Ya' know, pardon me for saying so, but I quite frankly feel that nobody really has to chill out over this. Honestly, I've been playing ToonTown from close to the beginning... or at least when there used to only be the Sellbot HQ when I originally joined... even Cashbot HQ was still under construction.
Now here's the thing... any service and/or game out there you pay for, part of that agreement is that what you're paying isn't JUST for the service, it's for the maintainance, which IS provided, as well as ongoing updates as long as you're making ongoing payments.
Now the thing is, people became complacent with TT taking awhile to release the next update and the BBHQ, etc... the people who are upset shouldn't be told to chill out, I honestly think it's TT that needs to be told to get their act together. And I don't mean about JUST releasing the BBHQ... I mean more like the "accidental" announcement that BBHQ was out and it was all complete.
Granted it was a misunderstanding, but to put it in a better perspective to describe those who are upset (and for the record, I'm not actually all that upset, just getting tired of the continual raising of hopes and following disappointments that Disney keeps setting the users up for)... imagine if you will, the XBox 360, the PS3, or even the Wii. It's release time comes around, and you've been waiting literally months or years for it to come out. You see an advertisement that says Walmart and/or Target has them in stock early, and is selling them to the first person to go find out how much they are. You run to Walmart or Target, all excited, all pepped up, all anxious to finally have the experience... to hear, "oops, that was a typo, we actually don't have them". Difference is, you haven't paid Walmart or Target yet. (Though, if you did a presale/preorder, then I suppose in a way you are then indeed expecting to receive that which you paid for.)
Here's another example; you go to a restaraunt and you're really hungry, you order your meal, and you're told, "sure, not a problem, it'll be right out". Several minutes, perhaps hours go by, you're waiting and waiting, seeing everybody else who's come in after you getting their food and wondering where yours is. Finally the waiter comes back out and says, "oops, my bad, we really didn't have that, but kinda busy... mind waiting a good while longer until I can come take your order again?". You were really hungry for that food, you got your taste buds thinking you were going to have that food, waiting patiently, etc, oops, guess what, another let down. (Which life has many... odd Disney would provide yet more to go with it, considering the money they have to actually pay their rather large staff). Anyways, again, that isn't something you've paid for either.
Now to finally bring it into perspective... same hopes raised, same let down, same misleading (accidental or not)... but guess what, many of us have already paid... Disney already has our money... and we've been patiently waiting a very long time to be able to perhaps actually "finish" the game.
Did anybody know that ToonTown was originally released in 2003? For anybody that's been paying since the beginning, that mean we've been paying for FIVE years... patiently waiting for this game to FINALLY be complete and NOT still "under construction". Now, let me do a bit of math for you, ToonTown costs what, $9.95/month? (I pay by credit card so don't really even pay attention to the cost of it anymore). AT $9.95/month that means anybody paying and playing since the beginning has dumped roughly $597 or so into ToonTown. Now granted that doesn't sound like much, but that's just one person (or to look at it another way, a brand new high-end gaming console bundled with bunches of games... or even a new middle-of-the-road computer). Now take EVERYBODY that's been paying and playing since the beginning, take that number, and multiply it by $597.
I dunno about the rest of you who pay for your own account, but I know I honestly work very hard for my money, and I'd like to think that when I'm paying for something, I'm getting what I'm paying for in a timely fashion, and I'm not saying right away or "5 minutes ago", I'm saying in a REASONABLE amount of time. FIVE YEARS people have been waiting for ToonTown to reach the "final" stage (and we're not talking addons or beyond the city of ToonTown, and expanding the realm in which we play... we're talking about the MAIN core shell of the game). There are games that have been out less time than that, with smaller development teams, that are complete with deeper and more advanced coding and graphics than ToonTown that also have expansions, addons, etc.
And I'm sure somebody will say, "be thankful that unlike other games TT isn't making us pay for each extra bit of the game like some others have you buy expansions"... that would be true, IF what they're STILL working on wasn't part of the BASE game. I'm sure that once they've FINALLY fully completed ToonTown, Disney will probably offer types of expansions or add-ons for sale too.
