This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/Upbeat_Ruin on 2024-06-22 18:36:05+00:00.
Hi! Some absolutely glorious drama went down on Neopets earlier this year, and I've been champing at the bit to post about it. This isn't about the A-pea-calypse of Christmas 2023, however; this is something different.
Neopets is a browser-based pet simulation game. It is THE virtual pet site. It wasn't the first of its kind, but it did set a precedent for virtual pet games. It walked so Webkinz, Mweor, Flight Rising, and all the others could run. If you were a kid or an edgy college student in the early noughties, you probably played Neopets at some point. (No, your pets aren't "probably dead". Neopets don't die, dicknips. Your Neopets are either still starving on your long-abandoned account or were wiped from existence in an account purge. Sweet dreams.) Founded in 1999, it continues to this day. Ostensibly the target audience is children, but in practice, most of the site's user base is nostalgic millenials and zoomers. Soon, Neopets will be celebrating twenty-five years of daily omelette distribution, obsessing over magic paint brushes, cake slices falling out of the sky, and spinning wheels to get your pets struck by lightning. Oh, and make that seventeen years of obsessing over UCs.
Okay, so what's a UC, you say. This requires a bit of a history lesson. In 2007, Neopets went through a radical overhaul that changed the site layout to its current form, introduced the premium currency (Neocash), and made it possible to "customise" (dress up) your pets. To achieve this, almost all the pets were converted into standardized (and much more boring) poses and ported to Flash. I say almost, and that's where the seed of this drama is planted.
You see, pets with certain species/color combinations were not automatically converted to the new artstyle. For example, the Faerie Ixi (a pet that looks like a goat) would not be converted, whereas a standard blue Ixi would be. You could choose to convert your pet if it wasn't changed. The pets that didn't get changed were dubbed Unconverted (UC). They couldn't be customised, nor would they ever show any emotions besides the default happy look, but they retained the classic artstyle.
And they became the most coveted assets on the site, bar none. Everyone wants a UC. I want one, you want one, your mother's cousin's roommate wants one. The "Pet Trading" board is a neverending chorus of people screaming about what UCs they want. If you want UC pet traders to even glance in your direction, you'd better have a valuable pet to trade for and a multi-paragraph essay on why you'd be a good owner ready. I don't think actual pet shelters use this much scrunity when adopting out real animals. There's a tier system in place to judge the relative values of 17+ year old JPEGs. ("You think your plushie Mynci is worth the same as my Faerie Draik? Get real!") People have even gone so far as to hack into old, inactive accounts to steal UCs and sell them out for real money (which is against site policy), and people will risk getting their accounts banned forever just to get ahold of those precious, precious UCs. If this behavior sounds familiar to you, I must say: you're correct. UC traders were the original NFT bros. But they're not ready for that conversation.
In the nearly seventeen years since The Great Conversion, the UC situation has gotten so severe that players were begging TNT (The Neopets Team, aka our benevolent overlords) to do something. One common suggestion was to implement a feature to deconvert pets for a Neocash fee. It's two birds with one stone, we said: the move would absolutely print money, and it would also kneecap the UC black market. For years, TNT was all "Yeah, we'll totally do that. Any day now! Sure...”Finally, in January of 2024, TNT announced that they would do just that. They introduced the Styling Studio, a feature that would allow players to apply a skin of the unconverted artwork to their pet. It wasn't the same as actually unconverting the pet, but it would be a way to wear the nostalgic artwork on your account. Also, the mascot for the Styling Studio is a nonbinary emo otter, so the fanbase immediately loved them.
Styling Supplies, the item that allows you to apply the skins, is bought with Neocash. It costs about $14 of real money, although it was released at a markdown price, and most players got free Neocash as part of a site event about two months before. So, many people were able to get the item without needing to pay actual money, or less than they would otherwise. Also, people who already owned a UC pet would get a free Styling Supplies to restore the original look of their pet. Both these details will be important later, so keep them in mind.
And then the Fire Nation attacked. As anticipated, the neo-elite with their UCs did NOT, NOT, NOT like this change. If you go over to r/neopets, you can find posts with screenshots of their angry chat board messages, including such gems as emo poetry about their crushed dreams, "I have multiple grounds to sue for this", melodramatic comparisons to historical monuments being destroyed, complaints about an "important site feature" being paywalled, and language that suggested the UC pets were "survivors" whom TNT was genociding. Yes, people really had the gall to claim that their pixel pets being changed was genocide, in the midst of several ACTUAL GENOCIDES happening in real life. And of course, we had the all-important useless petition against the change being made. No internet drama is complete without one. Many people threatened to quit the site or abandon their former UCs to the pound. (So it wasn't about the artwork after all, despite what they told us for years. They just wanted to feel superior.) Among the more level-headed users, the consensus was "these people really need to go outside and touch grass."
Well, despite the protests, TNT went forward with the change. On the 22nd, Neopets went down for maintenance to implement the big change. (We were warned ahead of time about this.) It was supposed to last until around 10:00 am US Pacific Time on the 23rd, but it went over by several hours. TNT must have underestimated how long it would take to implement the changes. Around 5:00 pm Pacific, the site finally came back up...running at a snail's pace from how many people were logged on. A lot of people joked that it seemed TNT had brought back another piece of early 2000s internet nostalgia: insufferably slow dial-up. Despite the insane lag, users bought the Styling tools they sought and applied the nostalgic art to their pets. Soon, r/neopets was replete with people celebrating having obtained their childhood dream pets at long last.
And what of the former UC owners, suddenly without their bragging rights? Well, to no-one's surprise, very few of them actually quit the site like they promised. Most of them came crawling back on the 24th, quietly took their pets to the Styling Studio (or heartlessly abandoned them to the pound), and hit the boards to start pet trading again. Except now, since Styling Supplies turn into a token of a pet/species combination (e.g. apply it to your Ixi to turn it into a Faerie Ixi, and the Styling Supplies turn into a "Nostalgic Faerie Ixi" token. Makes sense? I hope so.), their language had changed. Oh don't get me wrong, the Pet Trading board was still full of obnoxious clapping and red ball emoticons, but now they were trading "tokens" of certain pet/species combos. Yep, they're called tokens. And they're tradeable digital assets stored on a server, each of which is supposedly unique with a single owner...hmm. It really drove the point home about how this nonsense is hardly different from NFT bros getting mad when someone right clicks their ugly monkey JPEGs.
What's the big takeaway from this drama, you may ask? I've wondered the same thing. I think it serves as a reminder of the impermanence of the internet. Your UC that you worked so hard for...or obtained through "other" means...could go from a status symbol to a whole lotta nothing overnight. It also works as a reminder that at the end of the day, you should be caring for Neopets because YOU want them, not because they're status symbols. Just like real pets, you know? I love my neopets dearly, even though (or perhaps because) the Pet Trading board wouldn't find them "valuable". I wouldn't trade them for all the UCs in the world. Don't be the guy having a meltdown on the neoboards because they can't act superior to the neo-proletariat anymore.
Still, I would love to be a Mootix on the wall in a courtroom as someone explains to a judge why they deserve damages for a website changing how their pixel pet looks.