Many of you are probably in least vaguely familiar with Neopets.com, one of the biggest browser games of its era and the most popular virtual pet site ever made. Users can adopt, raise and customise their very own virtual pets, choosing from over 50 unique species. At its peak the game had over 35 million users, and over 4 billion page views a month. Odds are you either had a neopets account of your own, or knew someone that did - especially if you're part of its peak audience of 90's kids. It's had its ups and downs over the last 20 years, with many users feeling the site has long been in a slow decline. However, the most recent drama has caused an absolutely unprecedented explosion of outrage and disappointment within the remaining userbase. Why? Because Neopets has broken a multi-month long near silence with its playerbase to announce its releasing NFTs. EDIT: **What the fuck is an NFT?**NFT stands for Non-Fungible Token. It is a form of digital collectible that exists on a blockchain, similar to those the famous Bitcoin uses. The technology of blockchains means that each NFT is verifiably unique. They are bought and sold using a variety of cryptocurrencies. However, it is important to note that while many NFTs are tied to digital artwork, what you are buying is not the artwork. You gain no rights to it whatsoever, nor any exclusivity outside of the NFT world. What you buy is essentially a digital receipt with the artwork on it. NFTs by themselves serve no other function. The Neopets NFTS will be 20.0k randomly generated pet images to be used as profile pictures. This on its own would have been a pretty unpopular move, but the way the userbase found out that they were making NFTs wasn't from Neopets themselves - no, the userbase found out when a tiny, dodgy-as-all-fuck shell company and a random child company of neopets' parent company, NetDragon, announced that neopets were releasing a special collection of "metaverse" NFTs. The company in question immediately raised red flags within the community as the website seemed to lack even basic understanding of the game, using generic gaming terms instead of terms specific to Neopets (such as "skins" instead of "paintbrush colours", "character" instead of "species" etc) and using generic fantasy stock art as the sites background instead of art from the game (you know, like a neopets project should!). Joining the projects discord also revealed there were no actual neopets staff in there at all, and it appeared to be run by completely random strangers. On top of this, sharp eyed users quickly realised that the project was using assets stolen from a fan-made website instead of actual game assets. How did they know? Its quite simple really - this specific NFT example features a pet called a Dimensional Kougra. Looks kinda funny, and even more so when you realise that this is what a dimensional kougra looks like on the actual games website. And this is what a dimensional kougra looks like on the fan-site Dress To Impress. Oops! Even more damning, is that once pointed out they swiftly edited this "AI generated unique neopet" into a slightly different one - this is also functionality from Dress To Impress, which is a fan aggregated dress-up tool to preview on-site cosmetics. A comparison of an archived version of the site can be found here, so you can compare it to the edited live site here (this live version still has the stolen DTI version of a pet called the Eventide Kacheek on it, though, so they did a pretty poor job of hiding the blatant asset theft). People were, naturally, extremely upset by this development. Many users announced they would be quitting the site if the project were real, and others posted anxiously hoping it was fake. Tumblr, reddit, twitter and discord was filled with anxious and furious users begging The Neopets Team for answers as to whether this extremely suspicious NFT scam was an officially sanctioned project. Answers finally came after many hours when users dm'd the games support team on twitter and were told that it was probably a scam. Relief and laughter set in, as users realised this was another poor quality scam from an NFT company trying to cash in on nostalgia. I mean, what kind of professional project uses stolen fan assets, generic stock images and can't even get basic facts about the game its based on correct, amirite? EDIT: I edited the post and all the links broke. Need to fix! EDIT2: Should be fixed, thanks to everyone who commented pointing out the post broke! Except, shock flipping horror - it's bloody real! This is a real circus, run by clowns hired by the Neopets team themselves. Mayhem sets in. Neopets is immediately set upon by hundreds of extremely upset fans. The tweet announcing the NFTs from the initial account is the single most engaged with social media post the company has had for over a decade. They were, as the kids say, beating their ass in the quote retweets. The response to the feedback from the neopets team was essentially "we know you're upset, but don't worry - its a real project and not a scam!" Suffice to say, people were pissed. The official response did little to actually address player concerns, such as "why the fuck are you doing this" and "we am going to kick your ass stop buying premium and microtransactions until you stop". Never in the sites history has the site been so united in anything, with the response being a universal "NFTs? No Fucking Thanks Lol". However, naturally, there are two sides to this story, with the vaguely nostalgic crypto-community being very excited to return to "neo pets". Some of these users were unhappy that when they went to the on-site forums, the neoboards, they were met than a less than friendly reaction, dismissing peoples complaints and research into why nfts are essentially a scam as "misinformation" and bad takes. The general sentiment is that all these hundreds of distressed players were just misinformed, and that they just needed to be told the ""truth"" about nfts (from articles from pro-nft websites, of course) and they would come around. At this point, things become a little difficult to accurately share via screencaps, as the neoboards moved so fast, and are archived beyond view so quickly that it is virtually impossible for me to go back and screenshot the full range of conversations that were had (most of them were Not Very Civil). Goes without saying though, that shit got heated. Pro-nfters generally came across as condescending douchebags that ignored multiple arguments users had against the NFT project to focus on the few genuinely misinformed posts (often mis-quoting users in order to re-address the same points over and over). They would often talk about scrapping the old game entirely, mocking the people that were upset by this in the NFT projects discord, saying it was good to get an NFT project so the funds could "save" the site. Then they would go straight to the neoboards and complain that they weren't being given their fair shot. Nevermind that neopets users pointed out repeatedly that Neopets' main issue wasn't finance, but organisation (a huge topic too large to cover here entirely). They knew better than the people that had played the game consistently for over two decades, naturally. Neopets users on the other hand delighted in thoroughly "cyberbullying" people they saw as coming to astroturf the neo-boards, many of them getting site-warnings for getting too heated with their arguments, with mods hastily deleting the spicier and less constructive threads. One NFT user spent 28 straight hours responding to people dissing the terrible move, going above and beyond to astro-turf in defence of the project, and encouraging other people to do the same. Naturally, players were not pleased to see someone trying to desperately convince people to buy into something they saw as a scam, and they did not get a happy reception. Time for a quick break, and for some more context: 1. Why are neopets players so upset? - The overlap between "neopets players who actually play and enjoy the site" and "people who enjoy NFT's" is microscopic. The site has been in a gradual decline for a while now, with the staff at neopets (TNT - The Neopets Team) slowly reducing roadmap updates, content updates, site layout, and community engagement. A newly hired community manager held one giveaway and then immediately stopped posting, events earlier in the year had been beset by bugs, poor planning and rampant cheating, and generally speaking, the last thing the community wanted was something utterly pointless as an off-site project, despite TNT's claims that it wouldn't affect the sites development. They wanted real updates, meaningful roadmap planning, and real communication with the playerbase. Not whatever the fuck this is. 2. Isn't the site dying? Wouldn't the money from a pump and dump NFT project like this help the site? Selling 20k NFT profile pics would make a lot of money. - This is a big one, but the short version is that neopets still has a very active userbase, many of which spending large amounts of money on the site purchasing cosmectics (essentially the only feature that is regularly updated) and supporting the site. Its predicted that theres about 100,000 daily active users still, 1.5 million visitors a month - the site is nowhere near as popular as it once was, but it most definitely isn't completely destitute. Money and active players are not the issue, organisation and care is. Neopets have even done an NFT before, and that one was an actual game and not just static randomly generated PNGS. This ended with the games closure after a few months however, with about 1.8k purchases made and the tokens and cards being made useless when the company went bust. Everyone that bought into that was promptly suckered out of their money and lost everything they "invested". Neopets does not need more crypto scams, it needs a development team that cares about it. Grab some water and buckle up because things are about to get Even Spicier. So, as someone familiar with crypto and NFT's might know, the community space comes from a... dubious place. One of the web haunts quickest to adopt and celebrate all things crypto was 4chan, and the kind of lingo and terminology 4channers use (which NFTers use by extension) do not exactly mesh well with the lgbt-family-friendly vibe of neopets and its users. One term in particular started being thrown around, "oldf*g", and some members who weren't overly familiar with "the lingo" were naturally pretty fucking upset that people were seemingly fine with slurs being thrown around. The NFT server mods, of course, who come from that "community" were completely fine with this and ignored people pointing it out and complaining about it for a full 24 hours, and allowed users to dogpile on people complaining. They also ignored one user calling another a "f*ggot" for several hours afterwards, again, with users actively asking for moderation. The mods response? Kind of comedy gold actually. Turns out they don't have a PHD in AI so can't stop users saying the word "f*ggot". For the blissfully unaware "fudding" basically means "spreading FUD (Fear Uncertain Doubt)" and its commonly used by NFT types to tell people to shut the fuck up and stop being critical/killing the hype. Other users within the discord continued to dogpile users who were upset and pointing out there were still people using slurs, finally culminating in this head scratcher of an exchange. - Acktually slurs are all ⠀about context - Stop pulling the gay card :/ Nothing good came out of this exchange. This timeline is still evolving, and it seems like every single day the situation finds away to get even more embarassing for all parties involved. Some fun tidbits: 1. The NFT server moderators accidentally made a hidden channel public where they talk about ways to try to get TNT to silence the player base by releasing some features players have been waiting for for the past few months, distracting them from the current fires. 2. One of the NFT server minimods coming to the neopets community discord and trying to convince people that the things they were screenshotted saying were actually never said. 3. The Neopets Metaverse account retweeting whatever this weird NSFW HornyHedgehogs shit is from an account linked to a family friendly game. 4. The Neopets Staff deleting a contest winner on the site because their entry contained the text "NoNeoNFTs", only to immediately backpedal after realising what a terrible idea it was, restoring the first place entry with a tiny heavily blurred version nobody could read. This all literally only scratches the surface of the drama over the last 8 days, and if you'd like to read more the fansite Jellyneo has been consistently posting and tracking the drama on their twitter: https://twitter.com/jellyneo/. No doubt come monday the circus will continue and I will have to edit this post or make a followup. If you are a neopets player, and would like to make your voice heard beyond the tweets/neo-board posts/discord etc, there is a petition here organised by some community members: https://www.change.org/p/jumpstart-get-nfts-out-of-neopets TL'DR: Neopets announces NFTs, consistently embarrasses themselves literally every day since. Thanks for reading! This post attempted to summarise over 8 solid days of near constant drama and mis-steps from Neopets, so hopefully it makes sense and is mostly free of fluff and errors. And no, your neopets are not dead, try logging in and you'll see for yourself!
