CEO Dominic Law interview

[DarkSkies]

It's nice to hear about all the plans coming, I'm still a bit wary because it seems obviously a lot of stuff and iirc their team it's not very big.

Inflation it's a problem but you cannot say it's only because of cheaters. Like you don't need to be a cheater to corner the market apparently, which is what some people/guilds have been invested doing.

It's a lot of work but if they keep a stable roadmap hopefully we could see something good in future.

[Bat]

That NP is predominantly reentering the economy in small denominations as it's sold off through marketplaces. Nobody can centralize 60k of daily Food Club earnings without placing a target on their piggybank accounts, so the NP is either staying on the burners it's earned on, or being trickled into additional burners to sit and wait for the flags to fall off. This is being chronicled in broad daylight, yet people are still humming and hawing about an organized effort to tank the economy. I'm not advocating for mass botting. It's a lame thing to do to a game that barely has any appeal left to it, not to mention a rabid fanbase that would sooner destroy the game outright than let people enjoy it on their own terms. All the same, the outrage is misguided. As usual. Drop a zero from all the quest and training items for sale in shops right now and watch how quickly things go back to normal.

[Raposa]

lol watch out guys, they have a task force

I get it though. Mass botting sucks.

[Bat]

Not to brag or anything, but we reverse engineered a year's worth of Altador Cup programming done by a whole team of people in one afternoon of sitting around a Starbucks drinking coffee and goofing off. I'm not worried. Invest the effort into making the game fun again and stop chasing phantoms.

[Raposa]

Yeah they really underestimate you guys and cheating communities in general. If AAA games can't get rid of them, what makes them think Neopets can?

[Bat]

Speaking for myself, the automation I've made public is intended to relieve players from less enjoyable aspects of the Neopets experience. Neopets used to have more to do on it than incessantly clicking through pages. I value my time more than that, and you're not a superior player because you choose to endure that tedium every day for the chance at a few scraps of good fortune. If their leadership focused less on making everybody equally miserable and more on giving everybody something fun to engage with, then maybe there would be fewer people picking at their carcass for what little remaining fun is left in their abandonware site.

[Buizel]

To add on to what Bat is saying, they also didn't address their staff member that's been giving out high tiered items to users. Nor did they address the abysmal "security" this site has AND the source coding was sold on that darkweb website some time back.

So yeah, I'm sure that task force will do wonders, but the call is coming from inside the house.

[Dewgong]

I mean honestly, as someone who doesn't do it, I don't see any issue with food club botting. It's not like the NPs they earn from it are being taken from a limited pool, or out of the hands of other players. They're just being generated from nothing and, like Bat said, either being put back into the economy or sitting in banks.
If people really are concerned about it, what measures are those people willing to take to stop it? Letting TNT ban all food club tables/betting pages too? Severely reduce the winnings everyone can receive from it? Only allow a certain number of people to win per day? Unless TNT are somehow able to stop bots (which I very much doubt they can pull off), the people asking for an end to food club botting will likely just end up shooting themselves in the foot and making food club worse for everyone.

My only issue I can see is people using that money to mass purchase and inflate everything, but the people that are doing this already have the NPs for it, and they know how to generate profit from other methods. They need to target the problem itself, stop allowing users to do this, and not hit other avenues like food club or incite a mob against the mysterious cheater boogeyman and call it a day.

[Buizel]

I mean honestly, as someone who doesn't do it, I don't see any issue with food club botting. It's not like the NPs they earn from it are being taken from a limited pool, or out of the hands of other players. They're just being generated from nothing and, like Bat said, either being put back into the economy or sitting in banks.
If people really are concerned about it, what measures are those people willing to take to stop it? Letting TNT ban all food club tables/betting pages too? Severely reduce the winnings everyone can receive from it? Only allow a certain number of people to win per day? Unless TNT are somehow able to stop bots (which I very much doubt they can pull off), the people asking for an end to food club botting will likely just end up shooting themselves in the foot and making food club worse for everyone.

My only issue I can see is people using that money to mass purchase and inflate everything, but the people that are doing this already have the NPs for it, and they know how to generate profit from other methods. They need to target the problem itself, stop allowing users to do this, and not hit other avenues like food club or incite a mob against the mysterious cheater boogeyman and call it a day.

There was actually a recent board where people were advocating for FC to be removed from the site until they combat this botter. But like said here, that doesn't do anything other than punish the other users because the botter will just move on to something else.

He could also be doing the same for Trudy too, should we just remove that as well??? /logic

[stevenl4]

Neopets has far too little systematic NP sinks. Neopoints goes in and never comes out, of course inflation is going to run rampant.

Aside from random events, hidden tower, NPC shops, there arent many other ways to remove neopoints outside of players quitting / getting frozen.

Just adding a 1% tax on auction house, TP and player shops would probably take a billion out of the economy daily.