I was talking to them about Neopets. Well, Neopets and undead people eating bagels. But that's not the point. It was a normal conversation, anyway. Interesting. Fun. I brought up how Neopets changed.. and.. well, told them that I wanted to write a letter to the Neopian Times. See if I could get my opinions out there, and guessing that they would, of course, be censored. Like everything good in Neopets now.
While talking to them, I wrote this, in the chat room. Actually, they helped me with it. It was me, (charnorse/the_dragonfly), Amy (ginny_malfoy), Shadow (shadowblade13), and Mel (silverflamel).
Dear Neopets,
I've been at your site for a long time. Longer then most. My friends and I have a guild, and it used to be the center of our little online community.
We spent a lot of time on our guild. We had a project going. Sugar Island. We had this great idea. We wanted to take over TikuTaku island, and turn it into Sugar Island. We had huge plans for it, a million ideas.
We sent it in. A few times. Never got an answer.
You could have said no. But you never sent us anything back.
We don't even have proof that we did it, since someone- and it wasn't one of the admin. Staff of the guild- deleted all of our posts. All 800-and-some of them.
That's not the worst of what's happened, though. Not at all. The site used to be great. Neopets used to be great.
Another thing that happened is all the newbies. Bad monitors at the message boards. You get a warning if you make your own board and spam it, but you can't delete posts from someone spamming ALL the boards. They post the same things, over and over and over again. The kirbies- I'm sure you know about them. I hope you do, if you don't you need to pay more attention to your site. It's hard to have an interesting conversation on the boards when you can ask people to cyber over NeoMail, but you get frozen if you mention gay rights.
Did I mention that the Roleplaying board is now full of newbies that don't know the first thing about roleplaying, and a lot of the good roleplayers left? Because if I didn't get that point across, I need to.
I'm sure almost everyone has a story like this. Like the annoyers, like our guild. Something went wrong at Neopets, and it messed up what they were doing. And, since Neopets can censor any thoughts they don't want out there and cover up whatever they want to, they can't do anything about it.
It's not exactly kid-friendly when you have annoyers, as they call themselves, going onto message boards and.. well, I'd like to say what here, but I still want to get this in the Neopian Times. And if I said what it was, you'd never post it. You have something to blame for the message boards getting messed up, but not the Neopian Times. Hence the paper's lameness.
But I digress.
You see, all the little things your site had, the exitement when the Battledome opened, the hysteria over Mystery Island.. the Roleplaying Boards that used to be good.. that was what made Neopets Neopets.
When you crack down on people that are cheating on Tombola, and having multiple accounts, that's fine. But when you're paying attention to things that don't directly affect other players, as opposed to things that do, like people hacking other people's accounts, then you're just being stupid.
Neopets Staff, hear my plea. Neopia, please take my side. We can make Neopia the mystical, user-centered place it used to be.
Sincerely,
charnorse/the_dragonfly