When I was a newbie, things on Neopets were pretty different than they are now. There weren't the same pets. There weren't the same shops. In fact, there really weren't any shops, just like there really weren't any games. Kacheek Seek was the only thing that could be played for any kind of real money, and when my bank account hit 500 NP, I thought I'd die. Things were simpler-shops didn't restock nearly as frequently as they do now-and there was no Battledome. In fact most of the pets didn't even look the same. Shops were cheaper. No one had ever heard of an item worth more than 100,000 NP. Items in the 1000's were practically unheard of. It was a friendlier age. You couldn't even find Neopets merchandise in the stores; there was no magazine, no trading cards, it was just this one innocent, free little site on the Internet, and it was supported solely by the use of what were termed "Cool Offers." These were different back then, too. . . you signed up for mailing lists, no credit card was required. The best policy was to get an e-mail account on Yahoo! and have all the junk sent there. The Space Station had just been discovered, and Sloth was out running around. There weren't any other worlds, except for maybe Roo Island, if you could find it. There was Mystery Island, but you had to pay to get in. You had to have three magical totems, which would sell for about 300 NP. I remember agonizing for weeks over those totems, thinking that I'd never have the 900 NP required to get onto the island. That may seem strange now, but back then, you could only earn maybe 100 NP a night if you were very lucky with the games. Would you believe that books went for about 30 NP a pop back then, and didn't disappear when you were done reading them? That's right-you could read a book to all four of your pets and then sell it. It didn't cost an arm and a leg to adopt or abandon your pets either. There were theme parks back then, too, I had one! They were fun. . . I can barely remember them, but I know they were fun. Did you know that you could ask for Quests just by marching up on the Faeries and asking? You didn't have to wait for it to be a random even-but speaking of random events, those were more common, too! You pretty much got one random event a day, and frequently in them you would find money. I found a paint brush once-which sold for a little under 10,000 NP and was the biggest fortune I'd ever laid eyes on. The pets you painted with said paintbrushes were nothing like what exists now. They were simply drawn JPGs, hardly able to be looked at as more than a bunch of pixels, but they were the most awesome things ever. PS-banners and advertisements? Zero. On January 21, 2000, Neopets eliminated all banners and advertisements (except the "cool offers") to help the site "run faster." Here's another thing you probably don't remember. . . there used to be a video rental store. I never did find out what movies proved, but I bought one called Kiko Goes Boom. Can you remember discount cards? Bank loans? How about the school? Your Neopets probably just thought that was a sweet bedtime story, but it was almost real once!

From the NeoPets Terms of Use, exactly quoted, with rebuttal.

TOU: All user content and communications on the Neopets site is filtered and monitored. So that everyone has a good time, you understand and agree that you will not post or send through the site any words, images or links containing or relating to: . . .

(item 3) . . . attacks, comments, or opinions about other people or things that slander, defame, threaten, insult or harass another person.

REPLY: On any given trade you look up, you will find comments that fit into those slots very easily. Remarks such as 'junk offers will be laughed at' and 'no n00bs' are clearly insulting. Entire threads are devoted towards trash talk about these 'n00bs'-all presided over by mere Neopian children (members of two years and under). These things are clearly against the rules, but who stops it?

(item 9, same article) material regarding political, social, or religious views or opinions

REPLY: Check the message boards. A lot of political argument going on in there.

(item 10, same) links to or advertisements for third party commercial Web sites

REPLY: Neopets does this themselves. With few exceptions, every page you click on is home to three ads now, and it's a rare thing when one or even most of those ads will be internal-Neopets related. They all are concerned with third party, commercial websites! The majority of the population on Neopets is under 18 and can't even utilize these offers; the rest of us are not interested. Many of these ads are not even appropriate, some are for online dating services (something else forbidden by Neopets) and even condoms (which I think falls under their anti-sexual content clause).

You can read the complete Terms of Use here: http://neopets.com/terms.phtml

Here's something growing in commonality around the Neopets site. . . it's called freezing, and it's been around since the dawn of time. Basically, when a bad guy gets into the site and does something against the rules, they shut his account down. The account is still there, but the pets and NP are locked up in it, and the user isn't allowed access until they choose to unfreeze it. In some cases, they swear they will never unfreeze the account. One wonders what becomes of the wasted NP, items, and starving pets.

Recently, however, Neopets has been abusing this power. I take it back-it's not recent. You can get frozen for cheating in the games, for having inappropriately-named pets, or for-this is the real sin, here-having more than one account. Neopets, determined to not let anyone have more than four pets, has decreed that it's a big no-no to make an extra account if you absolutely must have five, seven, or eight pets. I once heard a story about a person whose account was frozen on the grounds of "using an auto-refresher on a flash game." That's a physical and scientific impossibility, not to mention something computers can't do. When he wrote defending himself, they changed their story. He is still fighting to get his account back. Another story, from a friend of mine-she named her pet something with the word 'pimpernel' in it. Despite the fact that the word 'pimpernel' gets used all over the site, and there are plenty of pets with names containing the apparently vastly inappropriate 'pimp', her entire account was frozen. Unlike when you go to post up your user prefs with a "bad word" in it, she didn't even get notified until a couple days later, when access to her account was forbidden. Even after defending her position and getting her account back, she found out-horrified-that the pet had been deleted.

There's a lot of horror stories like this. Neopets isn't doing its job anymore. The game is supposed to be fun and harmless for everyone, but it's now to the point where my seven-year-old niece can't participate in half of the site without involving her parents in a mound of paperwork. In the old days, anybody caught cheating was stripped of all their ill-gotten NP. Their accounts weren't rendered useless.

On my second day on the site, there was weeping and bitter gnashing of teeth because I couldn't afford food for my Neopets. Now I understand that Neopets don't need to be fed, but the issue is still the same-items are too expensive.

This was kind of covered in the Newbie/Newbie section a moment ago, and you'll see it mentioned in the closing section, but I'd like to cover it here, too. This isn't a sin strictly confined to those who've joined less than two years ago, as I can attest to-I've been guilty of it myself from time to time-but it is one that's seriously wrecking the site. I've never figured out the pattern, but there are some objects which will randomly skyrocket in price, while others randomly drop low. Take advent items, for example: the books invariably cost much less than 'normal' books (understandably, as everyone could have grabbed one themselves), but other items make less sense. One plushie goes up in price while another goes down. My theory is that items I wish to sell decrease in value, while items I wish to buy increase. However, I don't think it's likely that my buying and selling preferences are determining the whole of Neopia's price choosing, so what does?

There's a problem with the shops. They've become galleries. Sometimes, I think, people see something as a gallery item, and immediately decide to hike the price up. Others, in a genuine attempt to slow outrageously dropping prices, keep the market hovering up in the expensive zone. Others, feeling randomly generous, knock 200 NP off their price, unknowing that the next person in the shop wizard is looking to price their own, and she takes off another 50. The person after them is desperate to get rid of the thing, and so the object has decreased in value 500 NP for no good reason. There should be no price at which you can display an item but not buy it. Shops should not be galleries, they're for buyers! Prices should be determined by the actual worth of the item, not just because someone felt randomly generous or stingy when they looked at the SWA (Shop Wizard Average).

Paint brushes, for example, are never worth three million NeoPoints. So you say you bought it for 1.4 million in the Hidden Tower-how do I know you didn't win it for free in the Fruit Machine the way I did? Or perhaps you found it laying on the floor-that's happened, too. It took me a year to earn a million NP, and if you can get it any faster than that, there's a problem with accessibility in this site. NeoPoints, literally, grow on trees, and that should end. Prices need to be leveled out and make more sense so that it's more fair for everyone to play. And that's all I've got to say on the subject.

Everybody's got to be new somewhere, sometime. I was new once, and frustrated with the oldies when I first joined. Of course, it's the same basic problem now as it was then, yet somehow it skipped my "generation" of Neopets players, and just bounced directly to the members who existed in the slender few months between Neopets starting and my joining, to the crowd of newcomers who started popping up within two years of my arrival. The Oldies of my time scalped. The Newbies of this time scalp. Let me pause briefly to explain to you what the difference is between someone who is new and okay and someone who is new and a complete-well, it's a part of the body I'm thinking of, and not a pleasant one. Let's get the definitions out.

Newcomer: Someone who, for reasons that clearly can't be helped, has just joined the site within the last two years, especially anyone under 12-6 months of membership. Everyone has to start! There's nothing wrong with that, and a lot of people who are willing to try hard are just fine.

Newbieface: I hate your breed. You know nothing of this game. As an Oldie from my Neopets "generation" once said, you have "no pride." You have no idea what things were like in this game, so you saunter in, magically acquire mounds of NeoPoints, buy ridiculously expensive artifacts, then sell them for millions more than they are worth in the trades, all while making snotty comments and posting ridiculous, stupid untruths in your user lookups. You're the ones who say "no begging!" and paint your pets the most expensive things you can find. It's your prerogative to do well in the game, but nobody told you that you had to be nasty. You made that choice on your own.

So now you know what the problem is with newcomers. Because of how it's become, I refuse to buy anything very expensive from anyone who's been in Neopets less than a year, mostly because I know the expensive price is undeserved. You may have purchased that paint brush in the Hidden Tower for 1.4 million nps and are now selling it at a loss, but that was your bad decision. Early paint brushes rarely, if ever, went for more than 10,000 NP. They certainly aren't worth 1.2 million + snotty, insulting, degrading remarks. Be polite. It doesn't cost anything. You may have something someone else desperately wants, but for the sake of this game, don't scalp (sell something far above its worth, especially after purchasing it for very cheap) and for the sake of all us who are humans, don't be insulting.

Here's our plan, Neopets. This is what we stand for-New Neopia, and everything therein.

In the first place, TNT, fix what problems you have now before attempting to make the site prettier. Put the sidebar back on the side where it belongs. Eliminate the illegal advertisements that slow the site down.

Create galleries. The shop wizard is for people looking to buy items! People put inaccessible items up in their shops and gloat. Make galleries and spotlight them in much the same way you do NeoHomes. That way, collectors can display their eccentric collections without taking up shop space, or Shop Wizard time.

Help the stores. They need it, they're floundering. Remove the gallery items by creating galleries, and when you do so, set the maximum shop price as the maximum purchase price-150,000 NP, anyone?

Increase the number of random events that give you paint brushes, and decrease the ways to earn NeoPoints. Availability of NP is destroying the site-prices need to be lowered, and the ability to get NP needs to be reduced significantly.

Take limited edition pets out of the lineup of available pets to choose. What kind of mean way to taunt people is that?

Make time limits on the Money Tree like you did on the Igloo-it's impossible to get anything from MT unless you have DSL, and even then, you could click for an hour and never claim anything.

Start obeying your own rules and stop posting ads from outside sources. You're rich, NeoPets. Also, remember that 'imbedded advertising' you came up with? You were once able to run the whole site off of "Cool Offers," and now you're a money machine in several different countries.

Know that we WILL. NOT. ACCEPT. NEOPETS. PREMIUM. Neopets was born as a free site. You don't need to make it pay for any reason! We won't have it, we won't pay for it, and you'll destroy yourself. Same goes for e-mail-oh, my gosh! You have so many problems with the site now that we can't even trust that our e-mails would work if you were in charge of them! We love you, Neopets. We just don't love what you've become-and it's getting worse. Stop the bleeding. Let us play the game we've always loved.