was there altador cup drama this year?
Oh anon bestie, of course there was. Because this site can't go one minute without some kind of controversy.
I lowkey wanted to make a Tumblr post about this anyways because I know the people love Neopets drama so thank you for the excuse.
Ok, so, explanation for non-Neopets players: The Altador Cup ('AC') is a sportsball-flavored event on Neopets where people sign up for teams representing each 'land' of Neopia and then play various event-exclusive games to earn points for their team and individual points to spend in a prize shop (which was open from the beginning this year, so you could spend your points as you earned them). The team that performs the best gets first place, with second and third place also acknowledged. You don't get any special prizes if you play for the winning teams, but it's a point of pride for people.
This year was the 20th year of this event running so by all logic it should've been like, Extra Good. And to be fair, they did add some new stuff - one land (Neopia Central) finally got a team after two decades, and they added another game to play. This also brought the number of teams to an even 20, which was fitting. There was a little daily trivia a couple weeks before the event that also earned you points, and they added a few achievements (something that had only previously been a thing in Altador Cup V). This is one of the most popular yearly events on the site, and many people will come back just to play before wandering away from the site again.
The way the Cup has worked for just about every year it's been running (except the first year which was straight-up elimination and you had to pick a new team if yours lost) was a round robin where each team plays against every other team to determine standings, and it lasted a few weeks. Users could earn individual 'ranks' based on how much they played the games, with daily caps for each game. Reaching the top rank required a LOT of grinding and has been seen as a badge of honor. Your rank would be reflected on the trophy you got put on your userlookup at the end of the event, as would the team you played for.
This year they changed the entire format of the AC. For starters, the actual event would only last 9 days, with each team getting 3 'bye days' of not playing against another team but where you could still play the games to earn points for the prize shop. This meant people were only actually playing for their team for less than a week's worth of time. This was after a week of daily trivia and the 'press tour' (every day a few teams would get fun little in-universe blurbs), and then another week for people to sign up, so the lead-up to the Cup lasted longer than the actual Cup itself.
To compensate for the shorter play time, the format was changed to brackets. There would be 3 rounds, with bye days between them: The first round (1 day), teams would be randomly paired up. The winners would be in the 'Upper' bracket and the losers would be in the 'Lower' bracket. Second round (1 day), the 'Upper' teams and 'Lower' teams would be paired and the winners and losers would create 'Top', 'Upper Mid', 'Mid', and 'Lower' brackets. In the third round (5 days), each team would play every other team in their bracket plus a bye day.
As with real sports, people are dedicated to their teams and some AC teams are powerhouses, others consistently place near last, and some were middle-tier performers. With the bracket format, if a team that otherwise performs decently gets paired up with a powerhouse team in one (or both!) rounds, they get screwed into being in the lower brackets for the rest of the tournament. Obviously this is hugely demoralizing for people who really enjoy the Cup, and a lot of otherwise dedicated players gave up when their teams got placed in low brackets.
The other thing they did was get rid of individual ranks. It didn't matter how much grinding you did - none of it would reflect on the trophy you got for AC XX. For people who actually enjoyed grinding the AC (not me lmao) this sucked because you'd have nothing to show for your effort except how many prize points you got.
They also got rid of the Staff Tournament, where Neopets staff members would compete against each other and people could create teams from staff members fantasy-football style and get points based on how well their team members did. It wasn't super serious but it was still a fun part of the event with cute and silly prizes so it was sad to see it go.
Speaking of prizes... this year's prize shop sucked lmao. For starters the cheapest item was 10 points (there have ALWAYS been things in the prize shop that cost less than that). The next jump was 30, then one 50-point prize... and then 300. Then it jumped to 500, then 800. Most of the items are either kinda useless or low-value, with only a handful of collectibles or books in the top range. Usually there's at least more fun stuff like Petpets or plushies or something, but there was only a couple items in that vein this year. Also, for the first time ever, there were a few prizes that could only be redeemed by Premium members, which many people weren't thrilled with.
This brings us to our next point: this specific item in the prize shop.
This thing cost 300 points, but it was just a regular food item to feed your pet. Then, THREE HOURS before the Altador Cup ended, staff changed the rarity of the item from 101 to 100. Changing it to 100 made it eligible for scoring points for the Gourmet Club - another site feature where you earn a score for the number of qualifying food items you feed your pet. This doesn't earn you anything besides a trophy if you feed them enough gourmet foods, but some people do put a lot of effort into it. Some of these foods get very expensive, and after the rarity was adjusted the price of this item shot up to several million Neopoints. This last-minute changed pissed off a lot of people who had already spent most of their points, especially because one of the new achievements required you to buy 5 different items from the prize shop and it wasn't clear if you'd still be able to complete that particular achievement after the Cup ended.
Another smaller thing is that this year it was decided that team avatars for the Neoboards/forums - which you could get when you signed up for a team - would only be temporary and would be removed from your account after the Cup ended. Avatars are purely cosmetic and there is absolutely no discernible reason for staff to make them temporary. Apparently this change was told to community ambassadors like a month ago and they all told the staff it was a bad idea, yet they still went through with it anyway. A couple days after the Cup ended the backlash led to staff walking this back and restoring everyone's team avatars. Another weird avatar-related thing is that the AC XX avatar was locked behind getting all 5 achievements, and of course some of them were glitchy so not everyone who actually qualified was able to get them and thus got locked out of earning the avatar. Usually you just have to participate to get the year-specific avatar. There was also no commemorative stamp item, which is weird for something as big as the 20th year of a site event running.
Finally, the trophies. As mentioned before, there were no ranks this year so that didn't get reflected on the trophy you got at the end. But the team you played for also didn't show up on your trophy, unlike literally every other year of the Altador Cup. The requirements for the different trophies were also... really low. Under 250 got you a participation trophy, 250 got you Bronze, 500 got you Silver, and 1000 got you Gold. I only bothered with the Cup for the last 3 days and got 1000 points without too much trouble. This pales in comparison to the requirements for the top ranks in other years. Honestly getting a gold trophy with only a bit of grinding feels... kinda cheap.
They also once again didn't actually do anything proactive against all the cheaters/botting - Neopets staff got lucky in that the big cheating groups split themselves amongst teams that ended up placing in the mid-low end of the standings, but historically these groups throw their weight behind a team that ends up in the top 3. There's not really any transparency for how a team's standings may or may not be adjusted to account for obviously botted scores and such (and of course you can't give too much away without cheaters figuring out how to circumvent it), and it causes a lot of frustration for the playerbase when a team doesn't place where they're expected to based on the results from all the matchups that get shown each day.
There's probably things I forgot but those are what I can remember. Honestly was really hoping that last year's 'not Altador Cup' (which was just story based with no gameplay) meant that staff would do stuff like fix all the bugs in the HTML5 versions of the games and add other QoL stuff. Instead they put all that effort into... whatever this was.
Just another day playing Neopets I guess! I look forward to the inevitable Hobbydrama post about this.
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