Pink Poogle Toy Forum

You know, I find it really odd that someone who hates Neopets oh so much would make an account at a very desively PRO-NEOPETS fan site and get angry that people think his posts are dripping with venom.

Seriously, I think he's trying to get the wrong audience onto the band wagon.

Yes, Neopets has it's share of problems - glitches occur all the time, the database hiccups: but that it to be expected when there are 20 Million users constantly visiting the website and accessing the public database. You seroiusly cannot expect Neopets with such a large bulk of users to individually answers every e-mail they get IMMMEDIATELY after getting it. Think about it this way, how long does it take you to go through an inbox full of over 200 e-mails? If it's all just spam, maybe 3 minutes to sort out what ISN'T spam to just delete it. But Neopets with a support staff of 80 goes through ALL of the e-mails, reads them and does their best to answer them. Yes, sometimes you get a cut and paste response, but sometimes, that really is the best response to some reports.

Google and many search engines will rate certain websites more often on their listings if you pay them or pay for a search engine listing but I seriously DOUBT that such search engines that make their money from advertisers and people who subscribe to have their site listed would want to miss out on that extra revenue. Sometimes, your metacode with the term listings will get you more hits than the search engines just pulling random words from your website's content. This why you will get porn sites by looking up the word "pet"or "law". I betcha if you check out all the pages that are listed for virtual pets you will find at least 5 porn sites as well.

Now, as far as advertising and money is concerned... it really does seem that people are under the wrong impression of how items are priced in stores. A store orders a large bulk of a product from a supplier - say for a DVD. Now, they only pay maybe $3 - 6 dollars per DVD when they buy maybe an order of 100 DVDs from the company's distributor. They then mark-up the retail price to whatever they want in order to make money. Every company has a suggested retail price, but, the store doesn't HAVE to price it that way. The suggested retail price usually gives stores a decent profit.

So when you are in a business and want to make some mad cash, you take the item you paid $5 for and mark it up to $25. Thus turning you a profit of $20 per DVD sold. You then use that profit to pay your employees, rent, electrocity, security fees, and then to go buy more things to sell.

So when you pay $5.99 for a plushie, the Toy Manfucatoring Company is only possibly get $1-2 per plushie profit and then Neopets will get royalities for trademark use at possibly $.10 - .60. So in the end, the more people in the chain to manufactor a product, the less profit you make BUT the sheer bulk of things you sell and make will result in a large profit.

What does this mean? This means that most of the money earned through a sale of a plushie or toy goes to the store that sells it; then to the Company that makes it -which pays for that factory's: materials, labor costs, security, electrocity, rent; and then Neopets gets royalities that goes to pay for it's: servers, employess, rent, domain name registration, electrocity, water (they have to have a bathroom in their office), any new graphics programs, advertising, Company contracts, lawyers, Trademarks and copyrights, phone lines, internet and intranet service, translators, translation programs, computers, graphics tools (pencils, paper, tablets, ink, whatever they might use to create their materials), and whatever expenses that might occur.

There are a lot of costs involved that you might not even realise but in the end it does add up. In order to keep the website alive and growing in order to keep it free and buy more servers to hold more information, or make it faster - this means that Neopets must employ several methods of bringing in revenue in order to cover these costs: advertising space; sponsor games (which will most likely cost more to the company wanting it since it's a little more involved than a banner ad); product placement in game (I'm guessing once the contract ends; Neo retires the item and converts it to a generic name if they want to keep the item in play); offering a Premium pay to play service that is a little better than free service (Beta testing games, special items, things to lure people into paying for it. Why pay for Neo if you can get all the same stuff for free?); as well as toys, t-shirts and other products.

I really don't see what Neopets does as buying all their employees nice expensive cars but covering all the costs entailed in running such a large and successful website.

If Powerpets or its users cannot understand that, then they are foolish. The money to cover the costs to run the site have to come from SOMEWHERE. If not from advertisers and definately not from the employees then where? *GASP* "Oh! Let's have the users pay real money to get virtual items!" They need to get off their "moral" high horse and realise this. Even non-profit organizations have to pay for all of those things, the manpower might be mostlyu volunteeers but you do also have paid employees.

Neopets is more fun than Powerpets! That's all that matters to me, actually.

I'm not going into the debate of what PP decides to put on their own website. It is not our job to interfere with that. Neither Neopets nor Powerpets are our sites and there is no reason why we should get heated up all over it. It's not as if our accounts depended on it. Do note that PP did say that it was all satire and that none of what was written is true.

In all truth, none of this would've come up if the PP member that is also a member of this forum hadn't decided to post a largely anti-Neo sentiment article from PP. This is the type of reaction that will always happen when a large cloud of venom comes onto a largley pro-anything website.

The matter of this is not that it was fictional, but because it does mirror PP's actaul feelings towards Neopets. No matter how false you might say something is: if you are going to say it, then there is some truth to the feelings behind it.

Maybe Neo doesn't have all their ducks in a row, but it would also appear that PP owners have no idea whatsoever on how to run a business. The owners actually seem to be quite immature. For some reason, they act like they are taking a moral high ground by not having advertising, but I think they just can't get any sponsors. How moral can owners be, who publicly "flog" users who make them mad? I've seen many times where they make posts to people they don't like, calling them names, telling them they hope they enjoy their frozen account, etc. I mean, most of the people they try to embarass are, after all, just kids. How is that "child friendly" ?

I think it's far worse to pretend to care, and not, than just treat something like a business & stay out of the player squabbles and such. Both sites are quite fun, and I think that the only thing they really have in common is that they are both virtual pet sites. Any other comparison is like apples to oranges.

MattEdit: Double-posting is against the rules here, please use the edit button. I've combined the two posts for you ^.^




I think that feeling is pretty obvious, too: Jealousy.


*i don't understand. I didn't double post? I replied to another post?*

Lilly christmas, please don't double post. Thanks. I agree iwth you though

MattEdit: Thanks for pointing this out; however 'Backseat moderating' is against the rules also - If you see something wrong either leave a little note at the end of a meaningful post, or PM another mod.

If I have a chance to destroy powerpets I will.....

....they're just so cruel no neopets!

I'm sorry, I didn't mean to aggravate you. I just try to remember we all make mistakes..

But yes, I agree with a lot of your points, but I also agree with LillyChristmas.

As you can see I'm just a really confused person.

You obviously missed the hilarious hacking a quite a while ago.

Still.

I thought the powerpets article was hilarious, and if the owners of virtual pet websites want to be (double X chromosome in humans but applied to dogs) at each other, then good for them, and shame on anyone here for getting pepped up about it. Sure, if they were insulting your face, or the integrity of your spouse, but a virtual website, really.

TNT don't treat users with contempt, but they don't treat us specially. Thats generally quite obvious.

They refuse to listen to advice, and stick with a dogmatic, unfair freezing system that doesn't actually work.

Still. The banner ads don't bother me - I've never clicked on one of their ads so the sponsors have just wasted money. I couldn't care less about a banner, so people hating them really ought to get over it and just move their eyes a minimum of 2 inches down away from them.

And finally, to conclude my very disjointed post that is full of repetition, I thought the article was 'brilliant'. Why must everyone get so offended by it? I was a hardcore neopets player and I fought in this war, but I can't be alone in not getting completely offended by it. I mean.... you people are the reasons there are wars, and why books get burned. Don't be so uptight, even if you don't find it amusing, just say "losers" and go back to restocking endlessly for that extra hitpoint. You haven't got anything to gain from shouting about the whole thing.

o.O I don't think any of us were suggesting that PP should be censored... Just that the article was in really poor taste, and that we obviously support Neo, and people who come here (of all places) to bash it should maybe rethink their motivation for doing so.

Not everyone can do that. There are actually a few people on this board who suffer serious health problems if they have to view flash animations. They can't just scroll down quicky and avoid the ads altogether, either, since TNT put the links to their user and pet lookups immediately underneath the banner. Some of us have downloaded Firefox and blocked the ads entirely, but not everyone can do that. Anyway, it's not always as simple as people just needing to "get over it."



Don't be ridiculous. That analogy is off-base and insulting to all the people who have expressed their opinion calmly and rationally (most of the people posting here).

As for the Powerpets satire issue... I think it was unprofessional (not to mention unfunny). If Powerpets wants to grow into a great virtual pets site, they have to avoid making attacks -- even veiled attacks disguised as humor -- on other sites. It seems they're more annoyed with the people who compare the sites than with Neopets itself, anyway, so I don't understand the reasons behind writing that piece in the first place.

And as for comparing the sites -- you can't. They're both virtual pet sites, and that's as far as it goes. Powerpets is small (300,000 people is not that many), so it's easy for them to talk with members and help everyone who lost stuff in glitches. Neopets is HUGE. Yes, they have glitches and downtime, but as people in this thread have explained, that's pretty unavoidable. Yes, their freezing system is flawed -- but for every person who's unfairly frozen, there are probably a hundred people who are fairly frozen -- for cheating at games, swearing on the neoboards, autobuying, using multiple accounts to bid on the auctions, etc. We've all seen these people. And for every letter TNT gets from an unfairly frozen person who wants their account back, they probably get a hundred letters from guilty people begging for their accounts back. It takes enough time to sort through all the junk to even get to the real letters, let alone solve the problems.

And like someone else said above, Neopets is just more fun. If Powerpets has an inferiority complex because of that, that's fine. But they shouldn't write silly updates like the one that started all this, because... they just end up starting all this. They should let their actions speak instead -- if they're really that great, people will notice.

I think you are all just stating the same thing: Unfair freezing and glitches.

Glitches are plain unavoidable. Why? Because such large software you're going to have some problems after a while, when updating around every day. As for the time it takes, as stated above, the massive size of the programs. It isn't easy running a huge site like this.

Unfair freezing is also in a way unavoidable. In order to keep track of the site without any bots, you would most likely need hundreds to even thousands of monitors. They could make Player Monitors, but that would surely have many problems. With a site as large as this, you're gonna have problems.

It isn't the fact that that PP said the article was untrue makes a difference. It dosen't matter. It's the fact that PP made a un-called for attack at NP that bothers us. And the fact that PP tried to be witty to make it all okay for us that bothers me even more. I really think that it would be okay for NP to make an attack at PP, because, really, that was a very large attack that shouldn't just be passed by at. NP should at least defend themselves on this. PP is just a fairly small/medium site trying to grab attention away from NP.

Just because some average Joe says that PP's a copy of NP dosen't mean PP can make an attack at NP with no reason to it. Nice job PP. At losing lots of members that also play NP, that is.

I seriously doubt they have 300k users AND they catch every scammer.

Take it easy on neopets, they have to manage MILLIONS if users, HUNDREDS of pages, THOUSANDS of scam reports (both fact and fiction)

And its not always overload that makes the site down. Perhaps a really bad glitch, or huge update.

Oh, and they have to live their lives SOMEHOW



Okay, rant off. Powerpets isnt bad entirely, and its hard to come up with original ideas for pet sites, but this is a low blow.

Science, I disagree that NP should make an attack on PP. Do you realise just how much of a public outcry there would be? It'd be a case of Goliath attacking poor little David.

Neopets should just shake their heads and not retort back. There doesn't need to be a site flame war.

2 wrongs do not make a right... but 3 lefts do. ;p

'Going a bit far? If Powerpets has the right to post such rubbish, others have the right to point out that it is rubbish. Since we're being extreme - wishing the public to never criticise and just stay quiet is how totalitiarian regimes gain and stay in power.

Wow, that is sad. I pity those guys, if they have to write that then they must be really pathetic.