As you may know, the New Year always comes with the ‘’New Year, New Me‘’ kind of slogan. Sometimes, the New Year does not bring a new me, and in 2026, we enter a new circle in another domain: A Reddit war, but is it the right place to show this side of armies, and have a war there, in front of the whole CPPS community?
Designed by Master DS
What happened?
On December 29th, two days before the end of the year, a war started outside the Club Penguin Armies server. Void Troops and Templars had another issue between them on Reddit after VT posted some guides to help the community on Reddit with Club Penguin Journey and attract new members. Both went after each other once the Templars saw the similarities between VT’s guides and theirs.
Void Troops figured that the people who were flooding their guides were somehow related to the Templars community, since the same people were praising Templars’ posts while flooding theirs. Both were posting between four and five times a day and going on and off for the comments, it started to get out of hand. VT also accused the Templars of botting Reddit upvotes and downvotes in the posts. This was also accompanied by other armies posting occasionally.
This commotion cooled off recently, but the damage caused by it ended up costing the public image of the army community and the liberty of expression for armies on Reddit. People who were just coming to look for guides or talk about the game were complaining about the army side and the fragile image of the Army Community.
The Fragile State of the Public Image of the Army Community
Reddit community members having hatred towards armies
The recent incident on Reddit has once again reminded us how easy it is to turn people who are non community members against our community. The whole attempt from the Templars, the Void Troops and various armies in general, to promote their armies, ended up having the opposite results. The members of the subreddit were infuriated by the numerous posts that were published within a short time. There were posts which were a blatant attempt to recruit people by promoting features of the server, such as guides and mascot trackers. Following the incident, Reddit restricted army related posts. Regarding the incident, new rules were implemented to keep army posts from flooding the subreddit.
A Reddit moderator from r/ClubPenguin putting some new rules in place.
The army community versus the cpps one
To begin with, a CPPS is labelled as any Club Penguin Private Server. Those are made by various individuals among the greater Club Penguin community, usually in an effort to relive the nostalgia of the game. Some CPPS you may know are the Club Penguin Journey and the army based CPA: Battleground. Any Club Penguin version you have played after 2017, with the exception of Club Penguin Island, is a CPPS. There are currently about 20 of them, with most being similar but with some variations.
The army community often interacts with the CPPSes. Armies have been hosting more and more events in the most popular CPPSes. The events vary from recruiting events to stamp collecting to igloo raids. While being in the CPPS, trying to attract new players, armies should be reminded that their actions can affect the public view of our community as a whole. If an army tries unorthodox recruiting methods, as we saw with the Reddit posts, that will result in anger towards our community. Armies should not try to push game players to join them. People’s wishes not to join an army should be respected.
A perennial issue
Back in the original Club Penguin era, there was a similar issue. At that time, armies were using autotypers in order to attract new players. It included using bots to automatically send messages in Club Penguin over a long period of time. It was the lowest effort in recruiting that has happened in the community’s history. As it was expected, it ended up enraging several users who came across the bot messaging. Club Penguin Army Central had also written a post on that addressing the technique of autotyping.
The autotyping can be compared with the recent pushing of CPPS “rogues” to join the army. Of course, each army operates differently. There are some who are very respectful towards the people who just want to enjoy the game without joining the army, and others who have an opposite approach. This can also be seen through the Reddit posts and the armies’ website posts, with the people who read them being urged to join the army server.
A 5 year old comment on R/ClubPenguin
How does this actively affect cpa?
It is vital that armies understand how much they shape public opinion. One army misbehaving can cause a negative result for all armies and increase the hate. Each public action from every person and army of the community has an impact on it. Excessive drama and toxicity can also be spread outside the community and affect people’s views of it. A great example was the recent Templars vs. Void Troops Reddit post war, which was mentioned earlier.
The general cancel culture, which has spread over the community and was mainly active in the previous years, is also hurting its reputation. Some cancel posts are necessary to ensure some actions are exposed, and safety is upheld. Others are low quality posts, containing out of context stuff in an attempt to get someone couped, or removed. The cancel culture has been analysed in this extensive post, so it won’t be analysed here much. When it comes to the public image, though, these types of posts get spread further and reach more people who have no idea of the community. Naturally, they will want to stay as far away as possible upon facing a post like that.
A solution?
Finding a solution to this issue, but especially enforcing it, can be tough. To begin with, army leaders and members should be less selfish when it comes to actions that can hurt the community long term. They may help their army in the short term, but eventually it will return like a boomerang and hit the whole community harder. It is important that they are more considerate of the community overall. After all, armies are partially dependent on each other to operate and become more successful. Without other armies, an army is just a Club Penguin group that does costume events, gets stamps and publishes guides, at best case. If armies as a whole are growing, then individual armies within the community will also grow. If an army is hurting the community, then other armies will get hurt too.
It is important that the community has a common goal to strive to improve itself. Whether that is by bringing in new people, correcting old mistakes and learning from them, or finding ways to make Club Penguin a more fun experience. Wars within the armies should exist, and they should become even more common. Wars help armies interact with each other, which eventually brings growth. This happens due to the competitive state of the wars, which forces armies to do better and overperform. Toxicity can exist in wars, and that’s ok, as long as it doesn’t lead to harassment and threats. Additionally, wars should happen for the sake of it too, there does not need to be a whole twenty-page meaningless out of context exposes in order to declare a war. Anti-enemy army propaganda can be created in many ways, and people have been very creative with it at times.
Summary
The community should have wars going on within it, but when it comes to external threats, it should stand united. Only in that way it can keep growing and expand further than before.
Below you can see some extra screenshots from various Reddit comments in the r/Club Penguin subreddit regarding the army posts, so you can reflect after reading the post.
A Reddit user losing their mind over army posts
Advanced anti-recruiting tactics
Poor Jo’s puffle. Has anyone seen it?
More comments about the army structure in its entirety – Click to enlarge
Another negative comment about the community
The Reddit war between TCP and VT spiralled into something greater, which ended up hurting the army community as a whole and putting restrictions on it. Do YOU agree with the post? Did VT’s and TCP’s behaviour affect the whole community? Should there be a code or agreement of public behaviour between armies?
Kath
Reporter in Training
JojoTeri
Chief Executive Producer
More Information
Reporter in training for CPA
Absolutely right, the state of the community’s public image is very fragile. The scandals and controversies in the world of the army have given Club Penguin players a bad image of any army, as if it’s prejudiced. The army community now has a pre-determined look towards potentially sweet penguins.
Little do they know, it’s the fault of some armies that adore spamming ads on their Reddit page and bother them soon after they join. There are barely any armies that maintain a positive look, both externally and internally, like the Aliens or the Star Force. Other armies get into scandals and popular debate on very out-of-CPA matters that they shouldn’t have even tried to get involved in, in the first place. Those are the same armies that set insane weekly recruiting requirements, follow toxic policies, sexualize random things, ping recruits 7 times per event, and force them to attend a battle when they’re very sick because +1 to their size weighs more than a person’s health. I really wish these recruits knew that there are better armies around, because the armies they’re seeing are certainly some big armies that care less about their troops.
Take recent examples: Rebel Penguin Federation, Army of Club Penguin, Water Vikings, and so on. They have done things they didn’t need to, and yet after some time, we all forget that they’ve been involved in ruining everyone’s image. This is my personal opinion; it doesn’t represent that of any army. At least the newest armies, like the Tsunamis, aren’t as weird as most armies in the community.
The army community is a place to have fun. Armies that ruin this goal aren’t even deserving of being called an “army”. And, army veteran advisors are not any less: they help them when they become controversial, thinking that doing so will give their legacy some attention.
FIND FUN IN SOME OTHER WAY! ARMIES WERE NEVER MEANT TO BE LIKE THIS.