Webkinz "Helpfulness" and Censorship

My daughters and I are HUGE Webkinz fans. We play on the Webkinz site every single day and we have quite a few pets. These little stuffed animals, and their virtual counterparts, are the best stuffed animals we've ever seen.

All that said, as a person with programming experience, I've been very disappointed with the Webkinz lack of testing. They keep putting out new and potentially exciting virtual products and games that don't work (for example, they just came out with "The Wheel of the Month" -- it never worked for anyone, from all reports). They've also become overly helpful to parents, to the point of being UNhelpful to all involved.

My older daughter had one of the cute Bullfrogs that she wanted to adopt. We were feeling a bit of time pressure to adopt this pet, since the Curio Shop was selling an extremely rare Egyptian item (and we needed the cash from an adoption in order to have enough money to buy it). [We've been building an Egyptian room for our black cat for quite a while now.] My daughter felt (and still feels) that the most perfect name in the world for this sweet little frog was Buttercup (named after "Princess Buttercup" from the awesome Princess Bride movie).

Webkinz, in their quest to save us from ourselves, wouldn't allow the beautiful name Buttercup to be used. It won't allow Butterscotch either (our dream dog name). See the theme? It actually took us a bit. Furthermore, this censorship has caused us to talk about "bad words" a lot more than we normally would. We especially couldn't figure out why our new gorgeous Library room wasn't allowed to be named "Library". Where's the naughty word in that name? We've figured it out, but it took a while... The room is now called the "Book Room" and here is a snapshot of it (my daughter and her friend made it earlier today). Of course, these are only guesses since Webkinz customer support never answers our questions...


Their customer support also leaves most users questioning whether or not it even exists. Their online FAQ and Customer Support within the Webkinz world only have trite answers that have never once been correct for the situations that we have e-mailed them about. I haven't found anyone IRL that has had one of their problems (NOTE: these are customers that are reporting actual bugs, not customers randomly complaining) answered or even acknowledged. It is offensive that they insist that we, the users, are doing something to cause problems when the problems are clearly that the test engineers haven't been given enough time to properly do their jobs. This makes me wonder just how many programmers and computer engineers Ganz has employed for the Webkinz project. Definitely not enough. We customers would much rather have a more stable and reliable game than all the new features and products that keep showing up. Isn't this always the case in software?