[Neopets Battledome] How much is it monitored?

[Bat]

This is kind of insane?? Why are people going to resort to the potential doxxing of cheaters on a literal children's website. People need to get a grip on reality holy hell. It is not that serious.

They're convinced that expelling the cheaters will make the game more fair and enjoyable for everyone while failing to grasp that they're scaring everyone away in the process. They'll make arguments to justify it like if you're doing nothing wrong, then you won't run into them, but remember that they're looking at every piece of data about everyone and singling out players to go after. They've appointed themselves to have totally unrestricted access to every piece of personal information that you've ever shared within the Neopets properties, including the Neopets apps you've installed on your tablets and smart phones as well as your premium subscription information, which links your account to your physical address by way of your credit card, debit card, or PayPal details. Every smart device you've used, every e-mail address you've ever used on the site, every IP address you've used to access the site, every personal story you've ever told to a trusted friend through the Neomail feature, every commodity you've acquired by any means - it's all there for them to sift through.

But they're the good guys, so I'm sure that everyone would agree that it's a-okay that they datamine all of us to go after the bad guys.

[nexaeox]

They're convinced that expelling the cheaters will make the game more fair and enjoyable for everyone while failing to grasp that they're scaring everyone away in the process... your premium subscription information, which links your account to your physical address by way of your credit card, debit card, or PayPal details.

I am legitimately shell shocked by that - what is actually wrong with these people? They call this the black market, but that is ACTUALLY criminal. Like they've turned Neopets into an actual freaking cartel battleground. It def makes up my mind to not invest in a premium subscription at all, incase one of these freaks takes issue with me undercutting them by 100np and decides to put a brick through my IRL window. I'm surprised a community like that is allowed to exist in the open though, this is the kind of stunts that get sites like Kiwifarms banned from payment processors.

This type of behavior is def a liability for whoever's enabling it - and a liability for Neopets if they're not protecting this level of identifying information. They're going to target the wrong adult with disposable income (or worse, doxx a child) and there's gonna be a lawsuit. Hopefully it won't result in bankrupting the very thing they're trying to protect.

[Bat]

I wanted to come back and support the site during a time of transition to new ownership when it's especially vulnerable to failing if investors don't like the numbers they're seeing. But I have no means of even begging to catch up with people who have been playing consistently for 20 years and will sell items that should only cost a few 100k for several million because cash is worthless to them. Them inflating the economy beyond a new/returning player's ability to compete doesn't seem very fair either from my perspective. If I don't legitimately, manually play the game for hours and hours on end - which would look just as suspicious - then how am I suppose to legitimately get anywhere? It sounds like what they actually want is to make an exclusive club where only them and people who agree with them have anything of value. If they're literally breaking the rules to 'out' other people then they lose any pretense of moral highground imo, it's just about the 'correct' people seizing market control.

You can definitely cheat to get ahead in the game. The majority of our community is doing that on a daily basis. However, you started this conversation looking for pointers at how to let your automation run for especially long periods of time to perform a task that most people would stop doing after it ceased to be profitable for them. That's the kind of repetitive activity that would put you on the radar. Build your automation to behave as humanly as possible. Humans take breaks. Humans stop performing tasks when there isn't a profit or vanity motivator for doing them. Humans get bored of repetitive tasks and wander off to do other things. Build in pauses, stops, and even slight mistakes wherever possible to appear human.

[kalez]

every personal story you've ever told to a trusted friend through the Neomail feature

Whoa, didn't know that, I thought deleted neomails weren't retained after like a few months.
Do you know if they're all actually still live on the servers?

[Bat]

I am legitimately shell shocked by that - what is actually wrong with these people? They call this the black market, but that is ACTUALLY criminal. Like they've turned Neopets into an actual freaking cartel battleground. It def makes up my mind to not invest in a premium subscription at all, incase one of these freaks takes issue with me undercutting them by 100np and decides to put a brick through my IRL window. I'm surprised a community like that is allowed to exist in the open though, this is the kind of stunts that get sites like Kiwifarms banned from payment processors.

This type of behavior is def a liability for whoever's enabling it - and a liability for Neopets if they're not protecting this level of identifying information. They're going to target the wrong adult with disposable income (or worse, doxx a child) and there's gonna be a lawsuit. Hopefully it won't result in bankrupting the very thing they're trying to protect.

They're definitely crossing a line with this hacker-fed targeting stunt of theirs. They're convinced that it's for the greater good, and only the collective backlash of all the communities will force a change at this point. It's important for our community to speak up about this as well. I hope that everyone looking in on this thread is taking notes.

You can take measures to hide your identity through services like Privacy while still paying money for Neopets services, but we shouldn't be required to take those steps just because the people running the site won't get off their butts and close the security holes. For as much blustering as they've done about having a renaissance, they've been uncomfortably quiet about what they're doing to go after the hacker running wild in their service.

Whoa, didn't know that, I thought deleted neomails weren't retained after like a few months.
Do you know if they're all actually still live on the servers?

Erasing them after a period of time doesn't do you much good when somebody regularly copies the table from the database to hold onto it. It's true that normally deleted Neomail would be purged outright after the expiration period, but everything is being copied out on a regular basis.

[kalez]

Erasing them after a period of time doesn't do you much good when somebody regularly copies the table from the database to hold onto it. It's true that normally deleted Neomail would be purged outright after the expiration period, but everything is being copied out on a regular basis.

Right, that makes sense.
It's worse than I thought then, I was only thinking about passwords/emails/items and payment information.

[thegreatpinoy91]

If there were more kids playing the adults, then okay i get their point. But i think most of the playerbase are adults - those who grew up with neopets.

We all have jobs to do, some have kids, so yeah, not everyone has time on their hands like when they were kids and able to sneak in time to play

[nexaeox]

You can definitely cheat to get ahead in the game. The majority of our community is doing that on a daily basis. However, you started this conversation looking for pointers at how to let your automation run for especially long periods of time to perform a task that most people would stop doing after it ceased to be profitable for them. That's the kind of repetitive activity that would put you on the radar. Build your automation to behave as humanly as possible. Humans take breaks. Humans stop performing tasks when there isn't a profit or vanity motivator for doing them. Humans get bored of repetitive tasks and wander off to do other things. Build in pauses, stops, and even slight mistakes wherever possible to appear human.

Oh right, I made and ran simple bots in MMOs for a while so I know general hygiene when it comes to setting up schedules- I suppose I could have articulated that a bit better in my OP. It's just when it came to low stakes browser games I was more expecting staff stepping in when behavior looked suspiciously consistent on the backend to be my issue, which is something I figured I could anticipate and work around with community information - hence the original nature of my question. I have both legitimately, and with tools, played many MMOs for excess of 18 hours in a 24 hour period - and have been investigated plenty of times in those. You generally get a feel for when you 'trip the line' so to speak and set off an internal review. I thought there must be some sort of internal logic to flagging accounts automatically I'd need to dodge around, but now I'm seeing that seems like the least of my worries. I had no idea the unique scope of neopet's civllian anti-cheater corps. This has all been very enlightening for me, thank you very much for your advice, insight, and patience in explaining the situation in full.

[Bat]

Oh right, I made and ran simple bots in MMOs for a while so I know general hygiene when it comes to setting up schedules- I suppose I could have articulated that a bit better in my OP. It's just when it came to low stakes browser games I was more expecting staff stepping in when behavior looked suspiciously consistent on the backend to be my issue, which is something I figured I could anticipate and work around with community information - hence the original nature of my question. I have both legitimately, and with tools, played many MMOs for excess of 18 hours in a 24 hour period - and have been investigated plenty of times in those. You generally get a feel for when you 'trip the line' so to speak and set off an internal review. I thought there must be some sort of internal logic to flagging accounts automatically I'd need to dodge around, but now I'm seeing that seems like the least of my worries. I had no idea the unique scope of neopet's civllian anti-cheater corps. This has all been very enlightening for me, thank you very much for your advice, insight, and patience in explaining the situation in full.

Honestly, if it weren't for the players themselves policing other players based on arbitrary criteria, you wouldn't really have much to worry about. Their CDN's firewall can get stupidly aggressive when automation is left unchecked, and it doesn't discriminate the bots from the rest of the site's normal activity when it starts blocking. You can effectively DDoS the whole site using its own security system. As for the staff themselves, they don't usually look into logs or flagged account activities much nowadays. There was a period of time where they relied on the players to report one another before stepping in, but that has mostly passed with the introduction of hacker insights. The staff mostly just want to be left alone to generate content and keep the lights on. That doesn't stop the people we've been talking about from going after players they suspect for cheating though. If anything, it makes them more desperate for tribal justice. There's where the real craziness happens.