Neopets was my first exposure to the "stock market".
It was a very simplistic market where there was a price floor of ~$5, and prices would randomly go up and down from there (it was not based on buying and selling, it was a simple random walk generator). So it taught me a very simple lesson of patience and delayed gratification, where if I simply bought stuff at 5, and waited a few weeks/months until it went up to 15-25, I could sell with a high profit.
As I acquired more "capital", I could make bigger purchases with bigger payoffs over time, and I made far more buying and selling these stocks than I could ever have performing "labor" (playing the games for points), thus teaching me the second lesson on capital leverage.
I think a few years in, they realized people were doing this, and they added a purchase floor of $15, where you couldn't buy something unless it was $15 or more, which limited my ultra-simple strategy's profitability, but I still kept doing it for a few more years before growing up and moving onto other games.
A final funny anecdote, there was this one stock called BOOM (Boom Boom Boxes), which would very regularly shoot up in value to 100s -> 1000s in price (way beyond everything else which typically topped out in the 10s). And there was this strategy to always buy BOOM when it was cheap, because it would surely multiply like crazy. And one day they announced that BOOM was the first stock to go "bankrupt", resulting in everyone losing a ton of money as it went to 0. Thus teaching me the third lesson about "bubbles".
I'm astounded I remember this much detail from a game I played when I was 10 years old.
I was one of the lucky 2,000 players to receive 500,000 neopoints as part of the billion neopoints giveaway in 2000. I was 11 and some time later gave my password away to someone claiming they would make me a moderator so you know... important lessons were learnt.
And sometime later that password would probably show up in the leaked list of user accounts that's easy enough to find, since they stored everything in plain text
It was my first exposure to...scalping? I remember that for some reason, chocolate was very valuable in the game. There was a chocolate shop in the game that was consistently sold out, but if you hit refresh often enough and at the right time, you could catch it right when it "restocked" and nab one of those rare chocolates. Then I would sell it in my personal store at a tidy profit.
Timing the refresh just right and grabbing a super valuable chocolate was quite a thrill, probably even more than the games themselves.
I remember there was a "secret fairy shop", which was a hidden clickable link. And the shop was usually empty, or stocked with low-worth items. But every 1 hour or so it would stock with high-value fairies that can level up the power of your neopet, and these prices were always significantly below market. Kind of reminds me of Rolex :)
I remember reading guides as to how to time the purchase. I'm kind of surprised more enterprising users didn't write bots for this, as I always remember it being possible at human reaction time to actually pick something up, which I imagine would have been impossible if bots came along.
A long time ago, I worked for a company that had a cage in the 818 Pihana/Equinix datacenter in DTLA. Neopets also had a cage in this DC and they made it obvious it was Neopets which wasn't something a lot of companies did.
What I'll never forget though is that they had pink, purple, and aqua colored CAT5 cables when everyone else was using your typical blue, yellow, and red. Today it's probably not a big deal, but back then it was wasn't something you saw in any other cage, everyone stopped to take a peak, new people always asked about it, and I always thought it was super cool even if they had to crimp everything themselves.
They had a fairly sizable cage and I passed by it everyday. I never played the game, and I was having my own kids by the time I started working in the DC, but that's my tiny personal Neopets nostalgia story and anytime I come across someone who also worked at 818, they remember it too.
I learned how to program by writing auto buyers, bots that would buy specific items that had a higher value on the secondary market, for Neopets. I believe the farther I went was deobfuscating the API they used issuing points for their games and making fake game players. I was part of a bunch of Neopets automation forums where people would bot and then RMT (real money trading) gold and other items. Neopets basically had 0 security and would really only ban people when their checkout speed sub 1 second. Everything I wrote was in VB6 and then eventually VB .Net basically killed the scene I was in since the initial .net roll out was so poor, as well as people growing up. Hadn't thought about this in forever. Thanks Neopets!
You might be amused to know that Neopets still has dismal security 20 years later. Autobuyers are alive and well, to the point that the entire virtual economy is shaped around a handful of exorbitantly wealthy users who snipe and hoard valuable items.
There's also at least one grey hat (reddit user u/neo_truths) who's been able to get into Neopets' databases and expose how broken the site is and how much cheating runs rampant... real interesting stuff.
EDIT: Here's a fun example. Ancient bug where items above a certain rarity level weren't available in NPC shops, despite Neopets' staff insisting that they were... turns out r100s were in fact buyable, but not visible, so the only way to snag one was to figure out the exact URL for the item as it was generated.
I got into web dev because they didn’t sanitize your bio. You could stick whatever HTML in there you wanted! (Maybe they stripped out script tags at least, I don’t remember.)
Edit: looks like others in this post had similar experiences :)
I have the exact same experience. I got “reputation” by creating a daily do-welled that would collect np by automating all of the daily tasks. That let me into the private bb forum channels that had the auto buyers, captcha solvers, etc. I look back on those memories fondly - I must have been 10-11 years old then and was amazed at the skill disparity for the auto buying programs - constantly had the rarest stamps. I’m pretty sure all of my accounts were banned, including coveted short nicks like “bg”.
I did something similar. I would write bots to play the games, then eventually figured out I could just hit the apis that would give me items and gold. Eventually, I had a lot of rare stuff and so on. I kind of wish I could still log into that account. But I doubt I would remember the username, email, or anything else.
Their main user base is driven by nostalgia. Hopefully their attempts to modernize don't go so far as to alienate their existing users.
Right now they have a god awful synthesis of three types of GUI wrappers for their webpages, so as you navigate across the site nothing stays consistent. Sometimes the language will randomly change to Spanish. It's website gore.
If they would spend the money to create a consistent user experience across all their pages, not introducing one page at a time, but actually biting the bullet and pushing the change across the whole site, that would be a step in the right direction.
I have a lot of good memories of neopets. I didn't go on the boards like a lot of people, but I loved clicking around, getting items, and playing the arcade games for money.
(thank goodness for the giant omelette in dino land because my pet would have starved otherwise)
Having gone into webdev and software, I wish I could go back to then and pop the hood of the site. Maybe even generate some free neo points from the arcade games...
Neopets taught me HTML. I might have never become a developer without it. It’s crazy to think that letting kids shove some raw HTML into a text box could change lives. I bet MySpace has similar stories.
Same! I remember there being guild websites or something which led me to learning HTML/CSS in 6th/7th grade! This and Minecraft were huge influences on me.
Me too. To this day, I love finding Neopets-compatible HTML and CSS tricks to use on petpages. For a while, I had a fully functional chess game running on a petpage. It would play against you using stockfish and everything. But then browsers stopped sending the full path in image request referer [sic] fields, and the jig was up.
I wonder what the equivalent is today. How do kids start hacking away at HTML (or does anyone learn HTML now?) by being tricked in by games or social media?
That one in particular actually discouraged me from learning code scripting as a kid because it requires deobfuscating PHP code which definitely was not a kid friendly thing in 2004.
I played both Utopia and Neopets back in the days around 2000-2005. I still have screenshots!
You could submit it to HN and see if there's uptake. There's also Algolia.
The beauty of Utopia was that you start a province and you get together with max 24 other players in a kingdom. You vote which province becomes your king or queen, and you gotta work together with those other provinces. If it doesn't work out you can leave, but it comes with a penalty.
However even back then, trading, botting, and account sharing was rampant. Because it was an international game with people around the world, and sometimes you had to log in the middle of the night. And people had RL, too.
The cool thing about Utopia was the politics aspect. War, negotiations and all that. The dark side of it were pacts and people who resort to mentioned cheating but who also bullied to get on top. It is probably akin to Eve Online in that way (which seems way more complex).
> It probably has the hardest learning curves of any game ever made, but the community is really strong and encouraging.
Nah, not the hardest. Utopia Angel (which ran through Wine) made Utopia fairly easy cause it was an accurate combat sim, and later on there were Web 2.0 frontends for scraped/normalized data, and also sims available for the province non-combat features.
Neopets I started because the woman I fell in love with digged it. Honestly I thought it was kind of cute and akin to a browser-based MMO (like Utopia was, too). The market is just like in WoW auction house; a sim of its own kind. But the fondest memories I have regarding those massive puzzles they sometimes had. They were an adventure within Neopets, and an adventure into studying your browser and things like Flash. WoW also has a MMO puzzle adventure going for it right now. For WoW, my fondest memories are action related and MoP expansion (yes I played before MoP, even WC2 and WC3 when released). Although MoP also was my low: I got a psychosis from the stress related to requiring high performance.
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It was a very simplistic market where there was a price floor of ~$5, and prices would randomly go up and down from there (it was not based on buying and selling, it was a simple random walk generator). So it taught me a very simple lesson of patience and delayed gratification, where if I simply bought stuff at 5, and waited a few weeks/months until it went up to 15-25, I could sell with a high profit.
As I acquired more "capital", I could make bigger purchases with bigger payoffs over time, and I made far more buying and selling these stocks than I could ever have performing "labor" (playing the games for points), thus teaching me the second lesson on capital leverage.
I think a few years in, they realized people were doing this, and they added a purchase floor of $15, where you couldn't buy something unless it was $15 or more, which limited my ultra-simple strategy's profitability, but I still kept doing it for a few more years before growing up and moving onto other games.
A final funny anecdote, there was this one stock called BOOM (Boom Boom Boxes), which would very regularly shoot up in value to 100s -> 1000s in price (way beyond everything else which typically topped out in the 10s). And there was this strategy to always buy BOOM when it was cheap, because it would surely multiply like crazy. And one day they announced that BOOM was the first stock to go "bankrupt", resulting in everyone losing a ton of money as it went to 0. Thus teaching me the third lesson about "bubbles".
I'm astounded I remember this much detail from a game I played when I was 10 years old.
Timing the refresh just right and grabbing a super valuable chocolate was quite a thrill, probably even more than the games themselves.
I remember there was a "secret fairy shop", which was a hidden clickable link. And the shop was usually empty, or stocked with low-worth items. But every 1 hour or so it would stock with high-value fairies that can level up the power of your neopet, and these prices were always significantly below market. Kind of reminds me of Rolex :)
I remember reading guides as to how to time the purchase. I'm kind of surprised more enterprising users didn't write bots for this, as I always remember it being possible at human reaction time to actually pick something up, which I imagine would have been impossible if bots came along.
What I'll never forget though is that they had pink, purple, and aqua colored CAT5 cables when everyone else was using your typical blue, yellow, and red. Today it's probably not a big deal, but back then it was wasn't something you saw in any other cage, everyone stopped to take a peak, new people always asked about it, and I always thought it was super cool even if they had to crimp everything themselves.
They had a fairly sizable cage and I passed by it everyday. I never played the game, and I was having my own kids by the time I started working in the DC, but that's my tiny personal Neopets nostalgia story and anytime I come across someone who also worked at 818, they remember it too.
There's also at least one grey hat (reddit user u/neo_truths) who's been able to get into Neopets' databases and expose how broken the site is and how much cheating runs rampant... real interesting stuff.
EDIT: Here's a fun example. Ancient bug where items above a certain rarity level weren't available in NPC shops, despite Neopets' staff insisting that they were... turns out r100s were in fact buyable, but not visible, so the only way to snag one was to figure out the exact URL for the item as it was generated.
https://www.reddit.com/r/neopets/comments/npzffe/restocking_...
https://www.reddit.com/r/neopets/comments/nu4k5o/r100_restoc...
Edit: looks like others in this post had similar experiences :)
It was a bit nostalgic for me since I originally learned HTML/CSS from Neopets over a decade back
Within 30 minutes I discovered you could create any Neopet, including the limited edition ones like Jetsam, just by setting that name in the API call
The IP has been purchased by "World of Neopia", who have $4 million to modernize and re-open Neopets.
Source: https://people.com/neopets-launches-new-era-website-7563280
Right now they have a god awful synthesis of three types of GUI wrappers for their webpages, so as you navigate across the site nothing stays consistent. Sometimes the language will randomly change to Spanish. It's website gore.
If they would spend the money to create a consistent user experience across all their pages, not introducing one page at a time, but actually biting the bullet and pushing the change across the whole site, that would be a step in the right direction.
(thank goodness for the giant omelette in dino land because my pet would have starved otherwise)
Having gone into webdev and software, I wish I could go back to then and pop the hood of the site. Maybe even generate some free neo points from the arcade games...
Deleted Comment
That one in particular actually discouraged me from learning code scripting as a kid because it requires deobfuscating PHP code which definitely was not a kid friendly thing in 2004.
https://utopia-game.com/shared/
https://mud.fandom.com/wiki/Utopia_(online_game)
I believe there is about 2000 active players still.
Played a few ages a couple years ago, thinking about kicking back in.
It is complete nerd warfare, imagine 25 with people warring 25 other people through spread sheets in a fantasy context.
It probably has the hardest learning curves of any game ever made, but the community is really strong and encouraging.
You could submit it to HN and see if there's uptake. There's also Algolia.
The beauty of Utopia was that you start a province and you get together with max 24 other players in a kingdom. You vote which province becomes your king or queen, and you gotta work together with those other provinces. If it doesn't work out you can leave, but it comes with a penalty.
However even back then, trading, botting, and account sharing was rampant. Because it was an international game with people around the world, and sometimes you had to log in the middle of the night. And people had RL, too.
The cool thing about Utopia was the politics aspect. War, negotiations and all that. The dark side of it were pacts and people who resort to mentioned cheating but who also bullied to get on top. It is probably akin to Eve Online in that way (which seems way more complex).
> It probably has the hardest learning curves of any game ever made, but the community is really strong and encouraging.
Nah, not the hardest. Utopia Angel (which ran through Wine) made Utopia fairly easy cause it was an accurate combat sim, and later on there were Web 2.0 frontends for scraped/normalized data, and also sims available for the province non-combat features.
Neopets I started because the woman I fell in love with digged it. Honestly I thought it was kind of cute and akin to a browser-based MMO (like Utopia was, too). The market is just like in WoW auction house; a sim of its own kind. But the fondest memories I have regarding those massive puzzles they sometimes had. They were an adventure within Neopets, and an adventure into studying your browser and things like Flash. WoW also has a MMO puzzle adventure going for it right now. For WoW, my fondest memories are action related and MoP expansion (yes I played before MoP, even WC2 and WC3 when released). Although MoP also was my low: I got a psychosis from the stress related to requiring high performance.