Originally Posted by
HOSKO02
Agree with all these points made, would add that smaller hotel fosters better community. Post-merge and post-BETA, mad account deletion and the creation of a flagship website did nothing for the community. Going on a 2am GMT used to be where you'd find the most interesting of nightcrawlers in their scripted rooms with plenty to say about real topics, the ebb and flow of peak times etc added life to the hotel, now it's just all the New World players on in peak time.
The account deletion and removal of public rooms was a big guillotine to the very heart of the hotel, one of the sites strengths over sites like Facebook, Twitter, IMVU, Second Life etc was its history. The public rooms were the greatest familiarity to returning members, and it was already repping 5+ years before YouTube showed up. The website survived when titans like Sims Online and Coke Studios fell, paralleled by other popular sites of similar age (Runescape, Neopets). The rooms created in the early years held social memes, trends in pop culture, showed the stretches of design Habbos could apply to the then limited furni range, it was the historical iceberg beneath the surface, the maze of creation and past communities held in time, all gone. And all the photos? Well instead of pursuing the scripted ones, a small portion of what were the thousands of others, each one an in-game capture of life on the hotel, they wiped them all, again, ignoring users.
/rant. The point is here, for those outside of the hotel, it's a silly game they can't understand an affection for, but for those that got lost in it a few nights a week, built entire friendship bases, knew all there was to know and did their best to be involved and create, they were the lifeblood, loyal users retained community relations - not swathes of T driven newcomers, but it is this audience that has had all the attention and direction of the hotel since then and will, inevitably, continue to have as long as it is profitable.