The Neopets Primer: Getting Stared On That First Million!
Sep 20 '04 (Updated May 27 '06)
The Bottom Line The first million isn't as hard as you think ...
When I first started playing Neopets I was at a complete loss. My boys had shown me the basics of the site and I figured it was a great way to kill some time and have some fun with them. When I started to get more and more into the site I wanted to learn all that I could about it to I started to look online at the guides and sites that are dedicated to Neopets. Sadly, most of them are all glitz and no text; they do a great job giving you the basics of Neopets and having a lot of the graphics but almost none of them really went into detail about how the site works, how to accomplish tasks at the sites, quests and how to be a success at selling. Looking back on these things they seem so basic now – but when I was starting I was so overwhelmed by these that I really didn’t branch out and explore because no matter what I did, it was a complete disaster. My biggest snafus so far have been selling a Shoyru Transmogrification Potion for about 75,000 NP. I received it in a random event and had NO CLUE what it was worth. This was in the midst of a faerie quest too – and Shelly / lambchops [epinions music CL] told me to just not do the quest … I must have sounded like a complete moron in the Neomail I sent her. To make matters worse, I sent her an apple juice – a 150 NP item [and that is a generous price]. Look at her shop – the size of it and what she has stocked – and you tell me what impact apple juice is going to have on you. Ahhh .. live and learn.
1. Setting Up An Account
2. Setting Up & Stocking A Shop
3. The Shop Wizard
4. The Bank
5. Keeping Your Pet Happy
6. Feeding Your Pet
7. Random Events
8. Auctions
9. The Trading Post
10. Avatar Hunting
11. Message Boards
12. The News
13. Scams
The Basic Rules of The Site
Neopets can be a wonderful place to explore for kids as well as adult, but just like every other cyber site, there are always people out there looking to ruin it or exploit those who are new. You should read the Terms of Service before you join the site so you will know what you can and can’t do – ignorance of the rules doesn’t really mean much when TNT [The Neopets Team] freezes your account for breaking the rules. No profanity or foul language is allowed at the site and this includes spelling it incorrectly or using asterisks to fill in letters – this is something that happens mainly on the message boards but can happen via Neomail as well. There are content filters in place to catch a majority of it but it does happen. Topics of religion, politics and personal life aren’t allowed on the message boards and your account can get frozen if it is report to TNT by another user or one of the board monitors comes across it. Spam is another issue that Neopets takes seriously – spam people with initiations to guilds, harass them or mail bomb and you can have your Neomail privileges taken away from you.
Reporting someone for harassment is a serious thing and if you do this to get revenge for something it will backfire on you and you will get a warming from TNT or your account frozen for making false reports. From time to time you will see people saying “my account was frozen and I don’t know why” – that is a crock and they know it. Some of the reasons one can be frozen for include having multiple accounts, harassment, scamming, advertising scam sites or stealing accounts. That’s just a few so make sure you read the rules and follow them to ensure your account and items are safe. Once frozen you stand little chance of getting your account back – that is unless you plead your case to TNT and have proof that you did nothing wrong.
As far as the number of accounts – this is something that Neopets really needed to define when they started freezing people for it. You can have up to five accounts but you can only use one of them to earn NP, have a shop or do the daily freebies. The others can be used for posting on message boards, galleries or storage of items. There was a huge ‘bust’ a few weeks ago where hundreds of people were frozen for having multiple accounts; the details of it were never really disclosed but it was mentioned that Neopets stared watching certain accounts that hit the Tombola one after the other. This is something that can really give other players an unfair advantage over others – having multiple accounts and shops – but it is something that is wide spread. You will even see people bragging about it on the various message boards … the don’t brag for too long though because they get reported by other users or it’s picked up upon by one of the board monitors.
1. Setting Up An Account
If you are interested in the site you can sign up for free! There are several different age grouping to pick from so if you are within a specific age range or want to restrict access to some sections of the site [guilds, message boards etc] you can do so when signing up. They ask for a minimal amount of information to sign up and you get a confirmation email asking you to click on the link to activate your account. The email does take a little while to arrive and you are reminded to check your email at the top of each page to enter the code or click on the link in the email. You will have restricted access to some parts of the site during the first 24 hours; this is to eliminate people signing up to do the “daily freebies” such as the Tombola, Coltzan's Shrine and purchase scratchcards.
After you have activated your account you might want to spend some time looking at the various pets that you can have – I was a “one pet person” for a long time but recently added a very adorable Blumaroo to my little NeoFamily. She’s still pretty young and inexperience but her big sister, Poison Girl, is showing her the ropes. Think long and hard about what you want to name your pet once you have selected one because you can’t change it. Once you have selected and named your pet, you have to roll for your stats – this determines how your pet starts out at the site. You are given a few chances to try and improve the roll but in all honesty, the numbers you get are low so just go with whatever you get. There are numerous ways to improve your pets standings – some are free, others cost you NP but all are worth while to make your pat happy, educate them and if you choose, get them ready to battle.
2. Setting Up & Stocking A Shop
Life in Neopia isn’t cheap so you will want to set up a shop to finance yourself with NP, neopoints, the official currency of the site. Opening a shop will cost you 200 NP, a small price to pay to have five items of your choice up for grabs. You also get a starter pack, also called a newbie pack, when you join. This includes a chocolate bar, basic weapon, book and plushie. You can sell these or hold on to them to entertain and feed your pet. When you sign up for an account you are given a few NP and you also get points for creating a pet – these will be on display on the left side of your screen under your username and active pets name. When you set up a shop you are given five sales slots – simply put – you can sell up to five items. You can purchase things from the numerous shops or try to find bargains on the Shop Wizard and I have comes across more than a few bargains refreshing the pages of listings but be careful, too many searches at one time and you’ll get a ‘time out’ from The Wizard.
You’ll want to stock your shop with items that Neopians are always looking for – quest items, things used for the Faerieland Employment Agency, battle weapons and books are always great sellers. Pricing them is something that will make or break you at the site; price them too low and you won’t make a profit, price them too high and you won’t sell anything. My prices are usually dead on with the lowest price on The Shop Wizard but there are some items that I purposely over price because I don’t want to sell them right away. The highest price you can list something at it 250,000 NP but only items under 100,000 NP can be purchased from shops. Items over this amount are usually used when people set up a gallery to show off things they have collected.
Once a month the main shops have “Half Off Day”, all items are sold at half off the regular price. In this house it is a party that starts the night before the sale, usually around 9 pm. Some of my friends who are hard core players come over with their lap top computers; we order pizza and Chinese food and the brood stay up until the wee hours of the morning snagging bargains. It’s only once a month so I let them stay up as late as they want or until they pass out from exhaustion. Since we are on the west coast and on the same time as Neopets, the sale starts at midnight for us so you will want to check the NST [Neopia Standard Time] to see when the sale starts in your area. For us the hours of midnight to five am are the best for getting items but they do go quick. Items in the Hidden Tower are not part of the sale so don’t even waste your time going there unless you have made a killing and are looking to buy unbuyable items.
The “Half Off Sale” is a great way to stock up on items to sell in your shop, stock up on medicines or to get a ton of books to read to your pet but don’t overlook The Shop Wizard. In between the restocks make sure you check The Wiz for items that people are selling below the norm – you might end up paying a little more than you would in a shop during the sale but if you have a dial up connection or can’t seen to hit the restocks, you can still get items well below the selling cost. If you play your cards right you can end up getting a lot of higher priced items like ice cream cones and medicines for a dirt cheap price then reselling them to make some quick NP. At the same time, there are items in the shops that just don’t sell at any other time than when the sale is on – they are overpriced items that sell for a lot less on The Shop Wizard so it makes no sense to pay more for them in a shop than it does to buy them from other users. That might sound confusing but after a few days of buying and selling you will get the drift of it.
3. The Shop Wizard
www.neopets.com/market.phtml?type=wizard
This is the best way to determine how to price things in your shop. It is a search engine that you can use to price items, find a bargain or see what things are worth before you put something up for trade or auction. Simply type or cut and paste the name of the item into the box and you are set to go. To refine the search you can selected it to search for a specific item or anything with that word in it. Let’s say you want to start collecting things that are related to Neopia’s resident bad boy Dr. Frank Sloth; you can type the word ‘sloth’ into the search engine to see what all is available or a specific item like Sloth’s Scary Stories. You’ll be shown the user who is selling it, their price, how many they have to sell and hyperlink to their shop. If you do too many searches in a set period of time you will be told to “come back later” – this can be as little as ten minutes or as much as forth minutes. Trust me, you don’t realize how much you depend on The Shop Wizard until you are timed out from using it.
The Wizard is pretty picky when it comes to spelling so make sure you type in the name correctly to get good results. Newer items might not show up on The Wiz right away but there are times when Neopets screws up. Take the “Grundo Incident” as an example – when they released the new Grundo concert items they neglected to enter it in the Shop Wizard the same way it appeared at the site. This led to a lot of people selling the guitars and t-shirts for obscene amounts of money – people would list a guitar at 75,000 NP and someone would see it in their shop and check the price on the Wizard only to get the message that there was no item to match that – simply put – it was an item that no one else was selling. That was a huge ordeal at the site and led to a lot of people trying to scam others – and it was funny to see people posting “Grundo Guitar, only one in Neopia” on the message boards – then cutting and pasting the listing to make them look like a complete moron. You had to enter the first few letters from the name of the item to get the list, even then, when you would cut and paste the information to the message board – the people trying to scam insisted that you were lying. Once they were told how to search for the items – they left the board and were stuck with 50 guitars they purchased from other people and were trying to sell for huge amounts of NP. Serves them right …
4. The Bank
www.neopets.com/bank.phtml
The National Neopian Bank is a place where you can save up your NP and keep it safe from the meanies of the site. It’s also a place where your money can work for you by earning you interest in a daily basis. From this section of the site you can make a deposit, make a withdrawal or collect your interest – this is something that has to be done everyday, it isn’t automatic [another way they get people to come to the site each and every day]. It’s really important to remember to collect your interested before you do anything at the bank like putting in or taking out funds – if you do either of these then you can’t collect your interest. There are members levels that you can reach depending on how much you have saved up in your account, access this at the bottom of the page …
Junior Saver – Zero NP
Neopian Student – 1,000 NP
Bronze Saver – 2,500 NP
Silver Saver – 5,000 NP
Super Gold Plus – 10,000 NP
Platinum Extra – 25,000 NP
Double Platinum – 50,000 NP
Triple Platinum – 75,000 NP
Diamond Deposit – 100,000 NP
Diamond Deposit Plus – 500,000 NP
Millionaire Mega Platinum – 1,000,000
Neopian Mega Riches – 2,000,000 NP
Ultimate Riches – 5,000,000 NP
To give you an idea of what kind of interest you can make here is a peek at my own account:
Account Type : Neopian Mega-Riches
Current Balance : 2,490,210 NP
Neopian Mega-Riches Interest Rate : 10.5% per year.
Yearly Interest : 163,472 NP
That’s not bad for having my money sit someplace safe! Remember to check your shop till from time to time and empty your excess NP into your bank account so you can make some nice interest off of it. There is no cost associated with opening or maintaining an account so there’s no reason to carry it all around with you or leave it in your shop till.
5. Keeping Your Pet Happy
Your pets happiness can be found on their pet look up page and while it might not matter to some people, I take a lot of pride in keeping my pets happy. There are a lot of different ways to see that they are ‘delighted’ or ‘overjoyed’ – play with them by buying some toys, groom them and read them books are just a few of the ways to keep them perky and smiling. Of course, there are a ton of ways to keep them happy – here are some of my favorites. When I am doing some hard core shopping and come across some unexpected bargains like cheap toys or make up I always make sure that I play with my pets with the items before I sell them or add them to my SDB. This way if I don’t have to time to sit there and exclusively play with them, they don’t feel neglected. Reading to them will increase their intelligence level and if you read them enough books, you might just qualify for an award at the site. This takes a lot of time and patience – and NP – so make sure this is something that you really want to accomplish because the leaders in the sections are well over 1,000 books. I’m a third of the way there with over 300 books read to Poison Girl but it’s getting to be pretty expensive to find books that she hasn’t read. There are inexpensive items that you can pick up to make your pet happy – everything from brushes and make up to toys and occasional piece of chocolate. From time to time you will come across random events that will give you items that your pet would enjoy – things like crackers [a toy that your pet opens to find more toys], food items and even increases in your pets level. These are few and far between but they do happen.
6. Feeding Your Pet
Making sure your pet isn’t hungry is something that you will want to pay attention to, especially if you plan to take him or her into battle. You can feed them what ever you like but remember to occasionally give them some of the various vitamins and supplements to make sure they are getting all the things necessary to keep them healthy. Poison Girl really likes the Turkey Packed Lunches and I am pretty happy about that because I bought a ton of them when they were selling for about 200 NP [current price is 800 – 900 NP]. The nice thing about feeding your pet a packed lunch is this; you get a few items back from it when he or she is done eating it. With the Turkey Packed Lunch you get a carton of orange juice, half eaten turkey sandwich and a berry. All of these items can be saved up and used to feed your pet again or sold in your shop. If you are into really treating your pet you can start them out in the Gourmet Club; this is a cool feature to the site that tracks the number of rare food items you have fed your pet. Thing long and hard about this because it isn’t a cheap venture, most items are thousands of NP and some are listed as ‘unbuyable’ meaning that they are priced over 100,000 on the Shop Wizard.
There are several food shops to explore, some sell the basic common needs of your pet and others are a little more specific. Each section of the site has their own food shop that sells theme related items; the Space Station is a great example of this. You can get everything from Green Tea to Caramelized Galactic Beans here but getting to this or any of the food shops as soon as they restock will give you the best opportunity to get the rare items as well as those that can be resold for a huge profit. There are some foods that your pet will refuse to eat, you won’t know this until you try to feed it an item and it says “Yuck, I’m not eating that!” in the pop up window. If you are strapped for NP and have less than 2,000 in your account you can visit the Soup Faerie to get some free food. Another option is to scout The Money Tree or the Meridell Rubbish Heap for free food. Both of these places rely on donations from other Neopians so you might find a lot of half eaten berries and omelets up for grabs.
7. Random Events
From time to time something magical happens – you get a message box at the top of the screen that says those immortal words “Something Has Happened!”. What happened? Congratulations! You just had a random event! Most of the time these are good things – you could find food, a codestone, have your pets level raised or even be given a paintbrush. If you are busy refreshing a page or playing a game like Pyramids, there is a good chance that you won’t even see the random event message and the only way to tell if you had one and missed it is to look in your inventory – if you see something there that you didn’t buy or weren’t given by another user, chances are it was a random event. There is no way to prompt a random event to happen, no way to game the system into getting one and no way of telling what you will get from it. Some people say that donating to The Money Tree and Wishing Well increases your “good karma” at the site – some of them even go so far as to get into fights about this – and I hate to say it, but it’s not true. If it were people would be donating things left and right to both places and getting wonderful things in return. I donate about 50 – 60 items a day to The Money Tree – not to get something in return but to get rid of junk items, clean out my SDB and help out the poorer folks at the site.
Of course, not all random events are good. You have the Pant Devil that can swing by and steal stuff that you have in your inventory. The Boo Brothers that will take some of your NP when you aren’t looking. Then there’s the Tax Beast – he’s hit me a few times to the tune of 10% of the funds I was carrying on me. Ghosts can shake you down for a small amount of NP, the most they ever took from me were a few hundred. These types of random events are ever changing and new ones are being added so be on the look out for these meanies – and remember to toss your funds into your bank account on a regular basis.
8. Auctions
www.neopets.com/auctions.phtml
This is a great place to check out but it does take a while to get used to the fast pace of bidding on an auction and winning. You can place any item in your inventory into an auction; you select a starting bid as well as the increase increment you wish to have it increase at. This is where some scammer lurk so be sure to read the complete entry before you place a bid. A good example of this would be a Main Codestone; these can usually be found on The Shop Wizard for about 5,000 NP. Scammers will put them in auction at about 3,000 NP – a price that any codestone collector couldn’t pass up. Since the person bidding things they found a real bargain they will bid on it without looking at what the bid increase is – some scammers will have the increase be 5,000 – 10,000 per bid and once you place your bid it can’t be retracted. What you thought was a bargain will cost you two to three times as much when the auction is closed – funds that you use to bid on an item are removed from your account as soon as you place the bid and if you are not the winner, you will get the points back shortly after it closes. If you place something up for auction and it doesn’t sell it is returned to your inventory. The auction house is a busy place with thousands of items and hundreds of thousands of bids taking place so from time to time it will stop taking new entries to allow the system to catch up.
9. The Trading Post
www.neopets.com/island/tradingpost.phtml
If you are looking to get rid of items that just don’t seem to sell in your shop, The Trading Post is one place you can turn to. Located on Mystery Island, you can sell up to ten items at once and add your own personal information at the bottom of the listing. You can add information about it [as long as it is not misleading or false], your asking price or what you would like in exchange for it. When someone makes a bid on it you receive a notification of it at the top of your page, from there you can elect to accept or reject the bid. This is one of the many ways people try to scam others at the site – some will use the ‘rarity index’ to sell worthless berries for thousands of NP or misrepresent an item and claim that it will do something when in fact it does nothing. On each and every lot listing there is a link that can be used to report a user for such an offense. This is one of the main reasons why once you place an item into The Trading Post that it can’t be cancelled for fifteen minutes. When you report someone the lot number is added to the report as well as what ever the person typed – this in itself gives Neopets the solid proof they need to ice or freeze someone’s account for cheating, scamming or posting chain letters [more about that later].
10. Avatar Hunting
To change your avatar or see the ones you have collected, visit this section of Neopets: www.neopets.com/neoboards/preferences.phtml
Avatars are small icons that are displayed on your posts to the various message boards at Neopets. Some people could care less about how many they have and others are hard core collectors. Until about a month or so ago I wasn’t all that concerned with them and would snag one here or there if they were easy enough to obtain. The number you have is displayed on your user lookup however which ones you have are not disclosed. When I was bit by the avatar bug I started to go after the harder and more expensive ones; my biggest to date was dropping two million NP in The Hidden Tower to purchase a Faerie Queen Doll. This garnished me two avatars – one for making a purchase from the tower and one when my pet played with the doll. There are pros and cons to purchasing the most expensive avatar items – you can lend them out for people to use [asking for tips to try to recoup some of your spent NP] but that ultimately leads to someone trying to rip you off or people begging to borrow it without proper collateral.
Some avatars can be obtained by visiting a specific pet page, attending a concert [Sticks N Stones, Chomby & The Fungus Balls], others are given out at random [Sloth] and some can only be had when you beat a score when playing a game at the site [The Buzzer Game, Snowmuncher, Better Than You etc]. You can the avatar you wish to display by visiting the user preferences section of the Neoboards. There are a ton of general avatar icons to pick from and the ones that you earn are listed in a separate section at the bottom of the scroll list. If you are really into hunting for avatars there are guilds that you can join to borrow items, a whole board just for avatar chat and outside sites that will give you hints and tips on how to get newer and older avatars. Some of these are only available for a limited time, like the Easter and Valentine ones, while others stay active and are up for grabs for months on end.
11. Message Boards Remember to stay on topic!
www.neopets.com/neoboards/index.phtml
“To keep Neopets clean there are a few things that are not allowed, including the posting of any sexual or offensive content, attempts to use Neopets as a virtual dating service, chat about how "hot" anyone is, or attempts to scam, cheat, spam, or try to find out someone else's password. Please remember, you agreed to our Terms of Service when you registered your account, so please read them to make sure you're following all our rules.”
If you are new to the site your best bet to catching on to the goings on is to hang out on the various boards that are housed in the NeoBoard section of the site. You can find everything from Battledome help to shop ads, Trading Post adverts to a board just for newbies. If you are luck enough you might even be able to find the link to the illusive Jelly Board [www.neopets.com/neoboards/boardlist.phtml?board=18], I’ve seen some insane things posted there but remember, just because it is a “secret” board doesn’t mean you can’t get reported for using foul language, off topic posts or anything else that violates the NeoBoard rules. For the most part the boards are helpful in finding sale items, trades, auctions and other useful tidbits but there is a lot of spam that takes place as well as begging and scams. The general rules is that if it sounds too good to be true, it usually is and remember to never do trades with people outside the Trading Post. You will also come across something called a “live auction” – these aren’t allowed at the site and if reported could result in your account getting frozen.
You can edit some of your account information in the NeoBoard section – things like your avatar [the icon that is displayed on your post], the font that you use, your NeoTitle, NeoHTML and the language that you wish to have posts displayed in. If you click “user preferences” you will be able to change your personal information, password to the site, changing the HTNL to your user look up page and email address. Email addresses are not disclosed at the site, this is done so that there is less of a chance of people trying to hack into your Neopet account and so that people will use the NeoMail system. Before you start to use the chat boards make sure that you read the chat rules [www.neopets.com/chatrules.phtml] so you don’t say or do anything that violates the terms of service. Just like at Epinions, I am someone that reports people for breaking the rules at NeoPets. Some people will argue that off topic posts don’t hurt anyone or that people are “report happy” – sorry, this is an all ages site and not the place to pick up people [LOL], talk about sex, run contests or giveaways or anything else that breaks the rules. Ignorance of the rules is no excuse since you agreed to them when you joined the site so read them and follow them to have a safe and fun time at the site.
12. The News
A lot of people skip over the news section of the site but it is a great place to get the latest information about sales, special events, newly released avatars, games, new pets or added paint brushes for your pets, real life Neopet events [like TCG tours and the new Jamba Juice drinks] and more. This runs in line with the site newspaper – The Neopian Times; it’s a member oriented newspaper that features everything from helpful hints to cartoons. If you submit at least ten articles [and have them published] you can get one of the secret avatars that I mentioned earlier. That might not seem like a bug thing but when you are an avatar junkie, every one counts. From the news section you can also click on the “Neopets Merchandise News” to get the latest scoop on plushies, action figures, TCG events and more. This is also the quickest way to get to the ‘redeem a code’ part of the site – so if you purchased anything that comes with a rare item code, you can use that link to enter it in to the site and claim your prize. These are included in the trading card packs, in specially marked toys and other NeoMerchandise.
13. Scams
www.neopets.com/wallofshame.phtml
www.neopets.com/autoform_abuse.phtml?abuse=report
www.neopets.com/autoform_support.phtml?support=other
One of the brood got scammed a while back in a paintbrush trade. The person that listed it insisted that it was indeed a paintbrush that could be used to paint your pet a different color so my son bid about 200,000 NP on it. When the trade was complete he went to paint his pet and found out that it was nothing more than a plushie [a toy version of the real thing]. That’s how I got hooked on the site – I wanted to see exactly what was going on at the site and why someone would try and scam a kid. Sadly, there are a lot of different scams that go on at the site. When Fortune Cookies were first on the site people were selling them for thousands of NP saying that if you fed your pet one you could be given secret information about where to find NP, paintbrushes or codestones. Nothing could be farther from the truth, the only thing that happens when you feed your pet one of these is that you get a fortune – no secret information, no random events, no free items. Poison Girl refuses to eat them so I started giving them out to other people to see if maybe, possibly, by some small chance there were some secrets to be had from the cookies – out of the 50 that I gave out to people, the 48 people that replied and passed along what their fortune said – none of them had anything to do with any “secret” information.
Scams happen all over the site. People put items in the Trading Post and misrepresent them. The biggest offense there is berries – they are classified as “rare” items but that has nothing to do with the selling price. It is how rare the appear on the site – this is a confusing thing to try and explain to a new user, they see the words “rare” or “special” and think they are getting a real bargain. The same thing goes for weapons like snowballs and blocking shields – people try to pass them off as rare items when in fact they can be purchased for less than 200 NP. Scams that are most common on the message boards are saying that your account was hacked [asking for donations], asking to borrow items and “promising to return them” without providing collateral and misrepresenting items – a good example of this is the Snow Faerie Snowglobe. Most of the snowglobes at the site sell for big bucks but the Snow Faerie one sells for about 400 – 500 NP – if not less. People will advertise “Faerie Snowglobe Cheap” and new users will flock to it and pay thousands of NP for it – only to find out that they purchased something that isn’t worth much.
The most common scam is one that even experienced users don’t catch on to until it’s too late but seeing as how I am so skeptical, analytical and paranoid – I don’t trust anyone and suspect everyone of cheating. It involves one person with multiple accounts – they come to the board and say “If you buy something from my shop you will get a free petpet or codestone” so of course people aren’t going to listen to common sense and they will go to the persons shop to buy something – items are usually junk items that they are selling for thousands of NP. That should be an indication right there that you are getting set up. Then after a few minutes and a few buyers “someone” else will post “Thanks for the codestone!” just to make the people who bought stuff feel a little better and to bait newcomers to the thread into buying. They think ‘Hey, a few people already got stuff from this person … so I’ll do it!’. The “people” that are posting and saying they are getting the prizes aren’t real – they are the main users other account / accounts. It never ceases to amaze me the lengths that people go to at the site – it is a free site, its not real money …
Auto buying programs are another way that people scam the site. I won’t get into the details of them since I’ve never used one and have only heard about them in passing. They search through the site hitting the shops you designate and they “auto buy” all the things on your list. This eliminates having to go to the shops or haggling and it seems that just when Neopets implements a new system to foil them, they come up with a new one. My suggestion to Neopets is to have several different confirmation systems in place. First they had one where you had to enter in a series of letters then it changed to letter and numbers. The short lived “click the right neopet” program lasted about twelve hours – the images were too hard to see and I for one didn’t know all of the different species of Neopets. Now you have to enter the price you wish to pay for an item and click on the pet in the box below it. If Neopets would have three or four different confirmation code types in place it would make it a lot harder for the people with auto buying programs to function at the site. Have the confirmation code types change at random or put up some type of gateway to disable outside programs from accessing the site.
Lastly, chain letters. The scourge of The Trading Post. It seems like every time I go there to look for items, there are at least two or three adverts for a chain letter. Most read like this, “type this in ten of your trades and go to fairyland [sic] and you will get 1,000,000 points and 10 paint brushes” – the ones that are really funny are the ones that say “this truly works, it’s a neopets code”. Chain letters do not work, they will get your account frozen and they serve no purpose outside of scamming people into posting more letters. Usually they start when someone says “Send me a codestone, faerie or map piece and I will tell you how to get hundreds of thousands of points” What follows is usually a form letter telling them to post the same letter on their member page – something that can and will get you frozen. The “send me something scam” is nothing new – it’s the pyramid scam only it promised you several things – that it isn’t against the rules and “why would I risk my account doing something wrong”. In reality, these are people that have tons of accounts so when one gets iced, its no big deal to them – they just make sure they transfer the NP and items to another account on a regular basis. All this to scam a kid’s site …
From the Neopets website:
“Neopets will never ask you to pass any messages on to anyone else, nor will we ever ask you to post messages repeatedly on the message boards, trading post, or any other area of the site. These will not earn you paint brushes, codestones or anything else and are merely spam messages that annoy other users. Any "copy and paste" messages that tell you otherwise are false and are not endorsed by The Neopets Team no matter what they say. If you receive any such Neomail, simply delete it.”
The Bottom Line
This is the first in a series of detailed game guides to Neopets, I honestly feel that if people know as much about the site when they start out they’ll have a lot more fun while gaming. When I started I had to learn most of the stuff by trail and error and most of the time it was more error than anything else. There are so many different things to do at the site that it truly does take a while before you can learn the hang of everything – whether you love finding bargains, saving up for a paint brush, doing quests, battling your pets or just creating your own adventure – NeoPets is a great free place for kids of all ages to play. I know a ton of adults that are addicted to the site and instead of them talking about football or soap operas they are talking about how to increase their pet levels or which battle items they are saving up for. My brood are all members of the site and love it and of course I am hooked on it too – give it a arty and see if you can resist it .. chances are you’ll be addicted to it as well …
As always, thanks for the read!
~^V^~ Freak ~^V^~
© 2004 Freak369
Neopet product reviews ..
Neopets Online Website, Neopets Official Magazine, Hasbro Deluxe World Meridell Game, Hasbro Deluxe World Faerie Land Game, Thinkway Interactive Neopet Talking Shoyru Plushie and Talking Uni Plushie, Hasbro Playskool Neopet Mutant Kacheek Interactive Game, Hasbro Interactive Krawk Island Pocket Neopet, General Mills Neopets Islandberry Crunch Cereal, Neopet Red Shoyru NeoPen
Neopet Collectible Figurines
Chomby, Scorchio, Uni, Shoyru, Grundo, Aisha, Moehog, Wocky, Gelert, Kougra
Milton Bradley Neopet Puzzles
Blumaroo Lab Ray • Scorchio Scientist
Aisha Princess • Jeran Knight
And the editorials ...
Neopets: The Scams, Hacks, Cheats & Darkside of Neopia
The Dark Side of Neopets: Pant Devil, Dr. Sloth, Boo Brothers, Esophagor & Tax Beast!
The Neopets Primer: Getting Stared On That First Million!
The Neopet Primer II: Making The Second Million!
So You Want To Get Rich At Neopets? Quests, Quests & More Quests!
Spoil Your Neopet! Get Them Their Very Own Petpet!
Want to play the stock market? Check out Mobiprof’s primer here:
How I Became A Stock Market Millionaire
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.