New usermade Mystery Capsule at the Mall!

[Erik.]

Could say a lot about this, but I will just keep it short.

Messy execution.

Do you mean messy execution as in "TNT should be executed in a messy, horrible way"?

[Menine]

If anyone wants to know what the art for the fountain originally looked like, this is it I believe. Warning image is kinda big.

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And here's the chocolate dress entry.

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I would be happy with any backgrounds from celestial dreams capsule. But meh

And to be honest, I would trade for all the chocolate items. I really loved them all.
That dress was literally the only item that I don' think that TNT messed with (it looks amazing on chocolate pets) and I would love to own all the items that artist designed. That dancers foreground would be so pretty with royal ucs:

I don't know how to use image editors, sorry for poor image quality

[Flordibel]

it'd probably be composed of copied-and-pasted royals.

I can dream!!!! *sob emoji*

MENINE I STILL WOULD HAVE PAID MONEY FOR THAT!!!

[♥ PrettySarcastic ♥]

I would be happy with any backgrounds from celestial dreams capsule. But meh

And to be honest, I would trade for all the chocolate items. I really loved them all.
That dress was literally the only item that I don' think that TNT messed with (it looks amazing on chocolate pets) and I would love to own all the items that artist designed. That dancers foreground would be so pretty with royal ucs:

I don't know how to use image editors, sorry for poor image quality

Can you imagine how lovely this would have looked with actual original quality Neopets art, perhaps with the not-your-Neopets with a slightly faded effect to spotlight your pet a bit?

It would really be stunning.

But noooo.

[oventoast]

Even worse is that that item looks like it's intended to be a transparent in the white spaces, especially because it's categorized as a background item. But it's not transparent...
(you need an account to see links)

It's basically just its own terrible, plain background.

lol what the fuck

[mixednuts]

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[oventoast]

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That is not surprising, but really sad.

[Shoopada]

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It makes me wonder if JS knew what they were getting into when they bought neopets. They clearly cannot afford an adequately sized or skilled enough team to handle the websites demands. At this point I can't help but think that they are designating tasks to cheap overseas or freelance labour. Neopets as always had some weaker examples of art, but these newest ones are bad. I simply can't imagine someone with any sort of passion for their craft producing these shitty NC items are those bizarrely executed pet colors (the toy usul is perhaps the most offensive). There are way too many extremely talented art school grads in California to excuse this shit. They could quite literally hire a kid on for 16 an hour who would do better.

All they really seem to care about is pushing their shitty, cookie-cutter app to kids who couldn't care less.

[oventoast]

It makes me wonder if JS knew what they were getting into when they bought neopets. They clearly cannot afford an adequately sized or skilled enough team to handle the websites demands. At this point I can't help but think that they are designating tasks to cheap overseas or freelance labour. Neopets as always had some weaker examples of art, but these newest ones are bad. I simply can't imagine someone with any sort of passion for their craft producing these shitty NC items are those bizarrely executed pet colors (the toy usul is perhaps the most offensive). There are way too many extremely talented art school grads in California to excuse this shit. They could quite literally hire a kid on for 16 an hour who would do better.

All they really seem to care about is pushing their shitty, cookie-cutter app to kids who couldn't care less.

JumpStart didn't know what they were getting into, period. Figuratively, JumpStart doesn't even exist anymore. In 2017, they sold JumpStart to the Chinese company NetDragon which basically does what OP described... they're probably trying to move all their operations to Asians countries where they can pay $2/hour and retain all the profits. To them, it doesn't really matter if the artists, programmers, creative directors, moderators have zero communication. They're just trying to pump out a product as cheaply as possible.

Everyone railed hard on Viacom for ten years straight, when at least Viacom was able to somewhat balance their corporate greed with sustainability - due to the size of the company and its culture. On the other hand, I have seen non-stop JumpStart apologia since 2014. To this day, if you go to the Neoboards, you'll hear about how "uwu they're trying their uwu best" and how JS must be this poor, infantile company that's making an honest effort to rehabilitate the site!

That's not the case. That never was the case. The more you look into it, the more you realize that the rot became a lot quicker the second JS got involved. They acquired Neopets in March 2014. It is clear from the get-go that JS was always run by Silicon Valley investment morons. By March 2015, the JS team had announced that they completed "restructuring" Neopets.

I don't want to make any guesses about what JumpStart was thinking when acquiring Neopets. But quotes from David Lord, CEO at the time, are not particularly reassuring:

"After the acquisition of Neopets by Jumpstart, we took some time to analyze and decide the best course of action for modernizing the technology behind the site," he said. "Once we made the decision to upgrade the technology, the effort was a bit bumpy at times."

This quote was in the context of talking about having restructured the company - i.e. laying off a bunch of people less than a year after acquiring it. This was all announced shortly after they had rolled out the abomination that is Ghoul Catchers on the iTunes and Facebook platforms. It is very clear that JumpStart, with experience dabbling in children's games, thought they were going to take over operations, modernize it to become the same shitty Farmville-esque platform that sucks money out of kids and stupid boomers. During the acquisition, when going over Neopets' previous financial statements, they were probably smugly laughing to themselves "wow, if this is what this kid's game makes now -- wait until we implement our crappy, unoriginal gacha-based Facebook mini-games! We'll be billionaires!"

They literally purchased the company without understanding the history or the value of the asset that they were purchasing. They spent a year wasting money on shitty developments while neglecting key factors of the site, alienating more users, and I'm sure within 9 months, after the Ghoul Catchers launch, they looked at their financials and were incredibly dumb-founded that their tonedeaf idea didn't take off. I'm sure they never even bothered to try and understand what Neopets is actually about.

So before their year was over, they decided to start planning "restructuring" - i.e. massively laying off the Neopets team. They begun realizing Neopets was actually quite a difficult, broken platform with a sordid history, in need of a lot rehabilitation. Their original idea that it was going to be a kids' cashcow dream was very quickly dashed. At this point, in March 2015, they had laid off "TNT". As of that point, most of TNT did not exist anymore, other than maybe a couple handful of people like moderators who work from home or remote offices. At this point they probably started using their internal programmers and artists for of the things that they were pumping out.

They didn't care about Neopets, and they never understood it. And when it wasn't able to deliver, they started despising it. They definitely overpaid for Neopets - I don't think Viacom would have been stupid enough to let it go if they weren't making a profit. Whereas, I think JumpStart is just stupid enough to overpay for it. In 2017, they were probably up their neck in debt and were bailed out acquired by NetDragon. During this time, they were probably seriously trying to make the move towards outsourcing all of the operations to whatever country has the cheapest labour. And now we're here. NetDragon, a predominantly Chinese company. And yet, I still see people on the Neoboards worrying about how Jumpstart is going to pay their wages if they have to fix parts of the site - LOL.

They aren't going to take a profit cut under any circumstances. Hiring a kid in LA who they have to pay $16/hour is probably about 200% over their planned budget. They don't give a shit. Their end goal is a fully automated cashcow. NetDragon probably has enough tools to do it. It would have been better if JumpStart went fully bankrupt and desperately sold the rights to Neopets to some small start-up for cheap or back to a team of the original creators (some of whom are working at pretty decent places). I think that was Neopets' last hope. Instead, they were acquired by some shadowy figure who will keep it afloat until the population dwindles down to like (you need an account to see links).

@(you need an account to see links) in a previous post mentioned that Neopets was terminally ill. That terminal illness is called corporate greed. Focusing only on profit and shareholder value maximization, not paying any concern to other stakeholders like employees, users of the site and general community. Ultimately immediate quartile earnings trump long-term growth and sustainability.

They will never focus on anything other than maximizing the revenue and reducing costs -- the essence of corporate structure is that the lives of managers are directly tied towards short-term performance. In theory, hiring some kid from the Bay Area and paying him $16/hour to produce amazing work is great. In practice, that means David Lord won't get to buy his wife that tacky McManson he promised her in exchange for monthly handjobs, and Yi Xing won't get to buy his fifth yacht. You think Lord or Xing give a shit about how a bunch of working class people feel about their job, their hobbies, etc. when it's directly tied to their own immediate wealth? No.

This is just the way it is. The only thing left is to hope that whatever sad, impoverished Indian kid that is tasked with designing the Neocash items of Y20 is going to be secretly the next Da Vinci or Rembrandt.

[Maki]

With an absence of generational pop culture trends for this age and in the future, "nostalgia" is actually legitimate market to capitalize on. I wish the business guys of Netdragon could realize this I bet if they crowdsourced help onsite they would find that there are tons of people who would give their left nut to help out with site content for free lol. But I digress