This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/iLOVEkadoaties on 2024-06-01 16:58:16+00:00.

(Note: ‘retail’ refers to the regular Neopets website, currently owned by NetDragon, previously owned by JumpStart - thank you u/fancytables)

BACKGROUND

Before I begin this post, it is important to talk about what Neopets is and why a classic version of it was created in the first place. Neopets is a virtual petsite where you can own pixel pets, converse with other players on the neoboards, play games, meet people through guilds (which are like clubs geared toward certain interests), and partake in daily activities. Because Neopets is now a 24-year-old site, many of its users have been around for a while and remember what Neopets was like pre-conversion. 

In 2007, Viacom (the company that owned the domain at the time) decided to “convert” all pets in order to introduce customization–a new site feature where you could spend real money to dress up your pets. While pre-conversion Neopets had dynamic poses and character, post-conversion Neopets were static and rather awkward. Most species and color combinations were automatically converted, but owners of certain combinations were given the option to keep their original unconverted pet. This drove up the value of unconverteds (otherwise known as UCs), and created a fierce trading system on Neopets. In a sea of converted pets, everyone wanted an unconverted.

Players had the option to trade around and work their way up to getting one of these highly coveted pets–but starting from ground zero often meant working on a singular trade chain for years, if not decades. This was a daunting task for many. Soon enough, there was a robust black market for unconverted pets…and when I say robust, I mean, people who desperately wanted these “UC” pets were flooding the “black market” with thousands of US dollars per year. 

Millions of players who had been there since the beginning of Neopets would continue to be discouraged by the site’s direction for years to come. In 2020, it was announced that Adobe Flash would soon be discontinued. With the termination of Flash, all the beloved Neopets games that relied on it were lost. Three years ago, Neopets further dug its own grave by introducing NFTS. Needless to say, the active player base has dramatically decreased over the years.

NEOPETS CLASSIC IS DEBUTED

Enter Neopets Classic (NPC), a fansite made to model early 2000s Neopets when there were around 3 million active users. For privacy purposes, the name Kiko will refer to the site’s creator (all screenshots with him will be censored in YELLOW). Kiko began working on this project as a way to learn code in his offtime. He began posting screenshots of the progress he was making with NPC on Reddit as far back as 5 years ago (2019). To say Neopets fans were excited is an understatement. When the site eventually opened to the public in December 2020, tons of users rushed to make accounts and create the unconverted pets they had never imagined getting to own, along with names that are probably stuck on frozen accounts from 2003 or so on retail. Instead of Rose6920Neopets, it was possible for a user on Neopets Classic to actually make the pet “Rose”. In its early days, the site was incredibly nostalgic and fulfilling for many people. 

Kiko opened a Patreon account where people could show their support through monthly donations ranging from $1 to $25. Each tier unlocked special rewards on NPC’s Discord server, but the most appealing was the ability to make an NPC account for $1. After the initial wave of sign-ups, the site closed regular sign-ups to manage the influx of users as there were easily 200 members already. The only way people could get accounts after this point was by donating, or to wait for sign-up links to be posted about every month or so to the Discord. After receiving an email from Patreon where they warned him of Neopets copyright issues, Kiko moved to Buy Me A Coffee (BMAC).

A few months into Neopets Classic, there was a surge of site bugs and issues that went unfixed and quickly piled up. Kiko was nowhere to be found for almost two months. There was no communication indicating when users could expect fixes to the issues they were facing in game. Not even the mods were able to tell the users when or even if he would be back. He came back eventually, with no word of apology or explanation for his absence. This left users quite upset at the lack of communication while he was MIA, and not knowing whether their ongoing donations were going to waste if the site never started working properly again. 

Kiko’s prolonged absence opened a door for many cheaters to abuse the site. This included the use of various bots and scripts that could auto-refresh around the site and auto-buy items from shops. Additionally, several users funneled items and neopoints (the in-game Neopets currency) from their side accounts to their main accounts, which was against the rules. Upon his return, Kiko was made aware of the massive cheating issue and started issuing bans accordingly. He created a channel within the Discord titled “Wall of Shame”, where he mocked the users he froze and immortalized their “crimes.” Ironically, Kiko himself had quite a bit of experience with similar illegal behavior on retail Neopets. He had previously been a black market seller of “UC” pets for real money on retail - and Clraik, a forum-based website dedicated to sharing and engaging in Neopets cheats, did not hesitate to expose this in his ban message from their site. Interestingly, Kiko had previously been fairly involved in the Clraik community and even recruited his first Neopets Classic players from there. He eventually deleted the channel.

Kiko also shamed his own playerbase behind closed doors in BMAC-only channels, but the Wall of Shame wouldn’t be the first time he did so publicly. During the Halloween event in 2021, players collected candy around the site that came in different varieties. To redeem prizes, you had to collect certain varieties of candies - and if you didn’t have those varieties, you could swap candies with other users to get what you needed. One user made an unpopular choice to ask for multiples of one kind of candy for less of another and received severe backlash from not only the community but Kiko himself. While some users agreed that the player was acting out of line and applauded Kiko’s condemnation of the user, many others were grossly uncomfortable with the site creator openly ridiculing a player who wasn’t breaking any known game rules. Kiko had started a dogpile where members of the community continued to speak against the user, who then felt bullied off the site. A few friends of his followed suit and quit playing.

ART CHAOS

On March 7th, 2022, an NPC artist (who will henceforth be referred to as Carmariller) asked Kiko for permission to add a commissioned pet to the site that had been commissioned by a user with Neopoints. Kiko said yes and gave her permission, noting that it wasn’t any different from a user paying for a commission, as long as the user was fine with it being on the site. Their stone Shoyru design was eventually added to the site. Later on, several other users pitched in together to pay for a commission of another pet design from Carmariller in hopes of it being added to the site. When the site’s main moderator (let’s call her Lupe) found out about this in a public channel, she made it clear that commissions for pets to be added to the site were not allowed anymore, claiming it was unfair for users who couldn’t pay to affect site art through neopoints. However, those who had commissioned the art were confused and upset that this decision was made in direct opposition to the precedent of the Stone Shoyru. Following Lupe’s claims of unfairness, several users chimed in to express that it was problematic that users had commissioned art to be added to the site. Carmariller took a lot of heat from this discourse, which caused them to take a break from NPC. This series of interactions will be important later on.

ISSUES WITH INCLUSIVENESS

During April 2022, it was announced that a spring Easter event would take place on NPC. In the suggestions channel of the Discord server, a user submitted a suggestion to incorporate small nods to other religions because all the events around the holiday season were Christian-centric. This opened the door for a few users to vehemently disagree, stating that religion had no place on Neopets, that the site could never be “100% inclusive”, and that someone will always be upset. What started off as an innocuous suggestion for more inclusive features on the site ended in a heated debate, with many users feeling hurt and angry by the seemingly xenophobic arguments being made against the suggested features. Users from marginalized groups began to feel unsafe in the server as users were allowed to freely speak out against suggestions to make the site and community more inclusive with no mod intervention. When Kiko eventually came online, he did little to comfort those marginalized voices when [he wrote that he wasn’t interested in “pandering to other cultures”, and that “Christian holidays are…

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