I used to be a Neopets addict for four years. Neopets, if you don't know, is an online cyberpet game with a little bit of simulation lifestyle thingies thrown in. You have to feed your pets daily, but to do so, you have to buy food from stores (poor people can get free food from several sources though). This means you'll need money. You can make money from opening a store to resell the items you buy from shops (this includes toys, weapons, furniture, et cetera), playing silly Flash games, or taking part in popularity contests passed off as "beauty" and "art" competitions. Along the way, you can also build houses for your pets, train them to fight in arenas called Battledome, and more. Which, of course, needs money. You need money to buy furniture, you need money to stock up on powerful weapons for your pets, and you need a lot of money to buy paintbrushes that will change your pet into unique colors and forms.

Which means, of course, you'll keep playing and playing and playing.

It's fun. I love it at first. I call myself the Grundo Queen and adopt four silly blobby dumb alien creatures. I have fun training them, getting money to buy things or send the pets to schools so that they become stronger. When my stupid Grundo Ono-Kaboob wins his first Battledome match, I feel like a proud mother. (Yes, I also need to go out more.) But after four years, I realize several things. One, I've just spent 380,000 Neopoints on a set of lab treasure map so that my pet can access a lab ray that can change its color. I want my pet to take on the color of a Pirate Grundo because Ono-Kaboob is supposed to be a dim-witted but fearless world explorer and that color suits Ono-Kaboob perfectly. But to change Ono-Kaboob into that color I need to buy a Pirate Paintbrush for a few million Neopoints or to dump 380,000 Neopoints on a set of maps. And 380,000 Neopoints is my "life savings" on Neopets, not counting one incident two years ago when my account was hacked and I lost close to that amount of money to some jerk.

I made only 380,000 Neopoints after playing Neopets religiously for a few hours each day, more on weekends, for two years.

That is depressing. I must be doing something wrong, right? But what can it be? Is it because I don't use cheat programs that automatically buys everything in those shops for reselling at my own store at high profits?

Hard work isn't worth it in this game. I am on a fast Broadband connection, but it's not enough, apparently, because I don't make enough money to do fun things on Neopets. That's the problem with this game: I need plenty of Neopoints just to do anything fun.

Everytime there is an exciting new pet color released, it will cost me a few million Neopoints for my pet to join in the fun. Everytime there are some new fabulous items to make my pets prettier or stronger, the item will be so rarely stocked in shops and at such a low number that it will cost millions of Neopets just to buy one from those scalpers in the Neopets marketplace. Neopets contests are worse. All those treasure hunt games require contestants to look at source codes or have a familiarity with PHP syntax (at one time, to guess the password correctly, I must enter a "?password=myguess" after the URL in the address bar to go to a page telling me whether I am right - good luck to anyone not aware of this because you're apparently expected to know this). Who will win all those millions of Neopoint prizes then? That's right: all those elite teenaged whiz kids who also use auto-programs or spend the whole day stalking the stores to buy rare items using their ultra-fast T3 connection.

In the meantime, I am forced to play Pyramids and win a few hundred Neopoints per round until I reach the daily limit on how much I can win, and by then I am ready to vomit from the sheer monotony of playing thirty such rounds in a row. I hate most of the games I have to play on Neopets to win money. All those stupid games are fancy Flash versions of Atari games that went out of style back in 1988. I have as much fun trying to feed an idiot Skeith with jelly in a game that will bore even one-year old babies as I do watching the grass in the garden grow. I lurk around hack boards, reading in awe about programs that will allow me to cheat and win millions of Neopoints a day, and am about to try one out myself when I finally realize that I have to stop.

I am killing myself. I don't really enjoy Neopets as much as I am just bashing my head against a wall trying to break it down even if my head bleed all over the place.

As I've mentioned above, the shops in Neopets are a problem. The items are restocked several times an hour, at random time, and what item is stocked depends on the coding by the programmers. Everything is random. The problem is, Neopets have millions of visitors, but the programmers still stock the shops at the same rate as that of a few years ago. It's a mad dash to buy anything and it's a fight between the elite kiddies with the fastest connection. The fun of owning rare items to make my pet uniquely strong is dashed as the chances of me owning them is nearly zero. I'd also love to train my second pet DijiKakak into being the smartest Grundo in town, but books cost money - a huge amount of money - and the bookstore sells out within seconds of a restocking. So OnoKaboob is reduced to sitting at his Neopets home while DijiKakak is reduced to scouring the Marketplace hoping for some merciful soul to sell some books at a price that doesn't require the Grundo to sell his two kidneys.

Fine, those two will have to wait and I will concentrate on winning trophies for my third Grundo, ChijiWiji, who wants to have as many cute trophies as he can get his paws on. Oops. I play Pyramids religiously for two years and I still haven't cracked the Top 100, much less the Top 20 required to win a trophy. What do those Top 10 people do to play these games and win so often? Cheat programs? Or just a high tolerance for the pain of repeating an action again and again until the brain turns into mush?

Is there anything I can do on Neopets anymore?

It is sobering to take a good look at the site and realize that no, I can't.

Maybe I can move to a country and get a better Internet connection. Or maybe I can use cheats. Or maybe I should be content to remain a bankrupt Neopian after buying the treasure map and start all over again. Maybe I'll rebuild by 300,000 Neopoints fortune in another two years.

Or maybe I'll just give up. Which is what I did nearly a year ago.

And it's easier than I thought it would be.

So that's it. The game can't keep up with the players and now it's just not fun anymore. And that's why I stop playing Neopets.

Rating: 66

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