Hello. I come to this thread as an actual long time member of the Bagbean game and community. I, Obviously will not be disclosing any information on myself personally for the sake of the game, as I do, at times still enjoy engaging with prompts.
However some things to keep in mind, I have been a passive/active (depending, interest comes and goes) member of the community since 2016.
I agree, the game and everything surrounding it are a relative shit show. Despite there having been improvements (allowing people to create free characters during events, including 'mascots' that are free to use, implementing several ways to won / earn characters without monetary investments) there have still been some shitty things that happened, and even now its pretty bare bones.
I can summarize and detail some drama for the thread, please keep in mind, with age, and the nature of DA (and admittedly, laziness) I won't be able to provide 100% proof for any of this, but I hope my pointing out of them can help you all dig a little deeper.
Let's start with the talk of species. Bagbeans are not the only species in the world of griffia, there are many. There used to be more. This is the basis of this first drama. Back in the day the group and admins had a PRECIDENT FOR JUST SAYING CERTAIN SPECIES DONT EXSIST ANYMORE. They would remove species from lore suddenly without warning, and place the burden on YOU, the PLAYER to transfer the character to one of the species still used in the game (not even a full list, there was ones they /could/ become. notably, never a bagbean) or you would lose the ability to use your character in the game forever.
Now not only that this caused weirdness because suddenly, your character who you spent time, energy and sometimes money on for commissions was void. They, even if you transferred them, now had a different look, lore and everything else including 'game passives'.
Speaking of passives there used to be some super overpowered passive abilities of the species and subspecies. For those unaware, bagbeans have a vast array of sub species (Fauna, those themed off earth animals, Floral, themed offplants, nomnom, themed off food, abstract, themed off abstract ideas (like happiness, science, inspiration ETC) Indigenous (the subtype that's free to make during events) Item, themed off items ETC ETC ETC theres a ton of these.) however we will focus on the subtypes of MYTHICAL, bagbeans themed off mythical beats and mythflora, themed off mythical plants.
These bagbean subspecies in particular had the ability to instantly grow thier time tree/pool/flower to full.
The time tree (ill focus on one for ease) is a part of the game players earn for thier characters, and when fully grown, it will drop loot every month, and before it was removed, lovebeans (aka the item you use to make new characters)
Why is this over powered? Well, originally to grow a time tree you had to comment on a journal, every week, to water the tree, and it wasn't fully grown until after 20weeks of this!
So having a mythical could greatly reduce work needed. This meant mythical and mythflora were often worth the most, and at times, often the only viable game options if you wanted to keep up with others.
Another thing to note is there is a 'hybrid' subspecies, that can have aspects of other subspecies as well as thier passives. this leads into my next point.
There used to be a mod in the group by the name of BLOOMDOOM. Bloom would somehow manage to get Griffsnuff to gift her so many bagbeans, multiple a week, it all culminated in her receiving
this. Now to you guys this means nothing however let me clarify, this is s hybrid of EVERYBAGBEAN subspecies, has ever passive status and mutation, mainly meaning she was gifted things locked to other players, that allowed her to grind up 4x loot from EVERYTHING while normal players were left in the dust.
Bloomdoom was also notorious for stealing characters from others.
Back in the day users used to post 'wishlists' where they would detail their dream character, often times Griff and Co would look these over and make surprise gifts for members. However, Bloomdoom used these as her own personal shopping list.
Bloomdoom got caught doing this to user Fayfia, who posted a Wishlist about a fornlee
Seahorse. Bloomdoom took the Wishlist and used it to order a custom for herself, to spite Fayfia who had been on her bad side for awhile now. Bloomdsoom was finally caught and fired from being a mod and subsequently left the community. (other people she did this too came out of the wood work later, however, fayfia deleted the journals in order to keep things 'pleasant' for her own closed species.)
Another drama I remember was around
this sprout. Before it was a DTR (draw to raffle) it was a regular auction. Member BuyolitsezMC ended up winning the bid with a bid of 5k. Later it was revealed BuyolitsezMC had committed credit card fraud in order to pay, and the adopt was revoked and raffled off to the community. Buyo also, while never proven, its obvious, created a secondary account to get a second chance at raffles and at FTO things (opportunities and raffles meant to give first time owners a chance) Buyolitsez eventually left the community after being called out, while deleting commissions they had done for others, essentially erasing work people payed for.
You have the other big drama covered, when they removed lovebeans from timetree loot.
So let's see smaller dramas, I will not be giving names as these are all still active members of the community.
User [REDACTED] witchhunting another user, [REDACTED] (at the time) for making characters similar to hers. Sometimes the similarity was literally just white with rainbow accents. Now another user copies her themes out of spite.
Another user got caught tracing several times and still is around, tracing. Including for contests and the like. They are also known to claim themes out of spite just because they do not like another user.
There was a christmas event that was advertised as twelve days of free items for members, and you jsut had to enter, then when banking was too troublesome for the staff, they changed it to a raffle without warning.
Of course then theres also the fact they have done 'charity' adopts for the site, likely 10+k at this point and we still see little improvement. We've also been promised questing for 3+ years.