Pink Poogle Toy Forum

Things like your pets name and species as well as your username, amount of neopets, etc., are easy to get as they have their own variables that are constantly being passed.

When you get a random event regarding an item being stolen, turned to sludge, etc., they are simply picking an item at random from your inventory based on a sliding rarity scale and if statements. Now, if they had to actually parse data and look for a specific item or trophy, etc., to make a random event, it would use way more system resources to complete than the average process thus creating a heavier server load slowing the site down and requiring more servers to keep things steady.

Why spend the money just to get more personalized REs?

Because it improves the quality of the gameplay.

And besides just feeling good and happy about doing a good job, when they improve the quality of the site, people enjoy returning to the site and using it regularly, and then the advertising is more effective, leading advertisers to value it more and thus pay more for an ad spot, bringing in more money...

As far as your other note,
my idea was for it to work the same as the turned-to-sludge thing, that is, as you said, So if the RE came up, it would say something like..

*check for trophies, pick one randomly.
*select random pet
*make PET say "Tell me the story again about the time you got your TROPHY trophy!"
*if no trophies, make PET say "I wish we played games more often, so we could win a trophy!"

or,

*query number of user trophies
*select random pet
*make PET say "do you realize you've won NUMBER trophies? You're amazing!"

and again,

*select random pet
*query user gender; for male say Dad, for female say Mom
*query pet species
*if species Blumaroo, say "PET bounces around the room cheerily and says "you're the best GENDER ever!"; if species Skeith, say "PET growls happily and says you are a great GENDER"; if species Usul, say "PET giggles and says Hey GENDER do you want to play dress up?"

or,

*select random pet
*query user gender
*if male, say "Gosh, Dad, you are really handsome!"
*if female, say "Wow, Mom, you look beautiful today!"

I'm sure you get the idea. I want to use simple queries of pre-existing information already associated with the account. The hard part will be writing the IF statements for queries that have lots of possibilities with different results, such as pet species.

The only difference would be that for birthday/anniversary stuff, you'd have to add a few lines to the database for each user.

I personally only get annoyed by the ones with old, ugly art. Some of these REs were clearly around from the very beginning and look very outdated. It would be a quick thing to update them - heck, TNT doesn't even need to do new art! They could just recycle some caption contest or Neopian Times graphics for it.

I also think the neutral REs should be <i>interesting</i>. If they don't cause any effect, fine, but shouldn't they serve to amuse and entertain me? The "Oh no! You lose all your pets, np, [etc, etc]...oh wait, it's only a dream" for example I thought was funny, but "A dragon flies past" is just boring and not worth the .0923 seconds it took to load.

And "Monecerous will eat your pets!!!" serves only to confuse new members, since not only is he unable to eat your pets, but few people remember him.

I just got a funny Tyrannian RE (yeah, maybe this is the wrong place, but it kind of follows... maybe)...

"A fungus ball is sitting on this page... and it EXPLODES! You get confused and drop 109 neopoints "

I actually laughed out loud... that's a good RE, in my opinion.