Pink Poogle Toy Forum

Yeah, it's been really, REALLY hard to remember not to use my SDB. Pretty much, if it's sellable (or something I want to save), it goes into my shop. I've had to keep on top of pricing my shop so that the items that I want to sell clear out to give me space for the items that I'd normally chuck in my SDB (including 32 Nerkmids - I'm SOOOO careful not to accidentally price those since I'm saving them!). Thankfully my shop can hold 170 items, so as long as I price things every other day or so, I've still got space to handle it. A couple times, I've ditched all the stuff worth only 1-2nps to make space for more valuable things, but it's working so far.

I'm hoping to have time to try and identify my missing 3 items soon, but I keep ending up with things going on that are sucking my time away from me. And when I've had free time, I've usually ended up napping because I'm so exhausted. I think what may end up happening, is, I'm going to go through all my important items (EG, old plot prizes, p/bs, favorite NC Items, etc) and make sure those are all there, and if they are, I'm going to call the missing 3 a wash and just give up on TNT ever being able to find my missing things. Then, if they do, great. If not, at least I will know I'm not missing anything important!


ETA: I have actually started going through my items (comparing my NCMall Album to what I have, and trying very hard to remember trades). I've got a pretty good method worked out here, and some of the items I no longer have bring back...interesting...memories of trades I've made.
However, I have DEFINITELY identified 2 of my missing items already. They were both bonuses for buying at least one sweetheart gram this past February (I bought one of each of two different types), and I can't find them anywhere. I'm quite sure I didn't trade them off, either, as I made only one trade to someone besides Mr. P since then, and I know exactly what it was. So, YAY! Now, to try and find that last missing item...ugh.
My goal is to try and get through the rest of my NC Items today (I"m about 2/3 of the way done already), and then tackle important items. Who knows, maybe Illl update my crazy spreadsheet for regular items while I'm at it...

Hope you found that last lost item, Pickles. If I lost anything, I don't even know it. I don't even know what I had that was valuable... *shrugs*

People have found evidence of a Habitarium site theme as one of the possible "sorry we killed all your P3s" rewards. It's really cute!

I finished going through my SDB (and consequentially closet, storage shed, and gallery), and I never was able to figure out what my last missing item was. I did have one suspect for what it might have been, but, thanks to AIM chat history, I found reference to having traded it Christmas of 2012 (I thought I might have traded it, but for the life of me, I couldn't remember).
At the very least, I've managed to confirm I'm missing no plot or event prizes/advent calendar items/daily dare, etc items, and nothing that I had that was super old, as at least that I was able to compare with my old spreadsheet (which unfortunately hadn't been updated since spring of 2011, uugh). I went through all of JN's guides to make sure I had all the prizes.

Anyways, I updated my ticket with the names of the two confirmed missing items, so hopefully they'll be able to return them to me soon.

On a completely different, yet related, note: I just put 115 items I'd been keeping in my shop into my SDB (between Nerkmids, healing potions, other random stuff, and all the Habitarium and Halloween Goodie Bag things I picked up). Eeesh. At least my shop won't be overcrowded with stuff that shouldn't be in there now...and I don't have to worry about putting a price on something that I don't want to sell!

Now I can actually pull stuff out and do updated customizations for my pets! I'm kinda bummed I didn't finish going through my SDB in time to dress everyone up for Halloween, but autumn customizations are some of my favorites, so maybe I'll get that done sometime this week!


ETA: Still haven't gotten my items replaced, so I probably should update the ticket again to see if there's some reason they're delaying.

However, I wanted to update this with other fixes:

The battledome is now showing prizes at the end of battle again (and not giving the errors it was about moves not going through)!

Also, there is serious speculation that trophy time has gone back to when it was (10:40pm NST) as trophies were not awarded at 4:20pm NST this afternoon. I guess we'll see later tonight.

So, I actually spent some time on the Neoboards this weekend hoping to get a few extra CC votes, and pretty much all the boards were dead. Even the Food Club board in the games chat dates back to August (posts older than a certain amount are deleted, so every evening, the board loses 1-3 pages).

The only boards that span across more than one page in a single day are TP/Auctions, Pound Chat, NC Mall, Help, Guilds (which is weird... don't they have guild message boards?), BD, Avatars, Art (mostly "please vote for me" boards), and Winter Starlight Festival. Which is 9/31 boards. Obviously boards like Petpet Park and Habitarium are now defunct, but that really doesn't bode well for the site.

Pound chat was flying way faster than I ever saw TP/auctions fly (by the time the board loaded, my post would be at the very bottom). I was a little surprised to see customization didn't fill a page within a day, but I think a lot of that chat is split with the NC Mall. I kind of see pound and customization going hand in hand, and I guess it makes sense that the users who are still around are those invested in the things TNT has invested in (i.e., NC Mall customization, which I assume is the main source of income, even bigger than premium).

Avatars are still kind of big, as well, and so is making NP (to fund customizations and avatars, I presume). And Neopians have always enjoyed events; I know it's what keeps a lot of us around, just waiting for the next one. I was a little surprised to see BD chat so active when the new BD has been so buggy so long (and is still ridiculously in beta); I know there's a big 2P BD contest going on right now, so that might be it...

Seeing so many empty boards makes me wonder how few of us are left. I see a lot of frustration in just about every single area with glitches not fixed (galleries, neohomes, petpet park members not receiving refunds for prepaid memberships for a now-defunct site, etc.). I'm not sure who would join the site nowadays. Other games are more interactive, provide better avenues of communication with other users, provide achievable goals, have site features that actually work... It's too overwhelming for many kids, and it doesn't have enough interactivity to appeal to t(w)eens. Sure, there are adult players, but I see so many disillusioned...

I honestly wouldn't be surprised if the whole site were taken down within the next year or two. Unless TNT can figure out a way to modernize the concept. Even the Neoboards themselves reek of Web 1.0.

This is something I've been thinking for quite a while, but it really hit home after seeing the Neoboards. We're two months past the server transition, and I realize that was a massive undertaking that broke a lot of things, but part of the issue is the Gordian knot of coding that is Neopets. I have so many bug reports outstanding for years: Lenny Conundrum, heavy robe of thievery not working, broken gallery coding (due to the filters)... And new bugs are appearing daily (trophies glitched again, Expellibox glitching depending on the link used...). TNT will never be able to fix everything that's already there, much less have time to really give us something awesome and new. They used to remove things even as they added other things, but now they seem scared to do that, and the site is just bloated. The sad thing is, based on the "survey" of the Neoboards I did today, if they did cut back, the emphasis would shift even more to customization, and away from puzzles and games (which are my favorite aspects of the site, beyond the every-other-year plots).

Anyway, I've rambled enough. Any thoughts?

I do know what you mean.

Something that was pointed out in the Adam and Donna AMA was that TNT continuously release new content that has no use case. They're generating things without any real thought to game design. Look, another half dozen themed, garbage battledome weapons for a broken site feature that, despite the promise of a revamp, really is the same thing it was thirteen years ago and was only made then because Pokémon was popular. Look, another couple of books, one of which is a play on A Tale of Two Cities (seriously, they've used that joke at least three times. Look, another few permutations of our limited stock of food ideas, none of which you need because everyone just feeds their neopets with the Neolodge, Giant Omelette, and/or Giant Jelly anyway. Why do they bother working on this stuff? Who cares?

TNT need to really break out of the mould. Key Quest, the Petpet Park, and the Habitarium were genuine attempts to do that, and that's why it's especially sad they've shut them down. They have a big virtual world at their disposal and they need to do some big, dramatic things with it, instead of ticking along at the status quo. Something really adventurous and outlandish - bringing back that terrible blumaroo who should have been put down years ago to issue a bunch of repetitive 'challenges' with palette-swapped, meaningless prizes is not good enough.

Another big part of it is how poorly they know their target audience. It isn't children playing the site, and children aren't getting their credit cards to buy Neocash - they need to stop pretending it is.

At the moment it does feel like Neopets is sliding towards downsizing and disappearing in a few years. It's sad, but to be honest, the only thing that has kept me coming back to Neopets over the years isn't Neopets at all, but the Neodex. I genuinely really enjoy curating the wiki, far more than I enjoy the site itself.

I've been around lately largely because I use Meerca Chase and other flash games as a mindless break between homework, or a mindless thing to do with my hands when I listen to podcasts. I'm sort of half-contemplating writing something for the Neopian Times with the story for my Neopets that I'm working out in my head, except half the backstory will have to be only vaguely hinted at because saying it outright wouldn't be okay for the site rules. I'm sticking around in part because of here and in part because while I don't have the original account anymore, I started on Neopets when I was in... fifth grade, I believe it was? And I'm now in grad school, so I've been lurking around a *while*. And in part because the community here is nice, though I remember back when there were so many people hanging around PPT that it was intimidating ever posting and a plot thread would split multiple times a day.

A blogger I read was posting about video games in general the other day and said that with pretty much all video games, the point is "go over there and get the foozle/kill the monster/kill the monster and get its foozle", and what makes a video game attractive is the story one unlocks by doing so-- you're not going to the yellow dot and getting the foozle, you're helping reunite lost lovers or something like that. Which is why the plots still work, because we're doing something. There's no real *story* attached to anything we do on the site.

And yeah, the filters are insane and must be stopped. Seriously, this is the internet, children will see things that aren't necessarily appropriate, and Neopets' idea of appropriate has never been quite on the same page as anyone else's anyway-- the restrictions would be appropriate for much younger children than are capable of actually playing the site. (I'm studying to be a children's librarian in my grad school; I know *all* about appropriateness.) Even if they were actually targeting children, they're much harsher on language than they actually need to be.

I'm playing NQ2 on insane, and one of the characters actually uses "da**". I just had to change a Neoboards post about probability because I used the "colored balls in a bag" analogy, and I couldn't say "balls." My gallery thanks and wishlist pages are uneditable right now because the filter broke and all my seaweed items now trigger it (which, in a beach-themed gallery, is a lot of filter-triggering!). Why not allow those words and let people report violations? Same with things like "I wish it would snow."

ETA 1/3/2015: The lag and outages have been annoying lately, but I've been up for nearly 2 hours, and I haven't been able to get on the site yet, because it's been down every time I checked (I've not been checking super-frequently, but I would like to do my first Expellibox, Shrine visit, and Blue caption vote for the day... and maybe get a start on Food Club).

ETA: After over 3 hours (at the very least...), the site is finally back up. It seems to have minimal lag for now. Hopefully that will last.

Unfortunately, the lag still seems to be an issue. I really hope they get that fixed soon.

However, I FINALLY got my items back today (at least, the two I knew I was missing), YAY!!! I'm very happy to have them back...especially since I've got some ideas on how to use them in customizations in the next month or so.

ETA:
From TNT's Neoboard...

I like to think that that is an 'official' cover story, and in fact the server went down during some sort of spy chase scene - I don't know if you saw this on reddit a few weeks ago, Sooo… I found out it's entirely possible the North Korean Government deleted my lablog....

edit: not my lablog, that's the title of someone else's post =)

The site had been out of sync quite a bit for most of today - so if you pull NPs out of the bank, it takes a while before they show up...or if you switch pets, it takes a bit before it "sticks". Pleeeeaasse be aware of this in case you're doing a faerie quest!

Also, as a random note...they took out the "Habitarium" link (finally) from the games drop down...as well as Keyquest. There is now a "Pet Games" link, which quite frankly...is odd.

Ugh. I honestly don't know how much longer I can put up with this. The site is getting less playable by the day. Now I'm running late for work because it took 15 minutes for NP to actually come out of the bank (after 30+ minutes of lag trying to even get into the bank). I'm going for a trophy run in FC, and I need to bet today to have any shot at all at gold... Pre-transition, I could look at Food Club, pick my bets, and place my bets in less than 15 minutes (once I even squeezed it into 5 minutes), and it was easy, fun, and rewarding. Now it's just stressful, waiting, wasting time, and frustrating.

Did anyone notice the reused art from the new Ice Crystal weapon?



It's the chest containing the Great Ice Treasure from the old Winter Random Events.

Today's news directly addresses the lag issue:


Ironically, PPT has been really laggy for me tonight.

Yeah, so did last time's downtime. We'll see if this one actually fixes it.

I'd love that "under construction" sign for my gallery, though!

I really hope it works this time. Today is another "hope I can at least get my bank interest" day.

I have always found it interesting that certain areas of the site are laggier than others. It is much more pronounced now than ever, but it has always been there. For example, Faerieland is fast right now, but the garage sale and the bank are just not moving.