Neopets' black market pet controversy, explained

do you remember your first neopet mine was a gullart this little dog-like critter with flippy ears and tail i was a tween at the time and i just liked the design of the pets i took care of the little guy for a bit and then i forgot about neopets until the scandal while i was away neopets was brewing a stew of greed obsession and toxic nostalgia hackers black markets coconut jubjub the bubble has ruptured and the neopets team is trying to keep the community from falling apart without letting the site and its economy crumble into the sea like king hagrid's castle to understand why this happened you need to understand the history of neopets neopets has humble origins the site launched in 1999 and it was made by just two people donna williams and adam powell the premise is you adopt pets take care of them and play games playing games lets you earn a currency called neopoints which you can use to buy stuff for your pets unsurprisingly kids loved this within two months the site was getting six hundred thousand page views a day the site quickly sold with a majority stake going to a guy named doug doering who was a marketing genius under durian's leadership by the early 2000's the neopets was getting 21 million users and during targeted them with immersive advertising neopet owners can feed their pets crafts capri-sun drinks or play games in which they race mattel hot wheels cars or interact with the diva stars dolls neopets landed sponsorships with coca-cola craft procter and gamble disney nickelodeon mcdonald's and the advertising worked but for the kids and the adults let's be real playing it neopets wasn't just a business it was this huge creative opportunity they were joining guilds making friends learning css writing articles for the site newspaper and role-playing as their pets on the forums they were also figuring out how to exploit their own economy just like doring was exploiting their impressionable eyeballs cheaters made bots they exploited sight glitches to get rare items they created sock puppet accounts and they sold fake in-game stuff right from the beginning of the site's history there are basically three camps people who want to play a beloved children's pet game people who want to exploit a beloved children's pet game and the neopets team who runs the site and has to tell the difference between the two this whole thing has led to a freeze accounts first ask questions later admin culture at neopets which is controversial for the players but probably very necessary for the sanity of the admins it's a system where no one wins and it was about to be tested in 2005 viacom bought the site for 160 million dollars and it seemed like they were ready to respectfully assume the mantle of creative guardians to the home of everyone's beloved neopets we're committed to being everywhere our demographics are and they have them they literally say they want to put more banner ads on the site and they're going to make tv shows movies and toys kids books an upcoming animated movie neopets game for playstation tsp handheld game shortly after viacom stepped in neopets founders left over creative differences and in 2007 two years after acquiring the game viacom made a decision that would change the way people played neopets and fuel drama and chaos for the next decade players call it the conversion up until that point neopets made money from brand deals and banner ads but what if people could give viacom money directly wouldn't that rule so they introduced a new premium currency called neocash and customizations to buy with it but for neopets to wear clothes they needed new art if you've been on literally any social network that's just had a ui redesign you understand how well most users react to change now imagine if a twitter update did this to your dog so this would have been upsetting enough for a community this nostalgic but it became so much worse because not every pet was converted equally remember how i said players did crimes to get rare items well some of those rare items were paint brushes that could totally revamp your pet they're expensive as hell and some are just random drops that are plain difficult to find players work and save for a long time to get these brushes so the neopets team decided that converting those painted pets would be optional wait what's this suddenly even unconverted pets like the plushie nimo which nobody wanted pre-conversion became desirable because there was such a small finite number of them in existence and this totally changed the way people played neopets people on the neopian pound board where trading culture is centered created their own economy one that the neopets team has no control over they regularly vote on the value of all neopets and rank them in 10 tiers so if you really want that see derrick and walkie but all you've got is a terrain quiggle tough my dude you'll have to trade your way up and people go spectacular lengths to make that happen one way in is that no two pets can have the same name and since neopets has been around for decades a lot of names are complete gibberish so a good name is basically currency once traders are able to obtain their first unconverted neopet they can trade up for their goal pet here's how i obtained one of my unconverted neopets so you can see exactly how i did it when i read a new book and find a name that i like i see if it's taken another user loved the name too so she offered me an uncommon real word for my pet with a royal custom i traded the royal custom and book character name for the uncommon real world a few months later i traded my uncommon real word with a drake more for a very common real name misspell which also happened to be an uncommon real name i then traded this guy for an unconverted desert poogle with a bad name i then traded my poogle for a fandom real name that love bug then traded for an unconverted coconut jubjub with a bad name keep in mind this trade sequence took about 6 months but i'm not as active in trading as some traders as confusing as this system is that's literally the only way you can legally get your hands on a uc the neopets team's position was that generating new uc's couldn't be done no matter how nicely you asked so there are a lot of ways that ucs just don't really jive with the system we have in place now we upload pets as a system of layers now unconverted pets were not created in that way instead they are a single static image that doesn't change they need to be broken into layers they need new arguments and that's just scratching the surface but it comes down to that they weren't drawn to work as separate assets the way converted pets are and trying to make them fit in that way would be nearly impossible but as long as there have been ucs there have been people looking to profit off of them sometimes ucs are stolen from hacked accounts and traded away but you can also just buy one from a black market website for anywhere from ten to a hundred and fifty dollars you do risk getting your neopets account frozen but i'm not going to tell you how to spend your stimulus check the black market sites were around when viacom ran the show and they stuck around when the neopets ip was sold to jumpstart in 2014. by then neopets was 15 years old and long past the glory days of 21 million users and mcdonald's sponsorships it still had its core community of passionate creative and hungry players but there were problems right after the acquisition in 2015 a lot of neopets staff were laid off in 2017 a hack compromised millions of accounts and as of 2020 a small staff is still running the game while simultaneously redoing the ui of this enormous website and a lot of it still looks like it did when i first made my account over 10 years ago tnt thought they had more to worry about than unconverted pets little did they know the lennies were coming home to roost in december 2020 a player named amanda logged into her account to find her unconverted derrick and loop kleiko off joyriding on someone else's account she reported it and set off a chain of events that almost tore the community apart when a stolen pet gets reported it can't just be zapped back to its owner because of the uc gold rush pets get traded a lot so if clica was stolen from here and ends up here every pet involved in any trade that kleiko touched has to be restored to its owner usually this is a pretty stressful event for a community which again is doing this amanda's situation was extra stressful because it involved hundreds and hundreds of pets reversals were still happening in march of 2021 and when the dust finally settled some unconverted pets were just straight up missing tnt said they were doing their best to fix things but rumors started to spread via the boards that something drastic was being done to repay the community something that they had insisted was nearly impossible for over a decade missing unconverted pets were being replaced by creating new ones some people treated this like a big aha they were lying the whole time which i don't think is fair nearly impossible in this case clearly means really hard to do and definitely not worth it so please stop asking which like fair but a portion of the community really did feel betrayed like wait you have a tool that can unconvert pets why and how long have you had it but guess what things were about to get even more complicated youngest you see ever check my story on my first uc for those unaware for over a year a certain website has freely generated from nothing neopoints items neocash items and neopoints while they can't generate ucs from nothing they just need an existing pet that is the right color and species for the uc version to exist age doesn't matter ever see those ucs born after 2007. this post revealed that the black market sites weren't just selling legitimately obtained ucs they were adopting abandoned pets from neopets pound and turning them into new uc's by exploiting a vulnerability in the website but it got worse bulane released a list of 3542 names pets that allegedly were fake ucs purchased off the black market to give a certain degree of truth about my statements and how serious it is after years i finally reached my goal of enough np for a tyrannian paintbrush this let me paint my pretty pet and then make it uc and there was the proof an unconverted tyranny and quiggle born march 10th zero hours old a brand new uc but why why cause this chaos the very working theory is that allegedly the snitch had a falling out with the black market sellers they tried to sell them out to tnt didn't get a response they posted on reddit it got taken down the pound chat post was their nuclear option for the pet traders this was potentially a waking nightmare they had just been through months of chain reversals for a legitimate stolen uc and now there were over 3000 of them that were supposedly fake would tnt have to delete them would they just convert all of them would people's accounts get frozen for having contraband nobody knew but some players decided to round and find out using the exploit to create even more fake ucs and then getting their accounts frozen just for the meme r.i.p pisspet for tnt this was also not fun for one thing this all went down on a weekend and it meant that everyone knew that the black market sellers had for years been able to do the exact thing that tnt had been telling people they couldn't do unconverting pets the result is that now after the hubbub has died down tnt is promising big changes they say they're not going to touch the 3 500 cursed pets and they're looking at bringing back ucs for everyone i talked about it with stephanie lord neopets brand manager you know we announced it when uh this whole thing kind of went down but that we are looking at bringing them back in some way that people can't get them in like a safe way not having to go any off-site things i don't think that was you know a bad decision at the time i think one of the biggest things we've really learned is you know a decision we made in 2002 or 2007 even like 2015 might not be the same decision we would make today tnt has their work cut out for them this fall a new neopets cartoon is supposed to launch and jumpstart is poised to put out plushes and toys and trading cards a whole new generation of kids is supposed to fall in love with neopets the brand but what about neopets the website players have stuck with it for 20 years and they love it but we can all be honest that this doesn't really look like the games kids these days are used to and stephanie said something that really surprised me which is that maybe it's okay if most of the players on this website are adults i'm not sure if the you know classic site's ever going to be like mainly kids again as just nature of gaming has kind of changed but it'll always be a welcoming place for kids for sure but we also are looking at different projects we can do you know for kids like this was kind of made in a lot of ways it is kind of tailored to our current audience we still want it to be a game like the game that they you know remember and like love and you know if that means giving the kids um that do come like another avenue to enjoy the impacts then you know we'll do that it just so happens that a lot of players remember and love a set of jpegs that were discontinued 14 years ago if tnt can bring back ucs some people are really excited to maybe finally get their dream pet others fear that the uc economy will tank ruining the trading game but maybe that's just what the site needs if there's no rarity and the tier system doesn't matter anymore maybe people will just trade for what they love but this ain't the only sad story from this crazy mixed up website i reckon in the back room of some knockoff forum there's another bubble being born if there's a way to exploit it people will find it forget it jake it's neopets [Music] oh bye

Channel: Polygon

Views: 338,833

Keywords: video games, videogames, games, polygon, neopets, neopets drama, neopets scadnal, neopets scandal, the neopets team, tnt, jumpstart, viacom, neopets website, neopets game, simone de rochefort, simone polygon, blackmarket pets, neopets video, neopets stockmarket, neopets gameplay, nostalgia, neopets paintbrhs, neopets paintbrush, neopets hack, neopest, neopets hack 2020, neopets hack 2021, neopets conversion, neopets 2007, 2007 conversion, dupe day, neopets dupe day

Id: 5y8B7EMf5oY

Length: 15min 56sec (956 seconds)

Published: Thu May 06 2021