#fuck you netdragon

[pancakesmythie]

I made a model of my first World Of JumpStart mythie, Littlefox (R.I.P. WOJS). Oh and get this... HE HAS FUCKING MOUTH MOVEMENT?!??!

LIKE I CAN MAKE HIM EMOTE NOW?!?!?!? (kinda)

IS THIS FUCKING IMPROVEMENT I DUNNO?!??!!?!!?!??!

...yes, my !!commissions!! are still open too, my mind hasn't exploded just yet.

(literal screenshot of Littlefox)

[theneotrash]

You know what? Im gonna say it

Fuck all the dumbasses that kiss "new" TNTs ass

It's so funny seeing them say we have to trust Dom (the new owner) and we have to accept everything they say and claim.

Oh? You mean the chief officer of neopets METAVERSE? That's who you gonna trust?

We knew the metaverse was a fucking scam. A scammer is who owns the site now. People hate fearmongering but shit has been shady for a long while now.

Back when the nfts were announced the company in charge of the nfts moon idk what was the name, was connected to cherry picks and netdragon. It appeared out of nowhere just about 2 months before the neopets nft announcement.

Go on, check whatever happened to the neopets meta bullshit, go check it and keep kissing ass

[polyhexian]

nate you are the person i know who Understands modern neopets. i saw a bunch of people talking about the site no longer being under That Weird NFT Guy and getting excited about the site being back on track to actually work again at some point, is this an accurate assessment of the situation

Yes, so, neopets was owned by Jumpstart and Jumpstart was owned by Netdragon. However Netdragon finally nuked Jumpstart, but Neopets is apparently still profitable enough to be allowed to live. As a result they created a new company, World of Neopia Inc, and WoNi owns neopets now. So they are now independently moderating their own game. Staff has always given a shit about neopets and wanted to make a better game but jumpstart hand Netdragon have been shaking them by the throat like Bart Simpson. It's been pretty awful. Neopets has turned into a sort of shuffling zombie gacha game and become virtually unplayable. Only an incredibly dedicated user base who fucking refuse to leave has kept it afloat.

However now that the neopets team is actually in charge of neopets.... Yes, it's very possible the game might see real improvement. It's pretty exciting. We have a community manager in the discord (that's not new) who seems pretty happy.

I am very hesitant to get excited because I'm not joking about neopets being a fucking shuffling zombie and an unplayable game. We are so deep in the shitter it's unreal. And even with TNT in charge- well, I've run some numbers from Netdragon shareholders report about the budget and I've got an educated guess as to the operating costs and... Well, it's not great. I don't think they have all that much funding to work with considering the scale of the job of improving neopets. Which is. A huge fucking job. An absolute nightmare. So I am hesitant to get excited because I don't want to be let down again. Hell, the jumpstart acquisition was supposed to be exciting.

So, yes, it is very exciting and genuinely might be the dawn of a new day for neopets. It might also be business as usual. Only time shall tell.

[sawkinator]

Neopets NFTs: A tangent

(A somewhat continuation of my previous posts about the Neopets NFTs)

Okay so this doesn’t have much to do with the NFTs or Neopets Metaverse ‘project’ itself but imo it’s kind of wild on its own and needs to be recorded for posterity

So there’s one person in particular who’s been a major shill for the Neopets NFTs since the beginning. Let’s call them ‘Musty’.

Now I say ‘shill’ but I and many others believe he isn’t actually paid, he’s just that passionate about a project that, frankly, was doomed to start from the beginning, blissfully ignoring the insane amount of red flags.

At the beginning of this whole thing this dude spent like, 36 hours on the Neoboards (basically the Neopets forums) shilling the project and debating anyone who had any concerns.

He did so with a rather young account that already had a lot of nice pets on it which was kind of sus (and like. a lot of NFTbros bought shell accounts to do this. Which is just sad.)

This guy also came into the Discord server for the Neopets subreddit to try and have ‘debates’ about NFTs and the Metaverse but ended up just being a huge prick. Finally he was banned.

Musty continued to be a huge proponent of the project in the Metaverse server, telling people to stop spreading ‘fud’ (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) about the project and acting almost like a cult member? This dude’s vibes are rancid.

“NFTs can help get people out of poverty! Also fuck you if you’re poor lmao” ???

However when Neopets Metaverse announced the changes to their launch, like dropping Raydium and introducing a ‘price curve’ where the NFTs would get more expensive the more were sold. This upset Musty enough to even write an entire blog post begging the Metaverse team to delay the launch and change the launch method to be more ‘fair’.

Which like... Neopets (especially under Jumpstart) has a looong history of not really listening to the userbase on basically anything, and given that Jumpstart’s parent company, Netdragon, owned 2 of the 3 companies involved in this project. Almost the entire active Neopets community was vehemently against the NFTs and they went ahead with it anyways. You think they’d listen to one NFTbro and his opinions about how they should do the launch? Almost certainly not.

So with that background, let’s get to the genuinely crazy part of the story: the Maraquan Lutari.

This guy really loves this particular species/color combo, and one was even his active pet on the Neoboards (he claimed he ‘bought’ it but he also might have used a perk that Neopets Premium users have where you can make a pet basically any species/color combo you want but who even fucking knows. Also why did this guy buy a premium membership on a one-week-old account?). Musty had even been hoping to get or buy an NFT featuring a Maraquan Lutari.

The problem with this particular pet is that it was a fanmade design that Neopets asked the creator if they could use on the website, and at one point it was decided that any fanmade pet designs wouldn’t be used in the NFTs.

Naturally this also pissed Musty off, so in response, he took an image of his own Maraquan Lutari and minted it into an NFT without the original artist’s permission.

Of course this didn’t go unnoticed, and he was called out for it.

Even the original artist commented on his tweet about his NFT about how stupid he was being.

And then, under the guise of ‘properly paying artists’ (but not fucking asking permission to use their art in the first place apparently), he offered to compensate the artist.

In cryptocurrency.

Why crypto and not actual money? Supposedly, because he doesn’t like Paypal (which like, fair. But paying with monopoly money that burns down forests isn’t that morally superior my good bitch. Also like... Venmo exists.)

Of course, the artist turned down this ridiculous offer. Not long after minting his Lutari, it was taken down with a DMCA because at the end of the day it’s copyrighted Neopets material.

Now the REAL kicker to this whole story: neither Lutaris or Maraquan-painted pets were included in the NFTs. This guy was never going to get his Maraquan Lutari NFT.

And that’s the story of Musty, the Maraquan Lutari Guy.

(s/o to everyone on the r/Neopets Discord for the screenshots)

[sawkinator]

Final (???) Neopets NFT update

(Previous posts: first, second, third, fourth)

Alright so the minting period for the NFTs has been over for like two weeks. In the end, 4,224 NFTs were produced out of the 4,533 tokens sold (which includes publicly-sold tokens and the 500 meant for giveaways/staff).

Reminder that this was out of 10,000 tokens available to the public. Reminder reminder that when the NFTs were originally announced it was stated that 20,000 would be available and it was halved for reasons that remain unknown.

Inevitably some people missed the minting window and they are Not Happy! I present to you a mere fraction of the salt, courtesy of various people on the r/Neopets Discord server.

People are demanding SOME kind of compensation/refunds, so finally...

On the one hand, it sucks to lose hundreds of dollars. On the other, you should really read the fine print if you’re gonna throw hundreds of dollars at something. Those of us on the r/Neopets server frequently brought up the November 18th deadline and we all knew it - when the people who hate a project know more about it than the people who support it, that’s... something.

Also hey remember when someone made 100 more tokens out of thin air?

This conveniently happened not long after it was pointed out in the Metaverse server.

We finally got an answer back from ‘the team’ (whoever the fuck they are):

And then...

Now I don’t like to make outright assumptions, but frankly given the shadiness of this entire project, I would not put it past the NMC team to be doing just this, lmao. The fact that we (the actual Neopets community) discovered this, and not the NFTbros praising the blockchain for being ‘permanent’ and ‘uneditable’ and public, is yet Another Something. Bitches really thought they could fuck around and that we wouldn’t notice.

People are also now selling their NFTs on Solana’s market, and most people appear to be selling at a loss.

... And then you get these people who are either on crack or trying to money launder.

There is, apparently, a site that ranks the ‘rarity’ of all the NFTs based on what traits they have and also puts a value on them. Except that’s no guarantee an NFT will sell at its ‘valued’ price but we all know how delusional NFTbros are.

So between the anger at unredeemed tokens, the pathetic number sold, and the sad secondary market, any reasonable person would say this project was a flop.

Enter the NetDragon press release (reminder that ND owns Jumpstart, who owns Neopets)

Like okay I know press releases are meant to make your company look good but good LORD.

They also claim the project was met with strong interest from the Neopets community which is just a big fat fucking lie and a slap in the face to those of us who actually play the damn game. They also touched on plans to further invest in metaverse/NFT-related projects (though don’t mention anything related to Neopets specifically) which is also Not Fucking Great.

On another note, we at the r/Neopets server apparently have a ‘community’ NFT.

Some people understandably have mixed feelings about this, but personally? I think it’s kind of hilarious. Will having our ‘own’ NFT really mean anything in this project? Who knows, but I think it’s better to do what we can in the unlikely event an actual Neopets Metaverse game is made.

The conclusion to this saga appears to have reached a (temporary?) end with this new announcement from the Neopets Metaverse server.

So any further developments are, essentially, paywalled (unless the person who officially owns ‘our’ NFT decides to connect a wallet and shit, but I don’t think that’s something we’re going to demand of them if they don’t want to :P)

HOWEVER..........

People have recently discovered this Twitter account, which is... interesting.

This twitter account is several months older than the ‘official’ Neopets Metaverse one. It apparently has no official connection to Neopets or the Neopets Metaverse Collection, yet their website includes a ton of links related to the NMC, and they’ve retweeted quite a lot from the actual Neopets Metaverse twitter. They also have a different Discord server, which has a whopping... -checks notes- 4 members.

No one quite knows what to make of this. There are a couple of ‘retro’ Neopets sites (based on the pre-2007 overhaul of the site called ‘the conversion’) that Neopets tolerates the existence of since they aren’t for-profit, so this thing might be in that same category. But if ‘metaverse’ is going to continue becoming synonymous with blockchains and NFTs, these guys are going to get DMCA’d the second they try to get involved with crypto and actual money. What they were doing fucking around in late 2020-most of 2021 is anyone’s guess.

So it seems for now that the Neopets NFT saga is over and boy has it been A Ride. Whatever happens with the Metaverse, I just hope the Neopets brand can recover from this and that the site doesn’t get killed off by Jumpstart and Netdragon within the next couple of years. :,)

[theneotrash]

Fuck you Netdragon and Jumpstart