Did you know that Thailand had their very own version of HKO? Well, they did, but they shut down on December 24th. I’ve had an account on HKO-TH for some months, but I didn’t go to their shutdown party. Partially because I didn’t know what time it was in my time. I logged on when they said, but there was nobody at the Harbor, so perhaps it was held elsewhere?

They didn’t really say why they shut down, and I won’t go into speculation about why I think they shut down.

They ran a slightly newer version of HKO. The US/C and International servers are at v.1.9.9.0.2, but Thailand was at v.1.9.10.0.2, so we know that the devs were working at some point before abandoning HKO.

Here is their logon screen. You can see it’s in Thai, and I don’t speak or read Thai, but if you played HKO, it’s easy to figure out.

They didn’t have the Dream Carnival, so their Pure Dream collection is empty. But this is some of their NPC Encyclopedia.

The font was slightly different. A little bigger, more rounded. You can see it in the chat window.

One of the differences was that their plant names displayed correctly on the farms. Here is potato on two plots, but I tried random seeds in random spots, and they were all correct. I didn’t test every seed or plot, but given that all the ones I did test were correct, I’m figuring this particular bug was squashed, but we’ll never see it.

They have lots of stuff in the item mall we don’t have. Level 12 farms, for one. During their final days, almost everything in the item mall was free. Sounds kind of familiar?

This is the scarecrow. We were told that the scarecrows were removed because they were bugged. Either the scarecrows on HKO Thailand were fixed, or the devs lied to us. Me, I’m betting on the latter, since they’ve been deceitful to us in the past, and I personally feel like they’re deliberately sabotaging this game to make it fail.

We were told the pet nanny was also broken. But what do you see here…

Here are the level 12 farms.

Here are Tokyo tokebns.

Ever notice that question mark icon on the minimap? It triggers a flash page to be loaded, but it doesn’t work on US/C and International because the devs never got around to writing the flash pages. This is what I saw when I went to Florapolis.

At some point, before they abandoned HKO, they developed a “farm draw” event. Due to (yet another bug) we on the international server saw some of the items associated with that non-released event.

Bye HKO Thailand. I didn’t play you much, and I didn’t know your players, but I am still sad to see another version of HKO close down.

Saturday July 16, 2011 was GM-Heine’s last day. I would have posted sooner, but SanrioTown blogs are acting up. As usual.

A few of us decided to sit with him during his last shift.

Thanks GM-Heine. I’m sorry that it ended up this way, but I hope you will always find your adventures to be full of joy and happiness.

Everyone has memories of times they wish didn’t end. Today is another bitter day in HKO, as we said farewell to GM-Ben. So here are two screenshots of a couple of times where several of us had good times with Ben. A period where I can look back and say, yes, I wish that didn’t have to end. How easily we take the present for granted, and when its gone, all we can do is look around in shock and wonder what happened.

Bye Ben, take care.

Yesterday, Sunday October 17, was a bitter day. It was GM-Red’s last day.

So to express my sorrow at her leaving, as well as expressing thanks for all she’s done over the past year, I made this video for her.