I can't buy it now, and I'm not sure if I want to, yet or if it is worth it, or if I'll be playing it a year from now.
I can see their side: If someone had a dream and created something, they would like to be paid for it right? I would. who wouldn't? They have to pay for their employees, services, computers, bandwidth etc... Even the programs they use, such as flash are no cheap programs. Not to metion the merchandice costs, franchises, whatnot.
Also the better the funding, the better equipment they can afford, and the more staff they can hire. Also the more efficantly they can run their business. Neopets is a business afterall
Donations and merchandice are nice ways of making money, but seriously with the number of people on neopets today, they can't run by donations alone. To get what they need, people would have to be willing to donate each month and consistantly. To the TNT, it would be better to offer a service for those "donators" At least that's what they are thinking now, I think.
But as a lowly member I see the negative side. It happens to a number of free sites. What will happen to neopets I don't know. I personally don't think they'll be able to keep their promise that premium members won't get special benifits that will "hurt" the free members. If their premium service fails to encourage enough people to sign in, then they will have to up the ante. They will have to make something to encourage more people to sign up. If that means a paint brush or a neopet, then it will have to be. Or it could be cutting back on the free service.
If enough people are abusing a feature such as the boards, why not disable it for the free service entirly? That way they can scrutanize members before they register and "weed out the scammers, spamers, beggers, flamers etc.
As for me :? I sit on the fence. I rather not pay for service, but I really dislike the ads (ipod one is the worst. it displays two or 3x overlapping and fails to let the rest of the page to load without refreshing)
I think I will play neopets and then slowly let my interest fizzle and give up as soon as I am bored or my account gets frozen.
I am fairly disaapointed with their help support. I send bug reports and whatever responses they send have nothing to do with the bug. On the positive side, I see that some of the bugs I reported they fixed. The clock when they moved the UL used to extend down to the search (on a mac anyways). They fixed that after I sent a screen-shot.
BTW I can't try out for the trial. it says it's restricted to a limited number of members