Pink Poogle Toy Forum

I really don't think that there's enough on neopets to keep older players or especially me that started right in the beginning to make people want to stay if it turns into a very limited free site. Something magical has to happen in the next months, like a new neoquest or something to keep me even coming back. I barely come online for a few minutes to check mail and do some dailies each day.

Really, I can't take one definite side in this whole NC mall issue. The NC mall hardly bugs me, seeing as only one of my pets can be customized and it wouldn't be worth buying any of those items for him. If it's keeping this site free for a lot of my friends who don't want to pay, then I don't mind. (I have premium, I'll admit it. XD More concered about my friends poofing.) But I don't like how this is one step towards making more features payable, and TNT also seemed to state that it was okay to break promises if you made the proimse a while ago. Sure, they have a point that circumstances change and you sometimes end up doing things you never thought you'd have to do, but the way they stated that worried that made me feel as if they're going to be breaking more of those 6-year-old promises in the near future. Ones that may seem worse then a lousy mall that I don't have to be a part of. Better read all the old editorials again so I can predict what's changing next? XD

Oh, and I'd also like to say... at least they gave us decent answers for most of the questions =/ Not exactly satisfying, but, things like "we HAVE to care about money. We know money puts a lot of stress on relationships (both ours with you all, and those closer to you)" are a bit better then flat out not giving an answer, and rambling for as long as possible.

An example of what makes me mad... I'm a games kadoatery board regular, so often people come onto where I chat and ask questions about feeding and kadoatery rules.



I couldn't count how many times people have asked, "Will I get into trouble if I have too many items?", and I can't prove to them what "too many" actually is, seeing as TNT won't do more then confuse us on the subject =/ You can make a pretty good argument for 49, 50, 69, or some other random number. I've seen people say, "What? How was I supposed to know 113 wasn't allowed?!" A lot of kad feeders say 69 is the limit, but people like me say 50... it's pretty annoying when a 'mewbie' walks onto the board, and nobody can give them a quote to exactly what TNT says.

As you can tell, I'm still a bit upset about that one some 60-something editorials later. XD

Its already been said a good bit, but the number one thing that irks me is that they pretty much say that promises aren't permanant. That throws into question every promise they've ever made--including that Neopets will always be free.

Personally, I quit soon after they sold out to Viacom. >.<

Hence the reason for 'plots'
...and their trend of making the plots more frequent....[though shorter]


As for promises about the future, I never believed them to be permanent... there are always factors beyond one's control that could affect the promise....unless said promise has a *really* complicated wording...

Ok, a couple of things:
1 - Business dynamics:
If you have an independent company, it's fine to profit somehow short than a million every year. You can have a good life, run your business and have fun while doing that.
The moment you put shareholders on that mix, you can't do that. You are now demanded to have huge profits. Every year, tons of business and concepts are closed for being "not profitable enough". It's a downside of the present capitalist system: you're small, good; your huge, good; you're medium, you have no where to go. Before Viacom, Neopets was already a medium company. Now it needs to fight the big dog world with big dog profits.

2 - Contend
In the first years, Neopets grew organically. Decisions based in what the runners felt it was "nice to have". Now, they have to worry about demographics, target public, niches, et. all.
Once I was talking with a Movie theatre owner here on my city, complaining about how they showed a movie I wanted to see for less than a week, and how all their rooms are filled with silly kids adventures. His honest answer: "Since you're my friend, I will say: the adult public can go to %#&!@#$; we want to atract kids, because children came with at least another adult, they buy popcorn and soda, and kid's movies tend to be shorter, allowing us to squeeze an extra session."
Probably Viacom is fighting to have a simplier Neopets, with activities that atract their demographic dream, and keep those people around for a year or so, making the most money out of it.

So... things do not look good, they are about to get worse, but... businesswise, I'd do the same thing

Let me start by saying I have no objection to the NC Mall per se. If people want to rent clothes for real money, then hey: whatever floats their boat. If they came out with something I really wanted, I might even do it myself.

That said, I do object to the NC Mall in practice, or at least to the changes I feel have been made to the site on its behalf. If I felt the NC Mall didn't change my gameplay, I wouldn't care, but I feel the NC Mall DID change my gameplay, in a very drastic and unpleasant way. Let me explain.

When the new dress-up system first went into beta, I was a little surprised since it seemed so out-of-the-blue, and it seemed like a lot of work to go through for a fairly minor site feature, but I figured, hey, it could be fun and it looked like it was going to be optional, so who cared?

Then they released it and it was NOT optional, abandoning a lot of wonderful pet art, dashing many users' hopes of getting dream pets, and (in their eyes) destroying many users' pets. Like many other users, I assumed that when they saw how unhappy people were TNT would make the feature optional -- clearly they could do it, the code was even already mostly in place, since it was optional in beta -- or at least make it so you could still "grandfather" newly-painted "grandfatherable" pets.

Then the editorial came out saying, in essence, no, we'll never do that since we want all pets to be cusomizable, you're lucky we let you grandfather anything, if this makes you so unhappy you quit the site, oh well.

This confused me. Why make so many users unhappy when you could make everyone happy by making the system optional? Why do they care whether my pets are customizable or not?

I had expected a flood of new clothes for the system to be released in the first few weeks, but again I was suprised. Few new clothes were released and with two tantalizing exceptions, the ones that were were very high rarity and thus out of the reach of much of the target demographic. This confused me even more. It's no harder to make an item of clothing r40 than r90 and Neopets gains nothing by making the clothes so hard to get. Why release a system that most people can hardly use? For that matter, why not wait a few months to release the system so that instead of releasing it with almost no clothes, they could have released a bunch of stuff along with it?

I found myself wondering what TNT was smoking: it seemed like one of the worst-thought-out new feature launches ever. Not only had they upset a large percent of their user base by releasing it, it was barely even usable because there were hardly any clothes -- and those clothes that there were, were very expensive!

Then NC Mall went into beta and it all made sense.

Why release the clothing feature in the first place? Because it's a way to sell items that don't affect game play, and moreover since it's a brand-new feature you're less likely to get people complaining, "I paid 4 million NP for my X, why should people be able to buy Y for cash" than you would if you sold nontradable petpets, PBs, or other things that don't give an advantage.

Why not make it optional? Why not let people grandfather newly-painted pets? Why care about how many pets are customizable? Well, because the fewer customizable pets there are, the fewer clothing items you can sell. Neopets wants as many pets as possible customizable to maximize NC sales -- even if it upsets users in the process.

Why release the system with few clothes and even fewer inexpensive clothes? Because this way most users who don't have huge amount of NP to blow on clothes will have only one way to play dress-up: to go to the NC mall, where they can be tempted to spend their real-life money.

I'm even willing to bet that the reason the answer to the "why are we seeing our active pets on the Neoboards" question was so unsatisfying is that the real answer is, "If you can show off what your pet is wearing on the Neoboards, that makes clothing a bigger status symbol, and will hopefully increase NC sales." However, they weren't allowed to say that in the Editorial, so they had to make something up. (I think we should consider ourselves lucky it doesn't show the whole pet on the Neoboards, instead of just the head.)

Cynical? Maybe. But to me it's the only thing that makes everything surrounding the release of the customizable system make sense: it makes some of the decisions about it into logical decisions instead of inexplicable ones. And THAT'S what I have against the NC Mall: not the fact that they're selling clothes, but that they messed up my pets and threw away so much beautiful pet art to do it. When I look at some of the wonderful poses they did away with for the sake of playing dress-up I still get depressed: I feel that those old-style pets were the heart of the site and they gutted it for the sake of earning money. I have no problem with Neopets turning a profit: I know perfectly well it's a business and that's their job. I DO have a problem with their gutting the site for sake of increasing their profit.

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Aside one: reading this discussion about TNT vs Viacom has been very interesting for me. I hadn't thought about it before but reading this and re-reading the editorial, I agree: I don't think TNT is too happy about this. (I certainly gather that at least some of the artists were unhappy about the changes to the pet art). I don't know that it makes me feel better about the whole thing, but it does give me a more accurate target for my frustrations.

Aside two: I also would be interested in reading the layerbot explanation for item "rentals." I play Subeta as well as Neopets and Subeta sells lots of permanent, tradable items for real money. I'm willing to believe that there are legal problems associated with that and that Subeta just gets away with it because it's small, but it still sounds odd to me. It leaves me wondering if they laywerbot explaination is just a way to get out of saying, "Well, if they expire after 90 days and you still want them, you'll have to buy them again, so we get more money that way."

I actually think you've just hit the entire marketing scheme right on the head. By doing all they did, they maximized chances for "visual advertising" of their new NeoCash system. Of course, they released it in seemingly unrelated increments (first just customization, then the ability to purchase things for that along with lack of NP-based items at the moment). Yet, when you take each move into consideration, it adds up (at least, I think).

I've been mostly observing this thread, but I find the Viacom vs. TNT bit particularly interesting, and most viable. I can actually envision some of the artists cringing over the baby-proofed new images and such, as they are forced to churn out "new content" of the same bland fashion.

I bet your right. I also noticed that they chose a very poorly worded-question to answer. I bet they got a lot of questions about the expiration and I'm sure there were more intelligently worded arguments floating around on the boards somewhere. But they chose to answer one from a person who doesn't know the difference between a scam and something that's just not worth it. Then they argued semantics and did some "*patpat* there now, you're just a little kid, we have our reasons, but you're too young to understand them" BS instead of addressing the issue. I'm sure they did that just to try to make it look like anyone who objected to the expiration was stupid.

Everything you said makes perfect sense to me, bgryph. I keep fantasizing TNT uprising and overthrowing the evil viacom like in some corny movie about the little guys triumphing over the heartless corporate bad guys. Hehe, but of course that doesn't happen in the real world. XD

Like someone said before, until it starts affecting my own game play, I won't be concerned. And maybe in some small ways it does affect it as in, neopets putting too much time into NC Mall and not enough into plots or new games. I don't know. Honestly, for the most part i've moved on from Neopets. I still keep up to date with what is going on, but I've moved on to new stuff like Maple Story or Gaia Online.

The one thing in the Editorial that made me feel better was the fact that they said they care about the site as much as we do. That was reasssuring. My guess? I think Viacom, or whoever, doesn't care as much about the specific details of how to make more profit, as long as profit happens. I believe that TNT didn't want that profit to come from making neopets an exclusively pay site, so they had to come up with another way to make money. I see the NC Mall as TNT's way of looking for an alternative to making a pay site.

They're obviously not on the verge of bankruptcy, and I don't believe that's what they were implying. However, when the head office says "Justify your salary," there is a TON of pressure. It's the same with my job and with many people's jobs.

As for the tone of voice for the editorial, I think there are few things to consider. Firstly, they want to express their view point without arguing, debating, or insulting their parent company. Secondly, there are a lot of children on the site. They have to make important editorials like this simple enough for both children and adults to understand.

That editorial made me very mad. The Editorial was filled with people complaining about how you have the OPTION to purchase supplementary items for your Neopet. What is so bad about that? Neopets needs to make money too. They should all be thankful TNT doesn't charge them just to play! Look at Runescape, World of Warcraft and other sites that charge you just to play, but Neopets is still free, and NC Mall, Premium and the other stuff is just a way to keep Neopets free.

It's made by Nexon. Ever played MapleStory? Nexon runs that game, too. The Cash Shop there started out exactly like the NC Mall, with them claiming it wouldn't affect gameplay. Guess what? Over time, items were added that slowly impacted gameplay more and more. Now, there are Double EXP and Double Drops cards, that last 1 month. The Double EXP card is $20, and only functions for 4 hours per day.

What happens when they release a special training school, for NC Mall users only? One where you buy a 1-month pass for $20, and you can train your pet there for 1 stat every 2 hours, without requiring codestones or dubloons? Will you still support it then?

i'm not trying to start an argument, but i have to play devil's advocate.

can we really complain about what might happen one day? isn't it just speculation without a complete set of information?

as always responses and good discussion welcome.

Yes, in the same sense that weather forecasts, stock market advice, and gambling odds are speculation without a complete set of information. We can't accurately predict the future, but we can see trends, and consider what may happen. Then, we can complain about what may happen. Because we(or at least I) like complaining.