I paint my dream. @goghed - Tumblr Blog

Timothy Adam Matthews

To anybody not in the Neopets community y’all are missing the craziest hobby drama™️ right now. Basically tl;dr is that Neopets’ parent company announced that Neopets would be releasing THOUSANDS of NFTs without even telling the actual staff team responsible for the Neopets site. They literally initially state that they think the NFT announcement is a scam. Once it comes into light that it’s not a scam, Neopets users very very loudly protest this and vocally express that they are against this decision, which goes completely ignored. More details pop up and the whole thing starts to look really suspicious: The NFTs are going to be produced and managed via a third party company that just popped up about a month ago. They are affiliated with Neopets’ parent company in nebulous ways that suggest money laundering. They run an official Neopets Metaverse Discord where the word “gay” is autobanned by a bot but the word “faggot” gets thrown around (as well as alleged racism and transphobia going unmoderated). When people in the server complain about this one of the mods starts spewing insane NFTbro accusations that the people complaining are just trying to spread anti-NFT propaganda or something. Later, it’s revealed that the NFTs themselves are made using stolen/uncredited assets from a Neopets fan site. This is revealed because they don’t even bother to fix a visual glitch that is unique to that site. They refuse to address this or give credit when it’s pointed out, so they aren‘t just taking assets without acknowledgment but this means they cannot even produce their own damn art for the thing. NFTbros start joining Neopets and hacking/buying old accounts to act like long time players in “support” of NFTs. Actual users start protesting with log-off days, unsubscribing from premium membership, sending anti-NFT art to the art gallery, etc. Sketchy Neopets Metaverse Twitter starts promoing NSFW/18+ NFT projects and posting 4chan-tier NFTbro wojak memes (think “virgin X chad Y” type stuff), totally obliterating the whole “Neopets is a family friendly all-ages game where even writing that your Neopets are married to each other or saying the word cuCUMber can get you banned” thing. Finally, most recently, Neopets Metaverse announces their end goal plans for the Neopets NFT project: An entirely pay-to-play version of the site, where everything you do is powered by cryptocurrency microtransactions. To make matters worse, this announcement reveals that the third party does not know a SINGLE THING about Neopets, and describes “pay to play” features that literally are not a thing on the site, while not mentioning a single aspect of the site that is actually possible. This is alongside the fact that the actual, FREE to play Neopets website is currently almost completely unplayable since they have not converted it since Flash died. This makes it look like Neopets is slowly being switched over to entirely pay-to-play via cryptocurrency microtransactions.

Here are the real kickers:

1. Neopets actually did a cryptocurrency project a few years ago. The project died with a whimper and never saw any end results, leaving a ton of people having sunk their money into something completely worthless.

2. The “NFTs” are literally just randomly generated stock Neopets. With thousands and thousands of pet/color/clothing combinations to choose from, they all inevitably look like absolute shit. You cannot dress them up, change their color or species or outfit, or even name or care for them or pick their gender. And given the nature of NFTs, your “ownership” of them at all is nebulous at best. Functionally, you have significantly more ownership of your Neopet by just making a damn account on the website and creating it there for free, where you have full customization abilities and it is attached directly to your account information.