Neopets Live AMA - this Wednesday - Ft. CEO Dom, The infamous Alice, and more

[Aero]

Please apply to be an engineer, Bat. Please. You can just work there a week, fix everything and flounce.

Sadly Bat would be totally underpaid there as an engineer

[♥ Harvest Goddess ♥]

Please apply to be an engineer, Bat. Please. You can just work there a week, fix everything and flounce.

I'll even fund your coffee / lunch for the week you work there. Just because I know you can do it @(you need an account to see links)

[Bat]

If they want to hire me without asking a lot of technical questions, then I'd be happy to blow their minds. I can do things to your database that will leave you weak in the knees.

[Black Dog]

After reading everything here, I’m glad I decided to nap through the whole thing loool.

But the wording with NCUCs is confusing, yet again. A token? Is this another NC gambling thing? I’m definitely not buying if that’s the case.

[♥ GreyFaerie ♥]

Please apply to be an engineer, Bat. Please. You can just work there a week, fix everything and flounce.

If they did this to Alice, can you imagine what they would do to Bat? No, we must protect Bat at all costs.

[♥ Harvest Goddess ♥]

After reading everything here, I’m glad I decided to nap through the whole thing loool.

But the wording with NCUCs is confusing, yet again. A token? Is this another NC gambling thing? I’m definitely not buying if that’s the case.

I think they renamed it because they didn't want it to be 1 time use, from what Dom was saying.

It's like a ray token, so once you activate it I'm assuming you can turn a pet into an uc - but it wouldn't be 1 time use?

He didn't clarify fully but did say they changed it from PB because they didn't want it to be confused for 1 time use!

[birdies]

After reading everything here, I’m glad I decided to nap through the whole thing loool.

But the wording with NCUCs is confusing, yet again. A token? Is this another NC gambling thing? I’m definitely not buying if that’s the case.

The way they talked about it was incredibly unclear.

They were going to make it a paint brush, but they decided they wanted to differentiate it from a paint brush.

So they're calling it a 'ray'.

Dom mentioned you'd get a token for it, but we don't know if it's:

•*a token that changes your pet to a pet of your choosing,
• a token to use a ray that changes your pet to a pet of your choosing
• a token to use a ray that changes your pet to a random UC, or UC within a set type of UCs (eg: fairies)

What we do know is

• it's not coming until at least January (I say at least, because previously it was due in Dec)
• Faeries will be the first pets
• They showed pictures of some non-grandfathered UCs and said that was the art they're working with.
• They didn't say that would be the exact art for the pets but it seems likely.

He did also mention, I think, that it may be connected to the plot. But I thought the plot was going to be later than January.

[Bat]

The tables are probably connected internally to hundreds of services. As he said its not as easy from the backend side. They have so many old out dated features which are probably part of the spaghetti code. So trying to change the database which connects to all these can cause even more issues.

I've seen the schema, and those interconnected services and resources essentially boil down to using usernames and pet names for keys and seeds for various things around the site. It's less than ideal, but the names translate to numbers, so the answer is just to swap the names out with numbers like any other ID system uses. It'll be messy to pull that thread, but they aren't doing themselves any favors by continuing to build around the current setup. The CEO even said that they're implementing a new central login system currently, and this was not long after telling the communities that they can't allow people to rename themselves or their pets. You mean to tell me that they're going to totally swap out the security system, but keep the cruddy username keying system they built in the original version of the site? C'mon. That's lipstick on a pig.

[Buizel]

Bat and Joe sure could help a lot more than the residential Batman in the backend who has solved *checks notes* zero of the problems he reports on Reddit.

[Stunna]

I've seen the schema, and those interconnected services and resources essentially boil down to using usernames and pet names for keys and seeds for various things around the site. It's less than ideal, but the names translate to numbers, so the answer is just to swap the names out with numbers like any other ID system uses. It'll be messy to pull that thread, but they aren't doing themselves any favors by continuing to build around the current setup. The CEO even said that they're implementing a new central login system currently, and this was not long after telling the communities that they can't allow people to rename themselves or their pets. You mean to tell me that they're going to totally swap out the security system, but keep the cruddy username keying system they built in the original version of the site? C'mon. That's lipstick on a pig.

You've seen their internal proprietary db schema? That's interesting...Not surprising though, Neopets isn't a beacon for cybersecurity or even just having the ability to run a company decently.

Yea I understand what you mean, their db keys use usernames/petnames. They probably never updated the code over time and just building around it until it got too big and now changing it will cost them a lot of time and money. They aren't exactly Apple with trillion dollar market cap that they could afford to completely revamp from their original code, they fucked up and with so many different companies that took over Neopets over time it added to the complexity of the code. So they will have to completely redo the core db stuff to get it fixed and that's probably too costly atm.

And that also doesn't include the fact that there is probably tons of office politics in play in the decision making process...