Which isn’t to say the relationship between the Neopets Team and the players has been an easy one. We were like, okay, that’s not gonna work. We printed this list that was like 200 pages long. “It was one of the best things that happened to me,” Lord said. “Someone Neomailed me when I was just starting out, and they were like, ‘You posted my story in the Neopian Times, thank you so much.’” The user told her that Neopets had brought them through “dark times” in their life. “Everything you do is so important to people,” Lord told me. With that intensely committed user base comes a lot of pressure to get things right. “It’s really cool to see like the art side, the writing side, the dev side,” Lord said. The pages are inaccessible without a Neopets account, and so clicking around onto profiles on the forums feels like accessing a pastel dark web - a beautiful hidden garden, where so many online communities are porous and public. Users turn their fully customizable user profiles and pet pages into hubs for guilds, or portfolios showcasing their art.
Even now, as I was researching the video above, I stumbled across Neopets guilds that were still running weekly events, and creating cookbooks with recipes to make Neopets food in real life. At its peak, there were tens of millions of users on Neopets. Long-timers grew up on the site, making friends, learning CSS to customize their pet pages, and roleplaying their pets on the forums.
But the Neopets community is uniquely resilient and intense. The only way to keep players from going down the rabbit hole of crime may be to make unconverted pets more readily available.įourteen years might seem like a long time to hold onto the idea of old game art. There’s a rare item, people want it, someone’s gonna find a way to exploit the game to get it, and then sell it to these people outside.”īuying pets - and items and Neopoints- is a bannable offense on Neopets, but that hasn’t stopped black market sites from flourishing. “Or if you’re this person who - you’re obviously breaking the rules, but it’s the only way that you can get it. Except if you trade for it, which is gonna be super rare,” Lord said.
And there’s no other way to attain it right now. “Tech has changed, our users have changed, we’ve grown up a little bit.”įor Lord and the rest of the team, the hubbub over black market pets wasn’t surprising. “I think one of the biggest things we’ve really learned is a decision we made in 2002, 2007, even 2015, might not be the same decision we’d make today,” Lord told me. The decision was the right one for the time, Neopets brand manager Stephanie Lord told me, but the team wants to remain flexible. The only people who win, apparently, are the black market sellers who could, in fact, create more UCs through an exploit.īut this latest dust-up has been the last straw for The Neopets Team, who have announced that they will look into bringing back unconverted pets. Meanwhile, in Q&As on Neopets’ fictional newspaper, The Neopian Times, The Neopets Team reps explain in excruciating detail why bringing them back would tax an already small and over-worked team. Whether because of nostalgia, a love for the art, or simply the desire to have something rare, many Neopets users thirst for UCs. Neopets is reckoning with black market pet trading Inside the Neopets ‘black market’
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