FOOD CLUB BOTTER

[♥ Rattata ♥]

never bet on TNT doing something right

[infestedvirus]

Theres one thing for sure. Back in the day I was a pretty good restocker. I made hundreds of millions even when it was packed with abers and stuff... And now, I dont get a single thing (legit).
Its the same with wishing well. I used to win at least once a month with 80k online players. Now never.
But good thing is that I really dont care ... We should just play the way we wanna.

[oneofthefcbs]

Got told by a friend about this discussion so I joined to reply. I only skimmed through a few messages and wrote a few quick thoughts. Sorry I don’t have time to proofread



it is the *** seller who clears 15k USD per month selling NP and rare items which is enough to motivate them to have a dedicated setup i would imagine

There are botters but the idea that one person is botting on 60k accounts daily is pure ****.

There is one big botter running that business that nt keeps talking about, but about 10+ more businesses (and increasing) running operations of 1000+ bots. There are several small businesses in lower income countries “creating” shell accounts and playing games that can’t be botted.

These "60k accounts" (it is probably more likely several hundred thousand) are completely disposable and can change hands between 5 people. I don't know how you can associate accounts with the current owner.

Multiple of these botting businesses have recently done Reddit AMAs to clarify the botting situation, but the Neopets reddit mods quickly removed them. You might find them on google.

Also: $15k? Double it and start there. And that’s assuming he only sells on 1 website. This is a multi million dollar industry. There are about 20 different markets, some in different countries and languages. There are also different supply chains going to each market (for example, a seller on the eBay equivalent in Hong Kong might buy from the person at a bulk reseller rate).



Is FC botter in the room with us right now

Maybe not the main one, but several of them likely would be.



Thats why the focus of my topic is the HOW

Look at medium.com. The same site blogging about neo’s revival has a guide telling you how to code a bot for Neopets. It’s not hard to connect a script to a database.



Are they a convenient smoke screen or scapegoat for the site's deeper problems

Yes.



people returning i can see how it could be picking up for

People have returned to Neopets in recent years specifically because they can now safely buy things that they previously couldnt. Several people have thanked me personally for helping keep Neopets alive during the 2021-2023 period.



has a negative impact both for players and for the site in general

Disagree. See the point above.

If this was bad for the site, why would 50%+ of the players buy NP/items (yes, including many of those who complain about it on the NB/reddit)?

They want them. Neo should be thrilled to have so many people wanting to spend a fortune. They just don’t sell the right product.

Also, the inflation has nothing to do with botting. It’s more than the item generation exploits (which previously put more rare items in circulation) have now been patched, and the 2022 password reset caused sellers to lose trillions of NP worth of the remaining generated items. There are also other reasons, but in general, blaming inflation on botting is a cop-out that nt wants you to believe and the Neo players want a scapegoat.

Aside from impacting restocking, the only problem the botter is causing is creating an issue for everyone to complain about. If the botter was removed, the same problems would still exist.



The absurd restocking dominance that the food club botter has really destroys the ability for the normal player

That is the only problem. However, it’s not the “food club botter’s” fault. If he didn’t get these items, claim autobuyers and bots from other sites would.



I don't understand why TNT still hasn't shut down Foodclub

As I said, everything is being botted, not just food club. If FC was removed, the botter would just get more aggressive in other areas. Or just use more accounts to spin trudy.



but I cannot see the demand for that much points or even items to sell

That is incorrect. And since nt exposed that this demand indeed exists, more copycats and startup botters have been entering the market. For example, people are hiring freelancer coders to make bots.



I do wonder how much of an impact theguy has on server lag

Absolutely none.

Neo lag is usually caused by 1 of the servers behind the load balancer being unresponsive. This is why it randomly lags on average 1 in 10/20/30/40 page views, and not single every page view, and it’s not 1 particular part of the website.

Neo servers are laggy after maintenance which is due to their architecture (think Varnish or Memcached/MySQL cache needs to fill up again) OR some large DB queries/migrations are still running.

I speak from experience: when a new feature gets released and Neo is lagging, it’s impossible to code/test a bot/script. It takes a while, and by then, the site is usually running fine. Of course during the lag, Neoreddit is blaming the “60k better”, but that’s an incorrect assumption.

Furthermore, 10 bots create the same traffic as a normal user. Why? Bots typically go straight to the page they need to play. A regular user would open 100 pages and spend an hour deciding what to do. That is unless of course, the bots have been intentionally slowed, but this would consume computing resources.



I never thought to buy anything Neopets related except for here in Clraikland. I just feel safe here.

Generally speaking, sites like the one where the person sells are far safer than forums. Less scammers and easy for you to get your money back if you get scammed.



The way I see it is that they have several machines
As the accounts complete their tasks, it is also automated to where their programs dump the results into a log emailed to him daily or something. logs include the account info, food club results, items restocked etc

Your on the right track




Can't TNT just hire a professional private investigator and find out who it is for 100% and just file charges

What charges? The consensus is that violating a game’s rules are not illegal. And which botter? The one selling $15k+, the 5 in the US, the 3 in Canada, the 3 in the UK, the 3 in Singapore, the 3 in Australia, the 10 in Columbia/Brazil, should I go on?

Since Neopets doesn’t sell Neopoints, it’s no different to botting Mario Kart.

Furthermore, websites that people pay to play have botters “beating”/taking points from paying players. Think Runescape, World of Warcraft, Miniclip pool. Have you ever heard of anyone getting charged for that?

Runescape market is much bigger. There are youtube videos explaining how to start up a runescape botting enterprise.

[Miri]

hello @(you need an account to see links)

Thank you for posting, this is exactly the type of information I was hoping to learn from this thread

[Buizel]

Yet another reason for TNT to patch NT access faster. He doesn't even know the full scope of the situation, but he has no problem spinning a convenient story that appeases the peanut gallery of the Neopets Discord.

Granted, I'm taking what you're saying as well, oneof, with a grain of salt since it's unverifiable, but it does potentially provide more insight into the situation, so thank you for that.

[Miri]

also, how much capital is usually, generally, ballpark needed to start botting on neo if someone wanted to use 1000 accounts for example?


lmfaoooo

(you need an account to see links)

[oneofthefcbs]

Yet another reason for TNT to patch NT access faster

I can say with 100% certainty that the person has made incorrect claims and exists for fame and bringing attention to issues that suits him (assuming its a he).
One thing that becomes clear in this industry is that everyone has their own agenda. NT doesnt do this for the good of his heart.

Its also likely that he is generating np/items to sell by directly entering into the neopets DB (which he can), like changing a number in a spreadsheet, and his posts about botters are primarily to eliminate his selling competition, so he has a monopoly.

I doubt he was thinking "hey I'll make reddit posts about cheaters" when he was busy hacking neopets.

My biggest personal fear is that NT could deface Neopets.com with kiddy explicit images in minutes, and ruin Neopets as we know it forever. TNT Dom, and neo players in general, evidently dont see this is a business risk for some reason.


also, how much capital is usually, generally, ballpark needed to start botting on neo if someone wanted to use 1000 accounts for example?

If you obtain the accounts yourself, maybe $100 max. Otherwise, probably about $1000

[I_royalty_I]

Got told by a friend about this discussion so I joined to reply. I only skimmed through a few messages and wrote a few quick thoughts. Sorry I don’t have time to proofread

people returning i can see how it could be picking up for

People have returned to Neopets in recent years specifically because they can now safely buy things that they previously couldnt. Several people have thanked me personally for helping keep Neopets alive during the 2021-2023 period.

And you are? Not to be rude, but I think it would be helpful if you shared your insight as to your role and what you are doing to see and share the info you have. Bold claim to personally claim responsibility for keeping neo alive for a few years

I definitely agree there is more than one market. There is, or were, a huge amount of users in Germany and a number of Asian countries. There is a language barrier there, so unless you speak the language I'm sure it's difficult to get spun up and operate there. I know there are multiple groups in different places like FB/Discord/whatsapp/telegram/etc that have markets similar to what ck provides. There are also independent selling sites that can provide quite a hefty revenue stream with the right advertising. I'd imagine the advertising space is much cheaper now than when I had my few sites up back in the day lol

I agree that many things can be botted, obviously. Look at all the scripts and such that we have here on ck - and I'm sure there are other resources out there if you know where to look for them. Farming new accounts is good for scoresending, but many features require an account to be of a certain age. Food club simply being the most obvious and easiest point of entry if you have OLD accounts.

[Tapir]

Yet another reason for TNT to patch NT access faster

I can say with 100% certainty that the person has made incorrect claims and exists for fame and bringing attention to issues that suits him (assuming its a he).
One thing that becomes clear in this industry is that everyone has their own agenda. NT doesnt do this for the good of his heart.

Am I wrong in assuming he was just someone who was probably making money via exploits but got burned at some point (either getting caught or losing a lot of stock or something along those lines) and is just being extra in an "if I can't have fun nobody can!!!!" kind of way? I always got that impression whenever he posted on reddit, it had that tone. And now he has like a fan club almost. But I also am really out of the loop so this is all surface level observation.

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[I_royalty_I]

Am I wrong in assuming he was just someone who was probably making money via exploits but got burned at some point (either getting caught or losing a lot of stock or something along those lines) and is just being extra in an "if I can't have fun nobody can!!!!" kind of way? I always got that impression whenever he posted on reddit, it had that tone. And now he has like a fan club almost. But I also am really out of the loop so this is all surface level observation.

Please log in to view spoilers.

There is a post WAY back when, where he posted info on a ton of BIG accounts - taking way back in the day.
He said he posted it because the person he gave the info to, in order to secure things, sell them off, and give him his cut of the profits - ran off without giving him anything. So maybe now he is playing white knight and posting this stuff to "help" the community, but in the past he was here on ck cracking into accounts and selling stuff for a profit just like anybody else.