How did you find out about cheating?

[firedrops]

Curious how everyone's villain arc began

For me, I was "friends" with a few well known people in the Avatar Chat back in '11 or possibly earlier??? Yes. I cringe about it now that I think about it. Still don't know the reason to this day but one of them got banned because reasons? Me being the naive kid was like don't worry man, we'll help you rebuild but he was like nah I'm good. I have 100s of accounts which made me O_o cause again. Naive kid. I did eventually drop Neopets and lost contact with all those people but when I checked in recently, the guy is still around and a pretty well known TCer.

Oh yeah. That and the fact my main got permad for leading people to Facebook to keep in contact with said banned person. Never said I was a genius in the past.

I don't know if this is in the right section or not but please delete/move if it isn't?

[Bat]

Ha ha! Villian arc, right. Given that we're surrounded by some of the chillest Neopets enthusiasts I've ever had the pleasure of knowing, it's funny to be reminded that we're the bad guys. As baseless as that accusation often is, it's easier to blame the devil you know. That's such a shame. Many of the people that I've come to know in this community don't fit the motif at all.

I got fed up with always being poor and not having a stacked pet, so I used some cruddy old programs from a dairy-themed cheating community and immediately got iced because there were zero safety nets for an inexperienced user. It was then that I knew that I was destined to live a life of crime. I started building automation back in 2005, and I've been at it ever since.

[Unown]

Since young, I've never seen cheating as being bad. It's just a smarter way of doings and a better use of your time, even if it wasn't the intended use.

In most games, cheating is bad because it takes away from others opportunities and chances and hoards them all for yourself. You might argue that that could be bad. However, in such a grindy game like neopets where 80% of the automation/cheating doesn't even affect anyone else, it's just the smarter way to do things.

I started looking for cheats when I was young because I was tired of spending SO much time on this game and always ending up getting nothing because of 'luck'.

Thankful to all the scripts and programs that we have here that keep us safe as well.

[firedrops]

Ha ha! Villian arc, right.

I framed it that way because like you said most people are really chill. There seems to be a sentiment that we cheat because we want to be malicious to other users. Or the "holier than thou" feel because I earned everything legit dy spending all day on Neopets... which most of us probaby don't have as adults with responsibilities.

[Alienator]

Since young, I've never seen cheating as being bad. It's just a smarter way of doings and a better use of your time, even if it wasn't the intended use...

This 100% is the reason I got into cheating. I found out about it when I figured there HAD to be a way to just send game score data to the server, "it's just a website request, how hard could it be, surely someone has done it already?" I searched a little, and it didn't take me long to find j03's score sender. This was way back when he had it completely open to the public, I think you only needed to sign up for a forum membership to download the program, but I don't think he was auth-checking against the forum user data yet.

It feels like it's been so long since those days, and yet it also feels like it was just yesterday. Looking at my forum "joined" date just trips me out. This account has technically been around longer than @(you need an account to see links)!

[Bat]

I framed it that way because like you said most people are really chill. There seems to be a sentiment that we cheat because we want to be malicious to other users. Or the "holier than thou" feel because I earned everything legit dy spending all day on Neopets... which most of us probaby don't have as adults with responsibilities.

Oh sure! What you said makes perfect sense, and so does what you've elaborated with. Our biggest opponents seem to be locked in the mindset that we're a bunch of mean jerks making their lives miserable for the thrill of it. The truth is that I don't have the bottomless free time that I did when I was a kid to spend performing vacuous tasks for practically worthless rewards. As much as I love the game, I'm not going to bend over backwards to play it like everybody else just to give those crybabies some peace of mind. Sorry that you didn't win an expensive stamp because you were too lazy to socialize and have the answer handed to you, but that doesn't mean we should all suffer for your shortsightedness.

Let people enjoy things on their own terms.

[Cinderella]

My original legit account that I worked so hard on got hacked back in the day and TNT said the hacker 'did too much damage to reverse' and wouldn't give it back.
So I pretty much stuff y'all I'm not working THAT hard to get all I had lost...

[Charmander]

Oh man I guess my first toe dip into cheating was funnily enough after having my account iced for autobuying. I had no idea what that even meant and I had to look it up. I tried to get my account back but they said my IP was sus and wouldn't that me. I was living in university residence at the time and the internet was a weird network to connect to. So then I was like OK eff you. I started collecting dailies on multiple accounts and doing those weird add visits that give you NPs every day. Then I started messing with games with a speed gear to get avatars and game
High scores, then transitioned to using AoB and now......I'm here haha and using scripts and when I have a working PC using the sweet bots here. It's a slippery slope but it truly made the game more enjoyable and the community here was way better than any on site community I had experience with.

[firedrops]

For sure, so many of the tasks on Neopets are so monotonous and tedious so losing everything is lame. Automation definitely makes it more bearable.

Being an avid avatar collector in the past meant that my first attempts at cheating were AoB. Probably gave myself a little too much power when I discovered that I could suddenly obtain the avatars that were once out of my reach and proceeded to send too many avatar scores in a short span of time. I did have fun with it for the short time it lasted and seeing how much I could get away with blatant cheating.

[TipsyTay]

Haha, a fun thread!

I think when I was a kid, I was just sad I couldn't figure out how people made so many nps. It seemed unattainable lol so I made a bunch of bogus accounts to do those 100k a day lists. I never made a ton of nps doing it, but I was a dumb kid and just kept trading nps and items between accounts so I got iced lol I also used an auto-adopter to adopt some nice pets from pounding boards.

Now, like most of us I think, I'm an adult and I just rather spend some cash to get stuff on-site than a whole bunch of time. I don't use any of the serious programs, but I like some of the user scripts because it just automates things that would take me so long to do and hope I get lucky (like the rubbish avatar lol spent like 5 days trying and eventually just used Bat's script to get it).

And yeah, the community here is super chill! Some of the people on neo.... yeah. They can be a lot lol