This, on its own, was relatively harmless, as it did little to affect the gameplay or undermine the server's stability. There’s this notorious figure in the Toontown community named ‘Freckleslam’, who effectively popularized hacking within the community in 2010, using texture hacks that gave him inaccessible clothes such as colored gloves, and hacks that allowed for him to appear visible to the entire server at once, with the stated purpose of trying to push Disney to address the bugs in the game. The neglect of Toontown from Disney didn’t just end at new content, as even basic server maintenance and bugfixes were hard to come by after 2009, and this lack of oversight lead to an increasingly widespread problem with hackers. Given the disaster that inevitably comes with cramming a bunch of terminally online teenagers and children with the occasional adult mixed in onto a social media website, it probably deserves its own write-up, but that aside, there was one pastime that stood out as uniquely toxic to the game: hacking. Players even went as far as creating their own social network, Toonbook, to get around the limited communication system within the game. Like many MMOs, Toontown was a haven for roleplay, with an entire area of the game, known then as Toon Valley, devoted to people who roleplayed everything from Warrior Cats, to adoption agencies, to game shows, to, regrettably, 'dating' shows. Toontown was a subscription-based game, so 95% of the game was inaccessible to those who did not make regular payments, but this did little to stop players from enjoying the game, either. Online forums such as ToontownHall and ToontownCentral were used to coordinate events hosted by players who wanted to find ways to keep the game fresh, be it through self-imposed challenges to add variety, boss speedruns, or social gatherings. Not only does this environment create a foster a sense of community that can be very difficult to pull yourself away from, but it drove players to get creative with their approaches to the game. All MMORPGs are social, but none require the scale of cooperation that Toontown does, with most of the game being effectively impossible to progress through on one’s own. The game, as a family-friendly turn-based MMORPG, was arguably the first of its kind and developed a large, passionate player base that kept the game active even as Disney stopped releasing major updates in 2009. Released to the public in 2003, Toontown Online was an MMORPG released by Disney, where you could create your own toon to fight against the cogs, evil businessmen who wanted to take over the town and turn it into a corporate enterprise.
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