Trolligarch
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"What's your evidence for the claims you made on Habbo warfare?"
🕑 Added 2025-06-15 13:45:12 +0000 UTCI received a question today from a user called Joe Robertson, who asked the following—
What is your evidence for all the claims you make in your video? You seem keen on seeing Habbo as a microcosm of real-life social dynamics but never provide any actual evidence to back up your assertions. Were there really "counter-intelligence teams" or was it just elaborate larp? Were there really "wars" or was it ego-measuring contests?
The following is a reproduction of my reply.
What is your evidence for all of the claims you make in your video?
I apologise for the long response—if I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.
In short, the evidence for the claims I make in the video can be boiled down to:
Primary sources, e.g., videos filmed by others (which I cited on screen actually!), contemporary news articles, classified internal documents, etc.
Interviews with human sources, whom I’ve kept anonymous,
Anecdotal evidence, i.e. I’ve seen it or done it with my own eyes (which should be taken with a healthy dose of scepticism, as you should question, like with any video essayist, what my motives are for telling the story, how my subjective viewpoint can change how I view things, etc.)
For a more in-depth answer, the greater challenge isn’t actually showing the evidence for the claims I made (a decent amount of which I had already shown on screen), but rather explaining why the evidence I showed proves my claims. After all, this video is about a sub-niche (Wired weapons) within a sub-niche (Agencies/militaries/mafias) within a sub-niche (Habbo retros) within a niche (Habbo Hotel)—which meant that the first 30 minutes of the video were literally just a preface to give the necessary background information to understand what a Wired weapon was and why you should care about it. But 30 minutes isn’t a long time, and as a consequence, a lot of nuanced details (which would’ve helped with interpreting the evidence) were left completely unsaid.
To give one example, at 10:40, I claimed that military groups began conducting recon missions, among other things, “to study and copy the uniforms of their enemies.” One of the key pieces of evidence I used to cite this claim was the video by Speedo290 (shown on screen).
The specific clip shown at 10:40 was their “Dressroom”—and if you want evidence of this, you can see the commander telling his subordinates (in Dutch) at 08:51 to go to the “Dressroom” using the teleport “over there.” We know that the room at 10:40 likely was the “Dressroom” referenced because the room has the “Imperial Teleport”—the same one the commander told his subordinates to use to enter the “Dressroom”—and because it has football gates.
The latter is particularly important because football gates allow players to instantly change their clothing upon using it. If you notice the uniforms the players were wearing at 10:40, you’ll notice they’re different from the ones at 08:51—implying that they changed their uniforms. Whose uniforms were these? We got our answer at 10:53—they were the same uniforms as the ones used by the Habbo.nl US Marine Corp (the uniforms seen in the Dressroom were the same as the uniforms seen behind the front desk).
We can infer that the Dressroom likely had the uniforms of other militaries (which could only realistically be obtained by conducting basic recon) because the Dressroom had more than one football gate with a flag corresponding to each one. We see a US flag next to one of the gates—and while the original footage doesn’t show anyone actually using the gate, I think it’s safe to assume that that was the football gate for the Habbo.nl USMC’s uniform.
This was basically the level of analysis I’d done with a lot of the primary sources I cited in the video. The difference was that, while it took me around 20 minutes to do a write-up to explain how I reached my conclusion (for that one very small point), it took me far less than that to actually analyse the footage in the first place, because of my nearly decade-long experience playing the game.
I’ve tried to do this kind of evidence breakdown in the video itself, e.g., at 24:49, where I briefly illustrated how the Habbo.com USDF employed a tactic known as “kettling” to deal with the raids. But even with that short segment, a lot of nuanced details were lost. In the original draft of the script (which didn’t make it to the final cut), I explained how the one-way gates actually served a dual purpose. While they prevented the “uncontrolled spillover of raiders” in the room, they also prevented new players from actually entering the room, since they were unlikely to know how to get past the gates in the first place (by double-clicking the traffic light on the gate). In that sense, the one-way gates were also an explicitly anti-Quackity raid measure—since most Quackity raiders would be new Habbo players.
I hope you can forgive me then, based on the above illustrations, for my decision not to conclusively prove every single assertion I made in the video that would satisfy a lay audience with no prior knowledge of the game. I can appreciate that, in a practical sense, this means I’m telling you “Source: trust me bro, I played this game a lot”—which means you can’t take everything I say in the video at face value (nor should you ever do that with anything on the internet). The thing that holds me to account, personally, is the possibility of “peer review”—the idea that if I get something egregiously wrong on the internet, someone with the same or even more subject matter expertise will make a rebuttal to correct me.
Another point I wanted to mention is how different people can review the same evidence and come to vastly different conclusions. The most striking example of this was in a different video (DC Short I), which was about a financial crisis on a Minecraft server. Nearly every single source I spoke to had the same view about the finance minister involved—by attempting to bail out the collapsing stock market, the finance minister acted criminally and corruptly. I looked at the same evidence and reached practically the opposite conclusion—the finance minister acted almost entirely in good faith. The story I ended up telling in the video was historically revisionist—one that, provocatively (for the players of that Minecraft server), challenged the orthodox telling of the story that prevailed for years.
Some of the claims made in this video are of this type. For example, at 13:02, I claimed that “[w]hile the old-school owners saw their groups as a form of roleplay, the new-school owners saw their agencies as a form of business—as another way to make money.”
I don’t have evidence of the agency owners’ subjective intent. To my recollection, I’ve never had an agency owner tell me, upfront and on the record, that their agencies were set up to be nothing but a cash cow. I don’t recall reading any articles written by them that state the same, etc. Yet I felt very confident in making that assertion because the evidence (in my opinion) overwhelmingly supports this view.
I’ve combed through a lot of old sources from the noughties (you’re just going to have to trust me on this one) about Habbo militaries, crews, mafias, etc.—and I couldn’t find evidence of them doing rank sales as brazenly as their post-2010 counterparts (I can’t, of course, say it never happened, but I can reasonably conclude it wasn’t considered standard practice at the time).
Coupled with the comparison of the rank lists between the old-school groups and the new-school agencies, I hope you can see why I concluded that agencies intentionally designed a corporate ladder that was “pay-to-win” (and thus possessed an intent to make money, as opposed to being mere roleplay). If you’re still sceptical, I invite you to compare some example rank lists yourself:
Old-school militaries
Habbo.ca Canadian military (21:37)
New-school agencies
Habbo.com FBI NW3C (16:07)
Other Habbo.com agencies (I wrote an entire draft academic paper on it here (pp15-21))
That being said, the claim is reductionist. Not all post-2010 agency owners would see their agencies as a cash cow. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that a sizeable number of agencies post-2020 weren’t designed with that intent in mind, but instead copied the practice of rank sales and a pay-to-win corporate ladder simply because previous agencies had done so.
It’s also reductionist because it implies a bright-line distinction between “old-school militaries” and “new-school agencies”—a perception I may have reinforced at 13:50 where I described “drastic steps” being taken to readjust the balance sheets. The reality, as it may not surprise you, was far more nuanced than that. There’s evidence, for example, of the Habbo.com EPF (Elite Police Force) going through a two-year-long transition between being more army-like (e.g., in this August 2010 video, you can see old-school sentry gates being used) to being more agency-like (e.g., in this August 2012 video, where a more modern Wired security apparatus was used). The EPF doesn’t quite fit with the dichotomy that I used in the video—and there will be claims and assertions I make in the video that will be littered with technical asterisks that never made it into the video.
With that in mind, let’s answer the other two questions:
Were there really "counter-intelligence teams" or was it just elaborate larp?
There definitely were counter-intelligence teams and not just in a larp sense.
For example, the Habbo.com USDF has a National Security Council (NSC), with key officials including a National Security Advisor who “advise[s] the SecDef and DepSecDef on pertinent, highly-classified intelligence affairs.” The USDF also has an Undersecretary of Defence for Intelligence and Security (USD I&S) who also oversees “classified activity.” (Ibid.)
We know that these classified “affairs” and “activities” include counter-intelligence because of the USDF’s Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), which hands the responsibility of punishing Article 18 Espionage (defined as a communication of “any non-public information”) to the NSC and USD I&S.
The criminal offences in the UCMJ aren’t just larp and have actual consequences—one 2022 news article, for example, reported that nearly 20 people were blacklisted by the USDF for offences including Art 2 (General Disrespect), Art 22 (Conduct Unbecoming), Art 26 (Unfit for Duty), and Art 27 (Defamation) for allegedly speaking out against their leadership.
Anecdotally, I’ve had members of the USDF tell me, when I approached them for an interview, that they required security clearance to talk about the group’s internal operations—something you can corroborate by referring to their information classification regulation. Other publicly available materials can also help illustrate just how seriously members of the USDF take their internal processes and operational security—e.g, one user made flashcards to help them study the contents of the UCMJ, presumably to pass the relevant exams needed to gain promotion.
The Habbo White House had a Department of Defence (DoD), whose responsibilities included, among other things, maintaining “a public list of terrorist people and groups” under the Defence Act 2019. “Terrorism,” as defined under Part 2, s1(1) of the Act, is defined as “plan[ning], threaten[ing], attempt[ing] to or succeed[ing] to raid, trash, damage or deface any part of the White House, website or its resources.” (Ibid.) The DoD under Part 2, s 4 of the Act gives the DoD the “authority over … investigations that relates to the protection of the Habbo White House from … terrorism”—meaning it explicitly has counter-intelligence functions. (Ibid.)
Again, these counter-intelligence functions aren’t just on paper. For example, in April 2020, prosecutors successfully charged a user called “ASMaRgo” for “leaking personal information in base and posing a security threat to White House Members.” As the Supreme Court judgment notes, the prosecution was brought by the Department of Justice “on behalf of the Department of Defense”—the body that was tasked with these kinds of investigations in the first place (Ibid.)
That said, not all groups had dedicated counter-intelligence teams. Some, like the Habbo Intelligence Agency (HIA), for example, split various counter-intelligence responsibilities with multiple groups. The Legal Affairs team is responsible for reviewing activities related to promotions, firings, and disciplinary actions—activities which could be associated with agency racketeering (28:30). The Transfer Unit is responsible for reviewing transfer applications from employees of other agencies, which include cursory checks including whether the employee comes from a shell company (Transfer Requirement 1-2), whether the employee had been previously blacklisted by the HIA or its allies (Transfer Req 4), etc.
Were there really "wars" or was it ego-measuring contests?
Both. I said at 08:47 that the old-school militaries “aspired to be the ‘best’—whatever that meant”—and that was me implying that raids and trashings were, at least to a certain extent, ego-measuring contests, in my opinion.
If your question was whether agencies and militaries thought of it as war, the answer was that they did (for example, 38:52).
If your question was whether these were one-off raids or trashings, or whether there were full-on war campaigns, we have evidence to support the latter. HabboTiumen of the AEF (Australian Elite Force), for example, has uploaded various videos of the same agency/military getting trashed multiple times on multiple dates. The Global Imperial Force was trashed on the 20th December 2012 and the 13th January 2013. The Blue Dragon Army was raided and trashed by a coalition of the AEF and Hill Empire on the 18th June 2011 and 23rd January 2012.
For a different source, a user called kurttj trashed the USM multiple times as was illustrated in my video (11:48, 11:57).
I hope these answers are helpful to you.
Joe's reply
Edit (16 June 2025): Joe Robertson kindly wrote back to me with the following reply—
This was an incredibly through answer, thank you. There's a lot of evidence and links provided here which does validate your claims. I'm especially impressed that you acknowledge the limitations of anecdotal evidence. It's clear that you have a commanding grasp of this subject and you care deeply about the content you're putting out.
Comments
Ludie
Nice to see he responded to it! At the end of the day, as much evidence as we may like to gather, ultimately we need to fill in the gaps with our own interpretations and experiences. But I should like to think that you do so in a far more nuanced way than any other youtuber in the niches you're in! When I think of comparative youtubers, I only wish they posted some actual sources...
Chrispy
No-one can accuse you of half-assing your response!
