Neopet beds

I was extremely bored one night and bad things tend to happen when there was nothing to keep me out of trouble. I found myself down a rabbit hole looking at old or interesting websites. I think I saw the Space Jam site still up like a small internet time capsule. Seeing that had been a bit of a trip down memory lane. Through clicking random links, I found a site claiming to be a monster blind dating site. I only saw it for a second and the entire thing went down before I got a good look at it. After digging for information about it I read that it could only be accessed at midnight. If you clicked on the link at 12:01, you may get a glance of it but then it would go down before you could fill out a dating profile.
I thought it was a cute little gimmick. There was no way it could be real. I mean, a monster dating site sounded like something my kid sister would read. But I kinda did want to see what the site looked like. The second it was up I saw a chunky mouse cursor and blocky sidebars that reminded me of what the internet looked like in the 90’s. I can still remember the dial-up tone and my Neopets username...
The next night I found myself counting down the seconds until midnight. I refreshed the page a second after the clock rolled over. An odd excitement came when I saw the site go live. It reeked of the early internet, and I loved it. The webpage didn’t lag and didn’t have any terrible design choices that made it impossible to read text or find links like real older sites.
I didn’t plan on filling out a dating profile. Just to look around. I had a countdown of 13 minutes and not much else to look at. The home page displayed a few dating profiles of monsters complete with grainy images making it hard to really see their features. All of them were booked up. When I refreshed the page a few of the profiles changed and at least two had some availability. When I clicked on them, they became booked up within a second.
Were other people on this site? Or was it just a script running in the background? Was this just a fun little joke or some sort of code for people to actually hire sex workers but in a discreet way? I thought I would never find out the answer.
Another option was to make your dating profile instead of trying to book a certain monster. It asked very basic questions and thankfully lacked a spot to fill out your credit card information. As a joke I filled out a fake profile and used my burner email address I made just for things like this. My time ran out and the site went down. At least I'd been fun while it lasted. I wanted to get a screenshot of it but when I did, the image was black. I didn’t find that strange, but I felt a little disappointed I didn’t have any proof of the odd website.
That was until my cellphone pinged showing I had a text. I read the message of dread coming to my stomach. This could not be right. It was from an unknown number saying a date was arranged at ten PM next Friday with a Google Street View image of a nearby street corner.
I tried to think of a way this joke site got my phone number. I was under a family plan, so my number wasn’t even under my own name if they somehow got my name from, what? Hacking my computer somehow? Did I click a bad link somewhere? My Anti-Virus was normally so good at protecting me from my own mistakes. Maybe I should stop being cheap and pay for a VPN. Just to be safe I deleted the message and blocked the number. I then did a massive password overhaul and a few virus scans that came up empty.
I kept an eye on my bank and emails to see if anyone tried getting into my accounts to have nothing happen in the next few days. I learned my less than just clicking random links and going on a sketchy site wasn’t worth it.
I also avoided the street corner for the rest of the week. I needed to take a long way home from work but refused to be anywhere near the place. I got worried about how they got my address. Did they really have my address or just a general location and send the text to freak me out? I couldn’t really do anything about it besides keeping my doors locked and an eye out for anything strange. The cops would laugh in my face if I brought this to them.
I fully planned on staying on Friday night. Best not to even be outside in case this wasn’t a prank pulled by someone with a bad sense of humor. But a friend of mine called me over requesting I bring him some soup from a restaurant down the street. Everything was within walking distance and my buddy was sick as hell. He didn’t want to pay the ten-dollar delivery fee, plus the tip when he could just ask me to do it and give me the tip instead. I put aside my fear and did him the favor to get him his damn broccoli and cheddar soup. He'd done a bunch of stuff for me in the past, so I needed to help him out.
On the way back from his place I kept my hands in my pockets and looked around expecting someone to be following me. It was Friday night and almost ten. The sun has long since set and the street empty of other people. I took the long way again, still refusing to go near that street corner. My pulse rose every time I heard a sound on my walk. Only two blocks to go from home and I relaxed a little. I felt silly letting that site get to me so badly.
From behind I heard some papers fluttering in the wind. Nothing strange about that so I didn’t turn around to look. If I did, I would have gotten a head start at running.
“Mr. Stevens...?”
A voice came from behind and I stopped dead in my tracks. The voice sounded paper thin and hard to hear over the other rustling sounds. I realized that papers could not be fluttering in the wind because there wasn’t a breeze. Slowly, I turned only my head, trying to see the source of the voice that called my name.
The street was lined with lamp posts. From between two posts, a shape came out of the darkness and into the same light I stood under. The thing is at least ten feet tall and long. The body was in constant motion and made of different-sized pieces of dark stained paper. I didn’t see any kind of arms or legs on the creature, instead, it appeared to float a few inches off the ground. I darted my eyes upwards to look at the face. A large scroll hung down from the forehead attached to a massive twisted golden horn. The paper covering most of the face had odd golden writing on it. Under the paper, I saw a pair of sunken dark eyes and a mouth that reached to each end of the face. The hair was also made up of those papers flowing outwards. They were covered with the same golden writing. We made eye contact, and a smile came that showed off countless needle-pointed teeth.
Yeah, no.
I booked it. I wasn’t going to deal with whatever this thing was. I ran down the block, my legs burning within seconds. I wished I stayed in shape. The thing following behind, easily keeping pace. The countless papers rustled with each movement and the damn thing started to laugh making my heart nearly stop from fear.
Laughter grew making my head get dizzy. The sound echoed off the empty road and sounded so clear, almost as if someone was clicking glasses together. My vision faded and I found myself running the wrong way. I should have taken a left to get home but I turned it right and towards a park. When I pulled through the brain fog, I didn’t have a chance to correct myself. If I turned around, I would run right into the creature chasing me.
I couldn’t keep up running for much longer. My face dripped with sweat, my face red from effort. I ducked inside some trees a part of the very small park thankful my city even had a park like this. I slammed into a tree, panting and listening for the monster. The laughter stopped and I didn’t hear the paper rustling again. Was I going crazy There is no way that thing was real. I shook my head trying to figure out what I should do. I pulled out my phone to call for help. Even if it wasn’t real, I needed someone to come down here to get me to a hospital to get my brain looked at.
I stood sweating and fear turning my body cold. My phone refused to turn on. I held down all the side buttons forcing the phone to restart. It came back on, but the screen showed a glowing golden symbol and not the photo of my baby sister as my lock screen. This simply could not be happening. I needed to find a person, a real person to help.
I looked up through the dark trees and saw some leaves that looked a bit strange. All at once, golden writing flickered on showing the outline of the monster wrapped around a tree staring in my direction. I let out a scream that in any other situation would be embarrassing. Blinded by fear I ran right into a tree, smashing my nose and causing it to bleed.
I ran again, mind blank. I had no thoughts but to just get the hell out of there. I spilled out from the trees and into the park. The play equipment was off in the distance, but no one was in sight. I also considered trying to hide in the plastic slide, or inside the worn-out hollow plastic dinosaur that had seen better days. My feet became tangled trying to race up the hill and I fell forward.
The papers were on me at once. I rolled on my back, looking up at the creature and directly at the face inches away from my own. The eyes glittered in twisted joy at my fear. I was mistaken about this thing not having any limbs. A set of arms came from under the papers to grab my own. The ice-cold skin made my entire body crawl. I kicked my feet, and more arms shot out. Soon I was pinned down to the hard ground with too many hands to count. The creature let out another ringing laugh that made me nearly pass out. I snapped back, when the thing flicked out a tongue to run it over my face, tasting the blood from my nose.
“I Do not normally kiss on the first date, but you are a precious little thing.” The monster spoke, the whispery voice causing my body to shake.
“D-date...?” I choked out, mind moving slowly.
Was that damn monster dating website real? I didn’t have a chance to really think about it. The face came down over my own, the flesh colder than anything else I’ve ever felt. The sheer cold hurt my skin. Second passed and the pain became bearable, and the icy feeling started to fade. The hands gripped tighter, bruising in some places. When the monster pulled away, I gasped for air, unable to do anything else. I looked up and did not like the look in that creature’s eyes. It looked starving. Mouth wide and twisted in an uneven smile with saliva starting to drip out of the corners of the mouth. The long tongue came out and licked it away, but it was a losing battle to keep its face clean. I started to worry this thing had other ideas for me besides tearing my organs out as a snack.
“You are such a darling creature. I cannot help myself. I do hope you forgive my forward nature.” The monster spoke, and the tone sounded as hungry as it looked.
I struggled again against those hands knowing I wouldn’t get free. To my horror, the papers fanned out and they all came down wrapping around my body and blacking out my vision. I assumed this was another way this monster could eat me and was thankful it was fairly painless.
I jumped awake, finding myself in my bed safe and sound. Well, not entirely sound. My body had hand-shaped bruises everywhere that monster grabbed me. I looked around stunned by the previous events. It was early in the morning, and I wore the same thing I did the night before. I even still had my shoes on. I heard pans moving coming from my small kitchen and smelled of cooking.
Slowly I started to leave the room holding a bowling trophy as a weapon. I really didn’t have anything else and thought the heavy base might do some damage. I didn’t get the jump on the one inside my kitchen. The person turned around from where they stood at the stove and gave such a wide and blinding smile it made my head stop working. They were tall with an androgynous body. They were wearing my clothing that didn’t fit on their frame. I’ve never seen someone with such a beautiful shade of dark skin. Every feature was perfect down to evenly arranged pulled-back long dreadlocks.
“I made you some breakfast. I can’t stay long. You need to buy more food, there isn’t much here. Do you need money? Hang on.”
My mind was still in shock leaving me unable to respond. I watched as the stranger placed some scrambled eggs on a plate and set them down on the counter. I didn’t own a table and just ate my computer desk. When the person stopped in front of me, I became so spellbound by their golden eyes that I didn’t even notice they took my weapon away and placed something in my hand. I shook my head to look down to see a small pile of glittering gold pellets in my hand. No, they had a shape I recognized and wanted to toss the gold when I saw they were human teeth of different sizes.
“I can turn things to gold. I had these just taking up space, so I made them useful. Get yourself something nice and don’t be late for our date next Friday. Although I don’t mind chasing you down. That was the most fun I’ve had in a while.”
I couldn't find my voice. I had a million questions. The first one was why they just had human teeth. With so many questions I found it impossible to pick one to speak. This person didn’t look like the monster from the night before. They didn’t look like a monster at all. When a quick kiss was placed against my cheek, and I felt the cold feeling all over again I knew who this creature was.
“I... What... date this Friday?” I croaked out stunned thoughts jumbled together.
“Oh, you are too much!”
Three more quick kisses were placed on my cheek and if it was anyone else, it would be a cute action. The monster drew away and then quickly headed towards the door, face shining with a smile.
“I normally eat my partners quickly, but I’ll keep you around for a bit. We’ll have a great time together until I can’t hold back.”
Without being able to stop them, the monster left through the front door with a wave. A second after it peeked a head through to add one more thing.
“My name is Guild!”
And then they were gone again leaving me standing in the middle of my kitchen with a handful of golden human teeth and the first breakfast someone had made for me since I was a child.
I put the teeth down first and ate the eggs with some issues. My stomach turned. Somehow, I’d gotten myself into a huge mess. I would need to keep seeing the nightmare of a monster for dates until it decided to eat me. My life is now to be decided by someone else. I quickly sent a text to my sister telling her I loved her in case Guild came right back for brunch. She was confused at the random message, but I figured it was long overdue.
The only upside to this entire nightmare I found myself in was Guild looked cute disguised as a human. And I suppose I didn’t have to worry about money either, but I didn’t want to ask Guild for gold fearing what I may be handed next. My new relationship started with hundreds of red flags I can’t do a damn thing about.
Do me a favor and if you do come across a monster dating website, don’t humor it. I wish I never made that mistake. Just don’t go clicking on random links online. You’ll never really know where it might take you and what kind of horrible outcome it may have on your life.

Edit: Thank you all for your kindness. I think we’ll have to leave it here, I’m so sorry! But it’s time for bed for some of us. I’ll still send some, but probably won’t manage everyone.
Thank you all for your kindness! She’s so pumped, the wee cutiepie. She’s had it rough the last few months, but she’s shining so brightly. Thanks again, really. If anyone would still like to send a message, please do! UN is Viraha :)
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Hi all!
Sorry for posting again so soon. A few days ago I posted here telling about my cousin who loves Neopets, but is VERY worried about the shopkeepers turning grey. (I haven’t been able to tell her about the Magical Blue Grundo Plushie, her wee heart wouldn’t be able to handle it.)
Your response was so sweet & I told her we had a whole army of friends who want to help us help Neopia. (She doesn’t really get it, but is excited nonetheless!)
As you may know from my last post, she loves Hubert & hot dogs. And we’d love to send y’all some, spread some joy & prevent more grey-ness.
Anyone who’s willing to share their name, will get a hot dog. She’s really excited about this. (Honestly you’d be doing me a favour by letting her send you some. I’ve been pretending we sent some to the shopkeepers. I’m stuck in a web of lies.)
If you’d be up for sending a wee message in return, that’d be fantastic too. But no pressure whatsoever!
Neopia Kindness Army, unite!
(We play together on my account, also for safety-measures. No worries!)

So I’m fairly new to Reddit so i apologize if any of this is not allowed or if it’s not in a thread it should be in. I have a dilemma that’s been eating away at me for years. Back when i was 10 or 11 me and my two friends decided to start playing neopets, i didn’t own a computer so my best friend made me a neopets account and we’d all play at her house. I knew my account and my password but not the email. So flash forward i get into middle school and i completely outgrow this website and forget it exists. I never log into it again. Until 4 years ago the pandemic hit and i started thinking about how hard i busted my butt getting rare avatars and cool paintbrushes and i decide now’s a great time to start playing again. I forgot my password but not my username, and i don’t know the email address my friend used to create it. She doesn’t remember nor does her sister. Am i just out of luck and that account is going to wither into the dust forever until the internet or the website shuts down or do you guys have any advice on what i can do. I’m pretty much desperate to get my account back and i know im gonna be 80 years old on my death bed crying that i never got to see the inside of that account again 😂

I didn’t know what to tag the post as but I just wanted to vent again. To TNT, the users I’ve made friends with and gift back and forth with, thank you so much for giving me something to do everyday and look forward to. Everyday I wake up ready to do my dailies, buy cute pointless items etc and it’s just really helped me a lot after receiving a DID diagnoses. Things were feeling pretty hopeless for a while and just the site still being up and running and being able to rejoin the community was a game changer for my mental health status. Just “having a reason” to wake up means the world to me even if it’s just to do my neopets dailies. That’s literally the first thing I do when I open my eyes. Before I’d normally shut my eyes and go back to sleep but now I wake up and don’t do that, instead I grab my ipad and do my dailies and then I make my bed and then I make my tea (I recently gave up coffee)So just that one thing, “neopets dailies” is enough to get me up and feel positive about my day and starting it. I also landed a job recently and that’s been going well for us.
But mainly a huge thank you to TNT for doing what they can with the site, events, fixing things, etc and all the users I’ve made friends with.
The little things you do make a huge huge difference. Truly.
I don’t have many people to talk to so I just really wanted to say something.

during a group call, a friend casually brought up how he's been spending his days. Running, biking. Working on his own projects in the hopes of getting hired. He's been learning to cook, made greek yoghurt. Made me so sad to compare that to how I've been spending my days. Lying down, rolling the "what strange symptom will ruin our day today?" wheel. Playing fucking neopets in bed all day. Ugh. Ruthless. I was so careful for years, didn't matter. sad mad feeling bad.

NOW FINISHED - thanks to all who took part. Hope the 5 winners enjoy their gifts :)
I had my first bad day at work and it’s left me feeling quite rubbish. To try spread some happiness I have set up a few lots on the training post for some giveaways. All free, just offer 7p so I know you are from Reddit. Can offer on as many as you want. Will probably only be open for 30 minutes as I’m going to bed soon x
https://www.neopets.com/island/tradingpost.phtml?type=browse&criteria=owner&search_string=oceanfear

Just a vent I guess, but also a discussion starter for how I think this is going to end Neopets for good. I stupidly signed up for NeoPass, not knowing it was going to cost me my account and my dreamies. Although the email for NeoPass encouraged me to set up 2FA, I didn't, nor did I click on the button to do so. I thought, naively, that I would get around to it later. I thought it would be nice to be able to shift between my main and my second account without having to type in their passwords. Then I got logged out of my NeoPass, tried to log in... and it said login failed. My password is correct. My email is correct. I tried filing a ticket. A week later, I've gotten no reply whatsoever, not even a bot reply.
So... there it goes. After almost a year of daily grinding, after spending hours a day on my account after I had surgery for bleeding duodenal ulcers (which left me unable to walk for a solid month - losing 60% of the blood in your body will do that to you), the pets who got me through nearly dying and emergency surgery are gone. I had made personalities, descriptions and look ups for them. I was writing fanfic for them with the hopes of getting into The Neopian Times. I paid money for more pet slots. I had all but one of my dreamies, I had started making NeoFriends, I'd begun to look forward to my hour with them in the morning as a stress-free way to start the day. Drawing them got me back into art again. And now, because I had one stupid moment, they're gone. I'll never get to interact with them again.
I've been playing Neopets since I was 12. The times I was unjustly frozen or hacked didn't turn me off the site completely. I returned to it last year because I love the world, the lore, the way my imagination goes into overdrive making up stories for pets and turning them into characters. I didn't mind spending money on NC because I wanted to support the site. And after 20 years of being a fan and after shelling out real life money repeatedly, my reward for being a fan is having my access to the site yanked because I made one bad decision once early in the morning.
And the kicker is that I can't even sign up for a new account, because you can only do that through NeoPass, meaning if I signed up now, I'd just lose it all again.
Genuinely, I think this will contribute to the site's decline. If even people who pay money can basically be kicked off the site without a single rule violated and without so much as a copy-and-paste message from a staff member or a bot, then I don't see this as a site that will be able to sustain itself. If you kick out people who are devoted enough to your fictional world to pay real money into it, there's no way that that's a place that stays running. Making this the only way to sign up and not warning people that switching to it runs the risk of your accounts being lost means lots of users are going to end up losing accounts they've spent much, much more money and time on than I did mine. And since sending in help tickets gets zero response, that means there's no way for people to get them back.
Neopets was wonderful to me. When I was in the hospital, bleeding to death internally, isolated and alone over a thousand miles away from my family, I at least had my pets and had games to play from my hospital bed. I had my little cluster of dragons, my Shoyrus and Skeiths and Grarrls. As I waited to see if I would manage to stabilize enough to even have emergency surgery or if I would die first - which makes a night stretch on as if it were a neverending year of darkness - the site was like a friend holding my hand. It made that awful, awful time less of a nightmare.
If I could, I would love to support Neo and see it grow. But while I stabilized, I don't think it did.
EDIT: Within an hour of me posting this, they marked my ticket 'resolved' and told me to use Chrome and a gmail address to ensure an optimal NeoPass experience. I have reopened the ticket because I am already doing both of those things and still cannot access my Neopets account. My falsely 'resolved', reopened ticket number is #127386 and my new ticket number is #130942

i used to play back in 2008 when i was a child, but i couldn’t access my account when i came back in march, so i just created a whole new one.
since then, i’ve been playing religiously every day. that’s when i found out about the new plot and all of the annual events. i was OVERJOYED that there was still an active community. i never got the chance to actually invest myself into the game because i was too young to understand a lot of it, but i was determined to participate in the negg festival this year.
tell me why… it took 3 days for me to realize this.
let me set the scene: i’m happily collecting my neggs and getting the prizes. immediately put the prizes in my sdb. i wake up this morning and SHOOT out of bed. “have i been collecting the neggs or just the prizes?!” maybe it was a bad dream, maybe it was the sheer terror of potentially missing out on NP.
look in my sdb. sure enough, can’t find a single negg. my heart drops down to my ass. start writing a ticket to TNT… think: it’s no use. start googling instead.
and that, my friends, is why you do your research before causing a scene. i know you all probably know that you don’t get the actual neggs themselves, but i wanted to share my story about how i almost gave myself a neopets-induced seizure.

Mall link
150 NC

• Single Negg Dyeing Kit 2024

650 NC

• Duck, Duck, Mallard Negg Dyeing Kit
• Breakfast in Bed Negg Dyeing Kit
• Ribbons and Bowlas Negg Dyeing Kit

1500 NC

• Bundle Negg Dyeing Kit 2024

Per NC Mall Spoilers - The Negg Festival is NOT a blind-buy NC event. You can wait until they reveal all the final bonuses before you decide whether or not to buy all three negg packs. You can still get the bonuses after they've been revealed. To see what you can get in the negg kits, click here.

I am working with links and ID. Am am trying to make it were you click a link, only one ID section appears at once. But I am at my wits end. But after that is done I can combine my coding to make the page I want.
​
This page here has done section of coding, all I need to do is fix a couple of text being in a heading. https://www.neopets.com/~Aullire
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And the section that is not finished is here. https://www.neopets.com/~Mogizz with the IDs and Links.
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If anyone can help that would be great, but I am about to go to bed and won't get back to this post in the morning.

Hi, probably been answered before but I'm coming back to Neopets after ~10+ years away. Started a new account because I can't find my old one anymore and have been working on re-collecting game trophies. Do the tables not distribute just after midnight anymore? When I went to bed around 12:30am NST last night I was at the top of the leaderboard for 6-7 games, but no trophy. Woke up this morning and 2 trophies had showed up but the others had not despite still being on the board. Is it just random when this happens now?
Thank you!!

I can't tell you how excited I am to make one of those hobbydrama posts with an incomprehensible title that makes perfect sense by the end.
In my previous post, I gave a broad overview of some of the stranger parts of the history of Neopets, going back pretty much to the site's founding. Now I'm back again, to document some newer drama that's unfolded over the past year-and-a-bit. But first, some background.
What is Neopets? I went over this quite extensively in my previous post, so please refer to that if you want a detailed rundown. In brief, Neopets is a browser game, founded in late 1999, in which you create virtual pets and explore the fictional world of Neopia through them. The site has changed ownership several times over its history, which I'll discuss later.
Neopets is akin to a sandbox game. There are many different activities which can be explored separately from each other. Most players dabble in a bunch of different things, but many also have one or two aspects of the game that they're especially involved in. New content gets released daily, and for a site with 24 years of history that's a lot of content.
A few notes that will become relevant:
TNT: Short for The Neopets Team, the group who work on the game. Includes programmers, artists, moderators, and so on - even a company lawyer at one point. Someone in the comments of my previous post described the relationship between TNT and the players as parasocial. While this was more true 10-20 years ago, it remains a good descriptor - players have an odd fascination with the various staff members and their roles. At its best, this creates a sort of synergy, with memes and in-jokes forming a bond between players and staff.
Neopoints: Abbreviated NP, the in-game currency. Mainly used for buying and selling items. To provide a sense of scale, a casual player might get 20,000-50,000 NP per day from dailies. In many ways, it's significantly easier to earn NP now than in earlier years of the site.
Items: Many parts of Neopets revolve around obtaining different items, which you can keep in your inventory (which has limited capacity) or store in your safety deposit box (which is effectively infinite and protects you from random events). Items can be bought and sold using NP. Some items can be bought from NPC shops, others are available from other sources. Users can also buy or sell items to each other.
Some item types include books, which you can read to your pet (but each can only be read once); food, wearable items to customize your pet's appearance, paint brushes to change your pet's color and aesthetic, weapons for battling, and stamps and other collectable items. These last two categories will be major points of this post. Stamps can be put into a stamp album, and other users can view your collection. The stamp album is divided into different pages, each following a theme, and each stamp occupies a specific spot on a specific page. Currently there are 43 pages, with 25 stamps each (although not all pages are complete - which is to say, there are spots for which no stamp currently exists).
Items have numerical rarity levels, which will also be a focal point several times in this writeup. I'll put a brief explanation here; skip this quoted block if you don't care about the technical details.

Items with rarity 1-99 are buyable from the main, NPC-run shops. Items appear (restock) in these main shops at semi-random intervals several times an hour. The higher an item's rarity, the less often it appears. Rarity 99 (r99) items barely ever show up, and as such can be very expensive on the secondary market Items with rarity 101-179 are "Special", a broad category that refers to any items not available from the main shops. These items may be obtained from dailies, events or plots, random events, and a variety of other sources. The vast majority of Special items are r101 - since there's no distinction between items in this rarity range, the dev team can afford to be lazy here. There are a few other rarity categories, but they won't become important here.

Most aspects of the game have a wide difficulty curve. In other words, activities are very easy to get into, but become very, very, very hard to excel in beyond a certain point.
Want to read books to your pet? There are about 300 books priced at 1000 NP or less. You'll probably get 2 or 3 books for free just doing your dailies. But if you want to get your pet on the monthly high-score table for the number of (unique) books read? Be prepared to spend several years and hundreds of millions of NP just to get to the very bottom of the top 100.
Want to collect avatars, which are basically secret achievements that double as icons you can use on the on-site messageboards, the Neoboards? You can rack up like 60 in an afternoon with a bit of clicking. Want to, again, get on the monthly high-score table - which comes with its own avatar? Better get to playing those old Flash games really well, because avatar scores are absurdly hard.
Want to collect stamps? Again, you'll probably pick up a few doing your dailies. Want to get all 25 stamps on a single page and earn the associated avatar for that page? That sound you're faintly hearing is the entire playerbase laughing at you while also sobbing.
Now, this all sounds like a good way to keep your players motivated - after all, there are always more goals to strive for! But consider how both the demographics and competitors have evolved over time.
Back in the 2000s and early 2010s, we were all elementary and middle school kids making our first accounts. We had all the time in the world to pour into getting really good at a game. And Neopets' competitors - other browser games - all had more or less the same idea; just think of the kind of dedication people (still) put into Runescape. But the Neopets playerbase now is pretty much the same as it was back then (albeit dwindled a lot). Most people have been playing a looong time, and we're adults with jobs and kids. We no longer have the time, or indeed the energy, to work as hard as we used to on something that's supposed to be fun. The gaming market has evolved, too - mobile games reign supreme on the casual gaming scene, and that simple gameplay and achievable goals are what Neopets now has to compete with if it wants to keep its players - or Fyora willing, get new players.
Players leave, but very few new ones join, so the number of active players keeps declining. Among other problems, this means that anything valuable on a dead account - be it desirable pets or rare items - gets removed from the potential pool of circulation. So that old retired item you have your eye on will just keep getting rarer as the people who might sell it to you stop playing. Add to that the problem of wealthy players artificially driving up prices by buying and hoarding loads of valuable items, and the lack of money sinks that would remove NP from the player economy, and the site has a serious inflation issue.
How bad? Just between 2021 and 2023, the price of many desirable items increased 2-3 times, or more. People who spent years saving for an expensive stamp or powerful weapon found the object of their desire now selling for twice what it was just a few months ago. Once again: achievable goals are fun, impossible goals aren't.
TNT clearly saw this problem. And the way they're choosing to deal with it is at once extremely obvious and absolutely bonkers.
Give the People What They Want
One of the oldest recurring annual events on Neopets is the Advent Calendar, which runs for the entire month of December. Every day, users are treated to a short seasonal animation taking place somewhere in Neopia, along with a small sum of NP and 2-3 items. The prizes are different each day, and as a rule, those prizes are new items made specifically for the Advent Calendar, as opposed to preexisting items. Most prizes are junk that go straight into your safety deposit box, but it's still a popular site event - because who'd argue with free stuff and cute daily animations?
(The next few paragraphs have a number of links; first to Neopets itself, and then to Jellyneo, a major fansite. While most pages on Neopets require an account to view, this doesn't seem to be a problem for the ones I'm linking here.)
In December 2022, the Advent Calendar started as normal, but people quickly realized it was a bit... different. The animations were much simpler than past years. Rather than 10- to 30-second videos from recent previous years, we were instead treated to the likes of animated comic pages and short loops. This wasn't too surprising since 2021 had already started the trend of simpler animations. But some days didn't have animations at all, opting instead for mobile wallpapers or even printable coloring pages. This was well-received overall - the longer animations were starting to look pretty janky, so shorter was better there. It was also well-known that TNT was understaffed and operating on a shoestring budget, and a set of 31 complex animations for an event that doesn't earn the site any money would be a pretty big waste of resources. (Most other events have tie-in activities with real money to get wearable items, but the Advent Calendar has always been completely free.) Plus the wallpapers and coloring pages were cute, and things you could actually use.
But what really caught people's attention were the items. Mixed in with the Advent Calendar-exclusive items were some preexisting ones. Like with the animations, this could have been attributed to TNT phoning it in on the event. Except people quickly realized there was a pattern to the items chosen: most of them were from long-ago site events or other defunct sources. The first day had Baby Holiday Scarf, a wearable item from the 2013 Advent Calendar. Day 2 had Snow Faerie Doll, a toy item that had been discontinued and was selling for around 5 million NP, and then quickly dropped to about 25,000 after being handed out as a prize. There were a few more surprises over the next few days, such as the book Guide to Snow Rolling, which went from 3.5 million NP to around 10,000 within a day.
People who already owned the rereleased items were a bit salty because of the perceived loss of value, but most were quite pleased. Many people collect faerie dolls because they're pretty, and cheap books and wearables have widespread appeal as well. Whereas in past years the Advent Calendar was a nice and pleasant but ultimately inconsequential tradition, now people were actually excited to see what the prizes might be each day.
And ohhh, they were not disappointed.
Consider the scene: It's December 11. You crawl out of bed. Sitting down at your computer with a morning beverage, you navigate to your favorite virtual pet site to see what wintery goodies await you. Pausing just a moment to appreciate the mouse-shrew-thing hiding from the snow, you click the button to collect your prizes.
It takes a moment for you to register what you see. That can't possibly be right, can it?
Convinced there was a mistake, you check your inventory. But sure enough, there it is.
The Sticky Snowflake Stamp
Worth 160 Million Neopoints
Sticky Snowflake Stamp is an r99 item, so while technically obtainable from the main shops, it hardly ever restocks. There are very few of this stamp in circulation, and stamps in general are highly sought after. And TNT just... gave one. To every single user. For free.
The playerbase erupted. Unfortunately the fallout on the Neoboards is long since lost to time, but neopets watched gleefully
(Parentheses are my own additions.)

I am truly living for this chaotic energy from TNT. Let's see who else they fuck with before the year is over.
imagine being the person who bought it for 162 million not 2 weeks ago holy moly
165M (million) to 500k (thousand) in a week. RIP restockers.
Na restockers would still be happy to grab a 500k stamp. Resellers that bought them for 100mil and instantly put them back on the TP (Trading Post) for 150+ are the ones that will be hit the most, and I’m all for it!

A brief note on terminology: Restocking refers to waiting at one of the NPC-run shops, refreshing the page until new items appear (or restock), and then frantically trying to buy the most valuable items before anyone else. Reselling refers to buying items from other players, often in bulk, and then turning around and selling those same items at a large markup. Restocking is regarded favorably (or at least neutrally) by the playerbase, and is generally considered the single best way to earn money in the game, provided you have the time and patience for it. Reselling, meanwhile, is considered by most players to be vile and despicable and a scourge on everything that is good. I'm only slightly exaggerating - resellers are considered to be one of the primary driving forces behind the rampant inflation Neopets has been struggling with.
Which brings us to an important point: the price of a Sticky Snowflake Stamp went from an already-hefty 90 million NP in December 2020, to almost double that just two years later. It was very much a victim of the inflation problem. So if the previous item re-releases weren't enough, this really made the message clear:
TNT was combating inflation by giving away price-inflated items
Suddenly nothing was off the table. If TNT were willing to give out an outrageously expensive stamp for free, there was no telling what else they might release. People speculated that the other two super-expensive stamps in the Snowy Valley album page (where the Sticky Snowflake Stamp goes) would also be released by the Advent Calendar. Ultimately, nothing else that season quite matched the panic and excitement of Sticky Snowflake Stamp, but there were still a few more exciting releases. The Snow Candychan and Christmas Meowclops, festive versions of expensive and popular petpets (pets for your pet) made a number of people happy; as did a brand new petpetpet (a pet for your pet for your... pet, because this game gets just a bit silly), a couple of incredibly good new weapons, and a paint brush to give your pet a holiday flair. In any Advent Calendar until this point, any one of the items in the previous sentence would have been the absolute grand highlight of the event, and possibly one of the highlights of the entire year. But here, they were little more than footnotes, which should drive home just how monumental this was. In 24 years of the game's existence, nothing like this had ever been done.
People were calling this the best Advent Calendar ever, both because of the amazing swag and the delicious tears of resellers, but this turned out to be just the beginning.
The Magic Stick
2023 started on a high but tumultuous note. Players were viewing TNT rather like Florida Man: you were expecting them to do something unpredictable and a bit crazy, but you didn't know what, or if it would be bad or good.
In March, a mini-event called Lost Fragments ran. Intended as a tie-in/promotion for a new Neopets mobile game, it was very simple: navigate between a couple of pages and click on some conspicuously-placed crystals, giving points that you can redeem for prizes. Do that every day for a week, and you rack up the maximum possible points. For an event that simple, the prizes were... good. Really good. There was the popular Faerie Paint Brush to give your pet a pink-and-purple-butterfly aesthetic, and a few strong weapons. The Advent Calendar shook up the stamp collecting scene, and this made it look like TNT was aiming to disrupt other parts of the stagnant economy as well.
In June, news was released that Jumpstart - Neopets' parent company since 2014 - would be shutting down. And Netdragon - Jumpstart's parent company since 2017 - would be dropping the site. Speculation abounded as to what would happen next. Was this the actual-actual end for our weird beloved relic of the mid-2000s?
Then a hero descended, like an angel - or maybe an angel investor. Word got out that Neopets was bought in its entirety by Dominic Law, a former NetDragon employee who oversaw the (gratefully defunct) Neopets Metaverse project, and was also an old fan of the site. The dude being tied to the Metaverse debacle wasn't the best news, but at least this meant the site wouldn't be doomed just yet. Moreover, Neopets would be privately owned for the first time since 2005, so TNT finally had complete creative control!
And they were damn well going to use it.
In October, we got the Faerie Festival, an inconsistently recurring event centered on the (mostly) benevolent, semi-godlike semi-rulers of Neopia, the Faeries. This event was merged with another recurring event known as Charity Corner. Charity Corner had players clearing all the junk items out of their safety deposit boxes and donating them. Earlier versions of the event directly rewarded randomly selected items in exchange for donating, while more recent iterations gave points that could be redeemed in some way or other. This time was a mix of the two. You could donate a certain maximum number of items per day, and each donated item earned you points based on the item's rarity value. You also got a randomly selected item each day for making the maximum donations.
To make things more interesting, there two different faerie characters hosting the event this year, and each had their own prize shop. The two faeries were Illusen and Jhudora, and now I need to go into some lore. You can skip the following quoted block but you'll miss some of the context.

Illusen is an Earth Faerie, a nature spirit in tune with the trees and animals and all that. Jhudora is a Dark Faerie, meaning she occupies a nebulous space somewhere on the scale between "evil" and "misunderstood". Both characters offer daily quests with similar mechanics.
Once a day, you can accept a quest from one of the two faeries. You're asked for an item, and have a time limit of 1000 seconds (16 minutes, 40 seconds) to find it. The "level" of the quest increases each time you successfully complete a quest, but resets to 1 if you fail. There are 50 levels total. Every few levels you're awarded with a prize (prizes are always the same and in the same order), but the rarity of the requested items increases, so they become more and more expensive and difficult to find. By the time you reach level 30 (for Jhudora) or level 36 (for Illusen), in every single quest you're asked for an r99 item. This is where the quests get truly difficult; because the time limit is so short, you're unlikely to find someone who will sell you an expensive item in time, and then you're all the way back to the start; so basically the only way to have any hope of winning is to have a stockpile of super-rare items already on hand.
However, if you manage to persist and get all the way to level 50, you're awarded with an extremely powerful weapon: Illusen's Staff for Illusen's quests, and Wand of the Dark Faerie for Jhudora's. Illusen's quests are marginally easier, due to the highest-rarity items being asked for a bit later, and so Illusen's Staff is the less powerful of the two. However, both are considered to be endgame-level weapons due to their effects.
Canonically, Illusen and Jhudora are rivals, for reasons that have never been explained. If you accept a quest for one, the other will refuse to give you a quest for the next 24 hours.

Let's review: A pair of female characters with an unspecified rivalry. One a hippie-dippie nature lover, the other a goth bad girl. Now they're co-running an event, or rather, each is hosting their own version of the event because they just totally can't get along you guys. The duo's interactions during the event hinted that they used to be close but something went sour between them. And Neopets as a whole in the past few years has gone out of its way to be inclusive, including a boatload of Pride-related wearable items. Do you see where all this is going?
From the fanbase came a collective cry of "They're lesbians, Harold." Granted people had already been crying this for years, and also there aren't many other options for an all-female species, people were nevertheless running with it.
This was immediately overshadowed when the prize shops were released. Each faerie had a separate prize shop, with items that could be redeemed for donation points. Some items were the same between shops, others were unique to one or the other. But the item that caught everyone's eye...
Illusen's prize shop had Illusen's Staff as its most expensive prize. The going price at the time was difficult to pin down, but somewhere around 200-250 Million NP. Not only that, but people quickly calculated that a player who earned the maximum possible points could buy two Staffs, and still have points left over.
Now for a brief note on battling mechanics on Neopets. Again, skip this block if you don't want the technicals.

Battling is turn-based, either against another player or an NPC. You can equip 8 weapons, and each turn you choose 2 of those weapons to use, along with a range of abilities. Weapons deal damage based on icons, of which there are 7 types: air, fire, earth, water, light, dark, physical. Damage is dealt based on your pet's Strength stat - from 0.5 Hit Points/icon for a beginner, up to a maximum of 16 HP/icon. There's no distinction between icon types (an icon of air and an icon of water do the same damage) but there are also defensive weapons that defend against different icon types. 2 player battling gets very strategic, as you need to predict what weapons your opponent will use so you can defend against their attacks while also breaking through their defenses. Some weapons have other special effects such as healing, freezing your opponent for a turn, or reflecting damage; but these effects are less common, and weapons with them can be very valuable.

This time, it was the hardcore battlers who pitched a fit. For years, a certain subset of fans had grumbled about damage inflation, as more powerful weapons steadily became cheaper and more accessible. But this was unlike anything else - Illusen's Staff had spent a good 20 years squarely in the list of the most powerful and desirable weapons in the game. The whole situation had the same energy as "If we raise the minimum wage then burger flippers will earn as much as me!"
But the absurdity didn't end there. Before the event began, TNT released a guide showing the number of donation points could be earned by each rarity of item. As was typical in the past, r90-99 items were worth the most points, and accordingly people began stockpiling these items - since daily donations were limited, people wanted to maximize their points.
But then, with just a few days to go before the start, the rarity guide changed. Now, to the confusion of absolutely everyone, the highest point category was items with rarity 102 and above. As stated earlier, items with rarity 101 or higher are "special" (available from sources other than main shops), but the vast majority of such items are r101. There are relatively few items r102 or above.
Except for omelettes. The Giant Omelette is a daily that gives you a piece of an omelette which can be eaten 3 times. Try to take more than one slice a day, and you get yelled at. This hallowed tradition is one of the more well-known parts of the game, and oddly suitable for political humor on TwitXter. Several different types of omelettes were r102 or above, meaning the stacks of omelettes going bad in your safety deposit box were suddenly your most valuable items.
The absurdity of the whole situation was brilliantly summarized by a quote I unfortunately can't find the original source for:

The price of Illusen's Staff is now 120 omelettes

There wasn't ultimately much fallout here. The event proceeded as planned, and sure enough Illusen's Staffs flooded the market and are now selling for a still-respectable 10 Million NP each. This didn't change much in the battling scene either, because people soon realized that the Staff... isn't actually a very good weapon for most players. Its special effects (icon reflection and a conditional, percentage-based multiheal) make it extremely powerful in competitive battling, but aren't very useful for your standard casual player who just battles against NPCs to farm their daily 15 item drops. And the damage it deals isn't very good by current standards. None of that really mattered though, because the real point can be summarized as "Omg I can't believe I actually have an IStaff, 12-year-old me would freak out!"
As for IlluDora, fans continued to be baited with some "aww they really do care about each other" scenes, and hints at a future plot. We'll have to wait and see where that goes.
The Pea
Here we go. The spark that began this post and my previous one. I hope you're ready.
The site becoming privately-owned was a very big shift, and people recognized it as such, being heralded as "A New Era for Neopets". Among other initiatives was the announcement of a community ambassador program. To quote the above linked article,

This brand ambassador program in particular will help to bridge the gap by enabling key members of the Neopets community to serve as liaisons to TNT, helping make Neopets better for everyone by advocating for the wants and needs of players

Basically, certain players would be appointed to act as voices of the community to TNT and vice versa. People were quick to point out that the full list of duties was very extensvie for what was basically an unpaid internship. Still, better lines of communication between players and staff could be a good thing. Ambassadors were chosen and announced in October (scroll to around the middle of the page). The list of ambassadors included a number of well-known players - notably including several staff of Jellyneo, arguably the foremost Neopets fansite.
Nothing much happened with the ambassador program at first, and things stayed mostly quiet until the Advent Calendar rolled around once again.
Hype was MASSIVE for the Advent Calendar this time around. We had just had a year of TNT gleefully disrupting the Neoeconomy, pissing some people off but making dreams come true for many more. What would they do next?
In true Florida Man fashion, it was something no one expected.
One part of the Advent Calendar I didn't cover earlier was the daily bonus prize. Every day, there's something small to click on - a hidden image in the daily animation, or more recently a character popping up on the side of the screen and briefly waving at you. Click on the image before it goes away, and you get a prize randomly chosen from a pool of preexisting items.
The first day of prizes were rather unexciting - a wearable background, a cookie, and a snowglobe toy. However, reports quickly began popping up about an unexpected item in the item pool of daily bonus prizes: the Seasonal Attack Pea
The Seasonal Attack Pea (SAP) is of three weapons sometimes collectively called the "Pea Family", also including the Super Attack Pea (SuAP) and the regular, unadorned Attack Pea. SAP is the middle child of the family, more powerful than the Attack Pea but not quite as strong as the SuAP.
Or put another way, it's the second-strongest offensive weapon in the game.
Like with Illusen's Staff, TNT was mass releasing the slightly less powerful version of an endgame weapon. But unlike the IStaff which has limited use outside of competitive 2-player battles, SAP has universal appeal as a purely offensive weapon.
Moreover, the Attack Pea family are all released through the Smuggler's Cove. Unlike regular shops, Smuggler's Cove items are released in limited numbers - for most such items, only 100 exist on the entire site, making them extremely exclusive. (There are likely more of the various Attack Peas than this, due to a glitch some years ago that allowed users to duplicate items. But at the same time, many of these are stuck on frozen or inactive accounts.)
The elite battling community worked itself up into a frenzy while most of the other players rejoiced, but that's to be expected by now. What wasn't expected was the insider trading.
The following is a narrative pieced together as best I can understand it. Sometime late on December 1 or early December 2, reports of people getting SAPs abruptly stopped. After a few hours, Jellyneo staff released an announcement that the SAP had been removed from the prize pool, after several individuals in the ambassador program entreated TNT to remove it. However, after some time on December 2 or 3, people again started reporting SAPs, supported with screenshots - it appeared that the Pea was still in the prize pool, but with a significantly reduced droprate. Some time after this, Jellyneo issued a retraction and a lukewarm apology for jumping the gun.
All clear so far? Aside from the ambassadors taking it upon themselves to ruin everyone else's fun, nothing here is too hinky just yet.
However. On December 1, when SAPs were actively being given out, certain individuals were seen buying them up in auctions left and right, for around 80 Million NP each. After Jellyneo issued its announcement that the Pea was removed from the prize pool, the price shot up, and these individuals began selling the SAPs they bought for 2-3x what they paid. When Jellyneo issued its retraction, the price settled down again.
The users in question were both ambassadors AND Jellyneo staff.
Immediately, people began criticizing both Jellyneo and the ambassador program. Jellyneo is a valuable resource for information on the game, and people have relied on it for years. Meanwhile, the ambassador program was meant to give the player community a way to have its collective voice heard by TNT. This was a massive violation of trust on BOTH fronts: a select few players effectively used their privileged positions to artificially manufacture an economic bubble, earning themselves massive amounts of money at the direct expense of other players. (On top of that, billionaires using connections with those in power to make themselves richer is exactly the sort of real-world bullshit we play Neopets to get away from.)
But at least people got to spend a few days talking about "flipping peas" and "white-collar neocrimes", because the absurdity of our beloved game is not lost on us.
To my knowledge, the users involved are still both ambassadors and Jellyneo staff, having avoided any repercussions just like real billionaires. But players' trust in both institutions has been deeply damaged.
As for the rest of the Advent Calendar, this one was arguably even better than 2022. Candychan Stamp was released on Christmas Eve, which along with the previous year's Sticky Snowflake Stamp finally made the Snowy Valley stamp album page a widely obtainable goal. There were some other cool things as well, and ultimately the SAP settled to around 100 Million NP, down from the 1 Billion NP price tag it had previously.
The site is still loaded with issues - technical, administrative, cultural, economic. But for the first time in many years, it seems like TNT is not just trying to improve things, but succeeding. There's a long way to go, but the Neopets Renaissance might yet blossom.
Up next: NCUCs, or how TNT gave people what they've been asking for for 17 years and did it in about the best way possible, but some people still managed to get upset about it. Stay tuned!

Hello Reddit, you probably already know me as Maria/Kat/Peachy.
Previous updates as follows; I'm not going to recap this time: first, second, third, fourth, fifth.
Last night, I received an email from Alice saying that she would pass a note along to Jessie to unfreeze my account, as per my last update, I had been given my main account back by Alice but the new ticket I made for my side account had been received by Jessie, who promptly told me I had been found guilty of cheating and to go kick sand.
I emailed Jessie back and explained briefly what had happened, as well as to Alice, warning her that Jessie wasn't returning my account.
Well, right before going to bed, 11:30 EST, Jessie had emailed me back and given me a temporary password as well as unfroze my account. This morning I got in, changed the password, logged out and got back in with the new PW just to make sure it worked!
With this (HOPEFULLY) final update, all of my accounts have been restored and returned to me in full. I can't think you all enough for sticking with me and encouraging me to continue this process. I'm feisty, but there were plenty of times when I felt the whole world was against me and wanted to throw in the towel.
However, I cannot help but to wonder about those who lack social media. I've already started advertising on Neopets to inform people of what can happen, but to those without social media who've already been frozen, that won't matter.
To those of you lurking who may be going through something like this: I implore you to speak out. Be loud, be unforgiving. Being as such is the ONLY thing that got me to where I am today, and I firmly believe that.
Many of us have asked the question for the next AMA, and hopefully we see something that shows they're making progress toward this issue. Even if they can't overhaul their system right now to freeze folks differently, they should at least afford more resources to those with these claims and look into these cases thoroughly.
My DMs are open to those who may be seeking help or advice or just someone to talk to about such matters.
Also, my project, Project S.O.A. has changed petpages! It is now located at /~DuchesstheThird.
I will continue advertising on Neo to get the word out. As I've before, just because I won doesn't mean that the war is over. I hope that TNT will hear our cries for re-aligning the freezing methods!
Thank you all, for your support, your jokes, your generosity, and your platform.
EDIT: forgot to link my previous posts LOL

https://www.neopets.com/petlookup.phtml?pet=Senicitas
She'll give the Darigan Pteri avatar until tomorrow, Wednesday, January 24, 2024, ~2:40 a.m. NST. The site is still incredibly laggy for a lot of people, so if you need the avatar, I recommend clicking the link right now and hopefully it'll load before you have to go to bed/go to work/take a showeeat/whatever.
If you see this post late and miss her, future Darigan Pteris are tracked at https://www.neopets.com/~Aflow