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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/throwaway426542 on 2024-03-11 04:47:29.

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Hello everyone, i stumbled across this subreddit randomly and seen this post by u/maverden

This is a very nice written up post and better than anything i could ever do, but it seems a big part of neopets history was missed out revolving the economy so im gonna do my best to expand on top of this

WHO AM I? My name is Jesse, if you played neopets at all in the 2007-2016ish era you would have probably seen me on the forums, i had my friend group like many but i mainly hung around the Avatar and Trade chat, with some casual bouts on the Battle Chat. You may have recognized some of my names jesse_on_ice, financial_crisis, arctic_troll etc. I was a notorious troll on neopets in my younger years and was constantly banned, most people either loved me or absolutely hated me there wasn’t really any in-between, i was a nuisance. And most thought i cheated and this (at least a time) was not true. I was a fairly rich restocker/auction sniper/reseller. Then something changed. One day i got banned “for protection” on my main because i lent a friend 200 million neopoints for a stamp, banned for protection usually happens when tnt suspect your account was hacked. Long story short they wouldn’t give my account back because of all my previous infractions and my antics on the boards, this is when i started on the cheating side of neopets. (early 2014)

Now that we have some of my backstory out of the way lets continue.

In March 2014 Jumpstart bought out neopets.com from Viacom, later that year around September the servers started migrating servers this caused massive lag and BIG problems for the long-term economy of neopets. From this migration of servers they wanted to keep the site active during the migration period, this caused the site to lag and this caused an unintended side effect. Item Duplication. Now if you dont know what Item duplication is and why its a big issue i implore you to google, but its quite simple the item is double

A friend of mine found this out on like the day the servers started migrating, i was one of the first people to know about it because she showed us on skype as a bug, and reported it to tnt as she was an honest player. The friend group she showed though, some of us were not so honest and the dupe was going to be found out eventually anyway. It was as simple as spam clicking an item. When you moved an item to say your gallery from your inventory a drop down menu would appear and you would click where to send the item, gallery, shop, safe box etc. Etc. Well when you spammed the confirmation box it would make unintended copies of that item. And you can see how this would easily be abused.

(also a side note and a funny story, there was a really rare and strong battledome item called the moehog skull you could only get by winning an expensive scratchcard, i actually won one and sold it for $140 USD right before the majority of people discovered the duping, it was a good business decision on my end since it devalued to shit)

Anyway back on topic, there was always a stable economy in neopets aside a few items

There was obviously the Darigan Sword of Death, which is a 1 of a kind item owned and sold by featheralley to a user (i forgot his name) for his gallery. Then there were other items which would always gain value because they were so old and rare some examples being retired items, smugglers cove items, prize code items etc. Etc.

These items would sell for 100s of millions of neopoints just to sit in somebodies’ collection, and before the duping 100 million was a lot. Some of those items above were glossed over in the above post the Super Attack Pea is the one I’m going to talk about

the Attack Pea family was released in the smugglers cove, the smugglers cove was a rare event that would stock super rare items at the time only available for that event, so if you got a Super Attack Pea when they were released that was going to be the only time you could ever get one. And its been a while but im pretty sure they stocked at a certain time on a random minute, so it would be at 44 seconds on a certain minute for example. So you would refresh every minute at 44 seconds for example, but if you refreshed too often you could get banned from the cove for an hour. So it was always a luck and skill component (and a bit of internet speed, as you would need to fight the other people for it)

And if i remember correctly again, there was only 100 of each item released at the cove (i think later they offered more, but the early days it was only like 100 or 150)

Now for the fun part, these items got duped like fucking crazy, there were people like me who would do stuff like this just for fun because at the time i was a notorious troll, i would make a “fun auction” post on the forums and link to my auction trades and just see 8 of one of the rarest item in the game selling for funny numbers.

these at the time sold for over 500 million neopoints. And i had a lot more of these, i would estimate i had about 2000 of them.

And when the general public learned about this, this deflated every single item in the game. Well every rare notable item, i think our friend in the other post glossed over item rarities etc. Well the super super top end items people couldn’t get ahold of to dupe just went up in value, widening that gap. because only select people had them. And those accounts were inactive or items so rare nobody thought about, or if they were duped it was in secret (a lot of rare items that were previously thought gone forever or so rare they may as well be gone forever came out over the next few months)

There were side effects however. A LOT of people got banned, innocent or not, people with duped items got banned. It actually killed the playerbase of an already dying game as neopets didn’t have the best reputation as they were slowly releasing ways to kill the economy already making desirable things like krawk and draik neopet easily obtainable. (previously they were super rare, and weren’t like other limited pets you could make on a certain day)

And you know what, as much as this dupe had an effect on the currency side of the game, it could have gotten worse, and if you were an avid neopets player and hunted avatars i apologize profusely, because this dupe also extended to games, you may have heard of bilge dice, well im not gonna bore you with the details, I’ll just link you to the rules

Unfortunately, this game has been removed and you have me to thank. Because i found out an exploit using the same technique as duping where you just spam click the result to see if you won which would stack your points and completely broke the game. Keep in mind getting even 10 wins in a row in this for the avatar is extremely difficult and yet with the server migration creating all the lag this was possible, i released the method on the forums and the game got taken down a day later. I actually had a score of a 192 that i lost the screenshot of.

I would say I’m not proud of it, but that would be a lie, getting an entire game taken down because I was some dumb internet troll is just funny to me.

There was however 1 more hidden use of this duplication glitch, my friend Ana actually discovered this and she shared it with me, to my knowledge we were the only 2 people to know about this method which has since been patched (at least i hope so) this worked well after the duping had actually been solved because we were still doing this 2 years later.

The Money tree had an NC donation thing attached to it where you could refund your Neocash with an upcycle fortune cookie

and i actually again dont remember the specifics but you could donate 2 items a day and get some neocash back for those donations neocash for those who are unaware are used for special items with real world cash, not the regular ingame currency neopoints, either way you could buy this upcycle fortune cookie do the donate thing and its meant to be sort of like a recoup for items you no longer need or want, however if you spam clicked on the donate it would multiply the amount of neocash you got back, so instead of 25 you could get 250 etc. And this worked. And i didnt care too much about the cosmetics side of neopets so i never actually did anything with it, it was all for the “thrill” i guess but i made out with well over $40,000 USD of neocash that i could have easily sold offsite, i honestly should have but i didnt want to just implicate a bunch of random people in obvious fraud and at the time i was doing this i was kind of done with neopets.

I have a lot of stories about neopets including real life scandals, marriages, the drama in the neopets black market, and the notorious database leak (i acutally still have that somewhere) i know a LOT. So if there is anyone who is actually good at writing and played neopets and wants to collab feel free to hit me up, my remembering skills are a bit sketchy but with some research i could probably dig it all back up from my memory.