42 replies to this topic

[Oktober]

How'd Comcast get into this?

 

Of course I meant Jumpstart poor memory is poor

[Turnip]

Absolutely not, are they just pinning shit on people who cheat because they can't accept that TNT are really bad at doing everything? Site glitches have always been around and there have always been people there who exploited them.

But like its really stupid to blame the site's death on a small group of people who hardly affect the site? There are just so many other reasons why the site's like it is now. Like geez, if TNT got their act together sometime within the past EIGHT YEARS maaaybe Neopets wouldn't be so broken. Like that email glitch when creating a new account is still around right? I remember that being around back in like 2011 or whenever the Krawk Island update was, and I was saying it had been around for a while before that. Do they just sit around all day and not test anything out before adding it to the site, assume that everything works then panic after once they find out that something's really broken? Like broken to the point where it can't be brushed off like it's nothing. Who the hell even does that? And they do that for everything. It's pretty obvious that they're more interested in adding NC content over literally anything else, and once you realize they're just trying to suck as much money out of the userbase before it dies and probably won't be adding anything new and exciting to do (fuck yearly rehash events), you start asking yourself "why do I still bother with this boring piece of crap?".

Also like you can't really do anything about people getting bored of a site? On top of the staff usually treating the usebase kind of badly and content being stagnant, the virtual pet fad died years and years ago. There's new stuff to do and Neopets didn't try and keep up at all. Like come on, they took their mobile game down right as the mobile market got big, and they never bothered updating it or anything. Neopets is mostly flash and generally not mobile friendly, and there's no mobile theme available. Most sites have mobile versions now because everyone and their dog has a smartdevice now. But I guess it can't be helped, they can't change anything theme-related even if it's optional, because half the user base would shit themselves over it.

I wonder what the traffic would be like if no one used their shells or ABing and whatnot. Probably really low. Since some people let multiple accounts go all at the same time right? They're probably making up a good amount of traffic. And that helps a site out, not ruin it. If anything it's better that people exploit things than if they didn't. What if the duping glitch was kept a really good secret? Would it have gotten fixed by now? I wouldn't think so. It's kinda like we're playtesters, finding things that TNT thought were fixed and abusing it until they get off their lazy and incompetent asses and fix it.

[Shane]

We are a part of the problem with the marketplace at least. Look at any mmo that has or had bots. Timescale became terrible with bots invaded the game on multiple accounts. The price of everything dropped besides things you had to kill bosses to get. It made it harder for the casual user to actually get ahead because so many people ran bots to level up and to make money irl.

Neopets on the other hand has more than a botting problem. They have a problem with their infrastructure that desperately needs fixing or overhauling.

[Katya]

I may be stupid and don't understand nothing about economy but TNT is the culprit for the drop in the prices.

Cheaters didn't create a handful of dailies that give away TONS of coveted items. 

Really? Mass giving away draik eggs, draik/krawk potions? How can an economy have stability if some of the most desired items are suddenly giving away every day for free?

[Oktober]

I may be stupid and don't understand nothing about economy but TNT is the culprit for the drop in the prices.

Cheaters didn't create a handful of dailies that give away TONS of coveted items. 

Really? Mass giving away draik eggs, draik/krawk potions? How can an economy have stability if some of the most desired items are suddenly giving away every day for free?

 

Yeah, this was a horrible move. Maybe they wanted to make them affordable for anyone but I remember when many years ago having a krawk or a draik was the ultimate shit and you could get a UC for them (it was after the conversion). Now they are just meh.

[Katya]

And how many dailies/events were created after the shore that gives away UB stuff? Every single one of them. And even the old ones changed their prize pool to cover a even wider range of items.

Even this faerie quest event gave a couple of rare plushies.

It's just stupid and a really fast way to ruin such a small economy.

[Butterball]

Cheaters are like bacteria, you can never eradicate them fully, just find ways to control them. It's a common refrain on WoW, too, that the botters are ruining the game or whatever, but in that game at least they're providing a service to players in the form of selling gold, and SOMEBODY is buying that gold. You can't ban all the botters, you can only try to mitigate their negative effects.

 

I won't say that there's no danger to the site, I've seen other people posting about acquisition simply to gain control of an IP followed by a shutdown of a website, so it is still possible that JS could kill the site and transition Neopets the IP into shitty mobile games or what have you-- it depends on whether they're making any money or not from NC and ads or whatever.

 

That said, I'm optimistic that they're laying people off and restructuring things. The fact is that neopets was way behind the times for many years and still is. There are human elements in any organization and it may be that neopets was not well run and might have had a bunch of complacent employees who knew they'd never get fired so they'd just fk around all day and glacially produce new code or content etc. and by clearing out this dead wood they might be able to avoid further stagnation.

 

I'm definitely going to be backing up pictures of my pets, pet lookups, etc. just in case, but I think things are looking up. (Now if they'd just fix the lag...)

[KaibaSama]

Cheating can completely ruin a game. Refer to my duping week post, which describes the demise of the first iteration of Pokemon Tower Defense.

Now I'm reminded of the fact that the Pokemon games have a huge breach where you can just QR a pokemon with the 3ds camera, and it goes into your game. (Unless they've patched it, I haven't heard anything).

[Keil]

Now I'm reminded of the fact that the Pokemon games have a huge breach where you can just QR a pokemon with the 3ds camera, and it goes into your game. (Unless they've patched it, I haven't heard anything).

 

They have patched it IF you updated your software with the latest thingyamabob. If not, you can continue making weird pokemon with older software versions. I just made some Roar of Time Skitties yesterday without a problem the lols.  

Can't you also just use action replay to get whatever you want too?

 

Ain't nobody got money for dat.

[Keil]

You have money to buy a ds and $30-50 Pokemon games, but no money to but a $20 action replay cartridge?

 

That is correct.

 

Plus the PKHeX/Lunar/QR Codes are 100% free and doesn't break within 8 uses. Action Replays are so shoddy and poorly made. 

[DonValentino]

It's @Kelvin's fault

[Keil]

@DonValentino

 

SHUT UP

 

except it's probably true.

[Unmata]

A good Scapegoat is nearly as welcome as a solution to the problem.

 

Unless cheaters are responsible for the sale of neopets to jumpstart lol....than no. it's really not as simple as handing over the keys. Give it a year before we can say whether they can straighten it out or set it on fire. There are growing pains with a company take over, some of which appear in the form of glitches which we can take responsibility for exploiting. But everything else would happen with or without us. The site would have become inactive with or without us. People left neopets because they couldnt load any pages on the site. Period. Not everyone who left neopets knows it's somewhat(?) fixed. No one is buying shit because theres no one around. The fear and finger pointing within a childish community thats panicked and pissed off comes secondary. I think this is being given too much thought. THATS more of a problem than what you think is the problem. 

[Branlaur]

Of course I meant Jumpstart poor memory is poor

Ah okay that makes more sense. I thought comcast didn't have anything to do with neopets

[Grimley]

 

A good Scapegoat is nearly as welcome as a solution to the problem.

 

Unless cheaters are responsible for the sale of neopets to jumpstart lol....than no. it's really not as simple as handing over the keys. Give it a year before we can say whether they can straighten it out or set it on fire. There are growing pains with a company take over, some of which appear in the form of glitches which we can take responsibility for exploiting. But everything else would happen with or without us. The site would have become inactive with or without us. People left neopets because they couldnt load any pages on the site. Period. Not everyone who left neopets knows it's somewhat(?) fixed. No one is buying shit because theres no one around. The fear and finger pointing within a childish community thats panicked and pissed off comes secondary. I think this is being given too much thought. THATS more of a problem than what you think is the problem. 

 

 

Yeah, I agree with this. I really don't think cheating is "the downfall of Neopets" causing people to leave, and it all really is becoming like some sort of witch trial (hey, by myself included, I'm not trying to be an asshole with this response) trying to pinpoint a source of what may be griefing Neopets...while it really just comes down to people being frustrated by a myriad of problems that have snowballed due to lack of attention by TNT for, well, AGES.

[pancakeface]

Personally I think it's largely down to the growth of mobile gaming via the likes of Facebook initially and later the App Store and Google Play which caused a proliferation of free-to-play, social-oriented games which essentially superceded Neopets as a gaming destination. Massive growth in competition + lack of innovation on the part of Neopets results in lower market share and lower activity.

 

 

Yeah, I agree with this. I really don't think cheating is "the downfall of Neopets" causing people to leave, and it all really is becoming like some sort of witch trial (hey, by myself included, I'm not trying to be an asshole with this response) trying to pinpoint a source of what may be griefing Neopets...while it really just comes down to people being frustrated by a myriad of problems that have snowballed due to lack of attention by TNT for, well, AGES.

 

 

Spoiler

Absolutely not, are they just pinning shit on people who cheat because they can't accept that TNT are really bad at doing everything? Site glitches have always been around and there have always been people there who exploited them.

But like its really stupid to blame the site's death on a small group of people who hardly affect the site? There are just so many other reasons why the site's like it is now. Like geez, if TNT got their act together sometime within the past EIGHT YEARS maaaybe Neopets wouldn't be so broken. Like that email glitch when creating a new account is still around right? I remember that being around back in like 2011 or whenever the Krawk Island update was, and I was saying it had been around for a while before that. Do they just sit around all day and not test anything out before adding it to the site, assume that everything works then panic after once they find out that something's really broken? Like broken to the point where it can't be brushed off like it's nothing. Who the hell even does that? And they do that for everything. It's pretty obvious that they're more interested in adding NC content over literally anything else, and once you realize they're just trying to suck as much money out of the userbase before it dies and probably won't be adding anything new and exciting to do (fuck yearly rehash events), you start asking yourself "why do I still bother with this boring piece of crap?".

Also like you can't really do anything about people getting bored of a site? On top of the staff usually treating the usebase kind of badly and content being stagnant, the virtual pet fad died years and years ago. There's new stuff to do and Neopets didn't try and keep up at all. Like come on, they took their mobile game down right as the mobile market got big, and they never bothered updating it or anything. Neopets is mostly flash and generally not mobile friendly, and there's no mobile theme available. Most sites have mobile versions now because everyone and their dog has a smartdevice now. But I guess it can't be helped, they can't change anything theme-related even if it's optional, because half the user base would shit themselves over it.

I wonder what the traffic would be like if no one used their shells or ABing and whatnot. Probably really low. Since some people let multiple accounts go all at the same time right? They're probably making up a good amount of traffic. And that helps a site out, not ruin it. If anything it's better that people exploit things than if they didn't. What if the duping glitch was kept a really good secret? Would it have gotten fixed by now? I wouldn't think so. It's kinda like we're playtesters, finding things that TNT thought were fixed and abusing it until they get off their lazy and incompetent asses and fix it.

 

I love it when these people post. When are their responses ever not relevant.

It's easy to make cheaters the scapegoat but really, but people were leaving in droves way before anything. On a macro level, trends have shifted far and wide. Virtual pets are no longer popular, neither are games that require that much manual clicking. I mean Neoquest, srsly. With the rise of quick entertainment, mobile gaming platforms and increases in augmented reality gaming technology, neopets has not competed in a long time. Not to mention, on the other side of the spectrum there is the increasingly popular ideology that advocate quitting the internet altogether for more books, and outdoor time and people irl, so many people are giving up online games to begin with or at least heavily cutting back. Neopets can be a bit tedious and repetitive when you compare it to the former and when you consider time poor individuals tempted by the latter, Neopets does not have edge. 

Also, there were hella issues non-related to cheating that made the site unbearable for many. Undertones of cyber-bullying in the way some groups (neopets groups, online communities or irl friends) would band together and report people they didn't like without just cause. Overzealous mods which didn't check if these reports were baseless but took the number of reports received as indicators of guilt. Not being able to say "grape" because it has rape in it. The neo economy has almost always been a mess, retired items don't stay retired, valuable items don't stay valuable, even cheap items don't stay cheap. The restocking system is all fine and dandy is people were actually buying things, but they are not. Because the rewards you get from using these things are hardly ever good enough to justify doing quests. So nobody does quests and everybody restocks, oversupply but no demand.

 

Actually attainable avatars that are decently designed and not blatant money sinks haven't seen the light of day for how long now? Battledome has been busted for god knows how long. Battledome inflation rendered most middle class weapons useless and worthless, and when everyone has 9-11 icon weapons, why shell out 10000% more for 12-13 icons. And yet the average neopian couldn't buy a suap for 20 years of hardcore effort. Interesting plots? Nope, in fact they announced they weren't going to do those any more because that's not what paying customers wanted. Their own ads interrupt their flash games. Even more ironic, the bug report system is buggy in itself. The lag can be so bad that I can't even get 10 bets in on food club in half an hour. In light of all that, can you really say the cheaters are what brought neopets to where it is?

[Elindoril]

Cheating can completely ruin a game. Refer to my duping week post, which describes the demise of the first iteration of Pokemon Tower Defense.

Yeah, but that isn't a real game.

[magui28]

When I was younger, I played Habbo Hotel at the same time I was playing Neopets. The difference after all these years is gigantic: Habbo has never been more "alive" that it's right now; on the other side, Neopets seems to be stuck in time. And I mean, there are obviously a lot of cheaters at Habbo: but they will never be able to destroy it's economy. But Neo...

Edited by magui28, 02 April 2015 - 09:26 PM.