#sawk talks

Like many sites on the internet, Neopets does April Fool's pranks. For their 2005 prank, Neopets 'released' 50 new Neopets species. A lot of them sucked, but some were actually popular enough that users demanded they become official species. Among these joke species was the original Varwolf, and it's easy to see why any kid in 2005 would love this design.

Just look at it. The sparkledog OC potential is off the charts.

Soon after April Fool's, a vote was held between several of the fake species to decide which would become a real Neopets species. Because this was 2005, a llama-like species won and became the Gnorbu, but the Varwolf (which for some reason wasn't even an option in the vote) continued to have a cult following. Some Neopets spin-off/fan sites would even incorporate the Varwolf as a species you could own. A few people held out hope that one day, it would be added as a species to Neopets proper.

Apparently I voted for this design??? I don't even remember this one. This is nothing. What the hell was kid me thinking.

So, with the initial Premium-exclusive release in March, it was basically seen as fixing a 20-year-old injustice. The Neopets Team (TNT) said that a site-wide release would come though a mini-event in the summer.

... And then the release ended up getting delayed, for unspecified reasons.

And then it got delayed again.

Honestly it's on us Neopets users for being disappointed, because this is kind of how TNT operates at this point, and what's a few more months after 20 years of waiting? But still... man.

Finally, it gets confirmed to have a release date of November 26th. On that day, users started the Varwolf mini-plot by visiting a new location called 'the Scary Cave' and talking to an NPC named Pan. On this very first step, some users already encountered a problem - what was supposed to happen was you would scroll past Pan's text, click "Yes, I do!" to agree to marry?? help him, and receive a piece of a map (Neopets has plenty of maps you can complete for various prizes, all of which have 9 pieces - so only 8 more to go!).

But some people don't get this button; they can still continue the mini-plot, but they get locked out of a map piece. No one has been able to figure out what causes this issue. The questline continues as you visit various locations and NPCs, getting hints and map pieces along the way. But as the questline continues, so do the problems.

In one step, where you have to put the correct answer into a dialogue box in order to progress, some users (including myself) literally have to change a url in the page's code using Inspect Element in order to get it to function correctly. This only works on desktop; if you're a mobile-only user, you're SOL.

And the next step I'm going to complain about isn't a glitch, just... really poorly thought-out. You actually can skip it, but this isn't made explicit and players continue to get fucked over by it. Cool!

This step involves you and Pan going to an NPC called the Brain Tree, who wants you to complete a quest for him. The way the Brain Tree works is he asks for information about when and where someone died, and it's entirely randomized/unique to each quest. The only way to get the information is to complete two quests for another NPC called the Esophagor. The Esophagor asks for couple items from a limited pool of items that you can either get from one (1) of the official Neopets shops, or that you can get secondhand from other users on the site. People inevitably have started using bots to snap up these items from the one official shop, so it's pointless to try getting them from there if you're a flesh-and-blood human... so your only other option is getting them from other users.

Guess what items people have been inflating to hell and back in the days since the Varwolf event got released?

The price history on a couple of random items the Esophagor can ask for, courtesy of the Neopets fansite JellyNeo (by the way no one would be able to play Neopets anymore if this site didn't exist, lmao). Things are starting to calm down but holy shit, dude.

It's worth noting that a mere month ago, Neopets added a new yearly event, the Festival of Fears. Both the Brain Tree and the Esophagor gave out exclusive prizes for this event and can you guess what happened to the items that the Esophagor can ask for back then? Go on, guess.

In Septemberish of every year, Neopets has the Faerie Festival. Instead of being random events, users can get quests from the faerie characters of the site once a day. Again, any given faerie asks for items from a limited pool, and, well, can you guess what happens to every item within that pool? Can you guess??

Earlier this year, for the ongoing plot plot on Neopets (which is paused at the moment and is plagued with its own various issues that I won't go into here), a minigame was released where you could retrieve items for one of the plot characters to make tea to earn plot points and exclusive prizes. Again, she only asked for items from a limited pool. Can you guess what happened to all the items in this pool?

Can.

You.

Fucking.

Guess?

... So as you can see, there's been a bit of a pattern this year.

I don't know what TNT keeps thinking playing yo-yo with the Neopets economy like this. The Faerie Festival is at least a given every year, but to have several other events incorporating NPC quests like this (let alone two involving the same NPCs back-to-back??) is nothing short of baffling. All it does is frustrate users, reward scalpers, and price a lot of users out of time-limited experiences and prizes (or if it's not time-limited, in the case of the Varwolf event, have to wait for who knows how long until the scalpers get bored and move on to something else). Seeing the same thing play out over and over and over again, with TNT not learning anything, is infuriating.

ANYWAY. So let's say you do the entire questline. You visited all the locations, talked to all the characters, blah blah blah. Let's say you're lucky and didn't start with a glitched "I do" button. You end up with a grand total of... 5 map pieces.

If you're really lucky, none of these pieces will be duplicates. If you have shit luck like one user I saw, you'll get 4 of the same piece and 1 other piece.

Alright, well... this was release day, and TNT had never said if this was a multi-day event or not. All we knew was that there wasn't a time limit to completing it. Some people didn't wait and bought the rest of their map pieces right away to the tune of several million per piece, but most people waited to see if any new steps would be released the next day that would give you the remaining pieces. Maybe they'd even be able to fix the glitch that locked some people out of the first map piece and the other issues people had been having.

The next day rolls around, and...

Nothing. No new steps. No fixes. No more map pieces.

Alright. Cool.

So... if you need 9 pieces for a full map, where do you get the rest? Well, you have a few options:

A new daily activity, called the 'Haunted Woods Hunt', has map pieces in the prize pool. It also has a lot of other items in the prize pool, and you can only get a few items a day, so... good luck!

As a prize from another daily activity, the 'Wheel of Extravagance' (also called the 'Wheel of Extortion' by users). This wheel costs 100,000 neopoints to spin, and while you can win some pretty nice stuff, you shouldn't expect to make your money back (lots of people just spin it for the chance at the exclusive avatar it gives out). Again, good luck.

Buy them from other users

At the time of this post, each map piece is going anywhere from 800k to 1.5 million Neopoints. Full maps are going for about 12 million Neopoints, which is a crazy amount for the average Neopets player.

But let's say you have the money to drop on all the missing pieces. Hooray, you have a full map! You can get a Varwolf now, right?

Nope! All the map does is let you access the Varwolves's secret hideout. To actually get one, have to do one more thing - which again, relies on either a lot of luck or a lot of money.

First, you need to acquire these three items, which can only be acquired from the new 'Haunted Woods Hunt' daily I just mentioned: Hungry Fungus, Putrid Pumpkin, and Mound of Rotting Fruit.

Then you need to combine them at a place called the Cooking Pot into a new item, the Decaying Pumpkin Surprise.

Then, and ONLY then, will you actually be able to take a Varwolf home with you.

Ok, so what if you don't want to wait to get lucky enough to get the ingredients for the nasty Varwolf bait? Well, the Putrid Pumpkin is going for about 2.5 million Neopoints on Neopets's Auction House, the Mound of Rotting Fruit is going for about 20mil, the Hungry Fungus is going for about 175mil, and the Decaying Pumpkin Surprise itself is going for about 200mil.

Guys, I am certified Neo-Rich and that's expensive even for me. I would venture most Neopians will never see that many Neopoints in their entire time playing (especially not people who play more casually, which is exactly the type of player TNT has been trying to target for the past few years)

And look, I know how supply and demand works. I'm well aware that when a Thing gets released in a game, it's going to be expensive at first, then go down in price as time goes on and the supply of the Thing increases. But don't you think this is a bit much? Especially for something that was A. hyped up for so long and B. anticipated so highly by all of us.

At the very least the questline should've given you a full map from the get-go! It's not like it gives you an immediate prize, it just unlocks a location! Or maybe it could've given you one of the required items - the supply would've been a lot greater, but you'd still have to get the other ones either through the new daily or other users! I don't know, I'm not a game dev! But god, anything that wasn't... this!!

Neopets is no stranger to hard-to-get species; Draiks and Krawks were famously hard to get for a long time until the release of the Forgotten Shore feature. And on some level it would be nice to have a species that takes a bit of work to get again, but perhaps not the species whose release was hyped up and then pushed back for several months and that had a dedicated fanbase for two decades, with absolutely no indication it would be difficult to acquire?? This is just an asspull, plain and simple. Even as prices eventually go down, this was such a bad way to go about the release - and with the prices of the required items, who knows how long it'll take to be even remotely affordable to the average player.

But folks, if you can believe it, we're still not done. The final bits of Varwolf fuckery:

First off (and admittedly this is a petty complaint): On modern Neopets, you get 6 pet slots by default (but can buy up to 11 extra pet slots). Premium users got another 4. If you had full pet slots and wanted a Varwolf on release day (and were somehow lucky enough to have everything to get one), you would have to abandon a pet. HOWEVER, on Varwolf release day, in the official release announcement, Premium members were granted an extra 2 pet slots (and also an extra chance at Haunted Woods Hunt. Non-premium users can play again after watching an ad that might very well give you a virus). Users have been asking to be able to buy more pet slots for a while, so it's a bit annoying that Premium users got two free ones the day of a highly-anticipated species release.

Also in the announcement was this bit at the end:

There are a few dailies with NC (Neocash - Neopets's paid currency) components - you use an NC item that helps you 'find' an NC item prize exclusive to that daily. But this announcement has people worried that the 'best treasures' might be referring to the items required to create a Varwolf, rather than NC prizes. I like to hope that TNT wouldn't go that far, but given how chock-full of bad decisions this release has been, one has to wonder. Neopets has also really been pushing monetization the past few years with things like its game apps, increasingly gacha-based NC items, allowing you extra chances at certain dailies by watching ads, lots of new merch and licensing deals ... it's certainly not out of the question for them to release an item that makes it easier to create an otherwise hard-to-get pet at this point. Why not take advantage of a highly-anticipated species release to make money? 😒

And finally, as mentioned at the beginning, Varwolves were initially only accessible to Premium players. This also meant that they couldn't be transferred or traded off of accounts or abandoned at the Pound. This isn't the first time a species has had these restrictions; the Lutari, another species released in 2006, was initially only restricted to Neopets users who used the Neopets Mobile service. Even after Neopets Mobile was discontinued, Lutari couldn't be transferred, traded, or abandoned for many years afterwards (which was, honestly, pretty stupid). After the sitewide Varwolf release... they still can't be transferred, traded, or abandoned (this sucks because I made one of my Neopets into a Varwolf before my brief Premium subscription ran out, and I really wanna transfer her back to the account she was on for over 20 years. please she misses her brothers so so much)

Outside of the Premium perk, Varwolves can only be created. As far as anyone knows, they can't be made through any other means, such as your pet getting zapped into one by the Lab Ray. There is a Varwolf Transmogrification Potion that just got released - however, per JellyNeo, "unique to any morphing potion, this potion can ONLY be used on a Varwolf to turn it into a Mutant Varwolf, not any other species."

No other morphing potion on the Neopets site has this restriction. Or literally any restriction. It's unknown at this time if this is permanent or if it will be lifted at some point in the future, because despite all their promises to increase transparency and communication, TNT loves telling Neopets users shit or fuck.

In summary, Neopets took one of its most highly-anticipated releases since NC UCs and absolutely faceplanted at the finish line. This would've been such an EASY PR slam dunk that could have brought old or lapsed users back to the site to check things out. Instead, Neopets:

Couldn't even make sure the mini-plot worked correctly before launch (you delayed this for MONTHS and it STILL came out with this many issues??)

Required users to shell out exorbitant amounts of money to finish their maps and probably Brain Tree/Esophagor quests (if they didn't know they could skip them), and now users will have to pay ridiculous amounts of money for the items required to make a Varwolf, OR get insanely lucky and acquire the items from the new daily, OR wait who knows how long for the items to become remotely affordable to buy them from other users

Kept weird restrictions on moving Varwolves between accounts and how to get them in the first place

Trying to understand TNT's logic is a hopeless task, but I really wonder how things went this catastrophically wrong. Y'all had a fucking golden opportunity on your hands and you completely fumbled it.

I just...

god.