Random Saturday Ep 11: Happy Jamaalidays

Hey everyone, welcome back to another installment of Random Saturdays! Since we are in the final lap of the Jamaaliday season, I thought today's Random Saturday should be about the Jamaalidays. Without further ado, let's go!

For those of you new to Animal Jam or Play Wild, the Jamaalidays is a special season in Jamaa celebrated throughout the month of December. The Jamaalidays parallels Christmas, which is also celebrated in December. During this season, the whole of Jamaa becomes decked out in Christmas decorations. You can find presents, Christmas Lights and Snowmen all around Jamaa! In AJ, there is the seasonal adventure Jamaaliday Rescue, which is a maze adventure like twists and turns.

There also is a month-long gift calendar throughout the month of December. Every day, a new gift can be claimed from the guft calendar. Some of these gifts are really good, like diamonds in AJ or Sapphires in PW. A Jamaaliday Spiked Collar was also given out on one of the days in PW, and that was really cool too!

Throughout the season, Jamaaliday themed den items and clothing will be sold in stores. While Jam Mart Clothing is a common store to visit, why not check out the Shiveer Shoppe? After all, it is the shop in the Hot Cocoa Hut in Mount Shiveer.

Last but not least, why not hang out with your buddies? The Jamaalidays is a season of celebration. Spend some good time with your buddies and have fun!

There are a few days left to the end of the Jamaalidays, so truly, enjoy the great season! Happy Jamaalidays to you all!

-Dew

Agent Insights Ep 02: Trust Trading Scams

Hey everyone, Jade here with the newest episode of Agent Insights! Today, we'll be discussing one of the most common kinds of scams- trust trading. 

Trust trading, also known as trusting, is when you trade another user some of your good items for something bad, then they trade back the good items. For example: animaljammer1 trades a Spiked Collar for animaljammer2's Necklace. Then, animaljammer1 puts the Necklace on their trade list, and animaljammer2 trades back.

This may sound like just a fun game, but it can easily be twisted into more than this. How do you know you can trust the other person? What if they don't trade your item(s) back? The answers to these questions are very unclear. 

Because this method is relatively simple, it is often used for "giveaways" by scammers. Usually, the scammer will tell everyone that the giveaway is "trust" and that the best trade will win. Though they may trade some items back throughout the contest, in the end, they don't trade back at least one Jammer's items, and lock everyone out of their den, effectively scamming those items.

There are, of course, some tricks that scammers may play with this method to make it seem more believable. For example, they might tell everyone that accepting the trust trade is not required. However, they will often follow this up with either saying that unaccepted trades are worth less than accepted trades (which puts users who don't accept at a disadvantage in the giveaway) or that the final trade from the user who wins must be accepted in order to get the items.

Overall, there are much easier ways to do giveaways than trust trading. For example, the user giving away items could give everyone numbers, then use a random number generator, then give the items to whoever had the numbers given by the generator. Trust trading just isn't the way to go, even if the host is trustworthy- The giveaway rules don't even make sense! Why should the person with the rarest items be given more, instead of someone with less rares gaining them??

Moral of the story: Don't trust strangers on the Internet! You don't really know them, even if you think you do. Plus, better safe than sorry.

Random Saturday Ep 10: Evolution of Adventures

Adventures have been part of the game for quite a while now, with the first one coming out in mid-2013. They’ve changed quite a bit over the years. Below, I’ve tracked some of the changes in them over time.

Increasing Scale

Each consecutive adventure has increased in size, scale, and importance to the storyline. We’ve gone from saving small bunny burrows to taking down the Phantom Fortress. I think they might have reached the scale limit, though, with the newer adventures either being smaller or spinning off into different plotlines. We know they’ll never actually get rid of Phantoms in the adventures (unless a new enemy is introduced), because then you couldn’t make more adventures, but they will seemingly get closer. Eventually we’ll probably increase in scale enough to get to the Phantom Factory or the Phantom HQ or the Phantom Intergalactic Space Station (actually that would be cool).

Graphics

The graphics style has changed noticeably throughout the adventures. Mainly it evolved to/rotates between what I’ll call Traditional and Shiny. Adventures started off traditional. Everything looked very natural. There weren’t a whole lot of shiny machinery items, a lot of it was plants and old buildings and tree houses and things of that nature. 

As we moved on into the Phantom Fortress, Badlands and other such adventures/places, things got a lot shinier, mostly due to the style of phantom machinery. Den items from shiny and traditional adventures tend to look out of place next to each other. They’ve reverted back to traditional for Trials of Zios and beyond, though. I think traditional looks better in general, since it mixes with more other items/dens.

Mechanics

A lot of different mechanics and items have been added over the years. You started out with chomper plants, watering and plugs, and then added boomseeds, crystals, different phantom types (kings, engineers, heavy phantoms, etc.), paintseeds, snares, and a whole slew of other things. 

Nerfing

Lots of adventures got nerfed as time went on. The Normal Mode versions got shortened, had obstacles removed, and generally got easier as time went on. The Hard Mode versions stayed the same, resulting in some pretty big difficulty differences.

There we go, Random Saturday Episode 10 is complete. Bye!

Agent Insights Ep 01: Scamming for Pixels?

Hello everyone, and welcome to the first post of a brand new series we at the SASS are starting. This is Agent Insights, where we write about our thoughts on scamming. Without further ado, here is the first post: why do scammers scam for pixels?

First of all, let us look at these pixels. They only exist in AJ (and PW for some) and do not exist in real life. So why do scammers scam for these pixels that do not exist in real life? Let us see.

DISCLAIMER: Everything I'm gonna write here is going to sound like I'm justifying scamming. Don't get me wrong. Scamming is still bad and against the rules no matter what I write. This post is just to see what scammers may think when they scam.

Ok so, we know that these rare stuff that scammers scam for are rare and valuable. I can see why some scammers scam for such items because they really, really want those items. Granted, some of those items actually have a good design. Old items that are not on sale anymore like flower crowns? They actually look good. Newer players never had the chance to buy them when they were available. Sometimes, trades are just a tad unfair. Usually, trades are rare items for rare items, but if you can't even get rare, how would you trade?

Another thing that came to my mind is self-esteem. For some, getting rare is a morale and self-esteem booster. It makes them feel good, almost elite, when they get their hands, or paws, on something valuable. Now, to correct this way of thinking, why not boost self-esteem by doing good for the community instead? Reporting scammers and bullies, hosting true, real giveaways, there are so many ways that happiness can be derived from doing good.

One last thing: bragging. Some people get rare to brag. However, how would you feel if you were listening to another jammer bragging? That isn't nice, is it? So, why would you want to make people feel lousy by bragging yourself? Think about that.

Well, that's all from me now. Until next time. Ciao!
-Dew

Monthly Update - November

Hey all! We apologize for the recent inactivity, but we're back now, hopefully better than ever! Here's your update post for the month of November. 

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The major thing that happened this month was the resignation of Is. We're all sad to see her go, but understand her reasons for leaving and wish her well in whatever she chooses to put work into in the future. If you haven't seen her post about her decision, you can read it here.

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We also modified the posting schedule a bit, it now appears as follows:

Tuesday (every other week, alternating with Sat): Agent's Insights/Scammer Replication/Scammer Thoughts 

Thursday (every week): Scammer posts 

Saturday (every other week, alternating with Tues): The regular Random posts 

Tuesday's posts will be mostly information about different methods of scamming, how to spot scammers and call them out, or analyzing different methods and motivations of past scammers we have caught.

We'll probably change up the schedule again to increase the overall amount of posts when we have a sufficient amount of members to do that (applications are always open on our Joining page!)

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Finally, since we didn't have a recap post for October, here are a couple updates from that month's meeting.

We are considering starting a YouTube channel and a Tumblr page for added publicity. We're not sure about them yet, but we'll update y'all when we know for sure.

We are also considering instituting a new training system similar to the Academy page that the AJSWS used. It will be made up of a series of lessons that you go through one by one, interspersed with actual training with another agent on Animal Jam. Again, we'll update you all when we know for sure. 

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Thanks for reading! If you have any questions or concerns, leave them in the comments below and we'll get back to you as soon as possible. Happy Jamming!