It’s been less than a month since the Beta client first launched and a week since the discontinuation of Flash – how time flies…

In that time we’ve seen a lot of myths, rumours and misinformation flying about. In this article, I’m going to try to get to the bottom of some of those things and get you the right information.

1. When you buy credit furni from the MP it exchanges

False. When you buy a big piece of credit furni (e.g. a Hucci Bag or an Emerald Ring) you get the item of furni, as you always have done via the Marketplace.

You can’t list gold bars, sacks or coins on the marketplace.

This common myth stemmed from an FAQ uploaded on some hotels (which hasn’t been translated to the .COM English hotel yet!). This excerpt is Google translated from the German FAQs.

Why can’t I swap thaler furniture at the flea market?

This feature will be added soon. In the future you will be able to sell coin furniture at the flea market, but when the buyer receives it, instead of the coin furniture, he gets the number of coins that the furniture was worth.

Please note that the thalers are kept in the flea market area of ​​your earnings window if you buy furniture at the flea market.

This could mean that giving low-level credit furni (GBs and below) might be possible in the future. I’m not going to start another myth here so please note this is NOT confirmed at all – read the above and take it how you wish – but we do know for sure that if you buy credit furni via the MP you get the FURNI (which you could then exchange), NOT the coin value.

2. You can’t exchange coins, use teles, open gifts or use furni

There are definitely some odd glitches with furni that has ‘Use’ interactions. However, it’s a glitch for you, not broken for everyone.

Try reloading your hotel – hard refresh (Ctrl + Shift + R / Cmd + Shift + R) to get it to reload. This doesn’t always work, but has fixed issues we’ve found.

We’ve started putting together a “known bugs & glitches guide”, which will be out soon – as well as some quick fixes that we’ve found.

Side note: since I started writing this article, gifting has been removed. Myth 2.5 – this is almost certainly temporary. Habbo have already committed to bringing back gift wrap and gift messages.

3. Taxes are new and terrible

This isn’t the case (that they’re new. They are pretty drastic). Habbo has had a tax on the Marketplace for years – a 1% flat fee, rounded up.

This means things won’t change for the majority of Marketplace sales (the taxes only change from 11c and upwards). It starts to have a drastic effect on very high-value furni. See the graphs below to see how stark it really is.

This graph shows how many credits you get from sales: grey being the “actual price”, or if you traded via P2P – orange is how much you’d get selling via the Flash marketplace, and blue is the Unity marketplace.

The graph goes up to 60,000c – the most expensive furni we have on our Values database. Furni at that value is INCREDIBLY rare though and very, very rarely traded.

I think it’s fair to say that the vast majority of Habbos do not own any items worth more than 1000c. Here’s a graph showing how different it is – again, grey being the “real price”, orange being how much you would have got from Flash and blue being from Unity. The maximum difference here between the two Marketplaces (if you sold something for 1,000c) would be 85c.

Habbo have also introduced taxes on all kinds of furni and credits over recent years. You’ve had to have diamonds to exchange for many items of clothing, rares and even credit furni itself – or at least pay a little credit surplus (which was first brought in in March 2010).

You had to pay the following in taxes to exchange (which was the only way to give someone credits):

The only way to buy 1c or 5c coins now is by using diamonds, the others have a 10% tax, and there’s no bulk packs any more. However, there’s not much use for low-level credit furni except for room designs.

The new donation tool works out fairly similar – although you do pay a lot more if you do many lower donations (e.g. event prizes of 3-6c) constantly vs if you bulk bought your credits before:

Plus, of course, there’s the new 80% vault tax, which is new, and an extreme version of taxation on players – justified by Habbo by “the free credits you get via levelling up”, which total around 50c. 80% is a huge amount to tax players and I do disagree with how high that is.

The one silver lining of this is that I think a lot of us were very pleased to see it only costs circa 5 dollars, pounds or euros, to unlock the vault *permanently*. This is very affordable for a lot of players – even children on pocket money!

Do we enjoy the taxes? Absolutely not. I am as frustrated as the rest of you, players who spend a lot of time giving out prizes such as fansite hosts, agency owners, philanthropists or even players who own higher-value furniture. It feels like we’re being taxed in order to even help engage the community.

But it’s not fair to say all tax is new. And it’s definitely not illegal.

4. Habbo worked on this for 3 years and this is the best they could do

Yes it’s true that Adobe announced the end-of-life plan for Flash in 2017 and Sulake would have been aware of it since then.

However this ‘myth’ really rubs me up the wrong way! In project developments, things always take longer than you think, plan and mitigate for – and it’s not like they could push back the fixed deadline.

Choosing a platform itself isn’t always easy, there were also so many features to review and decide which ones to keep, which to change, and which to get rid of. A whole new feature – levelling – is now a core part of the game for a new player and that had to be completely scoped out and built up from scratch.

Also during this time, the entire UI was designed – new icons, badges, bars etc. Games can’t stay looking the same forever!

And that’s before you even get into the development time, number of developers… plus, throughout the last year (the key point for the hard development work) we’ve been thrown into a pandemic (who could forget) which has had a massive impact on many companies, employee workload, stress, ways of working – it’s not been easy for anyone.

You may not agree with the changes, but it’s clear Sulake have a strategy for the future of the game that necessitated these changes.

So no, they are capable of building a better game, and they are bringing in improvements continually.

5. The developers/social media people/staff are bad and they should feel bad.

No. They’re doing their job. Stop attacking them. Full stop.

Also: other players are allowed their own opinions. Stop saying mean things and bullying them too.

6. This is never going to be finished.

True in a way? A game will never be “finished” because there will always be new features, furni, wired, games, rooms. However the major missing features such as private trade, group forums, even things like stickies and mood lights not working we’ve already seen are a priority to the developers who are working on it.

It’s going to be a challenging few months but we believe in being kind & patient and the community will get through it. Both the Flash client itself and controversial events such as the Great Mute had very similar reactions and we got through that.

7. Habbo doesn’t care about me as a long-standing player

This is partially true… in that players who have been around for 10-15 years are probably not the audience which secures the future of the game. Adult players currently make up 80% of the Habbo population (if you believe the birth date field!), and let’s be honest – adults are dropping off games like Habbo at an alarming rate. Sulake need to reach a new audience to secure the future of the game.

Features such as levelling are very, very common game features, as is the large-scale UI that we see. The Unity client also allows Habbo to much more easily support the game across Desktop and Mobile simultaneously: and the mobile gaming market is gigantic. 

8. EVERYTHING is broken!

Stop being dramatic and be objective for a minute. The core features of Habbo work – there are rooms, a friend list, a navigator, an inventory, a shop, a marketplace, levels, achievements, badges, a vault, the ability to chat to people in a room – all there. Yes, it’s glitchy, yes it’s buggy but no not “everything” is broken and we’ve already had assurances bugs are the main priority for the next month or two.

We’d also recommend that you check with others – or visit our friendly HxHD team or have a peek at our guides section – to see what’s actually broken before telling others, as we’ve seen a lot of rumours that aren’t true about broken features. A lot of the times, things are just a glitchy for you.

9. Retros are doing a better job.

Sure. You might prefer the look or features of a retro. They’re completely illegal and against the Habbo Way and we at Habbox completely condemn them.

Retro owners and coders don’t own any of the IP – e.g. they don’t have to design most of the features (e.g. furni, rooms, players – even icons and UI elements). They’re also not held to the same professional standards as Habbo / Sulake would be. Some retro owners do have some professional experience and may code their platform to properly secure player data properly, but there’s no guarantee here. There’s no management above saying “do this” or “don’t do that” because they can make all of the decisions.

They also have the potential to work on their project 24/7 – whereas (whether you like it or not) Sulake professionals probably work 9-5 office jobs.

Just to take a side step here – despite this being their job – we want to give a huge shoutout here to the social media managers and developers who have been active on Twitter, particularly to those who were active and replying over Christmas and New Year, and well into the evenings and weekends. That’s well above and beyond their job description and has been really helpful to the community. They don’t deserve to be attacked and bombarded. See #5.

To summarise…

There are definitely quite a few bugs, glitches and general difficulties about this new Habbo client. It’s definitely frustrating to only have this option (and the news of a native Windows client – a downloadable app – coming soon!). For now, we are going to have to stop certain bits and pieces – some events just don’t work, big elaborate builds are near-impossible with how difficult it is, and features like room moderation are definitely missed.

I’ve been asked a lot recently “how can you be so positive about Habbo?”. Well, I just feel that it doesn’t help to be pessimistic and hate on everything  for the sake of it – and particularly not take it out on the front-line staff (or other players) so I try to give things a go, and be patient about bugs and glitches being fixed and features being added back.

It won’t be this bad forever. Not even for that long, in the scheme of things.

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