Honestly, where do I start?
First of all, there are tons of things on the site that have went outdated for YEARS. Not just a few, but games like Gormball hasn't been updated since it was released like 11 years ago. That's just ridiculous, especially considering how easy it would be to revamp it.
Neopian Lottery hasn't been altered with the rate of inflation, how trophies are given is ridiculous (relies on the amount of the JP and how many numbers you guessed correctly. JP has never gotten high enough in the past year or more for anyone to get Gold)
BattleDome has never been updated (in any major way) In order for them to actually get use out of the BD beyond a war plot, I feel they'll need to do a major overhaul.
Quests, like Snow Faerie, Brain Tree still give crap prizes and amounts of np as they always have. Pretty much making them pointless unless you want a trophy.
The problem is, there is so much outdated material on Neopets that people never bother with anymore. Practically making most of the site a waste and unvisited. I can't tell you the last time I clicked through links on world maps unless it involved some event. (Like this Negg Festival)
Then, you have to look at the fact that Neopets has promised countless things to it's users over the years and has never delivered on them. They never address them and if they do ever tell people what happened to the idea or what they're doing, it's either another empty promise, scrap the idea or they say nothing at all.
I'm still waiting to see the promise they made about making things up to users about the whole conversion thing. They promised they were going to do something to make up for it (or something to that effect) Heck, since Neopets released the Coming Soon page (
http://www.neopets.c...omingsoon.phtml) it has never been updated or changed and the only thing on that page that they've delivered on was "Plenty of things to wear", which isn't much of a promise considering that page launched around the same time that the customization was released, so it's a given that more things would be made for pets to wear.
Then, and this is what I consider to be Neopets' biggest downfall, is their outrageously HORRIBLE customer service. I don't honestly even know where to begin, although I have to say they have at least improved upon their CS a tad.
I used to be a volunteer monitor back in 1999/2000, so I saw a lot of favoritism (and I received some of it, even after they dropped all of their volunteer monitors) for users that were friends with staff. YEARS before transferring Neopets was even a thought of an idea, staff members would do that service for their friends.
When there was a glitch resetting people's shop size's back to 0, everyone else that had no connection to staff had to rebuild their shops and pay the price to do so. Not people like HRobi, they had their shop sizes restored by the staff. Cost them nothing.
Then there's the whole mari_jhane scandal that basically bit Neopets in the ass something major and blew the whole favoritism out of the water. (For those that don't know, long story short, mari_jhane was a big time player wayyy back in the day. She scammed something fierce (using direct buy links and anything she could) and she was close friends with Adam and Donna and they overlooked her scamming people and getting rich of screwing people for years until MJ decided to post conversations on the, then, most popular neo fan site and give out some staff secrets and ALL of the staff's AIM names; because back then all staff were required to have AIM to communicate during work)
Granted, since Viacom took over, I believe a lot of that stuff has stopped but they haven't really given their players any sort of real customer service and that's half the reason people either quit or turn to cheating.
I have been one of Neopets most devoted (sad really) players since 1999, spent THOUSANDS of dollars on merchandise (Pre-Target/KQ Plushies and Pre-NC), ran, owned or worked for almost every popular fan site over the years, joined Premium as beta months before it was released to the public or advertised. I am addicted to say the least and when I lost my most popular account, I was PISSED. I posted on on Charter and Greg (flighttime) was the one who froze me, he admitted to it and said "You deserved it. Go whine somewhere else". I later had a staff friend of mine (Wendy) talk to him to see if she could do anything and she told me he said "I froze that faggot because I felt like it" which is what led Wendy to leave the company early and finish her degree. (She had planned on leaving to do school for awhile but left early because of the huge uproar over him calling me a faggot) Needless to say, Greg has since been fired and his account frozen.
Neopets has a lot to do to get their act together. I think it still has a lot of potential to be relevant, but the question is do they realize this and can they move in that direction instead of catering their entire site to kids who will grow up and move on to something else.