Hotel Versions (V11-V20)

Every so often, the hotel receives a few interesting updates and the hotel version/released used to change. This occurred right up until R/V63, when Sulake decided to introduce "builds" instead (e.g. Build 1335) and also, we now refer to the updates past V/R33 as "BETA updates". Different releases/versions used to be a rare occasion back in 2000-2003 but they became more common as Sulake and Habbo Hotel grew in size. Here is a list of what V11 - V20 brought to the hotel:

V11

• At last, the most anticipated game has arrived... SnowStorm! This new feature lets players rub snow in their arch-enemies faces for just 2 credits a game.

  

  Snowstorm promotional image

• Players could now buy bulk tickets and pet food.
• Habbo Homes made an entrance! Players can display their information, friends and even rooms on their home pages. They can also customise their page with free backgrounds and stickers, but there is also the option to buy bigger and better ones for just a few credits each. A few widgets were also added to homepages.
• Players can now edit their settings, details and even their Habbo look from the homepage. When they clicked "Change my details" on the client, it would re-direct them to the homepage where they could easily look and customize their character! Users could also buy credits and certain pieces of furniture this way without even being on the hotel. The log-in technique also changed.
• Spectator mode was added due to people complaining that they never got the chance to see a celebrity when they visited. This mode was also used for important staff-hosted events. In spectator mode, players cannot talk or walk around the room but they could see what is going on inside.
• At last, some new clothing! Asian themed clothes were added for men and women, along with the t-shirt and jacket (all in one) top for men.
• New public rooms are added, including the Rooftop, Rooftop Cafe, Internet Cafe, Tropical Bar, two Old Skool rooms and a Dusty Lounge.
• Area, Mode and Candy ranges got an update. Area was made to be more blue and shiny, while candy and mode were made a darker shade. There were also some new additions, including more furniture in the Area range, a Chinese bookcase and a chair. Iced furniture also received a few additions and a small edit (in terms of colour).

V12

• With the new bank feature players can exchange their virtual credits into virtual furniture. Users can buy coins (1c, 5c, 10c), sacks (20c) and/or gold bars (50c).
• Instead of presenting players with a black screen whilst their furni loads, players must now wait for each piece of furniture to load individually - thus making loading much faster.

  

  Crocodile Pet

• Crocodiles arrived in the Hotel. After a few years of cats and dogs being in the catalogue, they have a new friend which was available to purchase at the price of 20 credits.
• One of the biggest advantages for Habbo Club members was the monthly gifts... now that range has widened! The moment players join Habbo Club, they would go through two years of different gifts. The Club Shop was also added to a few hotels.
• The option to buy Habbo Club was added to Homepage.

V13

Ecotron Machine

• Habbo released Habbo Groups where players can design their own badge, design their group's very own homepage and even control who is in the group. The badge players create can be worn in the client with the other badges. Sulake had to re-arrange the placement of badges to accommodate the introduction of group badges. The groups at this point in time were at a price of 10 credits.
• The first version of the Ecotron was introduced. Players could exchange 10 items of furniture for 20 gaming tickets, 20 items for a Palm Chair, 30 items for a Water Garden, or 50 items for a Polar Bear Sofa.
• Habbo decided to upgrade the boring old version of BattleBall which included square layouts and just bouncing around to a more excited version called Battle Ball: Rebound. New arenas, new rules, new tunes and new power-ups were all added.
• Habbo released the new Trax machine which enabled players to listen to music, and ever be able to mix it themselves. Users cannot trade trax machines. If a player gets bored of the tune, they can simply eject the trax and put in a new one. Another new feature that came with Trax is a mute button to stop the music if it gets annoying. At first, only the grey trax machine was available to buy, but from time to time different colours were added, such as purple. There were also prizes for winning the Habbo Charts (where a player could submit Trax they had made), which would win them a Green Trax Machine.
• Sulake's logo was added to the loading screen.
• Players could create stickers of avatars - either their own or other user Habbo avatars.

V14

• Players are now greeted with a more organised and user-friendly catalogue when trying to purchase new Habbo Home items. They have the choice of two sections, Inventory and Web Catalogue. The Inventory is split into Stickers, Widgets, Backgrounds and Notes which allow them to view and place their current items. The Web Catalogue shows the same menus but some of them (especially the stickers) have sub menus.
• The new introduction of the Rating Widget wa only available to Habbo Club members. Players can place this widget on their Homepage and let other Habbos rate them on a scale of 1 to 5. The widget is now available for all members to use.

  

  Rating Widget

• When players receive Friend Requests, they will now be able to tick a box next to the names and then choose whether they want to accept or reject the selected Habbos. Along with this, people are now able to send Friend Requests from the "My Profile" widget on a Habbo Home.
• The ability to turn the "Bobba" filter off was introduced.
• Some more Snowstorm arenas were added during this version.
• A new method of retrieving lost passwords was introduced.

V15

• The limit for group members raised by an impressive 4,500, thus allowing groups to have 5,000 members instead of the original 500. Not only could more users fit

  

  Console with advanced friend request options

  in, the owner could also choose a url to find the group at instead of having a group 'ID' in the URL - e.g. 'www.habbo.co.uk/groups/1/id/'.
• Players could now put a Trax Widget on their Habbo Homepage or Group homepage to play selected Trax Tunes.
• Players can now use BB codes in notes and comments, including making text bold, italic, underlined, quoted, large font, small font, codes, links and colours. Messages increase to 500 letters from 200, and automatic links are enabled for Habbos, Rooms and Groups by just entering a name, clicking search and choosing the one desired.
• On Habbo Homes and Group Homes, players can now search for a user on the friends or members widget, making it easier to find one particular Habbo.
• As of release 14 players could export their Habbo into a small image to show on forums in signatures or avatars, but they weren't very appealing. With this update, it was revisited and updated to look better. Players could also export songs and rooms with this method.
• Players could now buy a Jukebox for only 10 credits in the catalogue with a ten-song capacity. Players can now choose which order they will be played in, but can only queue a total of 9 tracks. Once a player has made a song on the trax machine, they can burn it to a CD which then can be put into a jukebox. This would cost one credit. Players could also trade these CDs with other Habbos and name their songs.
• On each player's Habbo Homepage, they can specify 20 tags. These were so that other users could enter a word into the search box to show every Habbo who has that word as a tag, therefore finding friends with similar interests. Tags now show up on the in-game avatar.
• Similar to the release 14 update, it was now possible to press a button to select all, deselect all, reject selected or accept selected friends in the console.
• The Trax editor was also updated - there was the ability to make up to 50 trax songs and have a play list of 5 songs.

V16

• Groups now have a discussion forum with limited features of a normal forum (stickie, close, delete).

  

  Room Rating

• The Jukebox recieved its very own voice! If a player went into a room, and if the Jukebox was turned on, it would display a speech bubble (just like a Habbo) saying what track is playing and the track creator.
• Players can now 'stalk' their friends - going to the room they are in. A link to the room the friend is in would be displayed underneath their name on the user's 'Friends List' and whenever they sent a message. This started to annoy the office staff who were being stalked by hundreds of Habbos every minute.
• Players could now rate any guest room, apart from their own. Once a player enters a guest room, they would see some small icons at the bottom left of the screen. By clicking either the thumbs up or thumbs down, they could rate the room. The total room rating is shown underneath the room name, at the bottom left.

V17

• Instead of just seeing the normal Dance, Kick, Wave etc. buttons underneath the Inf-O-Matic, players now had them in a pop up area, replacing the previous buttons. This made it clearer to see another player's Avatar image, Motto, Badges and Tags. Players could choose to show a their tags in-game or not. It was possible to hide a few buttons by simply clicking 'Hide actions', thus reducing the size of the Inf-o-matic.
• A house symbol was added to each player's Inf-O-Matic, which when clicked, would lead to that player's Habbo Home page.
• A player's avatar can now be accessed via the same pop up box by clicking 'Change avatar looks', which would take the player to the appropriate page on the main site in a new window, where the Motto can be changed too.
• Not only the staff can have recommended rooms anymore! By using the Room Rating feature introduced in the last version, as soon as a room gained a rating, it would appear on the Recommended Rooms section which displayed the 3 last rooms at the top of the Guest section on the navigator.

V18

Updated Habbo Homepage

• A brand new homepage and login system was put in place. When a player visited the homepage, they were greeted with a sleek looking page, where they could log in or register, which included a random Habbo generator which will show a Habbo, their username, motto and their activity status.
• The interface is also slightly different - a lot fewer tabs along the top, which made it much easier to navigate. There is also a brand new news system, with upgraded picture quality.
• On the 'My Habbo' section, players are able to see how many guest book posts, messages and friend requests they have as well as how many credits & subscription days to Habbo Club they have left. From the same page, players could also change their look - by clicking their Habbo.
• New features were added where players could view when they were last online and entered the Hotel, as well as seeing a list of their friends, both those online and those not. Groups and tags were also displayed, and finally a notification area showing whether they have new guest book posts. These were controlled by drop down menus at the top of every page.
• New clothing and accessories were released, including (most popularly) a bear hat and shark tooth necklace. The new clothes consisted of: Hair, Hats, Headwear, Facewear, Facial Hair/masks, Shirt Accessories and Belts.
• Accepting or declining a friend request became as simple as a green '+' to accept, or a red 'X' to decline!
• Habbo Club cost increased slightly from 25 credits to 30 credits - though there were discounts for bulk buying, which evened out at 20 credits per month.
• Sulake decided to give every banned account a second chance. The unbanned Habbos records were not deleted though - they were monitored much closer, if they made a mistake they would be banned almost straight away.

V19

• The console will now bounce up and down when a player receives a new message or friend request, which made them more alerting, especially to users in rooms with Trax on.

  

  New Navigator colours

• New starter furniture was added to those who now register with Habbo. When a player first registered, they were able to choose a starter room and it would come prepared for a new Habbo's introduction. For the first few days a player logged in, they would receive a present with a new addition to put into the room.
• To accompany the new release of the starter furni, Sulake also added some simple guides for when a player first entered a Habbo room. These included how to walk, how to use the console, how to use the navigator and what the purpose of the hand was.
• Release 19 brought a few extra pieces of clothing, including 2 HC-only items. The 4 shoes were a later introduction, just a week or two before Release 20 came.
• New images on the recommended room module informed a player of how popular a room was (Grey room = empty, Green room = a few people, Yellow room = quite busy, Orange = nearly full and Red = full).
• The loading screen was updated: the loading bar was much larger than it was before and after a few seconds of seeing the normal plain black screen, the black background changes into the hotel view.
• Small changes were made to the site. Top stories changed, some new buttons were added, homepages and the webstore received a design update and a search feature was introduced into the hotel.

V20

• When a player now speaks, a bubble with a 'tail' will appear which will also show a small image of their Habbo's head on a background of their shirt colour! When a Habbo is typing from anywhere in the room, a "..." bubble will appear above their head. Also, if you are too far away from a particular Habbo, you will see nothing of their text (if they're speaking on 'say'), whereas before it would display 'h. .. n.me .s d.m'. It is now possible to whisper to anyone from any where in the room.

  

  Clothing Wardrobe

• Habbo Club Members could now save their 5 favourite outfits into their Habbo Wardrobe and could change into each one or replace each one with the click of a button. Sulake also removed HC clothes from the Non-Habbo Club Members changing area.
• New settings meant that players could now set themselves to appear offline, thus meaning no one can see their statuses. It was could also just disable the 'Follow that Habbo' feature.
• There were also a few minor changes to the Habbo Console, one of which now shows 'online: Online' if a player was onthe Hotel View, rather than 'online: Hotel View'.
• The infobox on the homepage was made much more pleasing to the eye and players could now change their motto this way.
• The welcoming group finally arrived. Members who joined the group were sent a small pop-up asking them if they want to greet a new Habbo, or leave them alone. When a player first joins Habbo, they are asked if they want a warm welcome, and if the new player selected 'yes', one of the members of the group would be alerted.
• When a user hovered over the navigator icon, they would get a small pop-up window showing them the top three recommended rooms.
• A new group type allows players to have an unlimited amount of members in their groups, but it did have a few consequences; anyone could join the group, group/guestbook/forum cannot be set to 'private' and 'Mega' groups cannot be reverted.