crypto/NFT) and people who might not know exactly what is is but are fans of games like these
true! the nft community (? can i say that since its dying) is basically just 2016 youtuber flex culture. you need to be better than everyone around you, you need to invest in the latest trends, or you fall behind and get abandoned immediately. especially with nfts, this leads to people jumping on a hype train for an investment that turns out to be a massive scam
it's social in order to promote the scam, but i get what you mean when it comes to the people that are targets. i guess they go there for validation? since its common to be told they're all gonna make it
Yeah. I infiltrated the Cinder discord server, and all they talked about was crypto. Compare this to the Feral discord, which included discussion of hobbies, fandoms, pets, etc. I had wanted to learn more about Cinder and its relationship with Feral, but it was so boring there! After Feral shut down, I spammed the Cinder server with anti-crypto messages and got banned in less than a minute.
@@andromeda_va39 Nfts were never about game play and the nft bros who tried saying so knew they were blowing smoke up their butts. It's all about making that cash and dragging in others to buy nfts from you so you can profit while they get stuck at a loss. They don't understand how games work but they sure do want in on trying to out scam eachother. All Nft 'games' have failed and it's hilarious.
I wonder if feral will ever get a fan revival. It looked super cool and it's upsetting it turned out so bad. I feel like with a good loving dev team behind it that it could be amazing.
it's called emuferal if any of you wanted to know, it's still missing a few things, but the team working on it is adding it in bit by bit as they figure it out, and their discord server is the best and most wholesome server I've ever been in
Update Cinder shut down a few months ago Wild works never notified about the shutdown they literally closed the game and deleated all websites related to it overnight without a word... Seeing how they also sold animal jam... Yeah i will be surprised if this company lasts more then a year
Ex-Animal Jam ambassador here! I may have disassociated with all Wildworks games by now, but as one of the people whom were the first to play Fer.al during the closed beta, I figured I should give some input here. During my time of trying to acclimate to this game, it was quite clear to me that it had many technical issues and was far from being finished. I truly believe that Wildworks really spread themselves thin trying to run 3 games all at once. That was what worried me from the beginning, and I figured that Fer.al would have a difficult time because of that. I had a lot of faith at the time that it could be pulled off, however, as did many of the playerbase. As the months went on, it became more and more apparent that the game was just not doing well. Not even just financially, but technically speaking. I gave up on trying to play it because it wasn’t compatible with either my iPhone 7 or my Mac, therefore I never really grew a strong attachment to it aside from the aesthetic creatures you could create and customize on there. I could tell people were really passionate about Fer.al, and the tension during the 2021 holiday season after Cinder’s announcement was so palpable even to watch as an outsider. I quit all Wildworks games and resigned from my ambassador position in May 2021, but during my November/December visits to Feral and AJ Classic for the holiday season, witnessing this situation was really draining. I can’t imagine how people must’ve felt actually being apart of it. I’m just really glad to put it all behind me now. I’m now in a new community (Super Animal Royale) and everyone there is so chill/the people in charge of their discord server actually listen to their community and respect them! If anyone has been looking for a new animal game to replace Animal Jam, Super Animal Royale might just be for you! As for Fer.al’s community, I truly hope you can find some other community to be apart of. Fer.al was one of a kind for many people, and at one point I really had high hopes for it. Nowadays, I realize just how half-baked and underdeveloped it was. Trust me, when you spend time in a different community where you feel listened to and the people in charge don’t make you feel beneath them, you’ll look back on this Fer.al situation so differently. You’ll wonder how you even tolerated it.
Ngl got my hopes up for Super Animal Royale because I'd never heard of it before and was immediately disappointed when I looked up gameplay images X'D I swear there is never going to be another animal MMO with an interesting/appealing artstyle like Feral's... It seems every single animal game out there is either photorealistic to the point of being borderline unattractive or so kiddie-fied and simplistic that they look like literal Funko pops ;_; I know I'm being super picky about stylization but there's, like, no variety whatsoever when it comes to these type of games anymore and it's frustrating when you're looking for something to fill in the hole that Feral left behind
@@EagleTimberWolf Yeah I haven’t quite seen a game like Feral but I have an old Animal Jam friend who introduced me to Super Animal Royale, and it took a while to grow on me until I got involved with its community and played it a bit more. I think AJ players might find interest in SAR if they liked the cute animal aspect, but when it comes to Feral? I’m not sure how to help out there. There wasn’t any other game Feral reminded me of, so I completely understand why everyone is so upset about Feral’s downfall.
Yeah I think the thing that got me the most excited for feral was the aesthetics, there was an amount of freedom in the customization that I hadn't seen anywhere else. It had a good balance between allowing for lots of freedom in customization, while still being recognizable and not being overly confusing or complicated. I was initially excited for the advertising of the game as something less focused on the trading and rarity/collections of "rares". and more focused on the creative side and the lore. The first thing that started cracking my hopes a bit was how they explicitly forbid or at least heavily discouraged art commissions for in-game items and made art contests iffy. While this was due to legal reasons/scamming it still made me disappointed because I had planned to make art to get items I wanted rather than dealing with trading (because aesthetically appealing items tend to be valued). But I was hoping that what they said about a more controlled and approachable trading system would be true, or that they would add something similar to masterpieces so I could do commissions without it being against the rules. But neither happened the trading developed too fast right in front of my eyes but I couldn't keep up with it and it was too unpredictable, all I knew is that I'd need thousands and thousands of lockpicks and that the amount of lockpicks needed would always be rapidly inflating. I could barely keep over 30 lockpicks because I was horrible at the chest game, especially with the horrible lag feral sometimes had... Then disappointment after disappointment came. The lore was *less* prominent or clear than animal jam's the "quest" were rarely actual lore related and more to do with personal squabbles between npcs and random fetch quests. At least animal jam had somewhat of a storyline to actually participate in. They started teasing stuff about the castle but it didn't develop must past a shallow ARG type thing. I'm somewhat excited for a game my sister showed me called 'Palia', but it is still in Alpha and it is with humanoids rather than animals. So it definitely isn't perfect and is very unfinished but the team seems good and receptive.
I get the not being able to play it on some devices, that's why I stopped just before the season pass thing started. I mostly use Linux as my Windows installation is the education version and rather buggy, leaving me stuck playing the game with only wired headphones, and a controller, as it wasn't compatible with my keyboard. It made it nearly impossible to play. I kept asking in Discord for controller support, but being in computer science myself, and currently leading a group for a class project, it's really hard to add things in if you don't have enough people, especially people who have experience with that kind of thing. Honestly, at the start, I was wondering if it was just a FeralHeart/Impressive Title reboot with the Animal Jam styling, but I liked the different features, and it could have been good if it were dealt with a little better.
I remember being a feral player when Feral came out, it seemed really competent and I had high hopes for the game! After what happened I’m pretty disappointed
@@meowmreowmeow just like animal jam! sure there was always that aura of overvalued rares, but it wasn't nearly as bad before the diamond/sapphire shop. i had high hopes for the adventures- then they just kinda stopped making them and that sucked! i also dislike that they keep releasing new animals and clothing without making existing clothes look better on existing animals. now fer.al is doing the EXACT same thing, not updating quests and having some items look awful on creatures we paid good money for. It's super disappointing
I was one of the closed beta testers for this, and remember being so excited to play it with my friend after how many hours we'd put into Animal Jam. The character customization was great, and it was fun to explore the world with people. Their audience was perfect, and the devs were all so passionate about it. I stopped playing the game for a bit once they released the passes and forgot to ever check up on it again. This video is the first I'm hearing about the shutdown, and that's devastating. I thought it was such a fun project with a huge amount of fan potential. Shame they had to leave without even saying goodbye, just to be replaced with a crypto game that is destined to become obsolete.
As a fellow closed beta tester, this really does suck, the ironic part about this is that a few days ago the Cinder website completely shut down along with their discord. Cinder got dropped off the same way Feral did, and it hasn't even been a year. Fuck you Wild Works, no respect for their fans at all.
I wish there is a sequel to this because Cinder just got shut down like a few weeks ago which is a total victory to the people who are in the feral fandom but now just like Club Penguin there is some Feral private servers that are out there to avoid desist and asist copyright letters those private servers do not have anything purchasable and I am not going to mention the one I am in to avoid Wildworks from hunting it down
This is going to sound weird but as someone who predominantly lip-reads, thank you for taking so much effort to match your audio to your visual 100% spot-on in every instance. It can be very confusing on other RUclips channels when the audio's slightly behind or ahead of someone's lips as it can jam my brain so I really appreciate the effort for something that only probably 3 people here would understand.
@@PickleRicksFATASSCOUSIN it's also unfortunate because some of my favourite songs had captions by the community who went all out to match the music video... And the changes to CC made it so they're all messed up and impossible to fix But also, I liked captioning in my spare time. I feel it's a good way for youtubers without much monetary backing to become more accessible
(“1 nft an hour!” (Cancel) (“1 nft an hour!” (Cancel) (“1 nft an hour!” (Cancel) (“1 nft an hour!” (Cancel) ( “1 nft an hour!” (Cancel) (“1 nft an hour!” (Cancel) (“The server can only hold 1 nft an hour!”) ( To help the burning of fossil fuels, we will now only allow an nft an hour instead of 200 and hour. ) (Technical difficulties…) I can imagine how this game will end up...
late to the party and just starting the video but as someone who was (somewhat) involved i'm glad other people get to learn how awful this whole thing was. i joined the cinder discord for a brief second, posing as someone interested in the game but concerned about the company's recent controversy, and got banned instantly for "having a smug attitude," "spreading doubt about the project," and "being a bitter, insignificant child." also got the incredible line "we know everything" from a cinder mod when i brought up ww shady actions which is funny to this day. you knew everything but you didn't know the nft market was about to crash!
I think the most insulting part of cinder was the fact that they ripped the map from feral. They essentially stripped the bones of feral and everything that made it charming and slapped their own crappy nft avatars onto it for money.
Former Feral server mod here! Thank you for covering this. Really appreciate you getting the word out. The love the community has for each other was awesome to see for the past two years and this whole thing has been heartbreaking to watch. Good work! This game and the people who played it have changed my life and I am forever grateful for the experience, as bitter of an ending this is.
On the last day of the servers opening (for a whopping 3 hours,yes) they disabled voice chat and texte chat. So no one could talk to each others. Now,was it because it would make it easier for servers to handle the amount of players getting in without the servers crashing,or simply because they didnt want us talking about nfts and wildworks horrible treatment to the artists and community? I think the later is more probable. Furthermore,there was no goodbye events for the game.We werent given free items ( wwadmin said they were "considering it" for the last day but it didnt aged well) The npcs didnt Say anything out of the ordinary And when the game officially went down,we had no custom goodbye message. Just a cold "The connection has been Lost". Thats it. The only close thing we got as a goodbye message was when the feral site updated to read"thank you for your dedication" (not word for word but thats the gist of it) And that felt like a slap in the face. Like saying to us "yeah partys over,thanks for playing but you can go away now lol" And to this day,none of the feral socials announced ferals shutdown.And i dont think they ever will adress it. They truly wanted feral to die so Cinder would "replace" it. Dont ever support WildWorks. Get the word out.
As a former fer.al player, it honestly feels like being betrayed. Imagine supporting a company for its environmental morals for them to suddenly turn on their previous beliefs and basically just say “sorry, we used you as a test for this NFT scam game that nobody asked for or wanted” and then shut down the game that, bear in mind, you have put real money into.
Not to mention that in their terms of service it says that by playing the game you waive your rights to take them to court/a class action lawsuit. It's so scummy
Come back to this video after hearing news that NFTs are dropping substantially in interest. It's a bittersweet feeling because on the one hand, screw you for Cinder, and it's appropriately burning to the ground as we speak, but on the other it's like man... Everyone warned people like Clark Stacey they weren't going anywhere and he still did what he did to Fer.al anyway...
slightly off topic but im absolutely obsessed with a game that's somewhat similar in essence to feral, and i feel that any who played feral and enjoyed the few truly good parts of the game would also enjoy this game. it's called "sky: children of the light" and i highly recommend it! it has a season/season pass system similar to feral, beautiful graphics and large naturalistic areas, along with lovely character models and a lovely play style 💖
I was a college student in a game development program at a Utah school, and Wildworks (back when they were Smart Bomb) employees would occasionally come visit and playtest the students' games. They were clearly devoted to game development/design, so I can definitely see it as a case of being forced onto cinder by higher-ups. It's a real shame how far the company and its culture has fallen.
I was a player since closed beta and seeing this all go down was heartbreaking, the way they acted towards the comunity in its last months was cruel. They deleted official discord one channel at a time and they made us watch it all as it slowly dissapeared. They broke their own tos more than once and they punished us for reminding them of it. The game could have gone a much better way if they communicated with us and actually released tons of stuff they were working on. Gardening, main quests and battles were all found in the code. The feral enemies were called cinders so this really was just a stab in the back from them. Hell they dont even want to allow us to make feral rewritten. And the day feral shut down out of nowhere? yep it was the same day cinder launched. Theres this and many more reasons i dont trust them to even open the servers back up ever. Good job on the video izzzy the fer.al community appreciates that you covered this.
Ikr, I’m so upset about all of this. It’s such a shame they won’t let us make fer.al rewritten, but it makes sense considering their using the fer.al assets for cinder and don’t want anything getting in their way.. I hope cinder fails them. At this point they kinda deserve it considering how much further they went to silence the community, and how much more cruel they could’ve been about all this. Like- at least let us keep the discord!
@@BenDover-xw7dv Yeah, one at a time. We watched in real-time as they culled the server channel by channel, with everyone seeking refuge in the next possible channel. We did all this, mind you, while fighting a *ten minute cooldown.*
the perfect ending for this game would be a fanmade reboot with no paid content that later fills up with controversies and legal issues which result in yet another disasterous shut down, all time classic
well there’s already a fanmade reboot with no paid content in it, called EmuFeral. it’s the exact same game but has live servers and everything and it’s incredibly chill here, so I hope nothing bad happens to it
@@victimofmagic2314 weird, I commented a lot of other times about emuferal on this video (because nobody knows about it and I feel bad seeing all the comments going “omg I wish I could play this” because they still can!!) yet my reply to your comment was the only one that didn’t get automatically vanished lol
Wildworks definitely changed in a sudden way. If you look back in Clark's twitter posts, he retweeted an anti nft post in september. All of a sudden, he shares a pro nft tweet in October. The management of this company is so untrustworthy and changes so easily. Even if they stop with the nfts, they could easily go back out and towards something just as bad.
I mean, it makes sense. I wouldnt trust a company who exploits their audience made of minors. First they exploited their gaming audience with trading and rares, now they exploited their audience AGAIN with a beta NFT game. Clark is a massive hypocrite and leech. If someone is reading this comment, please spread the word. Artificial scarcity + trading is very harmful towards players, ESPECIALLY if the players are children and teens. It forces minors to ""work hard"" by grinding for inhumane amount of hours. I have seen people spend more than 5 years to get rares. Minors should not be encouraged to spend inhumane amounts of hours to get useless pixles. This is parasitic. WW does this solely for money gain. Children should not be messing around with ""economies"". This is really bad because it can get addicting, as children can't control themselves. I remember getting big dopamine rushes that would last around 1 minute just by getting rarer. Its addicting, and WildWorks know this. They ignore the fact that worth is stupidly high, because they know they'll gain money. By spreading about the harmful consequences of this cruel game design, you are bringing light to something that is unfortunately swept under the rug. What WW (and other multiple MMO rpg devs) is doing is exploitation. To elaborate on the trading part: they basically remove items on purpose for eternity > said item is deemed rare by the community > its worth skyrockets (and WW does nothing to balance worth) = children wasting hours on inhumane grinding for pixels. Because kids spend too much time on the game, theres a chance they'll spend money on it I understand that WW needs money... but exploiting your own audience thats made of minors for money is outrageous.
Honestly, what they've got going on in AJ with scarcity and trading unbelievably toxic. I remember a few years back when someone stole one of my rare items in the most outlandish way. They claimed that I "won a costume contest," and I believed it (I was distracted by something else at the time, so I didn't have a chance to properly asses the situation); they went to gift me, asking me to put a rare item on my list so they could offer on it later. Then they said "I have to go, please trade quickly!" I didn't realize they were trading for my rare item, and I accepted the trade way too fast. I spent way too long getting that item originally. They left after that. I was usually quite competent when it came to avoiding scams, but I had NEVER experienced this trick. Actual mind games, taking advantage of my courtesy like that. Felt like I was torn apart, and I cried so much. I had literal NIGHTMARES that night. If I, an older teen, had my mental health affected over getting a BUNCH OF MEANINGLESS PIXELS STOLEN FROM ME, then I think something is wrong. Very wrong. And for whoever scammed me to be so desperate to get stuff, that they had to learn something as manipulative as THAT? What's worse is in AJ's Help Center addressing scams, they note "We will not be able to return any items" if scammed. Reading those words crushed me that day. It's so stupid how upset I was over something like that, but that's the thing. If it cut me that deeply, then imagine how a 10 year old would feel about it. This game and its system is horrendous.
@@imagirabbii94 I am very sorry you went through that. Scamming sucks, I understand your pain. Thank you for bringing your experiences with this disgusting game design that is artificial scarcity + trading. Sorry if this bothers you, but I'll talk a bit about my experiences with getting scammed.... It wasnt on AJ though, it was on another popular MMO at the time. I remember having a pet donkey, which I loved very much. One day, I did something called "drop game" where you basically drop the item as a form of trading. I dropped the donkey and got kicked from the world. I cried so much. This shows that the mental exploitation in MMOs IS REAL. It not only exists on AJ, but has been existing on old school games such as Runescape or other more recent MMOs such as Growtopia. This is why I'm SUPER against trading, artificial scarcity and grinding. It either encourages children to waste inhumane amounts of time on items or encourages children to steal from others. It makes me sick. I am very sorry that you went through that... No one deserves to be scammed.
I played Feral during the early stages (I stopped playing right when they introduced the season pass stuff, so I really didn't play that long), but what I did remember was the game was stunning. The community was also really fun, especially during the absolute chaos of the pandemic in early-mid 2020. It's weird to now think of it in a nostalgic past-tense, and it's even stranger how the game succumbed to only be "beta testing" for an NFT game of all things.
I also played at that time (I joined in July of 2020) yeah and (I am not kidding) when I joined…I saw Wisteriamoon…I am not lying…I was so exited…I played for some time and then quit the game and became inactive
i was a second wave beta tester for feral, it was cool from what i remember but honestly? forgettable for me. it never invoked what i got out of animal jam in 2014 for me personally
As someone who has a degree in game development and am rather familiar with the dev cycle, it really sounds like they never had a solid plan for the direction of fer.al from the beginning which likely caused a lot of these issues. From there, they were at the whim of the higher ups because they'd have nothing to show against their demands for more money grabs in place of actual development. I can see why people would assume it was a cover for Cinder from the start because it really seems like they had no idea what kind of game they wanted fer.al to be and instead of hammering that out they just abandoned it in arguably one of the worst ways possible. It's really sad because from what I can see, the game had a lot of potential to become something amazing. Hopefully someone can buy it off of wildworks and polish it to workability at least.
I never hear anyone talk about this but fer.al’s music was soooo good. Like I would just sit on the map viewing screen and just listen. It gave me Diamond shop vibes (AJ) and felt mystical, made me want to explore and play more. It’s horrifying to see it go down this way.
I think what makes this whole thing even worse is the fact that Cinder itself ended up being even more barebones compared to Feral. There's only one or two maps to explore and...that's it. Feral, a game with vast amounts of potential and a very vibrant community, was completely abandoned in favor of a game where you spend hundreds of dollars to gain access to a glorified chat-room.
i was an on-and-off player since the closed beta. when the NFT shit was announced, i joined the discord out of curiosity to see how the community was reacting. it was chaos. people were outraged, server admins were doing their best to try to calm people down, but to hardly no avail. they tried to explain that they were just as in the dark as everyone else, but i don’t know if anyone was really paying attention. as a veteran animal jammer, it’s incredibly sad to see what this company has become, and the legacy it now has.
Oh geez, I had no idea this was all happening. I went to art school in Utah and many of my peers went on to work at Wild Works and I remember there were people I knew who's Animal Jam portfolios were being shown to prospective students as like a "look what we are doing in the local industry". Really sad to know that people I went to school with likely went through this mess, but not at all surprised based on the atmosphere and culture in Utah, especially surrounding tech, that the CEO would decry and then later support the NFT market
As an ex-fer.al player I'm glad to see bigger creators talk about this situation. The game was one of my favorites, and it was painful for me to see it get shut down. The community was awesome and always welcoming. Tragic.
I actually logged on today for the whole last hours of Fer.al thing expecting to be able to say goodbye to friends and talk with fellow players one last time. But nope. They disabled the chat feature. I understand that WW was ready to be done with Fer.al but to disable the chat feature in the last 3 hours, mind you there was no issue with chat in the first place before the server shutdown, just strikes me as a petty jab at what remained of the community. Honestly after that, and hearing that they're making an NFT game it really puts a sour taste in my mouth towards WW. Like mentioned in the video, I'm someone who was raised by the company. I started play AJ at a young age, and was really excited when Fer.al was announced since I was a teen by that point still playing Aj. It just felt like a kick in the stomach to hear they were abandoning Fer.al after being promised they wouldn't. And not even letting us say goodbye properly? NOT cool! I was there in the last 10 minutes sitting silently on the ratwall with a few other players. And then the update notice hit, and it was all over. But I guess that's my fault for believing in a company who tries to push paid memberships to kids :/
I remember a couple of times I got ads for feral, and it was beautiful, but sadly at the time I wasn’t interested and I just so happened to find out (and when I started getting interested too,) gone. I hope though in those last few moments you had on that game were memorable, sending hugs to those who put their heart into something only to find it thrown out the window. Have a great day, u deserve it my man.
Even if it was 'just' a project that still feels really sad to hear. Not even being able to use BUBBLE CHAT OF ALL THINGS is so insulting, and honestly, very immature of them. It's quite obvious they did what they did out of spite.
The high ups seemed almost vindictive that the original player base didn’t make them as rich as their Silicon Valley buddies. That ceo guy was straight up bashing all of you. It’s honestly got me pretty upset to see not only what was in the video but all of these comments about the final few hours. I’m hurt on your behalf. What a low down way to act on his part.
i feel so sorry for the people who lost money when the game shut down. since some people did buy the payable content, it's truly sick that they didn't get a refund, but it's not surprising at this point
I've never heard of an mmo refunding the players for every cent they spent once it shuts down, it's literally not feasible, that money has to go towards paying the employees, you can't just make them give back their salaries from several years when the game is shutting down. I'm not saying it's not super unfortunate that those people can't get further enjoyment from that money they spent, but at the same time that's why you've got to make sure you of the money you choose to spend.
Now I’m kinda grateful that I never got to buy anything in that game. During the time I was playing our finances weren’t really great so I never got to buy anything.
Holy shit, I never watched this cuz the shutdown still hurts me, but that footage on the Shattered Bay roof? I've got those screenshots. I arranged that with my friends. Felt so nice to see something I got to contributed to in an Izzzyzzz vid!! Shoutout to my fellow Roof Gang fellas, send shrooms pls (: If y'all knew a saddbo1, that was me ;3
I grew up with AJ and i never played Feral but it's just so disapponting that Wild Works went down this route. They just went down hill since NatGeo dropped them,going from a company that promotes caring about the enviroment to jumping on the NFT craze. As much as i loved AJ and the community i hope Cinder fails.
Dude I didn’t even know natgeo officially dropped them, I figured they did bc when I last logged in the “Nat facts” end of things seemed really different than my memories but how did natgeo drop them??
@@cordasolis well NatGeo basically funded the development of AJ since the begining, they stopped around 2018 i think. And with no funding from NatGeo AJ just got worse with the lack of content and slow updates
@@_emi yeah, I logged on recently (I log on every couple of months to keep my account, just for the nostalgia) and it was sad to see how updated everything was but how many more paywalls were around, and they don’t even stay specific to wild animals any more, they have domestic house animals and it just kinda feels like it lost the whole animal jam-ness of it all I suppose?
In my personal opinion, the game might have done better if instead of doing the membership thing, they just put a $20-40 price tag on it and we got all the things. Many other games could have done this, and it would have likely allowed it to be put on services like Steam, and consoles possibly.
I hate I missed the last hours of this game. I was a beta tester and I loved watching the game grow, even though most of the avatars were locked behind paywalls the character customization was the most fun I've had designing something in a long time. it was definitely my favorite part, I hope I can find something else like it
right?! i for one would have really enjoyed an expansion on harvesting (maybe w/ some quests of some variety, or a marketplace run by players for items and materials), or some additional lore on the queens and surrounding world. even if there's not an overwhelming amount of other things to do, i would have really enjoyed some canonized lore or fun bits about areas like the blood tundra or the shattered bay. why is the tundra full of blood? what's up with the tree? why is the port a huge trading area? does it get exports from other lands? some worldbuilding would have made a difference.
Ex-Feral beta player here. I played Animal Jam as a kid and then got into one of the last waves of Feral closed beta. I was so super excited for this game and was SO HAPPY to be a closed beta tester, even if it was like, the last wave before open beta. It looked amazing and the story and world seemed interesting and actually inspired me. It was going so well! And I wasn't even too upset about the avatars and such. I mean, I expected more than two unpaid avatars, and I didn't like the seasonal pass. But I understood paying for a few premium avatars for cosmetic purposes and it seemed better than the strict membership paywall of Animal Jam. I kind of stopped playing after Season 2 or 3 because I got bored and I was expecting to come back when there was more to do. And then it crumbled. I'm so disappointed. This game that I was so excited for and that was so amazing to me but fell within a matter of DAYS and suddenly it's closed forever within the blink of an eye. I mean, what were they thinking? What on Earth was their game plan here??
I only realized yesterday that Feral closed, since I was busy with school. I'm actually quite sad, since I spent so long making my character. I also want to add that voice chat had a situation where a child was talking to a much older guy on the game, and was exposed for it. Not quite sure what happened afterwards, but it was pretty disgusting. I'm extremely disappointed with how Feral closed and how poorly the community was treated, and this is coming from a user who just played the game and not so much reporting bugs and being involved with the community. It was a fun game for sure, it had features that I would've love to see in a game, just wish that the game was given a chance to flourish. I'm glad that I didn't spend money, but the time I wasted to collect star fragments to buy body mods and a Shinigami who I put my time and effort to design.
Well, your shinigami is goong to eventualy be turned into an NFT, and sold to some neckbeard for 10 morbilion dollars in etherium... If they ad shinigami to cinder
Thank you so much for covering this topic, as someone who was semi-active in the Fer.al community, there were fears that the radio silence across social media was an attempt to kill the game quietly so it's really nice to see the game being talked about and what went on behind. I was glad to give you footage too! Also I think it's worth mentioning that the end date of fer.al was moved twice after their initial call of Feb 19th; it was pushed back our final 24 hrs to 30 days later (they never gave us an official date anywhere, not even ingame, but told us they'd give us an extra 30 days due to breaking THEIR OWN TOS that the community did the math on to be March 20th/21st ish depending on time zone), to giving us only 3 hours on March 26th. This has not been updated since the original announcement in february, it still comes up as Feb 19th, leaving any players outside the discord/community completely in the dark that fer.al's final hours still haven't happened yet. Due to the lies and broken trust, there's fear within the community that Wildworks mightn't follow through tomorrow week when it's meant to reopen for one last time. For anyone who took the time to read my comment too, the purple kitsune you see in the footage I gave to Izzy for this video is called Spade, she was my main, and I'm glad she got to be shown one last time
You might be interested to learn about the rewritten project that's currently in the works, the teams still small but you might wanna follow em if you ever wanna see your kitsune again (that's sounds like a threat but it's not I promise) love the name btw
"seeing these companies fall to NFT scams is so exhausting" fucking tell me about it. like,the fact that it's all about the money and no one cares about the fact it hurts the environment (HARD),steals from artists and just feeds into a idiotic sense of elitism makes it really hard to even look at it every time a new one pops up out of nowhere.
This exact thing happened to a very small game development project I was part of. It would have been a good chunk of money and source of security for me and the programmer and the person who was to make the soundtrack. But the programmer fell on hard times, put a hold on our project, and turned towards NFTs and crypto, bad-talking artists who took a stance against them despite saying he had nothing but respect for my stance. Needless to say, his efforts flopped and it left him in an even worse position, and he gave up on both NFTs and the game we were developing. Just another example of people selling out, though times were difficult... Game development is hard and takes time and money but there are much better ways of going about it.
I had the pleasure of playing Feral at it's peak, before voice chats and that sort of stuff but after the levelling system, i think around the start of the passes i'm not sure. The community was wonderful, I specifically remember a group of people in the club who all sat in a green tent with me. We called it "the weed room" or something and one of the people there had a waluigi skin and someone else has a garfield one. When i noticed this video, my heart sank since I knew about the nfts but i wasn't aware of the shutdown. I'm not sure if you're there, but to the guys who sat with me at the weed room back then, yall were awesome.
I remember the weed room. I made some good friends in that club, I played Fer.al a LOT in summer 2020, and after growing up w/ Animal Jam I loved it. I miss that laid-back cat room atmosphere
OH MY GOD YES!!! IM SO HAPPY YOU COVERD THIS!!! As a long time Animal Jam user and someone who joined because of my love for animals this breaks my heart to see a company I loved and looked up to go down in flames for the sake of profit.. It's so incredibly disgusting that a company who preaches on saving environments and helping with animal conservation chooses to go down a path with NFTS. Thank you for covering this topic, as it is quite personal to me and many others.
WW was always selfish... Man, WildWorks is truly wild. The quantity of red flags that they give is IMMESURABLE. First they exploited their gaming audience with trading and rares, now they exploited their audience AGAIN with a beta NFT game. So gross. Hope WW goes bankrupt.... they deserve it! If someone is reading this comment, please spread the word. Artificial scarcity + trading is very harmful towards players, ESPECIALLY if the players are children and teens. It forces minors to ""work hard"" by grinding for inhumane amount of hours. I have seen people spend more than 5 years to get rares. Minors should not be encouraged to spend inhumane amounts of hours to get useless pixles. This is parasitic. WW does this solely for money gain. Children should not be messing around with ""economies"". This is really bad because it can get addicting, as children can't control themselves. I remember getting big dopamine rushes that would last around 1 minute just by getting rarer. Its addicting, and WildWorks know this. They ignore the fact that worth is stupidly high, because they know they'll gain money. By spreading about the harmful consequences of this cruel game design, you are bringing light to something that is unfortunately swept under the rug. What WW (and other multiple MMO rpg devs) is doing is exploitation. To elaborate on the trading part: they basically remove items on purpose for eternity > said item is deemed rare by the community > its worth skyrockets (and WW does nothing to balance worth) = children wasting hours on inhumane grinding for pixels. Because kids spend too much time on the game, theres a chance they'll spend money on it I understand that WW needs money... but exploiting your own audience thats made of minors for money is outrageous.
@@gone9820 I've spent ungodly amounts of money in aj just for my account to get eaten in that big halloween (?) data breach. I had all the info they needed to get back into that account EXCEPT I couldn't access my parent email, and for that alone they refused to help me get my account back. I had my previous username since I had it changed, previous passwords, the cards I used, my IP, even the address they sent merch to, and yet they still didn't think it was enough to get back in. I had been playing the game since it's 1 year anniversary. TL;DR: wildworks don't care about your account, they just want your money
@@dataexpunged93N15 Excactly. I know WW is a company, but they literally dont care about their players. I'm very sorry you lost all of your items, no one deserves to be hacked. Hope everything is okay now! Sorry if this sounds a bit annoying, but its very important to spread the message. This exploitation (trading and artificial scarcity) that WW does goes under the rug because its a very common occurence in MMO RPGs. I try my best to spread to message, but unfortunately not a lot of people care about it. :(
It sucks because the community as a whole is essentially grieving from this loss. I know to many Fer.al might seem like just another furry roleplaying game, but I've met so many wonderful people through this game. But, there are a lot of people in the community who have actually begun working on archiving the game and some assets so make a sort of "Fer.al Reclaimed" or "Fer.al Rewritten" like with ToonTown or Club Penguin. So hopefully that will get off of the ground and become a reality! A group of my feral friends have also worked on rebranding our avatars into an entire new world of our own to keep our creations but also still keep them together in a universe that would thrive.
idk if you’ve already heard but a group of fans successfully revived the game, now called EmuFeral!! it has live servers and everything and all the characters and clothings are unlocked
Fer.al had one of the most enjoyable character creators in any game I've ever played, and I'm still kicking myself for quitting before they introduced leveling, wings, and unlockable body mods. Absolutely infuriating.
Now I'm remembering why I put the game down for so long. I was really into the season pass and trying to beat the quests for hundreds of thousands of minigame points, and I played so much of the minigames that I burned out on the game. At that point, leveling and wings had not been introduced, so there was no other benefit to running around and collecting resources and crafting things with them. GOD, if only they had added levels and unlockable body mods before the public early access release! I would have played SO much more of this game! And EVEN THEN the people who WERE online found it way too tedious!
THEY PAYWALLED DECALS HOLY SHIT. The decal system was the only reason I stuck it out for this shitty little game, it made for some downright incredible character customization. God, no wonder this ship sank.
Oh let me tell you. You didn’t miss much. The leveling was VERY grindy. You could get xp by harvesting mats, doing quests, playing minigames and doing season pass stuff. I had gotten so far, I unlocked the first wings. That’s about it. It took a really long time. When I wanted to get xp, I was just playing a certain level of Do or Dye over and over again. After that I would harvest mats. Needless to say, I got burned out. Lost interest and went to play a different game instead. Altough I’ll miss fer.al a lot. It has a very unique vibe and the character creator was amazing. I even got some ocs from fer.al!
@@XerxesTexasToast They reverted those changes when they noticed the backlash they got from the community. Doesn’t make it right because they did do it.
I’ve been following Feral since the VERY beginning. Like, before the official announcement beginning. I was a VERY active closed beta tester, and continued to play well after early access. I’ve closely followed this situation and experienced it all as it happened. This whole situation is HEARTBREAKING and still puts a pit in my stomach. I’ve cried over this game. It may sound silly, but it meant the world to me. It was such a relaxing and beautiful game, that had INSANE potential. To see a game that I felt to close to, poured my heart into, and felt as it was almost a part of me be treated the way it has was horrible. I’m glad it’s almost over now.. to be honest I’m sick of the grief it’s caused me and so many others, and I just want to forget about it. I wish WildWorks was better. I really do. I’ll never be financially supporting them again after this, even if Feral does make a return. Thank you for making a video on the situation, we all as a community appreciate it.
I was just about to post a very similar comment, I've been following since it was announced as well and I too was a part of the closed beta (as i was a beta tester for Animal Jam when it went through its closed beta in 2010)... To say I was disappointed every time my feedback on the beta was ignored or shoved aside, every time WW did something with the game against the community's interests, is an understatement, and my HORROR when i saw the announcement of Cinder... i fell in love with fer.al, as an artist I ADORED how imaginative it was, how customizable your character was, and how gorgeous the world environments were. I spent DAYS on fer.al, even though the gameplay was limited, just exploring and talking to people and just loving playing the game. Then I learned that the devs were secretly stealing people's avatar designs without the playerbase knowing, in order to create the NFTs for Cinder... God, that's one of the scummiest things! Anyway, thank you for sharing your story with us. It means a lot.
@@GrayLenz Thank you so much for sharing your story as well. I absolutely agree, I poured HOURS into the game, it calmed my anxiety like no other. I’m just glad there are others who felt the same way as me
The saddest part about this is that the footage consists of players i’ve talked to and hung out with in the past. Most likely I will never get the chance to see them or converse with them for the rest of my life. Wildworks really tore apart a community I knew so so well. The vast majority of the players I was close with didn’t share socials, as it was never desperate, as if the game would be shutting down. Now there just memories, i may never see them again.
so they antagonized their original audience in favor of catering to cryptobros, and now with everything that went down with NFTs their audience is... who 🤡 lol
Seriously. I dunno why they thought cryptobros of all people would ever be interested in their furry/fairy mmo in the first place. They’re not exactly the type of people who play those sort of games lmao.
I got into Feral when the open beta started (about when lockdowns started in 2020) and it was enjoyable! For me the grindy collectathon gameplay wasn't "fun" per say, but it was something low-stakes and repetitive to do when there wasn't anything else I felt like doing. A nice massage for the brain, maybe. I fell off the bandwagon but came back last year....less than a week before the NFT announcement. So that was an extremely cool and fun and not-at-all-upsetting thing to come back to /s. I joined the Discord to read back the clark AMA, not knowing the absolute shitshow that the following months would be. The sheer unprofessionalism of the Wildworks staff (when they bothered to speak to us) was just staggering. A company that gained its status from _National Fucking Geographic,_ and its employees resorted to trolling its player base, brushing off criticism, and throwing barbs at users for the hell of it? It was all unbelievably childish, and while I don't think there was any ill intent in the initial decision to start Cinder, the people in the company got more openly vindictive after their community (justifiably imo) turned on them. I was one of many who tried to explain that the crypto grift was unsustainable both financially and environmentally (which, gotta love the "and yet you use paypal and a debit card. curious! i am very intelligent" attitude wwadmin and others took towards the environmental criticisms). Wildworks chose not to listen to anyone, except for the handful of people who took it too far. I genuinely hope they can use that sweet sweet cinder money to hire some goddamn PR, because heaven knows they need it.
hearing that a game shut down overnight (while its community imploded) and got replaced by an NFT-based knockoff was just the tip of the iceberg filled me with dread
Yeah they shut down the game with no warning, although many people saw it comming
Due to some pointing out this was a breech of their TOS they gave us one day, 30 days out
Then they pushed it back a couple days and gave us 3 hours...
@@starchild8822 WildWorks didn't like that Fer.al's community flat told them they weren't spending any money anymore, so they threw the community to the side and tried to push it to any Cryptobro that found it like a desperate MLM Hun.
@@katzcat8181 yea ik, I was there as it was going down
I've been apart of the community since closed beta
What THE FUCK
"The tip of the iceberg" was about the cons of NFTs, that’s why she shouted out Dan Olson's video on NFTs right after that comment. It wasn’t about the game.
I'm here from the "future" to let you all know that Cinder has been unceremoniously shut down in February 2023. It was not announced really, there are no big statements apparently but the servers are shut off and the whole team has apparently been let go. So much for that dream of big money, I guess.
They really shut down a really well loved game for a NFT game, only for them to shut down the NFT game not even a year later. I cant believe they waste everything for nothing 💀
My faith has been partially restored
YEEEEESSSS!!!
serves them right lmao, what a waste of effort
history repeats itself and nothing was learned
Good.
The irony of a team that partnered with National geographic to make an online kids game to teach kids about animals getting in to NFTs cannot be understated.
natgeo is pretty terrible themselves tbf
@@pgyws5137 i believe it
@@pgyws5137how?
@@pgyws5137 why? What happened?
@@s0up_1223they laid off their last writers back in June, stopping publication as an educational magazine and are now pushing garbage techbro articles online. They’ve taken pretty much the same route as Feral, actually.
The final day was awful. We were only given 3 hours and they had disabled text and voice chat so nobody could even say their goodbyes to each other in the game. They shut the severs down half an hour after the scheduled time and simply put a “sever has been updated” error. No goodbyes, no special party in the game, nothing. I jumped on the game and supported the game via the season pass and buying avatars and it hurts seeing how they pushed it to the side for an NFT reskin of the game with no compensation or warning of it shutting down. Thanks to wildworks, I now have little trust in any future social MMOs that pop up.
Oh my gosh that sucks so much, I didn’t know that they had disabled text and voice chat. That’s so stupid
I felt bad I missed my final chance at goodbyes but hearing how the last day went is... sigh
OH MY GOD I AM SO HAPPY I WASNT THE ONLY ONE WOTJ THIS ISSUE. Dude I cried when I had to wait 1-2 hours. Misery…
i didn't even know they were giving us only 3 hours, i thought it would at least be 24. i never got to play for the last time because i was busy that entire day, so later that day whenever i tried to log on the game had already been shut down :(
that's so awful that they didn't even allow you to talk to people in those last few hours.. like wth
Wow. They disabled the chat functions? That is fucking *spiteful.*
The Animal Jam to Fer.al to Cinder pipeline really is just the embodiment of "you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain"
One thing I don't see much talk about is the lore of the world. It isn't anything... technically special, but I thought it was interesting as all hell. Early on in development quests were tied to weekly rotations (there wasn't any way to replay quests, you just had to log in each week and run around doing what was available) and there ended up being a really intriguing mystery about my favorite zone, the Blood Tundra, and how it... well, became the Blood Tundra. There were ghosts and lowkey a cult of albino kolbolds and one of the devs later confirmed that two of the major ones were supposed to have an "ambiguous relationship" and...
Man. I just wish the game had lived to thrive as everyone hoped it would.
@@yin9008 well said. I played since closed beta and i really thought this game was going to have a huge epic backstory, lore, quests etc. but it turned out to be very empty
@@thiswillnotdo6027 yeah!! it's a real shame tbh. i was part of the discord and got a full pdf of the whole lore/game backstory (one of the mods shared it with us just before the closure) and it's exactly the kind of thing that i know i would've loved to discover and learn about over the course of years and years. really sad it ended like this.
"you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself in people's phones as a screenshot"
The fans went from Fer.al to e621
Remember when "Nft" stood for "Not for trade"... Me too, me too..
Ditto old sport ditto
Ditto. I even put it on my Pokemon's name in PokeFarm Q/PokeHeroes to let people know that my Pokemon aren't for trade.
That memory of telling people that certain items I had was not for trade on aj stuck with me so much that when the nfts became a thing, at first I genuinely thought that's what it still meant
Yes!! I remember!
:(
Not that wildworks guy saying turning the lights on in your house is the same as investing in a frivolous and ugly icon that produces massive amounts of carbon emissions 💀
plus, we need cars and lights and stuff like that but nobody needs a silly cartoon picture that they paid a shit ton of money for
Wait sorry if this is a dumb question, but how does it produce carbon emissions?
@@M00m00chi3 Blockchain (server) load (the amount of energy it takes to run servers). The blockchain stores the receipt of ownership for each NFT and a link to the asset. There are alternatives that are ultimately way cleaner for the environment that wouldn't require servers to hold receipts but since the same people invested in NFTs/crypto are also invested in the blockchain there's no incentive to develop cleaner technology. It's really just an indicator of how big of a scam NFTs are.
@@M00m00chi3 basically the energy needed to power the servers that host the blockchain, as well as the energy needed to power the actual transactions that take place. I remember hearing about an artist who tried to get into NFT art, but immediately quit when she found out that the energy needed to process a single NFT transaction was equal to the energy needed to power her entire art studio for 24hrs.
@@M00m00chi3nothing more that running your pc there just eco fascists dont listen to them
This whole situation is literally so ironic because animal jam, their first neglected game was a game all about saving the environment but fast forward 2 years later... and Cinder pops up, a game about NFTs right after they neglect another game of theirs that had so much potential
most likely higher ups or sumn the employees working on early feral were very happy to be working their i think the higher ups just ruined it and clark
Animal Jam seems less about saving animals and more about cool features. Ever since NatGeo stopped funding, a lot of the educational bits disappeared. The only notable thing I can think of is the donation spot in the Conservation Museum if that's still even there.
I used to love reading the lil animal facts scattered around and looking for the animals in each area.
@@fayolahh Yup its still there but yeah ever since Nat Geo stopped finding it’s only been that
@@fayolahh in both games there are still the little yellow paw educational pop ups, as well as the jamaa journal in classic. the conservation museum did come to play wild, however nobody (and i mean nobody) goes there. the movie theaters in the aquarium and in serapia forest are still there, but no new content has been made in like.... 6 years lol.
Animal Jam in ITSELF isn't even 'about' saving the animals anymore. The most it is focusing on right now is quick cash grabs, and screwing over nonmembers.
Man, the graphics and the artstyle of the game are absolutely gorgeous, I feel so fucking bad for the artists that got shackled with shit management
Seriously imagine the artists who spent months developing new avatar models just to have them all scrapped for ugly ass fae lol
The art and music of their games is so pretty. Fuck the corporation that took advantage of them.
The decal system was so fun. There were so many things you could make in it, from beautiful and graceful, aesthetically pleasing creatures, to a realistic finger dragon. I personally really enjoyed making pre-existing characters on my creatures (we called them cosplays lol). Such a shame that all that expression is gone now. I’ll miss it.
@@sadtoasties I'll miss it too, even if most of what I did was make Fire Emblem cosplays on all of my 5 or so accounts (most being backups specifically for that)
I like the fact this has 4 replies and 1k likes,
Ex Moderator here, and I sneakily contributed some images which I was happy to see here.
On behalf of the moderators who did not have the time to share added perspectives, it's very relieving to see your recognition of our blood sweat and tears during this terrible event.
It's been difficult to even see this ourselves, while we were literally gaslighted in areas to feel "okay" about it, or being told "everything will be fine."
While WW ghosted our concerns for announcements, concerns for community awareness, (It has been 7+ days since our messages were "passed down" and still left in the dark) WW has additionally failed to communicate to us on the many friendships we've created. On an emotional perspective, we were also greatly affected. From admins banning innocent members in front of us, having another WW administrator telling us to grow up, (literal evidence we have) we had to sit and watch most of the time. Some of us were vocal about it and addressing our points directly to staff with some avail to none.
This was more than just an "unpopular business decision," it was punishment honestly
wow, this just gives me so much more respect for you guys!
thank you for everything
So much respect to you mods
Thank you for your work in the server enemy ❤️ you and the other mods did the best you could with the shit-show we ended up going through
Never was in the Feral community but as an ex-discord mod myself I can strongly empathize. Moderation work is usually a thankless and unpaid job that you do out of passion and clear joy for the work itself, while when things go wrong with either discord or the topic at hand (in this case Feral) mods are the ones who take most of the vocal backlash like a meat shield. Dealing with apathetic higher-ups just deals even more emotional damage on top of that, ya’ll really were given a horrid hand and I’m sorry you had such a bad experience with WW 😔
Didn't realize fer.al had actually shut down until I saw this a month later. My dad and I always played together, as well as animal jam, and when I shared this with him (after keeping him updated on prior controversy), I am pleased to announce that on behalf of my father, Clark Stacey is now a professional "slimy jerkbag". (I'm pretty sure he would have said more choice words if my mom wasn't in the next room over)
I grew up playing games with my mother and honestly to this day we still hang out online. She pretty much wishes Clark Stacey would fall in a rancid hole right now and she has every right. Cheers to parents who not only pay attention to their children but bond with them and enjoy their interests with a fiery passion. 💕
@@skykidsbugnpoppy agreed! We support parents against nft scumbuckets
I really liked the customization in the game for the characters. It’s too bad it was corrupted and then had to go.
@@skykidsbugnpoppy man i remember when my mom and I would play zombie farm then they had taken it off ios. kinda sad but i’m glad for those memories, no where else to have been made and no else.
@@juliusevola4135 All that matters is that you enjoyed playing it together, and there are lots of other games to enjoy! We love Moms and Dads bonding with their kids.
Here's an update: Cinder shut down on February 8, 2023.
So they got their money and ran... like virtually all NFT scams.
They ain't make any money lmao
@@cyonu5675 They got investments. That's how every NFT scam starts. They make a demonstration product, look for investors, throw in the "we can put nfts in this for $$$", investor gets rock solid, they pretend to make a game for as long as they legally have to, then bail.
I was a Feral beta tester, and, like stated in the video, the way they handled feedback was outrageous. Players in the discord were always throwing ideas for things in the game that they WOULD be willing to spend money on (avatars, sanctuaries and building things, gardening/fishing and other features, ect.), and yet Wildworks still just continuously neglected that for shitty season passes.
Completely unrelated especially since Feral is now gone, but for some reason the word "avatar" in your comment sparked this idea: first, context, I very strongly wanted aj's masterpiece system in feral - I think it would have been really cool if we could set these "masterpieces" as sort of profile pictures especially since the game was supposedly suppose to seem like social media (i.e. "likes" as currency)
Oh god. I have a friend who was a beta tester on this. I don't know if she has a Discord account or if she goes by the same names there, but she goes by Takumi in the socials i know her from
bro i was a beta tester too lets gooo
I'm your 400th liker here & bye.
Currently experiencing the final hours of Fer.al. Despite chat being taken away, a group of players have all just kinda agreed to sit around the fire at the kobold camp in mugmyre swamp. It's oddly comforting. To those who couldn't make it whether it be schedule or bad device, I am sorry. Waddle on, guys, waddle on.
me along with many people gathered at centuria and some performed a final time.. it honestly made me really upset
I was unaware how recent it was shut down, I just went to play it after remembering the nostalgia of Animal Jam cause I remembered that it was in development. But I was too late :(
I saw that 🥺 I wished I could of joined but I wanted to enjoy my last moments
Just wanna let you know it touched my heart and hurt so much
@@Winter0721 personally It gave me the vibes of a group of homeless people huddled around one of those metal can fires, having been reduced to nothing but still finding joy in huddling up together and just comforting one another. I personally sat with them for about 30 or so minutes and it truly felt comforting, almost as though everything would be alright.
@@theonlyshinyumbreon Yeaa kinda like that too! :)! And that’s cool! I wish I could of joined, but I wanted to try and find things before it all ended.
Ex- Server Helper here. I believe that if they had listened to the amazing community feedback and ideas and actually communicated in the last year of the game, it could have been saved from failure and dare I say it might have become profitable. It certainly had potential; a big and active community, players willing to engage in the game, it just didn't have the substance to keep players engaged.
I literally would have paid money for some of the stuff that was already in the game had I not been so wary of spending money at all based on the painful grind and the subpar rewards for completing season passes. I bought the dragon! I bought the first season pass! All they had to do was make the game a little more fun.
Thank you for trying, man. I hope you're doing better for yourself these days :)
Honestly if they'd just released their match-three game for like $5 I would have bought it as a stand-alone. It was my favorite match-three game ever.
@@Cathowl For sure! Stuff like that was incredibly creative (of course, dizzywing dispatch was pretty much candy crush, but the others were creative). Alone those gave a large amount of the substance the game already had.
Genuinely, what is the point of beta testing if you don't listen to tester feedback???
I would’ve played the crap out of this. I’ve so desperately yearned for “high fantasy 3D neon dog game” since I was, like, ten, and this looks as close to what I want as could reasonably be hosted on a web browser. If I win the lottery, or get stupid rich somehow, I’m going to finance “high fantasy 3D neon dog game” so that the clearly popular niche can finally be filled with a proper long standing sparkleanimal RP-MMO.
Werent really dogs involved but it was enjoyable while it lasted, still had a ton of frustrating stuff about it.
To glitches, bugs and just horrible update choices by Wildworks
even if a game like that comes out when im 30 i still want to fulfil childhood dreams of playing as a neon creature collecting trinkets
i don't know if it's high fantasy, but someone in another comment thread recommended feralheart unleashed, which opens in 5 days!!! it's definitely 3d neon dog game, that's for sure
@@Parker-nm9cg thanks
@@Parker-nm9cg Sadly I can't access it on my device (don't have 60$ of my own to fork over) but it seems really cool!
At this point i really don't see how executives see every NFT proyect fall off (+ ratio) and decide they also want to make their own NFTs.
right like?? "ah yes, that thing completely failed and ruined the company, let's do the same thing!"
@@felixt808 I think is all apart of the hustle in their minds "haha all the non believers will leave, but no matter, we'll be rich by this same time next year! What can possibly go wrong?"
And how a bunch of other cryptoshiters promore the thing too "a bunch of outsiders might hate you for this but hey, you'll get the last laugh and anyways OUR community will always be behind you :)"
I'm pretty sure they all started their projects around the same time, and by the time other companies started failing they had sunk too much money in to cancel their plans
I think either they're in an echochamber and don't realise just how much gamers despise NFTs or they all hope the NFT buyers will pick up the slack and replace the lost revenue from actual gamers tenfold.
Because it is still sometimes making money off of the red pool scams. And a lot of people unfortunately are pushed by that bottom dollar.
NFTs take enough energy to power a small country to make one. The idea that someone who's against that must use no energy is fucking absurd. The epitome of "yet you participate in society"
people say that they don't even realize how recent its been since snow storms in the southern united states absolutely ruined people's lives for a bit, even with heating systems. energy isn't just television and phone chargers, it's expected for people to pay electric bills for a reason???
literally. like electricity is practically essential for humans to live but NFTs aren't essential nor a practial need! The admin gave a horrible analogy lmao
@@jessirocks-yd2eo Y e p .
People who resort to massive leaps of logic are almost always using this tactic as a cop-out to avoid justifying all their crappy takes. Like if the LGBTQ+ community says "Love is love" and opposers respond with "So you approve of ped*philia".
NFTs, at the end of the day, are unnecessary. To compare using a source of electricity for using your computer to do work or schooling, heat up/cool down a home, keep food fresh, etc...it's pathetic. :/
Not to mention you are using electricity to do something.
Using all that energy only to made a receipt to a JPEG is just not even comparable.
Fun fact. Today, the cheapest avatars for Cinder are at 14 cents price. And the entire volume of NFTs they have is just 800€
Which most certainly makes this decision to get into the NFT sphere about the worst one in their history.
They went from a project, that only made a few tens of thousands a month, to a game, that sold about that much in its entirety, and now has a potential of 2 weeks salary for a minimum wage worker.
thats awesome
aaaaaand now it’s shut down lol
@@spookynoodles1212 holy shit yes!
they went from losing money to losing money. Unfortunate
I've never played a game that had such a creative character builder, the decal system and the ability to switch characters any time you liked were things I've never seen elsewhere and the things players did with them were phenomenal. You could see a TARDIS against a starry sky or a fox in full naval uniform or a cat that looked like a beautiful china plate. Never before have I taken screenshots of other people's avatars in a game to simply look at later and admire the craftsmanship. What a loss. :(
do you have those screenshots posted anywhere? the avatars in the ads already look amazing, I really want to see what the players came up with!
@@theopatrick2961
oh man, sadly I don't at the moment... I'll see if I can put some in a tumblr photoset later or something. If I do I will let you know!
I had the Kirin for my first season pass. I loved it honestly. I also had a cool Senri with Red and Black accessories and grey with grey stripes named Versailles. He was so cool.
@@WireMosasaur thank you so much!
I miss seeing a bunch of beautifully designed characters and then a giant headed Senri with Joe Biden’s face on it in the middle of it all. Those people were always the most creative out of the bunch to me
I was so heartbroken when the cinder site was found. The thing about "we've been building and testing the platform for Cinder for over two years already" was just the final straw really
i remember the whole community felt so betrayed that basically all their money had gone to cinder instead of fer.al. They just shoved fer.al to the side like it was some beta test for cinder instead of its own thing.
@@sejsuper4660 ikr, it was so devastating. Idk if I’ll ever be able to reconnect with some friends I had on fer.al..
That shit literally made me cry. Like they literally betrayed us
I remember when we found it too. It made me sick
@@sejsuper4660 The sounds exactly like the hiveswap king's quest thing. A bunch of die hard fans invest a lot of time and money into bringing a project to fruition that they think they'll love and then some scumbag CEO decides that they're going to spend all the money on something else instead.
She's gone from throwing her phone at a wardrobe to getting sponsored by SwitchCraft and Genshin Impact. That's a glow up if I've ever seen one.
i wouldn't exactly call that a glow up/lh
Chill out, what ya yellin' for? Lay back, it's all been done before. And if you could only let it be, you will see that I am the funniest YouT*ber of all time. Admit it, my dear follow*r hen
@Abby i wouldn't say that. genshin is very generous in paying their sponsors
@Abby why? /gen
@Abby your personal dislike of the game doesn't diminish how a huge game with good compensation for RUclipsrs is sponsoring her now
No idea why Wildworks ever thought their audience of LGBT+ neurodivergent kids would ever like the idea of an NFT game, or even have the money to support it in the first place. Sad to see this company fall from grace so tragically...
Edit: For all the replies saying 'I'm not LGBT or neurodivergent!!' good for you, I don't need to hear about it.
And yes, I did watch the video. I know they were not trying to captivate their audience with whatever they decided to do with NFTS. My comment was saying this was a very strange idea BECAUSE of their fanbase, who typically would not run in with the NFT crowd. And their choice to go against their fanbase clearly did not go well as their NFT game was a failure.
NFT means "Fuck you customers" even more than virtual signalling
Doesn’t matter that they’re “lgbt+ neurodivergent kids”, I don’t think ANYONE like nft games
@@Rainbowfox_ People who like nfts like nft games
I think it was a desperate last bid to keep the lights on. It may have been a choice of "fire staff or try to cash in on the new lastest thing".
They probably never cared about them in the first place.
Cinder is a betrayal of what AJ and Fer.al stood for, it's very disappointing. They teach kids and teens how to protect the environment and then go on to create and support NFTs. Yikes!
I played since Day 1 of Early Access, but because they shut down the game without much notice and on short time I didn't know it was closing until a friend told me a while after.
So I didn't even have a chance to say goodbye to the friends I made over the years. (If anyone from The Bone Council reads this, I hope you're well!)
It always bothered me that we only got updates and info through Discord, it was chaotic and overwhelming so I had it on mute and most of the friends I made in game weren't on Discord anyway. I wonder if they even know what happened. I'm sad I couldn't say goodbye or keep in contact with them.
EXACTLY MY THOUGHTS
It's just so ironic
its really sad how relationships get cut off because of a comapny making spontaneous decisions :/
this enviroment damage misinformation bs needs to stop. blockchains use less energy than the traditional banking system. there is a reason both mastercard and visa are looking into blockchain tech. the enviroment damage misinformation bs is similar to how the oil industry spent trillions trying to convince people that it was better than alternatives. old energy inefficient, slow, and expensive transaction banking system sees efficient, instant, and zero fee blockchain tech and is afraid of being replaced
BOOST THIS COMMENT SO THE BONE COUNCIL READS THIS
May the bone council find you again
Imagine destroying an entire community, throwing away countless hours and years of work, dragging your company through a latrine. just to chase a dying pyramid scheme / scam.
I've heard of a shooting oneself in the foot. But this is sawing off the dam leg.
I’d classify this more like cutting off both of them tbh
No this is a bellyflop into a landmine.
@@mill2712 nah this is throwing your siblings and yourself into a volcano
@@mill2712 a swandive into acid
AND THEN ON THE LAST DAY ITS OPEN YOU COULDN’T EVEN CHAT
Honestly as someone who was *really* into Fer.al its just... Absolutely insane how fast this game fell. Weeks. Not months, or even years like most games of similar backgrounds, w e e k s
well in my opinion, the game had cracks since the beginning. it was just easy to ignore them which is what made the falling seem instant
@@r12jason Yeah exactly. Wanna see a game that failed within weeks? Look at Artifact.
Is as if everyone involved collectively fell down a set of stairs at the same time. It just all went to hell.
Me too, I was so attached.
Same here. I know how you feel.
11:50
"Shinigami remains in T-pose in Character Creator even after leaving decal menu"
"Shinigami cannot do the stanky leg"
Best bug report of all time
Cool, but cruel, update for y’all:
Cinder has shut down quietly after WW was bought by Nazara Tech when Cinder’s team split from WW.
So they kinda just ran with the money
I've said it before many times but I really do think that WildWorks losing their partnership with NatGeo in 2017 caused the main downfall of the company. I mean, with as big of a company as NatGeo is, they probably got desperate for money. And since NFTs and crypto junk was marketed as a "get rich quick" scheme they latched on to that thinking it would save them.
They should have adopted a gacha system
@@Zenocius At least a gacha is more friendlier than Nfts but like maybe make a separate game that’s not Feral.
@@Zenocius They actually implemented gacha mechanics in their mobile version of Animal Jam. Edit: wanted to add how it's also scummy considering how the economy there is set on rare pets with particular traits
I was thinking why they wouldn’t use their reputation with Animal Jam to make a deal with a bigger game publisher for Feral (which could potentially lead down a slippery slope depending on how greedy the publisher is, but it’s better than leaving your game stale for years)
As an original player of the game, seeing how the game fell so SO fast- I honesty just kinda sat back and watched everything play through. I feel kinda sad though,,, we were so sure it could work out but then wildworks just kinda made it into a money maker..
It went down in *weeks* which is absolutely INSANE
@@syrup4835 IKR???? And a lot of people saw good in it too 😨
I’ve been playing since closed beta and it’s really sad how fast it went down, the game had so much potential but it was handled by WildWorks
Wilworks was already making games into money making machines by exploiting their audience.... First by adding trades and rares, now this. Such disgusting practices.
If someone is reading this comment, please spread the word. Artificial scarcity + trading is very harmful towards players, ESPECIALLY if the players are children and teens. It forces minors to ""work hard"" by grinding for inhumane amount of hours. I have seen people spend more than 5 years to get rares. Minors should not be encouraged to spend inhumane amounts of hours to get useless pixles. This is parasitic. WW does this solely for money gain. Children should not be messing around with ""economies"". This is really bad because it can get addicting, as children can't control themselves. I remember getting big dopamine rushes that would last around 1 minute just by getting rarer. Its addicting, and WildWorks know this. They ignore the fact that worth is stupidly high, because they know they'll gain money. By spreading about the harmful consequences of this cruel game design, you are bringing light to something that is unfortunately swept under the rug. What WW (and other multiple MMO rpg devs) is doing is exploitation.
TO elaborate on the trading part: remove items on purpose for eternity > said item is deemed rare by the community > its worth skyrockets (and WW does nothing to balance worth) = children wasting hours on inhumane grinding for pixels. Because kids spend too much time on the game, theres a chance they'll spend money on it.
WW needs to stop.
Yeah I remember seeing this trailer and really wanted to play I forgot all about it till now. Sad it went down hill though 🙁
On behalf of the family if KitSenDragn, we would like to thank many of you for the kind words you left after her passing. We are sad to, belatedly, hear about the end of Fer.al as it and it's family of players meant a lot to her.
!!!
You're a family member of hers?!? I beg to hear more about the KitSenDragn. Please.
@@fierceloyalist KitSenDragn shared her mother's love for books and games. She was a gamer all her life whether it was video games or table top. I can remember hearing her and her mother squabbling over how long she had been playing her game on the PC and thinking it was really her mother who wanted her daughter to get off so she could play, too. When she was a teen, her uncle introduced her and her boyfriend (who later became husband) to Dungeons & Dragons. They used to sit at our dining room table rolling dice while her uncle was the Dungeon Master. She was highly artistic and covered her walls with artwork of her own or from others. We parted ways when she stayed in California to go to college while most of the immediate family moved to Arizona. Unfortunately, that was also when we began to lose touch. I think without family support she sort of lost her way at first, but eventually she did very well and lived a comfortable life. We were surprised and very happy for her when she got a job at Electronic Arts and continued getting jobs in a field that she loved. Unfortunately, like many artistic types, she was easily swayed by her own emotions or those of others. It was a horrible "perfect storm" of circumstances that caused her passing. We cannot blame any one factor without blaming them all so we blame no one.
@@fierceloyalist KitSenDragn's father died before she did. And her mother has not gotten over the death of her only child. I'm sorry, but because of this It WOULD be an invasion of privacy to give you her true name. She has no cemetery location, but her mother has her ashes.
My condolences for your lost loved one. 🕯
@@Tokuijin A creative mind in the hands of an incompetent corporation. KitSenDragn is in a more creative world than the one we inhabit. She smiles upon us all.
Critical update: Cinder's servers have permanently shut down, in basically the same way as Fer.al's -- out of nowhere, just one day it was gone.
As an ex-feral discord mod this whole situation is just wild. I became a trial moderator mere weeks before all of this went down (and was still a trial mod when the announcement came). I remember first joining the game back in 2020 during the first few months of early access and being so excited about it's concept. Ignoring all the obvious flaws with the game such as no gameplay loop/barely any content, the content that is available being very grindy, the bugs, the lack of communication or meaningful updates or changes, what it had going for it was truly astonishing. It's avatar editor is still my favorite in any game I've ever played, and it's a shame that all the hours spent designing avatars, crafting items, buying season passes, and trading clothing and furniture are now pretty much meaningless. Now like the other mods even though I truly believe this was a last resort and they had no ill intentions with fer.al at the start, WildWorks still handled this situation extremely poorly. From being passive aggressive with users, to not communicating with the mods with the original Cinder announcement (and of course basically no communication in every other aspect), choosing style and graphics over any substance or long-term gameplay, etc. WW really shot themselves in the leg with how they handled the game, a game that had a LOT going for it, from it's avatar customization and sanctuaries and harvesting and more. I really hope that those that have been working on fer.al these past few years, such as the artists and coders and devs, I hope they are able to get new jobs now that fer.al is no more. And to all of the friends I made on the game, and to anyone that was actively into fer.al when it shut down really, I hope you'll be able to find other games that can bring the same or similar amounts of joy that fer.al once did. RIP fer.al.
hi yedd
omg is that yedd don't starve no way you're celebrity !!!
Yo! What's up it's Jevil from Fer.al!
I played during the closed beta and absolutely loved it! It seemed it peaked in that time and early access, which is really sad. I would've loved to see it keep going because I felt like it could've been something really special.
Yeah, I only played at the beginning as I use Linux for school, and having to switch operating systems just to play wasn't really practical for me. Especially when FeralHeart still exists and was fairly similar at the start. I really wanted to see the adventure aspect go further with more lore, but perhaps we as a community can learn, and create something better. I focus on web development or else I'd want to help to make something like what it could have been.
I'm really confused why they didn't just start selling merch? Literally could've used preexisting art for the game and thrown it on stickers and t-shirts with some drop-shipping company. Enamel pins and prints too! That could've been a really simple way to earn a hell of a lot of money without alienating the fanbase. I feel like the whole money problem became such a stressor, they could no longer enjoy making the game and being a part of the community. That might've been what caused some of the rushed, unrequested, and glitchy updates. Everything became hyperfocused on money.
And honestly? They could've asked for donations. People LOVE this game, and if you were to, in a non-obnoxious way, have a button or something that was like "Hey! We're struggling to keep the game open and financially self-sustaining. Could you spare a couple bucks?" Five dollars from hundreds of people can add up to a fair amount. I dunno how much running a game costs, but I'm sure the community would have done their best to help.
They did consider merch as an idea. And honestly, it wouldn’t be that bad.
They literally had a bunch of plushie items of beloved avatars/NPCs that they could’ve used. The furniture items for Feral could’ve been an actual reality. Man.
@@bubblybobabubbles Apparently they cant do that though because of what kind of company they are. So donations and a Patreon weren't on their list.
@@Woolykins_Clubhouse That sounds utterly stupid. Almost like an outright lie? I've done a quick search. It's only illegal if you're using it for criminal activity. So unless wild works were planning on shipping weed they've could have totally taken donations. But it would be taxed. So the only motivator to not take donations was money. SURPRISE!
honestly that's kind of genius, it's what neopets really dug into around 2002-2007 and it massively boosted their profits. the customization factor would be a massive incentive to buy, if you could get an exact replica of your designed creature as a plush or even just a nicely printed poster - i can see people going nuts for that. such a shame the community was screwed when the company had so much opportunity to thrive.
All I remember of my time with Fer.al was a “cult” of people crowding around that one tooth-talking npc, going on about the wonders of good dental care and brushing your teeth. Good times
11:47 i’m sorry “Shinigami cannot do the stanky leg. Instead leg just twitches uncontrollably” destroyed me
what makes me sad is this game looks absolutely gorgeous, if I didn't know that the game was basically unplayable and then got deleted I would honestly check it out because the character and environment designs look beautiful
Oh trust me.. it was gorgeous. The character customization was unmatched too. It’s an absolute crime the situation went the way it did
the game was so fun and the character customization was absolutely peak
It was actually very playable, but after you customize you run out of things to do
It was very playable. I personally never had much trouble with it. And the game was gorgeous. It’s had amazing customization, beautiful lands, deep lore and fun and interesting quests. I also loved the games sense of humor. So sad it’s gone
It was definitely a gem, and the music was great too!!
Wow, that admin's bad-faith take was upsetting.
Just because we are already hurting the environment doesn't make it okay to add more fuel to the fire.
And when one NFT takes more power than a whole house, you just can't compare the two.
Also, the biggest difference is that NFTs are fucking worthless. At least when I’m wasting electricity by playing video games I’m using it for a specific purpose and having fun. Or when I’m using electricity to cook my food I’m doing it to eat something. NFTs take up way more energy than they’re worth.
this guy get's it.
Yeah, besides, things like electricity use would be what some call "necessary evils", if anything. NFTs, however, are unnecessary.
yeah I can't believe they were doing the unironic mudhut argument.
Like that's the point where it's so obviously wrong that you just gotta sit them down and ask "ok so what is this really about?" because holy shit they might as well have just said they want the money and don't have a good excuse for it.
iirc, in new york prices skyrocketed so high that it was incredibly difficult for a lot of the population to pay, literally at the peak of winter (aka when people need indoor heating the most). the difference between basic household electronics and nfts is that one is necessary for most peoples' day to day survival and the other is worthless garbage that means nothing and is only meant for the wealthy to be purposefully wasteful.
I just realized the painful irony that it was the same guys that made Animal Jam, a game to teach kids about the world and environment, went down the NFT path. That's just twisted.
It seems this great idea from clark ended how we all expected: cinder seems to be dead as far as I can see. Their twitter stopped posting months ago, and seeing as no one talks about it, Cinder wasnt very popular and died how most nft scams do, in a pathetic whimper.
Love poetic justice
the game was shut down without notice as well, and the discord server has been on read-only since february. seems like they were so ashamed of their nft """game""" they ended up swipping it under the rug without telling anyone.
@@crystalmoonlgdc beautiful! Love to see it!
As someone who has played Animal Jam since childhood, I feel betrayed. I basically played Animal Jam almost every day since I was a kid, and I would sometimes spend money on Animal Jam merchandise. I also liked playing Fer.al too, but I slowly lost interest in playing it over time. Then the whole NFT thing happened, and I was betrayed when I realized that Fer.al was a playtest server for an NFT game all along. This also made me feel like Animal Jam lost its main purpose to teach kids about the importance of the environment and how to protect it.
Same here. This stuff really leaves a bad taste in ones mouth. I also spent money on Animal Jam.. an embarassing amount.. and I don't want to know where it went.. I have a scummy feeling about it.
Yeah. In my opinion once animal jam wasn’t in collaboration with National Geographic anymore it really started to go downhill
Dude same, I found the game with my best friend in Cali when I was 9-10. Got addicted to just playing the claw machine and so that sound of hitting a plushie is forever embedded in my psyche. A year later I got into it more than just the claw and got a membership. Was addicted until I turned, idk, 16. Went back to it a few times since then. Might go back to it again for nostalgia sake.
Same.
Me too, back when I came back to school I always played AJ. It's hurts but also so dissaponted :/
what’s most upsetting to me is that fer.al served as a safe haven for many lgbtq+ and neurodivergent young people. i’m not sure why, exactly, but for many (myself included) it was a fundamental and welcome safe place to see like-minded and accepting people. the game itself had multiple trans, lesbian, gay, nonbinary, and other lgbtq+ npcs that worked as positive representation. sucks to see that fall away so quickly
this!!! i didn't really interact too much with people while playing but it was such a safe place for me honestly being both queer and neurodivergent
I'm gonna miss my gay little Kobolds 😔 long live Mikelle and Gladiolus
Ik! I'm heavily neurodivergent, and the aesthetic of "You can collect resources or complete quests, or you can lay down in a warmly lighted room." Even if you don't do anything in it, living in an alternative world is... nice.
Im queer and nuerodivergent and yeah its really sad to see it go i stopped playing it for a while (i remember when the dragons came out so around the closed beta period?) its a shame it all went to waste i loved the maps in the game and the player base was amazing i wish i got to see more of it before the whole train wreck happened :(
Yes, even in this video, I saw a character with an asexual flag as a tail! It was a place to chill and not worry about gender or ADHD, I could just run around as a cat-like creature enjoying the unique environments and trying to get some cool accessories for the character.
I'm still pissed that I've lost the characters I worked to make in that game, and all the money I spent. And then it was used to fuel an NFT project. How lovely.
The art style is so aesthetically pleasing that it saddens me to know this game has fallen to the end of NFTs. Hopefully a similar looking project might arise from a honest and respectable game development studio.
Yes...
I'm still bitter about this. I fell head over heels for this game last year and hell, I even made my late cat Dagger in the game to cope with his death. So hearing what they were doing, making Cinder, and killing Feral entirely? Yeah I legit cried. No joke. I cried my heart out.
They suck
Edit: It was a good, calming game for my anxiety and the repetitiveness didn't even bother me because as someone with Autism, I find such things comforting. I even played it a bit with a group of friends in my discord. I want this back...at the very least so I can see my kitty again.
Also yeah the bugs were crazy, qn example being that the sky jellies almost never produced anything and twice I got an item from rare chests that resembled black spiky eyes/glasses and it was just called "Item Missing" It was pretty cool and freaked me out when it happened.
i loved the game too. im so sorry you went through all these emotions. ): i miss playing the game as well.
Might I recommend you a game called Wildcraft? It's a hunting based RPG sort of thing with highly customizable animals and possible roleplay, although the game wasn't really made with that in mind, pretty sure the devs had never even heard of it xD.
It's game play is addmitedly more bare bones and most items need to be unlocked, but the randomized chest system for this is pretty fun and it's maps+ graphics are really cool to play in while you earn coins, I've also found it's repetition comforting as a fellow autistic myself.
Idk, maybe give it a go lol :)
I noticed you like repetitiveness and calming games and if you’re looking for a game similar to that I’d recommend Sky:Children Of The Light 🥺 it’s a game you can play and chill out with friends and you can collect candles and visuals are stunning; there’s also a lot of customization options available too but you play as a little light person 🥺 not rlly animal based creation sadly
I’m also autistic and this game was also really great and calming for me. I was so excited when it first came out and I couldn’t wait to see what it would be like once out of beta. Sadly that never happened and now it’s shutting down ): I don’t even know if I’m going to be able to play one final time ):
@@gwenl1451 I played WIldcraft before. The customization isnt really that great: the animals and skins are all blocked by a paywall. I remember watching ads just to get a box and I would gain almost nothing. When I would get an Epic or Legend custom, it wasnt usable. From what I remember you can buy loot boxes? Its almost like gambling... Please correct me on this last part. I wouldnt say its a highly customizable game because of this issue but its a good game nevertheless. It has a high emphasis on roleplay which is a thing a lot of people like.
It will never stop surprising me how often crypto/nft-related projects emphasize virtual world/building community/MMO etc. but if you look at nft enthusiasts' accounts or their discords, they don't seem like people who want to socialize and make friendly communities. Most of their conversations are 1) showing their financial status 2) promoting their investion 3) looking for new investions. I can't really understand why companies are pushing this social aspect, when just these ugly pictures are better at fulfilling the premise (buying something expensive to show off and maybe sell at higher price in the future)
I think they want to show it as something fun and exciting you miss on if you don't have NFTs, you know, making the ads that appeal for crypto enthusiasts (since they will buy anything that's crypto/NFT) and people who might not know exactly what is is but are fans of games like these
true! the nft community (? can i say that since its dying) is basically just 2016 youtuber flex culture. you need to be better than everyone around you, you need to invest in the latest trends, or you fall behind and get abandoned immediately. especially with nfts, this leads to people jumping on a hype train for an investment that turns out to be a massive scam
it's social in order to promote the scam, but i get what you mean when it comes to the people that are targets. i guess they go there for validation? since its common to be told they're all gonna make it
Yeah. I infiltrated the Cinder discord server, and all they talked about was crypto. Compare this to the Feral discord, which included discussion of hobbies, fandoms, pets, etc. I had wanted to learn more about Cinder and its relationship with Feral, but it was so boring there! After Feral shut down, I spammed the Cinder server with anti-crypto messages and got banned in less than a minute.
@@andromeda_va39 Nfts were never about game play and the nft bros who tried saying so knew they were blowing smoke up their butts. It's all about making that cash and dragging in others to buy nfts from you so you can profit while they get stuck at a loss. They don't understand how games work but they sure do want in on trying to out scam eachother. All Nft 'games' have failed and it's hilarious.
I wonder if feral will ever get a fan revival. It looked super cool and it's upsetting it turned out so bad. I feel like with a good loving dev team behind it that it could be amazing.
Ya guessed it. :D
There *is* one, but it's still kinda buggy and only for pc so far. They are going to expand on that though.
it's called emuferal if any of you wanted to know, it's still missing a few things, but the team working on it is adding it in bit by bit as they figure it out, and their discord server is the best and most wholesome server I've ever been in
Ohh I hope I’ve never played but would love too
@@ShortTheCake where!??
Update
Cinder shut down a few months ago
Wild works never notified about the shutdown they literally closed the game and deleated all websites related to it overnight without a word...
Seeing how they also sold animal jam... Yeah i will be surprised if this company lasts more then a year
Ex-Animal Jam ambassador here! I may have disassociated with all Wildworks games by now, but as one of the people whom were the first to play Fer.al during the closed beta, I figured I should give some input here. During my time of trying to acclimate to this game, it was quite clear to me that it had many technical issues and was far from being finished. I truly believe that Wildworks really spread themselves thin trying to run 3 games all at once. That was what worried me from the beginning, and I figured that Fer.al would have a difficult time because of that. I had a lot of faith at the time that it could be pulled off, however, as did many of the playerbase. As the months went on, it became more and more apparent that the game was just not doing well. Not even just financially, but technically speaking. I gave up on trying to play it because it wasn’t compatible with either my iPhone 7 or my Mac, therefore I never really grew a strong attachment to it aside from the aesthetic creatures you could create and customize on there.
I could tell people were really passionate about Fer.al, and the tension during the 2021 holiday season after Cinder’s announcement was so palpable even to watch as an outsider. I quit all Wildworks games and resigned from my ambassador position in May 2021, but during my November/December visits to Feral and AJ Classic for the holiday season, witnessing this situation was really draining. I can’t imagine how people must’ve felt actually being apart of it. I’m just really glad to put it all behind me now. I’m now in a new community (Super Animal Royale) and everyone there is so chill/the people in charge of their discord server actually listen to their community and respect them! If anyone has been looking for a new animal game to replace Animal Jam, Super Animal Royale might just be for you! As for Fer.al’s community, I truly hope you can find some other community to be apart of. Fer.al was one of a kind for many people, and at one point I really had high hopes for it. Nowadays, I realize just how half-baked and underdeveloped it was. Trust me, when you spend time in a different community where you feel listened to and the people in charge don’t make you feel beneath them, you’ll look back on this Fer.al situation so differently. You’ll wonder how you even tolerated it.
Ngl got my hopes up for Super Animal Royale because I'd never heard of it before and was immediately disappointed when I looked up gameplay images X'D I swear there is never going to be another animal MMO with an interesting/appealing artstyle like Feral's... It seems every single animal game out there is either photorealistic to the point of being borderline unattractive or so kiddie-fied and simplistic that they look like literal Funko pops ;_; I know I'm being super picky about stylization but there's, like, no variety whatsoever when it comes to these type of games anymore and it's frustrating when you're looking for something to fill in the hole that Feral left behind
@@EagleTimberWolf Yeah I haven’t quite seen a game like Feral but I have an old Animal Jam friend who introduced me to Super Animal Royale, and it took a while to grow on me until I got involved with its community and played it a bit more. I think AJ players might find interest in SAR if they liked the cute animal aspect, but when it comes to Feral? I’m not sure how to help out there. There wasn’t any other game Feral reminded me of, so I completely understand why everyone is so upset about Feral’s downfall.
Yeah I think the thing that got me the most excited for feral was the aesthetics, there was an amount of freedom in the customization that I hadn't seen anywhere else. It had a good balance between allowing for lots of freedom in customization, while still being recognizable and not being overly confusing or complicated. I was initially excited for the advertising of the game as something less focused on the trading and rarity/collections of "rares". and more focused on the creative side and the lore. The first thing that started cracking my hopes a bit was how they explicitly forbid or at least heavily discouraged art commissions for in-game items and made art contests iffy. While this was due to legal reasons/scamming it still made me disappointed because I had planned to make art to get items I wanted rather than dealing with trading (because aesthetically appealing items tend to be valued). But I was hoping that what they said about a more controlled and approachable trading system would be true, or that they would add something similar to masterpieces so I could do commissions without it being against the rules. But neither happened the trading developed too fast right in front of my eyes but I couldn't keep up with it and it was too unpredictable, all I knew is that I'd need thousands and thousands of lockpicks and that the amount of lockpicks needed would always be rapidly inflating. I could barely keep over 30 lockpicks because I was horrible at the chest game, especially with the horrible lag feral sometimes had... Then disappointment after disappointment came. The lore was *less* prominent or clear than animal jam's the "quest" were rarely actual lore related and more to do with personal squabbles between npcs and random fetch quests. At least animal jam had somewhat of a storyline to actually participate in. They started teasing stuff about the castle but it didn't develop must past a shallow ARG type thing. I'm somewhat excited for a game my sister showed me called 'Palia', but it is still in Alpha and it is with humanoids rather than animals. So it definitely isn't perfect and is very unfinished but the team seems good and receptive.
I get the not being able to play it on some devices, that's why I stopped just before the season pass thing started. I mostly use Linux as my Windows installation is the education version and rather buggy, leaving me stuck playing the game with only wired headphones, and a controller, as it wasn't compatible with my keyboard. It made it nearly impossible to play. I kept asking in Discord for controller support, but being in computer science myself, and currently leading a group for a class project, it's really hard to add things in if you don't have enough people, especially people who have experience with that kind of thing. Honestly, at the start, I was wondering if it was just a FeralHeart/Impressive Title reboot with the Animal Jam styling, but I liked the different features, and it could have been good if it were dealt with a little better.
I remember being a feral player when Feral came out, it seemed really competent and I had high hopes for the game! After what happened I’m pretty disappointed
same, a lot of people had high expectations,,, but then wildworks just kinda made it to a money maker thing.
@@meowmreowmeow just like animal jam! sure there was always that aura of overvalued rares, but it wasn't nearly as bad before the diamond/sapphire shop. i had high hopes for the adventures- then they just kinda stopped making them and that sucked! i also dislike that they keep releasing new animals and clothing without making existing clothes look better on existing animals. now fer.al is doing the EXACT same thing, not updating quests and having some items look awful on creatures we paid good money for. It's super disappointing
@@meowmreowmeow you seem knowledgeable about this whole thing, is there anything similar to play instead?
offtopic but aloy :DDDDDDDD
@@harpy5629 last i played it was like 5 years ago, but transformice was kinda fun? not sure what it's like now tho
I was one of the closed beta testers for this, and remember being so excited to play it with my friend after how many hours we'd put into Animal Jam. The character customization was great, and it was fun to explore the world with people. Their audience was perfect, and the devs were all so passionate about it.
I stopped playing the game for a bit once they released the passes and forgot to ever check up on it again. This video is the first I'm hearing about the shutdown, and that's devastating. I thought it was such a fun project with a huge amount of fan potential. Shame they had to leave without even saying goodbye, just to be replaced with a crypto game that is destined to become obsolete.
As a fellow closed beta tester, this really does suck, the ironic part about this is that a few days ago the Cinder website completely shut down along with their discord. Cinder got dropped off the same way Feral did, and it hasn't even been a year. Fuck you Wild Works, no respect for their fans at all.
I wish there is a sequel to this because Cinder just got shut down like a few weeks ago which is a total victory to the people who are in the feral fandom but now just like Club Penguin there is some Feral private servers that are out there to avoid desist and asist copyright letters those private servers do not have anything purchasable and I am not going to mention the one I am in to avoid Wildworks from hunting it down
Do you know were I can find those private server?? I miss the game so much-
@@okanimation68fer.ever
This is going to sound weird but as someone who predominantly lip-reads, thank you for taking so much effort to match your audio to your visual 100% spot-on in every instance. It can be very confusing on other RUclips channels when the audio's slightly behind or ahead of someone's lips as it can jam my brain so I really appreciate the effort for something that only probably 3 people here would understand.
I'm not hearing impaired but I have attention issues, so I always appreciate when youtubers have closed captions, even if it's just auto captions
I have audio processing issues, I definitely appreciate it a lot too. It's really the little things that feel the biggest
See? This is why getting rid of the other captions feature *_"Community Captions"_* was basically a dumb idea...
You’re valid!!!
@@PickleRicksFATASSCOUSIN it's also unfortunate because some of my favourite songs had captions by the community who went all out to match the music video... And the changes to CC made it so they're all messed up and impossible to fix
But also, I liked captioning in my spare time. I feel it's a good way for youtubers without much monetary backing to become more accessible
it’s sad that a company that promoted helping our environment is now making nfts.
(“1 nft an hour!” (Cancel)
(“1 nft an hour!” (Cancel)
(“1 nft an hour!” (Cancel)
(“1 nft an hour!” (Cancel)
( “1 nft an hour!” (Cancel)
(“1 nft an hour!” (Cancel)
(“The server can only hold 1 nft an hour!”)
( To help the burning of fossil fuels, we will now only allow an nft an hour instead of 200 and hour. )
(Technical difficulties…)
I can imagine how this game will end up...
I’m still so devastated that it’s gone. This was the most beautiful game I’ve ever played, and there’s nothing like it left.
I know how you feel. If you have a computer there is an emulator for the game!
@@BirdaeBlue As tempting as that sounds, Its hard to trust.
@@captainngoose there’s a whole discord community for it, they’ve pretty much got the whole game running but I don’t have a computer for it
late to the party and just starting the video but as someone who was (somewhat) involved i'm glad other people get to learn how awful this whole thing was. i joined the cinder discord for a brief second, posing as someone interested in the game but concerned about the company's recent controversy, and got banned instantly for "having a smug attitude," "spreading doubt about the project," and "being a bitter, insignificant child." also got the incredible line "we know everything" from a cinder mod when i brought up ww shady actions which is funny to this day. you knew everything but you didn't know the nft market was about to crash!
Lmao who is laughing now, right?
I think the most insulting part of cinder was the fact that they ripped the map from feral. They essentially stripped the bones of feral and everything that made it charming and slapped their own crappy nft avatars onto it for money.
Former Feral server mod here! Thank you for covering this. Really appreciate you getting the word out. The love the community has for each other was awesome to see for the past two years and this whole thing has been heartbreaking to watch. Good work!
This game and the people who played it have changed my life and I am forever grateful for the experience, as bitter of an ending this is.
the sudden spiral was just depressing to watch.
This.
Also hi Ish, love you
@@Casleiov hi!!!
yooooooo ish!!!
Ishmael, we mightnt have interacted directly much, but mad respect for you and the other server mods honestly it was a LOT
On the last day of the servers opening (for a whopping 3 hours,yes) they disabled voice chat and texte chat.
So no one could talk to each others.
Now,was it because it would make it easier for servers to handle the amount of players getting in without the servers crashing,or simply because they didnt want us talking about nfts and wildworks horrible treatment to the artists and community?
I think the later is more probable.
Furthermore,there was no goodbye events for the game.We werent given free items ( wwadmin said they were "considering it" for the last day but it didnt aged well)
The npcs didnt Say anything out of the ordinary
And when the game officially went down,we had no custom goodbye message.
Just a cold "The connection has been Lost".
Thats it.
The only close thing we got as a goodbye message was when the feral site updated to read"thank you for your dedication" (not word for word but thats the gist of it)
And that felt like a slap in the face. Like saying to us "yeah partys over,thanks for playing but you can go away now lol"
And to this day,none of the feral socials announced ferals shutdown.And i dont think they ever will adress it.
They truly wanted feral to die so Cinder would "replace" it.
Dont ever support WildWorks.
Get the word out.
Came back to this video to inform you guys that.... CINDER CLOSED DOWN LAST WEEK
Came here looking for an update, thank youuuu
Time for my daily dose of learning about obscure children's media I have zero history with.
Fr
Same lol
I never cared at all about Animal Jam, but damn if I'm not fascinated by bizzare conflicts like these.
As a former fer.al player, it honestly feels like being betrayed. Imagine supporting a company for its environmental morals for them to suddenly turn on their previous beliefs and basically just say “sorry, we used you as a test for this NFT scam game that nobody asked for or wanted” and then shut down the game that, bear in mind, you have put real money into.
Not to mention that in their terms of service it says that by playing the game you waive your rights to take them to court/a class action lawsuit. It's so scummy
Yeah... It really did feel both like a betrayal and loss. I mourn to see it go...
it really did feel like a betrayal, we trusted them and they did This with our trust.. :(
@@dominicgray5768 I am pretty sure that isn’t actually legal.
Come back to this video after hearing news that NFTs are dropping substantially in interest. It's a bittersweet feeling because on the one hand, screw you for Cinder, and it's appropriately burning to the ground as we speak, but on the other it's like man... Everyone warned people like Clark Stacey they weren't going anywhere and he still did what he did to Fer.al anyway...
slightly off topic but im absolutely obsessed with a game that's somewhat similar in essence to feral, and i feel that any who played feral and enjoyed the few truly good parts of the game would also enjoy this game. it's called "sky: children of the light" and i highly recommend it! it has a season/season pass system similar to feral, beautiful graphics and large naturalistic areas, along with lovely character models and a lovely play style 💖
I was a college student in a game development program at a Utah school, and Wildworks (back when they were Smart Bomb) employees would occasionally come visit and playtest the students' games. They were clearly devoted to game development/design, so I can definitely see it as a case of being forced onto cinder by higher-ups. It's a real shame how far the company and its culture has fallen.
I was a player since closed beta and seeing this all go down was heartbreaking, the way they acted towards the comunity in its last months was cruel. They deleted official discord one channel at a time and they made us watch it all as it slowly dissapeared. They broke their own tos more than once and they punished us for reminding them of it. The game could have gone a much better way if they communicated with us and actually released tons of stuff they were working on. Gardening, main quests and battles were all found in the code. The feral enemies were called cinders so this really was just a stab in the back from them. Hell they dont even want to allow us to make feral rewritten. And the day feral shut down out of nowhere? yep it was the same day cinder launched. Theres this and many more reasons i dont trust them to even open the servers back up ever. Good job on the video izzzy the fer.al community appreciates that you covered this.
yo whats up grey!!
Wait, one at a time? Seriously? That's absurdly cruel considering they could have just deleted the whole server, god damn.
Ikr, I’m so upset about all of this. It’s such a shame they won’t let us make fer.al rewritten, but it makes sense considering their using the fer.al assets for cinder and don’t want anything getting in their way.. I hope cinder fails them. At this point they kinda deserve it considering how much further they went to silence the community, and how much more cruel they could’ve been about all this. Like- at least let us keep the discord!
not a fan but i lost so many games I invested into. vmk, habbo, millsberry, clubpenguin, webkinz, fosters home online, etc
@@BenDover-xw7dv Yeah, one at a time. We watched in real-time as they culled the server channel by channel, with everyone seeking refuge in the next possible channel.
We did all this, mind you, while fighting a *ten minute cooldown.*
"It took 130 hours to reach level 100."
Runescape Players: "First Time?"
the perfect ending for this game would be a fanmade reboot with no paid content that later fills up with controversies and legal issues which result in yet another disasterous shut down, all time classic
well there’s already a fanmade reboot with no paid content in it, called EmuFeral. it’s the exact same game but has live servers and everything and it’s incredibly chill here, so I hope nothing bad happens to it
@@pumkinpatchworkoh i had no idea! i hope it stays chill
@@victimofmagic2314 weird, I commented a lot of other times about emuferal on this video (because nobody knows about it and I feel bad seeing all the comments going “omg I wish I could play this” because they still can!!) yet my reply to your comment was the only one that didn’t get automatically vanished lol
Wildworks definitely changed in a sudden way. If you look back in Clark's twitter posts, he retweeted an anti nft post in september. All of a sudden, he shares a pro nft tweet in October. The management of this company is so untrustworthy and changes so easily. Even if they stop with the nfts, they could easily go back out and towards something just as bad.
I mean, it makes sense. I wouldnt trust a company who exploits their audience made of minors.
First they exploited their gaming audience with trading and rares, now they exploited their audience AGAIN with a beta NFT game. Clark is a massive hypocrite and leech.
If someone is reading this comment, please spread the word. Artificial scarcity + trading is very harmful towards players, ESPECIALLY if the players are children and teens. It forces minors to ""work hard"" by grinding for inhumane amount of hours. I have seen people spend more than 5 years to get rares. Minors should not be encouraged to spend inhumane amounts of hours to get useless pixles. This is parasitic. WW does this solely for money gain. Children should not be messing around with ""economies"". This is really bad because it can get addicting, as children can't control themselves. I remember getting big dopamine rushes that would last around 1 minute just by getting rarer. Its addicting, and WildWorks know this. They ignore the fact that worth is stupidly high, because they know they'll gain money. By spreading about the harmful consequences of this cruel game design, you are bringing light to something that is unfortunately swept under the rug. What WW (and other multiple MMO rpg devs) is doing is exploitation.
To elaborate on the trading part: they basically remove items on purpose for eternity > said item is deemed rare by the community > its worth skyrockets (and WW does nothing to balance worth) = children wasting hours on inhumane grinding for pixels. Because kids spend too much time on the game, theres a chance they'll spend money on it
I understand that WW needs money... but exploiting your own audience thats made of minors for money is outrageous.
I remember I use to look up to Clark Stacy :( this is just depressing
Honestly, what they've got going on in AJ with scarcity and trading unbelievably toxic.
I remember a few years back when someone stole one of my rare items in the most outlandish way. They claimed that I "won a costume contest," and I believed it (I was distracted by something else at the time, so I didn't have a chance to properly asses the situation); they went to gift me, asking me to put a rare item on my list so they could offer on it later. Then they said "I have to go, please trade quickly!" I didn't realize they were trading for my rare item, and I accepted the trade way too fast. I spent way too long getting that item originally. They left after that.
I was usually quite competent when it came to avoiding scams, but I had NEVER experienced this trick. Actual mind games, taking advantage of my courtesy like that. Felt like I was torn apart, and I cried so much. I had literal NIGHTMARES that night. If I, an older teen, had my mental health affected over getting a BUNCH OF MEANINGLESS PIXELS STOLEN FROM ME, then I think something is wrong. Very wrong.
And for whoever scammed me to be so desperate to get stuff, that they had to learn something as manipulative as THAT?
What's worse is in AJ's Help Center addressing scams, they note "We will not be able to return any items" if scammed. Reading those words crushed me that day. It's so stupid how upset I was over something like that, but that's the thing. If it cut me that deeply, then imagine how a 10 year old would feel about it. This game and its system is horrendous.
@@imagirabbii94 I am very sorry you went through that. Scamming sucks, I understand your pain. Thank you for bringing your experiences with this disgusting game design that is artificial scarcity + trading.
Sorry if this bothers you, but I'll talk a bit about my experiences with getting scammed.... It wasnt on AJ though, it was on another popular MMO at the time. I remember having a pet donkey, which I loved very much. One day, I did something called "drop game" where you basically drop the item as a form of trading. I dropped the donkey and got kicked from the world. I cried so much.
This shows that the mental exploitation in MMOs IS REAL. It not only exists on AJ, but has been existing on old school games such as Runescape or other more recent MMOs such as Growtopia. This is why I'm SUPER against trading, artificial scarcity and grinding. It either encourages children to waste inhumane amounts of time on items or encourages children to steal from others. It makes me sick. I am very sorry that you went through that... No one deserves to be scammed.
@@rinibunny4576 People look up to MJ , so don't worry too much
I played Feral during the early stages (I stopped playing right when they introduced the season pass stuff, so I really didn't play that long), but what I did remember was the game was stunning. The community was also really fun, especially during the absolute chaos of the pandemic in early-mid 2020. It's weird to now think of it in a nostalgic past-tense, and it's even stranger how the game succumbed to only be "beta testing" for an NFT game of all things.
I also played at that time (I joined in July of 2020) yeah and (I am not kidding) when I joined…I saw Wisteriamoon…I am not lying…I was so exited…I played for some time and then quit the game and became inactive
@@shootingsmilla1239 I got on her live, and gave her a gift… Just to quit and see it downfall
i was a second wave beta tester for feral, it was cool from what i remember but honestly? forgettable for me. it never invoked what i got out of animal jam in 2014 for me personally
As someone who has a degree in game development and am rather familiar with the dev cycle, it really sounds like they never had a solid plan for the direction of fer.al from the beginning which likely caused a lot of these issues.
From there, they were at the whim of the higher ups because they'd have nothing to show against their demands for more money grabs in place of actual development. I can see why people would assume it was a cover for Cinder from the start because it really seems like they had no idea what kind of game they wanted fer.al to be and instead of hammering that out they just abandoned it in arguably one of the worst ways possible.
It's really sad because from what I can see, the game had a lot of potential to become something amazing. Hopefully someone can buy it off of wildworks and polish it to workability at least.
I never hear anyone talk about this but fer.al’s music was soooo good. Like I would just sit on the map viewing screen and just listen. It gave me Diamond shop vibes (AJ) and felt mystical, made me want to explore and play more. It’s horrifying to see it go down this way.
I think what makes this whole thing even worse is the fact that Cinder itself ended up being even more barebones compared to Feral. There's only one or two maps to explore and...that's it. Feral, a game with vast amounts of potential and a very vibrant community, was completely abandoned in favor of a game where you spend hundreds of dollars to gain access to a glorified chat-room.
i was an on-and-off player since the closed beta. when the NFT shit was announced, i joined the discord out of curiosity to see how the community was reacting.
it was chaos. people were outraged, server admins were doing their best to try to calm people down, but to hardly no avail. they tried to explain that they were just as in the dark as everyone else, but i don’t know if anyone was really paying attention.
as a veteran animal jammer, it’s incredibly sad to see what this company has become, and the legacy it now has.
Oh geez, I had no idea this was all happening. I went to art school in Utah and many of my peers went on to work at Wild Works and I remember there were people I knew who's Animal Jam portfolios were being shown to prospective students as like a "look what we are doing in the local industry". Really sad to know that people I went to school with likely went through this mess, but not at all surprised based on the atmosphere and culture in Utah, especially surrounding tech, that the CEO would decry and then later support the NFT market
As an ex-fer.al player I'm glad to see bigger creators talk about this situation. The game was one of my favorites, and it was painful for me to see it get shut down. The community was awesome and always welcoming. Tragic.
I actually logged on today for the whole last hours of Fer.al thing expecting to be able to say goodbye to friends and talk with fellow players one last time. But nope. They disabled the chat feature. I understand that WW was ready to be done with Fer.al but to disable the chat feature in the last 3 hours, mind you there was no issue with chat in the first place before the server shutdown, just strikes me as a petty jab at what remained of the community.
Honestly after that, and hearing that they're making an NFT game it really puts a sour taste in my mouth towards WW. Like mentioned in the video, I'm someone who was raised by the company. I started play AJ at a young age, and was really excited when Fer.al was announced since I was a teen by that point still playing Aj. It just felt like a kick in the stomach to hear they were abandoning Fer.al after being promised they wouldn't. And not even letting us say goodbye properly? NOT cool! I was there in the last 10 minutes sitting silently on the ratwall with a few other players. And then the update notice hit, and it was all over.
But I guess that's my fault for believing in a company who tries to push paid memberships to kids :/
I remember a couple of times I got ads for feral, and it was beautiful, but sadly at the time I wasn’t interested and I just so happened to find out (and when I started getting interested too,) gone. I hope though in those last few moments you had on that game were memorable, sending hugs to those who put their heart into something only to find it thrown out the window. Have a great day, u deserve it my man.
Even if it was 'just' a project that still feels really sad to hear. Not even being able to use BUBBLE CHAT OF ALL THINGS is so insulting, and honestly, very immature of them. It's quite obvious they did what they did out of spite.
The high ups seemed almost vindictive that the original player base didn’t make them as rich as their Silicon Valley buddies. That ceo guy was straight up bashing all of you. It’s honestly got me pretty upset to see not only what was in the video but all of these comments about the final few hours. I’m hurt on your behalf. What a low down way to act on his part.
i feel so sorry for the people who lost money when the game shut down. since some people did buy the payable content, it's truly sick that they didn't get a refund, but it's not surprising at this point
Even if you get your money paid off from another paycheck, I will always feel ripped off
I bought the dragon avatar 😭
I've never heard of an mmo refunding the players for every cent they spent once it shuts down, it's literally not feasible, that money has to go towards paying the employees, you can't just make them give back their salaries from several years when the game is shutting down. I'm not saying it's not super unfortunate that those people can't get further enjoyment from that money they spent, but at the same time that's why you've got to make sure you of the money you choose to spend.
I bought every season pass from season 2. I wanted to support the game. Will never do that again with another game.
Now I’m kinda grateful that I never got to buy anything in that game. During the time I was playing our finances weren’t really great so I never got to buy anything.
They traded away the untapped potential of Fer.al's four-legged creatures for generic humans and a moneymaking scam.
WHAT.
THE.
FUCK.
Holy shit, I never watched this cuz the shutdown still hurts me, but that footage on the Shattered Bay roof? I've got those screenshots. I arranged that with my friends. Felt so nice to see something I got to contributed to in an Izzzyzzz vid!!
Shoutout to my fellow Roof Gang fellas, send shrooms pls (:
If y'all knew a saddbo1, that was me ;3
I grew up with AJ and i never played Feral but it's just so disapponting that Wild Works went down this route. They just went down hill since NatGeo dropped them,going from a company that promotes caring about the enviroment to jumping on the NFT craze. As much as i loved AJ and the community i hope Cinder fails.
Dude I didn’t even know natgeo officially dropped them, I figured they did bc when I last logged in the “Nat facts” end of things seemed really different than my memories but how did natgeo drop them??
@@cordasolis well NatGeo basically funded the development of AJ since the begining, they stopped around 2018 i think. And with no funding from NatGeo AJ just got worse with the lack of content and slow updates
@@_emi yeah, I logged on recently (I log on every couple of months to keep my account, just for the nostalgia) and it was sad to see how updated everything was but how many more paywalls were around, and they don’t even stay specific to wild animals any more, they have domestic house animals and it just kinda feels like it lost the whole animal jam-ness of it all I suppose?
Glad to see bigger creators are covering this wildworks issue, I hope this lets it gain more notice. There was only so much I could do aha.
:o Leamon!! I didn't know I would find you here, I just watched your video about this topic!
Same! I love your content too
In my personal opinion, the game might have done better if instead of doing the membership thing, they just put a $20-40 price tag on it and we got all the things. Many other games could have done this, and it would have likely allowed it to be put on services like Steam, and consoles possibly.
@@the_real_tabby I assume misunderstanding on how season passes work.
yep
I hate I missed the last hours of this game. I was a beta tester and I loved watching the game grow, even though most of the avatars were locked behind paywalls
the character customization was the most fun I've had designing something in a long time. it was definitely my favorite part, I hope I can find something else like it
Man, this made me miss feral. It really did have some gorgeous environments and lore that I wished I could have seen unfold
right?! i for one would have really enjoyed an expansion on harvesting (maybe w/ some quests of some variety, or a marketplace run by players for items and materials), or some additional lore on the queens and surrounding world. even if there's not an overwhelming amount of other things to do, i would have really enjoyed some canonized lore or fun bits about areas like the blood tundra or the shattered bay. why is the tundra full of blood? what's up with the tree? why is the port a huge trading area? does it get exports from other lands? some worldbuilding would have made a difference.
Ex-Feral beta player here. I played Animal Jam as a kid and then got into one of the last waves of Feral closed beta. I was so super excited for this game and was SO HAPPY to be a closed beta tester, even if it was like, the last wave before open beta. It looked amazing and the story and world seemed interesting and actually inspired me. It was going so well! And I wasn't even too upset about the avatars and such. I mean, I expected more than two unpaid avatars, and I didn't like the seasonal pass. But I understood paying for a few premium avatars for cosmetic purposes and it seemed better than the strict membership paywall of Animal Jam. I kind of stopped playing after Season 2 or 3 because I got bored and I was expecting to come back when there was more to do.
And then it crumbled.
I'm so disappointed. This game that I was so excited for and that was so amazing to me but fell within a matter of DAYS and suddenly it's closed forever within the blink of an eye. I mean, what were they thinking? What on Earth was their game plan here??
Yea I liked playing it when open beta released as a former AJ player but the game was too much for my computer so I had to stop, way way way too laggy
Cinder's servers abruptly shut down few months ago. Turns out the crypto grift wasn't profitable.
I only realized yesterday that Feral closed, since I was busy with school. I'm actually quite sad, since I spent so long making my character. I also want to add that voice chat had a situation where a child was talking to a much older guy on the game, and was exposed for it. Not quite sure what happened afterwards, but it was pretty disgusting. I'm extremely disappointed with how Feral closed and how poorly the community was treated, and this is coming from a user who just played the game and not so much reporting bugs and being involved with the community. It was a fun game for sure, it had features that I would've love to see in a game, just wish that the game was given a chance to flourish. I'm glad that I didn't spend money, but the time I wasted to collect star fragments to buy body mods and a Shinigami who I put my time and effort to design.
Well, your shinigami is goong to eventualy be turned into an NFT, and sold to some neckbeard for 10 morbilion dollars in etherium...
If they ad shinigami to cinder
Thank you so much for covering this topic, as someone who was semi-active in the Fer.al community, there were fears that the radio silence across social media was an attempt to kill the game quietly so it's really nice to see the game being talked about and what went on behind. I was glad to give you footage too!
Also I think it's worth mentioning that the end date of fer.al was moved twice after their initial call of Feb 19th; it was pushed back our final 24 hrs to 30 days later (they never gave us an official date anywhere, not even ingame, but told us they'd give us an extra 30 days due to breaking THEIR OWN TOS that the community did the math on to be March 20th/21st ish depending on time zone), to giving us only 3 hours on March 26th. This has not been updated since the original announcement in february, it still comes up as Feb 19th, leaving any players outside the discord/community completely in the dark that fer.al's final hours still haven't happened yet. Due to the lies and broken trust, there's fear within the community that Wildworks mightn't follow through tomorrow week when it's meant to reopen for one last time.
For anyone who took the time to read my comment too, the purple kitsune you see in the footage I gave to Izzy for this video is called Spade, she was my main, and I'm glad she got to be shown one last time
Ah, like Ace of Spades! I love them
Aww I love the Ace flag tail!!
Spade because it's the ace flag? Nice
You might be interested to learn about the rewritten project that's currently in the works, the teams still small but you might wanna follow em if you ever wanna see your kitsune again (that's sounds like a threat but it's not I promise) love the name btw
@@troncrash7912 I know of it, I just hope it doesnt get taken down.
never played feral or aj, but my heart still goes out to any fans. seeing these companies fall to NFT scams is so exhausting :(
"seeing these companies fall to NFT scams is so exhausting" fucking tell me about it. like,the fact that it's all about the money and no one cares about the fact it hurts the environment (HARD),steals from artists and just feeds into a idiotic sense of elitism makes it really hard to even look at it every time a new one pops up out of nowhere.
It really stabs me in the heart, because the NPCs were so much fun and full of personality, I got really attached to them ( ；∀；)
@@JT5555 mwah! amazing comment!!!
@@MEOWMIX3DS i'm glad you agree with my amazement factor.>;3
Man, the concept of this game was so neat. I was kinda devastated when this game shut down. RIP my purple worm on a string dragon avatar
This exact thing happened to a very small game development project I was part of. It would have been a good chunk of money and source of security for me and the programmer and the person who was to make the soundtrack. But the programmer fell on hard times, put a hold on our project, and turned towards NFTs and crypto, bad-talking artists who took a stance against them despite saying he had nothing but respect for my stance. Needless to say, his efforts flopped and it left him in an even worse position, and he gave up on both NFTs and the game we were developing. Just another example of people selling out, though times were difficult... Game development is hard and takes time and money but there are much better ways of going about it.
I had the pleasure of playing Feral at it's peak, before voice chats and that sort of stuff but after the levelling system, i think around the start of the passes i'm not sure. The community was wonderful, I specifically remember a group of people in the club who all sat in a green tent with me. We called it "the weed room" or something and one of the people there had a waluigi skin and someone else has a garfield one. When i noticed this video, my heart sank since I knew about the nfts but i wasn't aware of the shutdown. I'm not sure if you're there, but to the guys who sat with me at the weed room back then, yall were awesome.
There's another commenter talking about the weed tent, by pastelphoenix. Here's their channel ruclips.net/channel/UCY8bmh2XC-v6AL1XHjxtTfw
I remember the weed room. I made some good friends in that club, I played Fer.al a LOT in summer 2020, and after growing up w/ Animal Jam I loved it.
I miss that laid-back cat room atmosphere
@@sgcl8883 there’s nothing there are you just advertising
I REMEMBER THAT
OH MY GOD YES!!! IM SO HAPPY YOU COVERD THIS!!! As a long time Animal Jam user and someone who joined because of my love for animals this breaks my heart to see a company I loved and looked up to go down in flames for the sake of profit.. It's so incredibly disgusting that a company who preaches on saving environments and helping with animal conservation chooses to go down a path with NFTS. Thank you for covering this topic, as it is quite personal to me and many others.
WW was always selfish... Man, WildWorks is truly wild. The quantity of red flags that they give is IMMESURABLE. First they exploited their gaming audience with trading and rares, now they exploited their audience AGAIN with a beta NFT game. So gross. Hope WW goes bankrupt.... they deserve it!
If someone is reading this comment, please spread the word. Artificial scarcity + trading is very harmful towards players, ESPECIALLY if the players are children and teens. It forces minors to ""work hard"" by grinding for inhumane amount of hours. I have seen people spend more than 5 years to get rares. Minors should not be encouraged to spend inhumane amounts of hours to get useless pixles. This is parasitic. WW does this solely for money gain. Children should not be messing around with ""economies"". This is really bad because it can get addicting, as children can't control themselves. I remember getting big dopamine rushes that would last around 1 minute just by getting rarer. Its addicting, and WildWorks know this. They ignore the fact that worth is stupidly high, because they know they'll gain money. By spreading about the harmful consequences of this cruel game design, you are bringing light to something that is unfortunately swept under the rug. What WW (and other multiple MMO rpg devs) is doing is exploitation.
To elaborate on the trading part: they basically remove items on purpose for eternity > said item is deemed rare by the community > its worth skyrockets (and WW does nothing to balance worth) = children wasting hours on inhumane grinding for pixels. Because kids spend too much time on the game, theres a chance they'll spend money on it
I understand that WW needs money... but exploiting your own audience thats made of minors for money is outrageous.
Yeah I had the same reaction to the WWF doing NFTs too
@@gone9820 I've spent ungodly amounts of money in aj just for my account to get eaten in that big halloween (?) data breach. I had all the info they needed to get back into that account EXCEPT I couldn't access my parent email, and for that alone they refused to help me get my account back. I had my previous username since I had it changed, previous passwords, the cards I used, my IP, even the address they sent merch to, and yet they still didn't think it was enough to get back in. I had been playing the game since it's 1 year anniversary.
TL;DR: wildworks don't care about your account, they just want your money
literally the exact situation, aj beta player here. i was so excited for fer.al but alas
@@dataexpunged93N15 Excactly. I know WW is a company, but they literally dont care about their players. I'm very sorry you lost all of your items, no one deserves to be hacked. Hope everything is okay now!
Sorry if this sounds a bit annoying, but its very important to spread the message. This exploitation (trading and artificial scarcity) that WW does goes under the rug because its a very common occurence in MMO RPGs. I try my best to spread to message, but unfortunately not a lot of people care about it. :(
It sucks because the community as a whole is essentially grieving from this loss. I know to many Fer.al might seem like just another furry roleplaying game, but I've met so many wonderful people through this game. But, there are a lot of people in the community who have actually begun working on archiving the game and some assets so make a sort of "Fer.al Reclaimed" or "Fer.al Rewritten" like with ToonTown or Club Penguin. So hopefully that will get off of the ground and become a reality! A group of my feral friends have also worked on rebranding our avatars into an entire new world of our own to keep our creations but also still keep them together in a universe that would thrive.
idk if you’ve already heard but a group of fans successfully revived the game, now called EmuFeral!! it has live servers and everything and all the characters and clothings are unlocked
Fer.al had one of the most enjoyable character creators in any game I've ever played, and I'm still kicking myself for quitting before they introduced leveling, wings, and unlockable body mods. Absolutely infuriating.
Now I'm remembering why I put the game down for so long. I was really into the season pass and trying to beat the quests for hundreds of thousands of minigame points, and I played so much of the minigames that I burned out on the game. At that point, leveling and wings had not been introduced, so there was no other benefit to running around and collecting resources and crafting things with them. GOD, if only they had added levels and unlockable body mods before the public early access release! I would have played SO much more of this game! And EVEN THEN the people who WERE online found it way too tedious!
THEY PAYWALLED DECALS HOLY SHIT. The decal system was the only reason I stuck it out for this shitty little game, it made for some downright incredible character customization. God, no wonder this ship sank.
Oh let me tell you. You didn’t miss much. The leveling was VERY grindy. You could get xp by harvesting mats, doing quests, playing minigames and doing season pass stuff.
I had gotten so far, I unlocked the first wings. That’s about it. It took a really long time. When I wanted to get xp, I was just playing a certain level of Do or Dye over and over again. After that I would harvest mats.
Needless to say, I got burned out. Lost interest and went to play a different game instead.
Altough I’ll miss fer.al a lot. It has a very unique vibe and the character creator was amazing.
I even got some ocs from fer.al!
@@XerxesTexasToast They reverted those changes when they noticed the backlash they got from the community. Doesn’t make it right because they did do it.
I’ve been following Feral since the VERY beginning. Like, before the official announcement beginning. I was a VERY active closed beta tester, and continued to play well after early access. I’ve closely followed this situation and experienced it all as it happened. This whole situation is HEARTBREAKING and still puts a pit in my stomach. I’ve cried over this game. It may sound silly, but it meant the world to me. It was such a relaxing and beautiful game, that had INSANE potential. To see a game that I felt to close to, poured my heart into, and felt as it was almost a part of me be treated the way it has was horrible. I’m glad it’s almost over now.. to be honest I’m sick of the grief it’s caused me and so many others, and I just want to forget about it. I wish WildWorks was better. I really do. I’ll never be financially supporting them again after this, even if Feral does make a return. Thank you for making a video on the situation, we all as a community appreciate it.
i was never into aj or fer.al, but you summed up exactly how i felt about littlebigplanet, and lbp2's shutdown ):
I was just about to post a very similar comment, I've been following since it was announced as well and I too was a part of the closed beta (as i was a beta tester for Animal Jam when it went through its closed beta in 2010)... To say I was disappointed every time my feedback on the beta was ignored or shoved aside, every time WW did something with the game against the community's interests, is an understatement, and my HORROR when i saw the announcement of Cinder...
i fell in love with fer.al, as an artist I ADORED how imaginative it was, how customizable your character was, and how gorgeous the world environments were. I spent DAYS on fer.al, even though the gameplay was limited, just exploring and talking to people and just loving playing the game. Then I learned that the devs were secretly stealing people's avatar designs without the playerbase knowing, in order to create the NFTs for Cinder... God, that's one of the scummiest things!
Anyway, thank you for sharing your story with us. It means a lot.
@@GrayLenz Thank you so much for sharing your story as well. I absolutely agree, I poured HOURS into the game, it calmed my anxiety like no other. I’m just glad there are others who felt the same way as me
The saddest part about this is that the footage consists of players i’ve talked to and hung out with in the past. Most likely I will never get the chance to see them or converse with them for the rest of my life. Wildworks really tore apart a community I knew so so well. The vast majority of the players I was close with didn’t share socials, as it was never desperate, as if the game would be shutting down. Now there just memories, i may never see them again.
so they antagonized their original audience in favor of catering to cryptobros, and now with everything that went down with NFTs their audience is... who 🤡 lol
Seriously. I dunno why they thought cryptobros of all people would ever be interested in their furry/fairy mmo in the first place. They’re not exactly the type of people who play those sort of games lmao.
I got into Feral when the open beta started (about when lockdowns started in 2020) and it was enjoyable! For me the grindy collectathon gameplay wasn't "fun" per say, but it was something low-stakes and repetitive to do when there wasn't anything else I felt like doing. A nice massage for the brain, maybe. I fell off the bandwagon but came back last year....less than a week before the NFT announcement. So that was an extremely cool and fun and not-at-all-upsetting thing to come back to /s.
I joined the Discord to read back the clark AMA, not knowing the absolute shitshow that the following months would be. The sheer unprofessionalism of the Wildworks staff (when they bothered to speak to us) was just staggering. A company that gained its status from _National Fucking Geographic,_ and its employees resorted to trolling its player base, brushing off criticism, and throwing barbs at users for the hell of it? It was all unbelievably childish, and while I don't think there was any ill intent in the initial decision to start Cinder, the people in the company got more openly vindictive after their community (justifiably imo) turned on them. I was one of many who tried to explain that the crypto grift was unsustainable both financially and environmentally (which, gotta love the "and yet you use paypal and a debit card. curious! i am very intelligent" attitude wwadmin and others took towards the environmental criticisms). Wildworks chose not to listen to anyone, except for the handful of people who took it too far. I genuinely hope they can use that sweet sweet cinder money to hire some goddamn PR, because heaven knows they need it.