For those of you who don’t know, Club Penguin is an MMO (massively multiple online game) geared for ages 6 – 14, where players join a virtual online world as penguins, each with his or her own igloo, in a winter-themed world. It was released on Oct. 24, 2005 and gained a huge following with over 200 million registered user accounts as of 2013. The game, created by New Horizon Interactive (now known as Disney Canada, Inc.), has some free memberships available, but generates its revenue from the game through paid memberships. Paid memberships allow the user access to fun features like virtual clothing (some of which is very rare), furniture, and pets called “puffles.”
When users get items in Club Penguin that almost no other penguin has, other users take notice. How do they do it? Sometimes they obtained these items through legitimate means. Most of the time there is a more nefarious explanation: hacking.
There are many forms of hacking in Club Penguin, including changing the way the game looks, but most people like getting items for their account and getting a free (read: stolen) membership. Some get the Beta Hat, others get puffles, (though, thankfully, most puffle hacks don’t work), some get CP coins, furniture, clothing items, and more. Check out the video below for how to spot hackers.
Normally, you would have to play games to earn coins, then use these coins to buy the in-game items, and memberships cost real money. Hacking codes and websites dedicated to methods for hacking the game are a Google search away. Because of the ease of obtaining the codes or information to do so, hacking and getting all of this for free seems great, right? So, how you do it?
If you want to be a good player and community member, you don’t.
Hacking Club Penguin has consequences. You could be banned, or even arrested (theft of virtual items is still theft). Also, it hurts the integrity of the game and the community. You may think “Who cares?” Well, it’s more important than you think. Go back to when you were five years old, when you were just learning about the rules of life and concepts such as honesty and kindness. A lot of those rules apply to CP, too. You must be kind and honest — meaning no use of third-party programs. You’re not only breaking the rules of CP, you’re breaking the rules of life.
Hacking also hurts the community. Hacking takes the fun out of the game for non-hackers, as they feel like they will always have less than those who hack and have everything in the game. You hack, and you destroy the integrity of Club Penguin.
So do us all a favor: Remove all known hacking sites from your devices. That is a small step toward avoiding the temptation of hacking that goes a long way in improving Club Penguin for everybody.
