Pets are Friends not Food

And then maybe instead of all the UC drama over ancient art because the poses are admittedly more dynamic and appealing, if people don’t like the converted image of their pet they can draw the way they envision the pet themselves. Maybe if they shift the site more toward the idea of pets as characters they could ENCOURAGE people to draw their own pets. And maybe Neopets could allow drawing commissions to be a thing because plenty of other pet sites allow it, it’s kind of silly that they don’t and it’s pretty detrimental to artists since getting art for free is becoming so normalized and people are constantly begging for it.

Sure, we’d probably lose the portion of the userbase that only cares about UCs, but the site could become something that would encourage new people to come in, or old players who abandoned their accounts years ago to return...

I don’t agree with the idea of “rioting” over it and how aggressive it became, and in hindsight they were probably not issues that really warranted that kind of thing and more minor but

I guess the way I saw it it's like. If I want to advertise pets I go to the PC, even though I'm not part of a PC community or comfortable there. I wouldn't consider myself part of any ArC community either, but the Art board has always been the place TNT designated for BC advertising, since back when it was called the Beauty Contest board, and advertising off of it has always been against the rules. But what qualified as “advertising” was wishy-washy and there was a lot of frustration springing up about some people getting warned when others weren’t for doing the same thing, be it chatting or sugarcoated spam in the form of going around to PC boards and commenting on their pets (which I’m not going to deny I’ve been guilty of in the past, too). So people wanted a more concrete line on this. And I guess I would have been fine with the other side of that line as well (allowing advertising anywhere), if that’s what they decided.

As well, it didn't really make sense to me for the same image to earn multiple trophies, and it got kind of tiring seeing the same image week after week. So they were issues I've complained about in the past.

But everyone’s making it about “bad art” and “good art” and I guess some of the rioters said things that implied insults to other artists?

I mean I guess everyone is bitter when they lose too, it’s a natural reaction. When emotions over our personal creations are involved things get mucky really fast. :x 

So I’m kinda in the middle of all this right now since I get where the people who are angry are coming from and I agree that the riot probably shouldn’t have happened at least in the form it did but.

I’ve definitely complained about both issues the rioters were on about before too and I still kinda agree with them on what I actually want for the BC but at the same time I feel like I might be subconsciously some kind of “Art Elitist” for it.

I don’t know what compelled them to change it from 0.8:1 or whatever it was before to nearly 2:1 but literally the highest scores on the table wouldn’t get you 1000 NP?

like

You need 1,500 points for the avatar. people have enough trouble with that. The highest score currently is 1,568. You need 1,960 points to get 1000 NP.

And can I point out that in Volcano Run once you get past a score of about 1000 continuing to increase your score becomes difficult, since the obstacles get notably harder around 500m in and practically impossible to the point of needing pure luck (i.e the geysers appearing in really narrow passages) at 1000m in, plus you can only earn up to 450-500 points in gems. Even using the best possible strategies it’s a challenge to surpass 1500 (I literally spent years trying to get that stupid avatar) and you expect us to score nearly 2000 all of a sudden??

S'pretty much why I adamantly deny any one of my pets having a “UC value”. Really don’t want to touch that mess with a 10ft pole, especially lately. Other people can blame the so called “decline” on Jumpstart all they want, I blame it on UC drama

Probably a combination of both, really. The site had been “declining” for a long time even before JumpStart but the staff layoffs and constant downtime were certainly a catalyst.

Yeah pretty much my thoughts exactly

Ah thanks, I’m glad to have agreement at least

Like people act skeptical/annoyed when you say you don’t like/want UCs and it’s like

It’s not that I don’t like the pets or the art, yes it’s amazing and way more dynamic than the converted poses in a lot of cases

Or else they should have left things as they were.

Basically, it should have been all or nothing because the amount of drama and shady black market business they’ve caused by leaving some pets unconverted while others weren’t has caused far, far more trouble than it’s worth.

Part of me still wants them to convert everything now... like.. UCs feel kinda pointless? You can look at old art if you feel like it, you can put it on your pet’s lookup, just because the main image of your pet looks like the converted image doesn’t mean you can’t design them differently? Like all my pets are converted now, but even when they were UC they had their own designs separate from their lookup images...

But I also don’t want to be an ass because I know people have traded for years to get UCs (or, in some cases, spent massive amounts of money) and I know converting everything would destroy everything for them and I want to be sympathetic

But at the same time I have so much trouble wrapping my head around why people care so much about having a virtual pet with an older piece of artwork as their “official” image especially when a lot of them give the character their own design anyway and it seems like the whole thing has caused so much havoc and people being hurt/upset that I feel like the site would be a generally happier place if UCs didn’t exist and TNT had converted everything back in 2007

Of course this would happen on my side account lab pet and not my main where I actually have a lutari