I've been getting back into Webkinz lately, and after being in the community for some time, I started catching glimpses of the drama, in a sort of "Finally old enough to learn the family lore" sort of way. The first rabbit hole I came across is something known as Kiwigate.

Background

Webkinz is an online virtual pet game released in 2005 by the Canadian company Ganz, with the primary gimmick being that you buy a stuffed animal from a retail store, which comes with a code you can input into the website to unlock a virtual version of that animal. You can feed and take care of your pet, decorate their room, play games and complete daily activities. Its popularity peaked during the mid to late 2000s, but the game is still active to this day.

During the game's early years, you had to buy a physical plush and redeem the code it came with to access the game, which would grant you membership for the next year. If your membership expired, you would be locked out of your account until you bought another plush. But in 2012, the game switched to a freemium model, allowing access to limited features in the game for free, with more content available through the "Full" and "Deluxe" membership tiers. New users could also make an account without a pet code, being provided with one free pet upon signing up.

Then a few years later in 2018, Ganz introduced a way to adopt additional pets for free. This is done by collecting pet medallions, which are obtainable primarily through playing games in the arcade. If you rack up an impressive score in a game, there's a chance you'll receive a medallion for a random species of pet, and if you collect a certain number of medallions for a specific pet, you can adopt it. However, this usually takes a long time, as you can only collect up to about 10 medallions per day, each medallion is assigned to a certain species at random, and each species requires anywhere from 50-250 medallions depending on its rarity.

However, every year during April, Ganz holds a Webkinz anniversary event where they distribute large amounts of medallions geared toward a specific pet. The way this is typically done is that every day of the month, players are able to collect up to 4-5 medallions a day by clicking on them whenever they float across the screen. Usually the event pet of choice will require 100 medallions, so players can get the pet if they log in and collect every medallion for 20 days out of the month if they have Deluxe membership, or 25 days for everyone else. However, they also have a failsafe for people who can't log in that often: upon logging in on April 29th - Webkinz anniversary day - a gift box will be added to the player's dock, and when opened, it will grant the player an extra 25 medallions toward the pet.

The Drama

Back in 2021, the April event pet was the kiwi bird. Webkinz hosted the aforementioned daily medallion distributions followed by the 25 pack on Webkinz day. However, something was different about this year's Webkinz Day gift box. Upon opening the box and collecting the prizes, players noticed the box did not disappear from their inventories, and could be clicked and dragged back out again for duplicate prizes. Interesting, maybe this is some sort of prize bonus. And hey, I got 50 medallions rather than 25, I won't complain.

But then players realized they could open the box again. And again. The same prizes, over and over, and there was no indication of when it was supposed to end. Most players quickly caught on that this was a glitch, and they were not supposed to get more than one gift box. Some players grew worried that they might get banned, especially those who didn't realize they were exploiting a glitch at first, and hunkered down to wait until the glitch was fixed.

However, other players decided to take full advantage, continuously opening the box and racking up thousands of medallions. Some adopted as many kiwis as they could to create kiwi armies. Others used the medallion exchange system (a feature where you can trade in 10 medallions of one pet for one generic "AnyPet" medallion to put towards whichever pet you want) to collect enough medallions to redeem other pets.

Aftermath

As one can imagine, the website quickly went down for maintenance, and the glitch was fixed when it came back online. Many users were banned for exploiting the glitch. Some got their accounts reinstated with a warning. Some had excess medallions removed from their account.

In the wake of the banning spree and subsequent appeals, discourse rose from the ashes, namely around if players should have been banned for what happened. While the comments I could find indicated that players were mostly banned for purposefully exploiting the glitch rather than players who used the glitched box a few times by accident, some comments argued that even those who took advantage should be left alone, and that they shouldn't be punished for what was ultimately Ganz's poor coding. One post argued that banning accounts that players have invested a lot of money into might have lost Ganz a lot of paying customers for the sake of "being petty" or "proving a point." Another user declared they would boycott by cancelling their membership until all accounts involved were unbanned. In contrast, one commenter stated that those who had gotten banned had made the decision to exploit the glitch and were simply facing the expected consequences for their actions.

Despite the anger of some over the bans, the dust settled relatively quickly. The glitch was only active for a few hours before being corrected, so most players were likely unaffected. A few stray posts asked for updates on bans (with one user expressing concern for their account years after the fact), and the incident inspired a post about other interesting glitches in the game. Beyond this, the "Kiwigate" incident seems to have been largely forgotten, remembered only through the accounts of users who were active at the time, and explained to newbies as a funny anecdote from Webkinz past.