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writerkitI don't know if I've mentioned it here, but I've gotten back into Neopets in a desultory sort of way-- a bit of Battledome fun, doing the new daily quests, playing Hasee Bounce and Sutek's Tomb, planning to make G. play Crisis Courier at some point because I want to see what he thinks of the "Does this remind you of anything?" elements of it... (Crisis Courier is 100% stealing inspiration from the old Super Mario that I remember my cousins playing when we were kids.)
Especially now that they've fixed enough of the site into HTML5 that it functions again. (The degradation of the site is nowhere more exemplified in the fact that despite everyone knowing the end of Flash was coming for forever, they didn't make a concerted effort to deal with the fact that the site had been almost entirely programmed in Flash until Flash's demise had broken the site.)
Neopets also has an annual December tradition of the Advent Calendar: you go to the Advent Calendar each day, you see an animation (well, in the days of Flash it was an animation; now it's a comic), you get a prize. Often these prizes included exclusive items, which meant their prices went up dramatically the farther you got from the year they were handed out.
This year they've added a "click on the not-reindeer peeking out from the side of the screen to get an extra prize."
Now, the Advent Calendar prizes are the same for everyone. The bonus prize has a pool and you get random ones.
Another piece of necessary context: Neopets has been left mostly alone, content wise, for more than a decade, and has recently been bought by new management who are interested in making it more functional. (As someone who, like *many* Neopets players from the Days of Yore, used a fake birthday back when and is now locked out of her original account because I can't remember what I put, this is a great blessing as it means I can reasonably expect to build my new account up.) Part of this making it more functional includes fixing the economy, since there are a lot of items that were released long ago and have escalated into the kind of ridiculously expensive prices that mean you can't get them, and these include some of the best battledome weapons.
Which brings us to the Seasonal Attack Pea, second-best offensive battledome weapon on the site in terms of straight icons of damage, exceeded only by the Super Attack Pea. (Icons do not one-to-one correlate to damage dealt; there's a lot of math involved in the weapons being multiplied by your pet's stats, such that there are actual damage calculators to tell you how much damage you can expect to do with a given weapon and a given pet. I have a couple of weapons, some faerie abilities, and a leaf shield, and I just use these as a bludgeon because I cannot be bothered trying to optimize it.)
The Seasonal Attack Pea, mind you, is exactly what it says on the tin: it is a pea in a Santa hat. There were originally only 100 of them released. This is exactly as bad an idea as it sounds.
(This was in 2002, and I believe the site had not yet gotten close to what would be user peak, so it may have been a less bad idea, but it was still a bad idea.)
Neopets in general had a fondness for time-limited items, which was more or less fine when they were adding new ones regularly-- although it still led to stuff being extraordinarily expensive that shouldn't have been-- but become a massive problem once they mostly stopped adding new content.
I gather there is some backstory involving previous attempts to right the economy over the summer (before I had gotten back into it) which backfired horribly and created massive price fluctuations of certain items, and there was much outcry from the neobillionaires who had kept playing regularly since the site's inception and suddenly found their stuff going down in value.
Everyone else was annoyed at the poorly-thought-out *ways* they were trying to fix the economy but were in general supportive of the idea of making rare items *possible* to get.
Which brings us to this month's Advent Calendar, which included the Seasonal Attack Pea in the bonus prize pool at a one-in-ten chance. And there was much outrage.
In reaction to the outrage, they upped it to a one-in-one-thousand chance, and then when that provoked more outrage, back down to one-in-one-hundred.
With all this moving around, the prices of the Seasonal Attack Pea have been fluctuating wildly, and the staff of major website Jellyneo allegedly used their control of the primary price averaging site to flip theirs-- buying when it was in the pool, making the claim that it had been taken out of the pool entirely, and then selling at the resultant price rise (refusing to put an inflation notice on it for the flimsy reason of "it's an event item").
Neopets Reddit has been having utter meltdown over this.
And thus, the Great Seasonal Attack Pea Controversy of December 2023.
Especially now that they've fixed enough of the site into HTML5 that it functions again. (The degradation of the site is nowhere more exemplified in the fact that despite everyone knowing the end of Flash was coming for forever, they didn't make a concerted effort to deal with the fact that the site had been almost entirely programmed in Flash until Flash's demise had broken the site.)
Neopets also has an annual December tradition of the Advent Calendar: you go to the Advent Calendar each day, you see an animation (well, in the days of Flash it was an animation; now it's a comic), you get a prize. Often these prizes included exclusive items, which meant their prices went up dramatically the farther you got from the year they were handed out.
This year they've added a "click on the not-reindeer peeking out from the side of the screen to get an extra prize."
Now, the Advent Calendar prizes are the same for everyone. The bonus prize has a pool and you get random ones.
Another piece of necessary context: Neopets has been left mostly alone, content wise, for more than a decade, and has recently been bought by new management who are interested in making it more functional. (As someone who, like *many* Neopets players from the Days of Yore, used a fake birthday back when and is now locked out of her original account because I can't remember what I put, this is a great blessing as it means I can reasonably expect to build my new account up.) Part of this making it more functional includes fixing the economy, since there are a lot of items that were released long ago and have escalated into the kind of ridiculously expensive prices that mean you can't get them, and these include some of the best battledome weapons.
Which brings us to the Seasonal Attack Pea, second-best offensive battledome weapon on the site in terms of straight icons of damage, exceeded only by the Super Attack Pea. (Icons do not one-to-one correlate to damage dealt; there's a lot of math involved in the weapons being multiplied by your pet's stats, such that there are actual damage calculators to tell you how much damage you can expect to do with a given weapon and a given pet. I have a couple of weapons, some faerie abilities, and a leaf shield, and I just use these as a bludgeon because I cannot be bothered trying to optimize it.)
The Seasonal Attack Pea, mind you, is exactly what it says on the tin: it is a pea in a Santa hat. There were originally only 100 of them released. This is exactly as bad an idea as it sounds.
(This was in 2002, and I believe the site had not yet gotten close to what would be user peak, so it may have been a less bad idea, but it was still a bad idea.)
Neopets in general had a fondness for time-limited items, which was more or less fine when they were adding new ones regularly-- although it still led to stuff being extraordinarily expensive that shouldn't have been-- but become a massive problem once they mostly stopped adding new content.
I gather there is some backstory involving previous attempts to right the economy over the summer (before I had gotten back into it) which backfired horribly and created massive price fluctuations of certain items, and there was much outcry from the neobillionaires who had kept playing regularly since the site's inception and suddenly found their stuff going down in value.
Everyone else was annoyed at the poorly-thought-out *ways* they were trying to fix the economy but were in general supportive of the idea of making rare items *possible* to get.
Which brings us to this month's Advent Calendar, which included the Seasonal Attack Pea in the bonus prize pool at a one-in-ten chance. And there was much outrage.
In reaction to the outrage, they upped it to a one-in-one-thousand chance, and then when that provoked more outrage, back down to one-in-one-hundred.
With all this moving around, the prices of the Seasonal Attack Pea have been fluctuating wildly, and the staff of major website Jellyneo allegedly used their control of the primary price averaging site to flip theirs-- buying when it was in the pool, making the claim that it had been taken out of the pool entirely, and then selling at the resultant price rise (refusing to put an inflation notice on it for the flimsy reason of "it's an event item").
Neopets Reddit has been having utter meltdown over this.
And thus, the Great Seasonal Attack Pea Controversy of December 2023.
