Butterball

On one hand I'm upset because Habitarium is how I make NP legitly for BD training, on the other hand I have to cheer because it's a broken piece of shit. Not sure where I'll go from here, maybe start AAA botting again.

Aight, my two accounts were banned at the same time last week after ABing 5-6 days per week for the last few months. The reason was auto-buying (guilty, heh heh). I think they were flagged for freezing independently since I mainly ran one at work and one at home, and there was a small amount of crosstalk between them. They were posing as relatives. My main account and many sides, which received the MPs and clothes that I turned my AB'd NP into, have not been frozen.

I got sloppy; I was getting bored with neopets and was just ABing, not keeping up appearances by playing games, posting on the boards, etc. I had made my accounts look like mains with custom layouts, trophies, etc. and gave both accounts a distinctive typing style.

One account only went to the AAA and mostly only got buyables and low UB's; I think this one may have been frozen since I would just leave it on to check the AAA all day. Seems dumb in retrospect, but I figured that since it was only checking the AAA at the set times it would be okay.

The other account AB'd at one shop that I had good luck with. I would AB for 2-2.5 hours, take a 2 hr break, then AB for another 2-2.5. I had buy times of 1.2-1.7 ms here, so that might have been too fast and set off some flags (although there were certainly faster ABers in the shop taking most of the UBs from me). I would also stop the ABer and log into the account in a browser to keep this shop cleared; maybe the discrepancy between the AB times and my by-hand times was a red flag. This account would rarely get restock banned and if I did I would shut off abrosia as soon as I noticed and usually not AB the next day.

I sent in tickets for each account last week, in-character for each account, but now I'm reading the Get-Unfrozen guide and I DUN IT WRANG. Ah well. I lost about 25 mil NP, and a couple pets plus clothes (<500k value) that hadn't yet been transferred off those ABing accounts. I would have liked to use some of the money I was still sitting on to paint a couple other pets (was waiting for another FFQ, got tons of cookies) and to replenish my main's coffers. I never sent my main money, just a couple (pricey) items now and then; same with my sides. This might have kept these accounts safe.

I'm now debating whether I want to get into the multi-month/year fight to get those accounts unfrozen, if it's even possible; I might just recreate my lost pets and quit once I'm done.

Juicing is the dark secret of athletics-- everyone successful, breaking records, etc. is doing it. It's like cheating on neopets-- everyone successful is doing it, or has done it, or has accepted "gifts" from people who do it (i.e. "my coach gave me something, I don't know what it was but I gained 20 lbs of muscle in a month" etc.). People who don't get left in the dust, and it's only the people who do it to obvious excess who get caught because the baseline is all cheaters.

Heck, even leaving out steroids the Olympics are just a contest of who can invest the most money in their athletes. Like baseball, the olympics have really lost all meaning. In the future, I think they will stop dividing events based on men and women (this is already been proposed, they keep stripping medals from women who do too well and accusing them of being transgendered) and give up on trying to police steroids: there'll be Low T, High T and Superhigh T divisions. Further down the road, just wait until gene therapy becomes a thing. China will be splicing together superhuman chimaeras for maximum performance. At that point all pretense will be abandoned and the olympics will just be a "show off your ubermensch" parade.

I think they should scrap the auction house completely and get rid of the price limits in user stores. Make it so you can buy anything up to 999 million NP in the stores. Keep the trading post but make it just be for item-item trades. If black-market neopoints trading is a concern, then have the system flag weird transactions or whatever. Trying to trade items on the TP is the worst, so many things are unpriced and haggling is annoying. They also need buy orders-- sort of a backwards store, you post neopoints that can be bought with an item, so if you're looking for a certain rare item that isn't listed, someone can find your buy order and immediately find a buyer.

They should stop flooding their own databases with useless items. It drives me crazy when there's four rows of multiple-count, negative profit items in a store and it'll never restock. I think they should use their employment agency system (keeps tabs on the average price of items on the SW) to block certain items from restocking if the market is flooded with them. Keep restocks of the more valuable items at a manageable frequency and volume still, but don't block the restocks with these useless items.

Should be able to toggle between a customizable and a non-customizable (UC/old) version of every pet. (Heck, if neopets was my site, there would be a slider bar that lets you toggle between every version of a pet, including the shitty old ones. Why not.) UC pets are overwhelmingly valuable not just because of their rarity, but because they look good, look DIFFERENT, and aren't stuck in terrible forced poses. Some of the most expensive colors (ignoring the newest ones, like water/eventide/wraith) are maraquan and mutant because for many pets these colors mean a non-standard pose.

Bipedal pets should also have a "relaxed" pose normally, and the outstretched hand-on-the-right ONLY IF THEY'RE ACTUALLY HOLDING SOMETHING. This is doubly annoying when you're talking about a mutant pet who isn't allowed to hold anything anyway.

I'd like to see better thought-out wearables as well-- I've been making, painting, and dressing up pets with my ill-gotten gains and as I've looked through the different outfits it's painfully obvious to me that for some of them, they make up the outfit first, and THEN choose which pet to give it to, against all logic. Why else would there be so many quadrupedal pets with accessories they can't hold? There are also a lot of wearables, especially non-species restricted ones, that are glitchy and don't sit well on the pet.

They also should really be less crazy about multiple accounts, especially for dailies; the amount of money you can win from them is so piddlingly small that you would probably be losing money (as opportunity cost) clicking through them every day on multiple accounts. Or at least I've never won anything good in all my years playing neopets.