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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/maverden on 2024-02-16 14:17:15.
I can’t tell you how excited I am to make one of those r/hobbydrama posts with an incomprehensible title that makes perfect sense by the end.
In my previous post, I gave a broad overview of some of the stranger parts of the history of Neopets, going back pretty much to the site’s founding. Now I’m back again, to document some newer drama that’s unfolded over the past year-and-a-bit. But first, some background.
What is Neopets? I went over this quite extensively in my previous post, so please refer to that if you want a detailed rundown. In brief, Neopets is a browser game, founded in late 1999, in which you create virtual pets and explore the fictional world of Neopia through them. The site has changed ownership several times over its history, which I’ll discuss later.
Neopets is akin to a sandbox game. There are many different activities which can be explored separately from each other. Most players dabble in a bunch of different things, but many also have one or two aspects of the game that they’re especially involved in. New content gets released daily, and for a site with 24 years of history that’s a lot of content.
A few notes that will become relevant:
TNT: Short for The Neopets Team, the group who work on the game. Includes programmers, artists, moderators, and so on - even a company lawyer at one point. Someone in the comments of my previous post described the relationship between TNT and the players as parasocial. While this was more true 10-20 years ago, it remains a good descriptor - players have an odd fascination with the various staff members and their roles. At its best, this creates a sort of synergy, with memes and in-jokes forming a bond between players and staff.
Neopoints: Abbreviated NP, the in-game currency. Mainly used for buying and selling items. To provide a sense of scale, a casual player might get 20,000-50,000 NP per day from dailies. In many ways, it’s significantly easier to earn NP now than in earlier years of the site.
Items: Many parts of Neopets revolve around obtaining different items, which you can keep in your inventory (which has limited capacity) or store in your safety deposit box (which is effectively infinite and protects you from random events). Items can be bought and sold using NP. Some items can be bought from NPC shops, others are available from other sources. Users can also buy or sell items to each other.
Some item types include books, which you can read to your pet (but each can only be read once); food, wearable items to customize your pet’s appearance, paint brushes to change your pet’s color and aesthetic, weapons for battling, and stamps and other collectable items. These last two categories will be major points of this post. Stamps can be put into a stamp album, and other users can view your collection. The stamp album is divided into different pages, each following a theme, and each stamp occupies a specific spot on a specific page. Currently there are 43 pages, with 25 stamps each (although not all pages are complete - which is to say, there are spots for which no stamp currently exists).
Items have numerical rarity levels, which will also be a focal point several times in this writeup. I’ll put a brief explanation here; skip this quoted block if you don’t care about the technical details.
Items with rarity 1-99 are buyable from the main, NPC-run shops. Items appear (restock) in these main shops at semi-random intervals several times an hour. The higher an item’s rarity, the less often it appears. Rarity 99 (r99) items barely ever show up, and as such can be very expensive on the secondary market
Items with rarity 101-179 are “Special”, a broad category that refers to any items not available from the main shops. These items may be obtained from dailies, events or plots, random events, and a variety of other sources. The vast majority of Special items are r101 - since there’s no distinction between items in this rarity range, the dev team can afford to be lazy here. There are a few other rarity categories, but they won’t become important here.
Most aspects of the game have a wide difficulty curve. In other words, activities are very easy to get into, but become very, very, very hard to excel in beyond a certain point.
Want to read books to your pet? There are about 300 books priced at 1000 NP or less. You’ll probably get 2 or 3 books for free just doing your dailies. But if you want to get your pet on the monthly high-score table for the number of (unique) books read? Be prepared to spend several years and hundreds of millions of NP just to get to the very bottom of the top 100.
Want to collect avatars, which are basically secret achievements that double as icons you can use on the on-site messageboards, the Neoboards? You can rack up like 60 in an afternoon with a bit of clicking. Want to, again, get on the monthly high-score table - which comes with its own avatar? Better get to playing those old Flash games really well, because avatar scores are absurdly hard.
Want to collect stamps? Again, you’ll probably pick up a few doing your dailies. Want to get all 25 stamps on a single page and earn the associated avatar for that page? That sound you’re faintly hearing is the entire playerbase laughing at you while also sobbing.
Now, this all sounds like a good way to keep your players motivated - after all, there are always more goals to strive for! But consider how both the demographics and competitors have evolved over time.
Back in the 2000s and early 2010s, we were all elementary and middle school kids making our first accounts. We had all the time in the world to pour into getting really good at a game. And Neopets’ competitors - other browser games - all had more or less the same idea; just think of the kind of dedication people (still) put into Runescape. But the Neopets playerbase now is pretty much the same as it was back then (albeit dwindled a lot). Most people have been playing a looong time, and we’re adults with jobs and kids. We no longer have the time, or indeed the energy, to work as hard as we used to on something that’s supposed to be fun. The gaming market has evolved, too - mobile games reign supreme on the casual gaming scene, and that simple gameplay and achievable goals are what Neopets now has to compete with if it wants to keep its players - or Fyora willing, get new players.
Players leave, but very few new ones join, so the number of active players keeps declining. Among other problems, this means that anything valuable on a dead account - be it desirable pets or rare items - gets removed from the potential pool of circulation. So that old retired item you have your eye on will just keep getting rarer as the people who might sell it to you stop playing. Add to that the problem of wealthy players artificially driving up prices by buying and hoarding loads of valuable items, and the lack of money sinks that would remove NP from the player economy, and the site has a serious inflation issue.
How bad? Just between 2021 and 2023, the price of many desirable items increased 2-3 times, or more. People who spent years saving for an expensive stamp or powerful weapon found the object of their desire now selling for twice what it was just a few months ago. Once again: achievable goals are fun, impossible goals aren’t.
TNT clearly saw this problem. And the way they’re choosing to deal with it is at once extremely obvious and absolutely bonkers.
Give the People What They Want
One of the oldest recurring annual events on Neopets is the Advent Calendar, which runs for the entire month of December. Every day, users are treated to a short seasonal animation taking place somewhere in Neopia, along with a small sum of NP and 2-3 items. The prizes are different each day, and as a rule, those prizes are new items made specifically for the Advent Calendar, as opposed to preexisting items. Most prizes are junk that go straight into your safety deposit box, but it’s still a popular site event - because who’d argue with free stuff and cute daily animations?
(The next few paragraphs have a number of links; first to Neopets itself, and then to Jellyneo, a major fansite. While most pages on Neopets require an account to view, this doesn’t seem to be a problem for the ones I’m linking here.)
In December 2022, the Advent Calendar started as normal, but people quickly realized it was a bit… different. The animations were much simpler than past years. Rather than 10- to 30-second videos from recent previous years, we were instead treated to the likes of animated comic pages and short loops. This wasn’t too surprising since 2021 had already started the trend of simpler animations. But some days didn’t have animations at all, opting instead for mobile wallpapers or even printable coloring pages. This was well-received overall - the longer animations were starting to look pretty janky, so shor…
Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/1as8d1d/neopets_how_a_dev_team_decided_to_fix_a_broken/