October 29, 2018

Random Saturday Ep 08: Scamming Justifications


Hi guys! Before we go, I'm not defending scammers here. That would be an odd thing to do on Special Agents STOPPING SCAMMERS. I am looking at common justifications I see for scamming (AJ scamming, specifically), and discussing them.

If you float around on the internet enough, especially in AJ circles, you will come across scammers who like to post videos of them happily scamming people. (Some of them are clickbait, but some of them aren’t.) Naturally, when the comments from people who aren’t active scammers come rolling in, people feel the need to make justifications for cheating small children out of their items. I’d just like to comb over some common ones I see a lot and discuss them a bit.

‘It’s just pixels! Why should you care about pixels in a computer game?’

This argument annoys me. Yes, they are pixels in a computer game. However, these pixels do have value in-game. There are only certain amounts of these configurations of pixels available in-game, and thus people place value on them. Animal Jam is also targeted at young children, and thus younger children make up much of the playerbase. Young children are not going to rationalize that these items don’t matter. 

Also, what’s the point of scamming pixels if they don’t matter?

‘Scams are really obvious. It’s your own fault if you get scammed!’

First off, victim blaming is almost never helpful. Especially since your average, functioning teen or whatnot is not going to fall for most scams. However, a good portion of AJ’s playerbase at any given time is not composed of average, functioning teens. Many small children, tired people, trusting people, and desperate people play as well.

You can draw an analogy here to actual, real-life scams. Many scams work because the victims are elderly, stressed, panicked, trusting, or desperate. Elderly people (and very young people) tend to not function at full capacity. This does not mean they are idiots, it just means that they tend to give in to panic or trust more easily. People who are stressed or tired are also not at their peak, and are more likely to fall for such things.

People who are panicked (say, because “the IRS” is suing them, or someone is “hacking” them) tend to act first, think second. Those who trust friends wouldn’t dream of friends scamming them, and thus trust them. People who are desperate for money, items, etc. tend to throw reason out the window when they see what they want. Scammers are not beings of superior intellect who are immune to human emotion. Calling people stupid for falling for scams is unfair and wrong.

“Alright, so you don’t like me/us scamming. So? How does it affect you? Just go on your merry way and leave us be, we aren’t hurting you.”

Yeeeahh, you aren’t hurting me, but you’re hurting other people. Since we like helping other people, we want to warn them about you and thus help them. Even if you think what we do doesn’t matter, it’s never a bad idea or a waste to try to help someone.

There you go, Random Saturday #8. Hope you enjoy! If you have another justification you have/have seen, feel free to comment it. Bye!

October 24, 2018

Random Tuesday Ep 07: Adventure Weapons

Disclaimer: Random Tuesdays have been discontinued and merged with Random Saturdays.


Hey all! Jade here, with episode 7 of Random Tuesdays. Today’s episode will be on a well-known, yet still confusing, aspect of adventures: adventure weapons! 


Adventure weapons are items that get you extra hit points when damaging something in an adventure. The default damage for an animal without any items is 10 points, but this amount can be increased up to 60 points with a single item. 

These items can make it easier and quicker to get through adventures, as they help decrease the amount of time you need to spend destroying objects, as well as decreasing the amount of times you need to re-spawn as a result of not destroying a Phantom item quickly enough.

The rest of the post is under the cut- click read more to continue!

October 21, 2018

Random Saturday Ep 07: Pet Phantoms


Hey everyone, it's me again, with this installation of Random Saturdays. This time, I'm going to touch on the little Pet Phantoms, and speculate a little on how they came about.

Pet Phantoms are pets that you can buy in the diamond/sapphire shop in AJ and PW respectively. The quote that came with the Pet Phantom when purchased (on PW) is: "While most phantoms want nothing more than to destroy Jamaa and leave it in ruin, it appears that some of them just want to be loved and cuddled!"

Now, one question we could ask ourselves is: Why? Why is there a distinction between regular phantoms and the pet phantoms? Well, I think this goes back to the origin of phantoms.

I'm sure most of you have heard about the tale of the phantoms' formation in Jamaa. You know, the one where Zios left Mira and her tears became the phantoms? That one. Well, I'm sure Mira was feeling many things when Zios, the one she loved, left her. She probably felt grief, betrayed, maybe even anger. Maybe, these negative emotions turned into the regular phantoms once the tears hit the ground. However, among, the majority of negative emotions, there could be a small minority of positive emotions that she could have felt at the moment. She could have felt love. It was her love for Zios that made her feel sad in the first place. So, maybe, when those tears that came from love hit the ground, they turned into the pet phantoms who just want to be loved!

Well, that's it for this installation of Random Saturdays. Tune in next time for your next installation of Random Saturdays.
-Dew

October 10, 2018

Random Tuesday Ep 06: Tunnel Town

Disclaimer: Random Tuesdays have been discontinued and merged with Random Saturdays.


Hey everyjammer! It's me again, and in today's Random Tuesday, I will be going into more detail of one of WildWorks' apps, Tunnel Town.

So, Tunnel Town is a free app that is available for everyone to download. However, there are in-app purchases that can be made inside the game. Tunnel Town is essentially a breeder game. You start off with a couple of bunnies, and then breed them to get more. Of course, they can be bought in the Tunnel Town store, at a significantly higher price.

This post is kind of long, so the rest is under the cut! Click read more to continue!

October 06, 2018

Random Tuesday Ep 05: Animal Jam Birthday Cakes

Disclaimer: Random Tuesdays have been discontinued and merged with Random Saturdays.


Hello all, Jade here! In honor of Animal Jam's recent birthday (September 9), today's Random Tuesday is on the well-known Animal Jam birthday cakes. 

Animal Jam has been going strong for eight years now, and we can all agree that it's changed a lot over the years. Many new features have been added, new items have been created, and new fun has been made possible. There are a lot of pictures in this post, so I'm going to put the rest under the cut! Click read more to continue reading!

Random Saturday Ep 06: Halloween Den Tips


AJ has just recently released the yearly Night of the Phantoms Update, and thus, I decided to follow the theme with a post on how to make a decent Halloween Den.

1. Do Not Use these items in your den
- Phantom Mech.
Why? Except for a few pieces, it’s all very bright, colorful, and shiny. It’s out of place with the texture of the rest of the Halloween items.

- Bright Items (Most Spring/Easter items, pool things, Epic Wonders things, etc.)
Why? Bright things lessen the coolness factor. Would you rather have a haunted house den with or without sports cars, Epic Trains, and gold bars? You generally want to go for darkness.

- Unrelated Items (Items from other seasons, events, holidays, etc.)
Why? Because they’re unrelated. They are made for their respective event, and usually they don’t mesh well with Halloween items. (Note that certain crops are excepted from this. Nothing wrong with pumpkins growing in the yard of your Haunted House.)

2. Where to get cool items?
- Adventures. Even if Phantom Mech looks weird, there are other adventures with softer dark things. They don’t even have to be specifically phantom. Lava Crystals, Fire Pits and Phantom Statues are all cool, non-Mechy items. Bitter Sweets is not usually a good place to get Night of the Phantoms items, since it gives out mostly candy, but I think there are a few Halloween clothing items for members in it.

- Parties. I’m talking about the ones AJ hosts here. They generally have a lot of cool items there, and although many are members-only, there are a few items (skull tombstone, dusty books) that are not.

- Shops. Around Halloween, most stores release halloween-related items. You’ll want to take a spin around all of the shops, including the underwater ones and the less-visited ones. There are also a few shops with year-round items that work with Halloween dens, like the Balloosh dock store, and certain items can just be colored black or gray.

3. Types of Den
If possible, get the Haunted Mansion. It’s a very cool den, themed for Halloween. If this is not possible, normal houses or Sunken Ships work. Really, any den works for it, as long as it isn’t something like the Princess Castle, with shiny pink things making it up.

4. Basic Things
-Put trees, plants, etc. outside, and put furniture inside. Fairly obvious.
-Experiment with where things go. On the wall, on the floor, floating, etc.

5. Have fun! I really can’t give you a guide for how to place the items, let your imagination run wild!

October 03, 2018

Monthly Update - September

Hello all, we’re really, really sorry we didn’t have an update post for the month of August. I guess we were all too busy and we all kind of forgot so…

Anyway, thankfully, there was nothing much going on in August. Most of our society upheaval came in September anyway so this update post will be focused on September! Hooray! 

We formulated a new posting schedule at the last society meeting. Now, we will have Random Tuesday posts in addition to the Random Saturdays. In addition to that, we are no longer posting scammers on Monday, and will only post scammers on Thursday. 

Also, we’ve decided unanimously as a society that the chat rooms should go. I guess nobody uses them anymore, so the society chat room is pretty much unused. We decided that it wouldn’t make a difference if we took it down, so there you go. Now, you may contact us through our email or through our discord. 

We host recruiting days on AJ after Agent Adventure Day, and our applications are always open on our Joining page. We encourage you to send in an application, as we are always looking for new agents to join us! 

So, with all that said, that’s the society update for the month of September! We sincerely apologize to those of you who came over to our blog, wanting to read some scammer posts, and end up viewing a wall of random posts instead. We promise you that we have not completely forgotten about our scammer posts. Sorry! 

On behalf of the SASS, it’s Flint and Dew.

Random Tuesday Ep 04: Mobile Apps

Disclaimer: Random Tuesdays have been discontinued and merged with Random Saturdays.


Hey again everybody! Welcome to another installation of your Random Tuesdays. Today, I'll be writing about the mobile apps that WildWorks has created, and give a brief overview of each app. I may go into detail for some apps in later Random Tuesdays, but today's will just be a quick summary.

Did you know that WildWorks has released five apps for mobile? I'm sure you are familiar with AJPW but have you heard of Tunnel Town? That's right, Tunnel Town is an app that was created by WildWorks and is still available to download onto your mobile device.

1.Tunnel Town.
Tunnel Town is probably one of WildWork's oldest mobile app out there. In Tunnel Town, players breed bunnies and expand their collection. Different combinations of bunnies give different possible babies, so there are many possible combinations to experiment with. Players also get to farm food for their bunnies and build their own bunny burrow. This game is free to download.

2. AJ Jump
I'm sure you guys have heard of AJ Jump, most likely due to that special non-member pet, the Joey. Anyway, AJ Jump appears to have similar game mechanics as with Sky High from the main AJ game. Just that, everyone in AJ Jump is a kangaroo. Apparently, the gems earned in AJ Jump can be synced over to your AJ account so you can be earning gems away from your computer. Oh, and purchasing the game (yes, it is not free) gives you an exclusive pet in AJ - the Joey.

3. AJPW
This app by WildWorks brings Jamaa into your mobile device - in 3D. Well, AJPW isn't an exact copy of AJ. There are some differences as mentioned in a previous Random Saturday. This is a great app to download if getting on your computer for regular AJ is too much of a hassle for you. Not to mention that the graphics in PW are awesome!

4. AJ Academy
Do you remember those books you can find in the Chamber of knowledge? AJ Academy is pretty much that. AJ Academy has many books for people to read about animals. From otters to toucans and foxes, the app has 29 books for you to choose from!

5. Dash Tag
I'm sure you have seen the advertisements for Dash Tag repeatedly appearing in the AJ News in both AJ and PW. Well, Dash Tag is WildWorks' most recent app after all. In Dash Tag, players attempt to keep on running for as long as they can. If you've played Temple Run or Subway Surfers before, then I'm sure you can adapt to Dash Tag quickly. Players also can collect more pets as they progress through the game.

Well, that's all from me for now. Stay tuned for your next episode of Random Tuesdays!
-Dew