Club Tortimer's a Hit and Miss, but Mostly a Miss
I've really tried to like Club Tortimer. I really have. But 9 times out of 10, I end up having a terrible experience. Those 9 times out of 10 include things like trees getting chopped down while I'm trying to make extra Bells catching bugs, people constantly asking how old I am, and getting intentionally disconnected from the server.
It's bad enough I'm playing the game during the winter, when beetles are virtually nowhere to be found in my town. To make it worse, you'll get this one player who decides it's a good idea to start chopping down
every single tree on the island. I end up wasting the ship fee and just end up relocating to my personal Tortimer Island. The person doesn't bother saying "Hey!" or "How are you?"; s/he just starts chopping down trees and ticking a lot of people off in the process.
Secondly, I don't understand why people on these servers are so obsessed with finding out how old I am. If I tell them my age, I get disconnected instantly. If I tell them I'm "old enough," I get disconnected almost instantly. If I ignore them, I get disconnected. It seems like that question is an intentional d/c waiting to happen, regardless of how you choose to address it.
Of course, the biggest problem of these is getting booted from the server. If I've been hunting around for beetles or happen to have a souvenir in my inventory while trying to sort out everything else in my take-home box, I instantly lose all of that, just because the other person on the server wants to be a jerk and disconnect intentionally, causing me to lose any and all items I didn't have immediately stored in my item box. I can't tell you how many items, how many Bells' worth of beetles, or how much time I've lost due to people pulling mess like that. Of course, the items I'm purchasing with hard-earned Medals are for catalog completion anyway, but it would be nice to not have to deal with that on a daily basis. Today, I had to say "goodbye" to a whirlpool bath (which costs 70 Medals, by the way) when a new person arrived, said "hiiiiiiiiiii
", and immediately disconnected while I was trying to sort out my items and the pricey beetles I had caught. All of that work over a 90-minute time-span? Gone in 5 seconds. Needless to say, it's an atrocious system filled with malicious users. The worst part about it, though?
Once you've been disconnected, there's no way to blacklist the person, so you could easily wind up in the same situation with that person in the future, though the probability is extremely low.
I've stopped going altogether, unless I absolutely need a particular furniture item, in which case, I just farm the Medals normally on my private island (usually 100 Medals at a time), travel to Club Tortimer, purchase the new items, and leave immediately.
However, that one time out of 10 keeps me coming back to the island due to some infinitesimal hope that I'll get to meet a person who's actually looking to chat about something meaningful. Out of all the times I've been to Club Tortimer (which I'd estimate at about 80 times so far since I purchased the game), I've only gotten that twice (now that I think about it, it's not even a 10% positive rate; it's only at 2.5%). One was a girl from Japan who ended up talking about how much she wanted to visit America, while the other was a boy who was fascinated with my Link costume and talked about Legend of Zelda together for a few hours. That's the experience I hope for every time I connect, but there's always going to be someone out there who wants to make the experience for other players as miserable as they can, just to get a quick "ha ha" and move on with their game without any consequence.
I'm sure Nintendo expected players to be a little more, well, player-friendly, but they certainly didn't take into account all the nasty ones that lurk in the gaming world, especially those who lurk in something as innocent as
Animal Crossing.