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miko2Hehe.
Disney's Toontown does not let you talk freely to other players. You must use the "speedChat"... a series of drop-down menues that provide dozens of possible statements you can choose to utter.
Unless...
If you have a "Secret Friend" then you can type any message you want and they will see it, but nobody else will. How do you get a secret friend? Well, it was originally designed for only real-life friends to use, so you had to have a secret password that you give to them, that they type in. So basically, it's not possible to have a secret friend unless you've communicated with them outside the game, right?
Well... as it turns out, that's not true.
I was playing this week with some of my friends that I've met in the game, and at some point they decided to stand around and hold a bewildering SpeedChat conversation with me. They kept saying "Please be my friend!" but they were already on my friend's list. Then they would say "Use the SpeedChat" followed by "No". Then "This way" followed by unitelligible animal sound-words that I knew were all I would see when someone was using the Secret Friends chat system... ie for a mouse, I'd see "Squeeky squeek squeek squeeky squeek". That's what you see when you're not really that person's secret friend.
So I was able to follow this strange conversation far enough to realize that they wanted to be secret friends with me... but how could we ever accomplish that? They also kept saying "Let's work on that" and "Let's go to Toontown Central!" which, in the game, is the newbie area. But they clearly weren't headed there. At one point I decided to head there, but this wasn't what they wanted me to do.
There was a lot of other strange statements that I couldn't follow or make heads or tails of, and in the end although I realized what they were trying to do, I A) wasn't sure I needed any secret friends, and B) felt like they might be circumventing the rules a bit -- sneaking around Disney's carefully created system designed to protect kids from the idiots of the world. MOre importantly, I didn't understand HOW I was supposed to become their secret friend.
The next night another friend tried some of the same things with me... "Please be my friend" "I Can't Understand you" "Use the SpeedChat" "No" "Let's work on that" and "Let's go to Toontown Central". I basically ignored it because I saw no way to guess what their secret password might be. I tried entering "Let's go to Toontown" as a password, and a few other variations, but none of that worked.
Then one of the other two friends from the night before tried talking me through it all again. This time after more bewilderment I clicked on "get a secret", and I realized that all secret passwords are generated by the program, and consist of two alphanumeric sequences of three characters... as in "axj 8t4". Obviously, "Let's go to Toontown Central" could never be a password.
Okay, but how was I to ever guess what those numbers and letters were?
It occured to me that some of what my friend was saying that sounded like complete gibberish might really be part of the code... so I tried taking the first letter of each statement he made. After trying it several times I was still confused and getting nowhere, when I realized that in between some of the statements he was also jumping up and down a lot... as in, jump up and down four times, say "ok", say "nice shot!", say "ok", jump up and down nine times, say "ok"... 4n9.
Viola! I cracked the code!
Meanwhile another of my friends was standing by completely confused about what was going on and why we were just standing around spouting gibberish... hehe.
So... once I was able to talk to my friend, I learned his real name, and that he is old enough to have a son that plays the game (a lot of the top players are the parents or grandparents of children who play I think), and his son is also a friend of mine. He told me that all of the exhortations of "Let's go to Toontown Central!" meant to go to www.toontowncentral.com, where there is a message board that you can exchange secret passwords at. Apparently this isn't the big concern with Disney that I thought it was -- they must assume that the people using the message board are not young children (there is an age statement you have to make when you register).
Like I was ever going to figure out that they wanted me to log onto a web site out-of-game... anyway I went there, and found several messages left there for me. ^_^ Heh.
Disney's Toontown does not let you talk freely to other players. You must use the "speedChat"... a series of drop-down menues that provide dozens of possible statements you can choose to utter.
Unless...
If you have a "Secret Friend" then you can type any message you want and they will see it, but nobody else will. How do you get a secret friend? Well, it was originally designed for only real-life friends to use, so you had to have a secret password that you give to them, that they type in. So basically, it's not possible to have a secret friend unless you've communicated with them outside the game, right?
Well... as it turns out, that's not true.
I was playing this week with some of my friends that I've met in the game, and at some point they decided to stand around and hold a bewildering SpeedChat conversation with me. They kept saying "Please be my friend!" but they were already on my friend's list. Then they would say "Use the SpeedChat" followed by "No". Then "This way" followed by unitelligible animal sound-words that I knew were all I would see when someone was using the Secret Friends chat system... ie for a mouse, I'd see "Squeeky squeek squeek squeeky squeek". That's what you see when you're not really that person's secret friend.
So I was able to follow this strange conversation far enough to realize that they wanted to be secret friends with me... but how could we ever accomplish that? They also kept saying "Let's work on that" and "Let's go to Toontown Central!" which, in the game, is the newbie area. But they clearly weren't headed there. At one point I decided to head there, but this wasn't what they wanted me to do.
There was a lot of other strange statements that I couldn't follow or make heads or tails of, and in the end although I realized what they were trying to do, I A) wasn't sure I needed any secret friends, and B) felt like they might be circumventing the rules a bit -- sneaking around Disney's carefully created system designed to protect kids from the idiots of the world. MOre importantly, I didn't understand HOW I was supposed to become their secret friend.
The next night another friend tried some of the same things with me... "Please be my friend" "I Can't Understand you" "Use the SpeedChat" "No" "Let's work on that" and "Let's go to Toontown Central". I basically ignored it because I saw no way to guess what their secret password might be. I tried entering "Let's go to Toontown" as a password, and a few other variations, but none of that worked.
Then one of the other two friends from the night before tried talking me through it all again. This time after more bewilderment I clicked on "get a secret", and I realized that all secret passwords are generated by the program, and consist of two alphanumeric sequences of three characters... as in "axj 8t4". Obviously, "Let's go to Toontown Central" could never be a password.
Okay, but how was I to ever guess what those numbers and letters were?
It occured to me that some of what my friend was saying that sounded like complete gibberish might really be part of the code... so I tried taking the first letter of each statement he made. After trying it several times I was still confused and getting nowhere, when I realized that in between some of the statements he was also jumping up and down a lot... as in, jump up and down four times, say "ok", say "nice shot!", say "ok", jump up and down nine times, say "ok"... 4n9.
Viola! I cracked the code!
Meanwhile another of my friends was standing by completely confused about what was going on and why we were just standing around spouting gibberish... hehe.
So... once I was able to talk to my friend, I learned his real name, and that he is old enough to have a son that plays the game (a lot of the top players are the parents or grandparents of children who play I think), and his son is also a friend of mine. He told me that all of the exhortations of "Let's go to Toontown Central!" meant to go to www.toontowncentral.com, where there is a message board that you can exchange secret passwords at. Apparently this isn't the big concern with Disney that I thought it was -- they must assume that the people using the message board are not young children (there is an age statement you have to make when you register).
Like I was ever going to figure out that they wanted me to log onto a web site out-of-game... anyway I went there, and found several messages left there for me. ^_^ Heh.
