A brief foray back into Neopets, part 1

[selenicseas]

Posted to Dreamwidth on 9 November 2024, backdated to 28 July 2023. Originally posted on Wordpress.

After hearing the news about Neopets getting a new owner - from the r/games subreddit, of all places - my curiosity got the better of me and I decided to check out Neopets once again. Since I deleted my old accounts in 2010 or so, I had to make a new one. It's selenicseas, and my sole Neopet is a blue Kougra named xDarksweep, a revival of my old Christmas-painted Kougra named Darksweep.

Right off the bat, I noticed that...the website is buggy. The search function doesn't work if there's an underscore in it, attempting to go back a page causes the page not to load at all in a lot of cases, and right-clicking on links is next to impossible on the new (mobile-friendly?) layout, which you can see above.

This new layout is only available on some of the pages. Other pages are basically the same as they were 15 years ago.

What you see above is the "old" layout. It's much easier to navigate and you can right-click on the dropdown links without problem.

It seems to be a lot easier to gain Neopoints just from non-game dailies. I don't think I managed to break 100k back in the day, but this time around I had 26k in about three days. Rare items are incredibly, horribly inflated in price compared to the past, with paintbrushes in the trade center being worth millions of np instead of the hundreds of thousands I remember.

Speaking of games, there were only a handful left (due to them being Flash-based) until July 25th, when an update was released to revive some more old games using the Ruffle browser extension. I only checked out a few of the games, mostly pre-Ruffle integration, and they're actually harder to play...due to my 1080p monitors. Back in the day, we all had 1024 x 768 monitors, and those 300x300px games were a lot easier to deal with.

There are also certain aspects of the site that rely on Flash that seemingly haven't been updated, and are still buggy even with Ruffle.

I looked up the usernames of a couple of people I remembered. Some of those accounts are still there but inactive, some are frozen, and some people are still using the site. I don't plan on reaching out to those people.

I've only been using the site again for a week and there have already been a few updates. The new team clearly got right to work, but it's going to take a while to fix over a decade of mismanagement. At the very least, I'll stick around to the end of August to see what I can accomplish in that time.