it's official: welcome, voyagers and comrades, to catadromously's little trading post! come throw some coins at the fool whose working field is nothing but seasonal jobs, and in return, receive blorbo from your shows, brain, or field guide in .png form. dm me here on tumblr if interested ꩜

⇴ STATUS Working slots full: 3/3 Waitlist: open

The Terms:

New stuff on the trading post and let me tell you I'm a big fan of the fact that outfits are not gender locked or change depending on your race and body type!

So Neopets has three player-to-player paid-exchanges—storefronts, the Trading Post, and the Auction House. Storefronts are mostly used to keep relatively lower-value Neopoints (NP) items available and searchable. Each item can only be sold for a max of 999,999 NP in shops. The Auction house has a limit of 100,000,000 NP and is typically used for RIDICULOUSLY expensive, rare items.

Sitting between the two of those is the trading post, which is used for high-value, rare items that need to be negotiated. Despite the higher value items, there is a 2mil cap of pure NP that could be offered for a trade. However, you could add along items in addition/instead of NP, which made certain relatively-high value items handy as a currency marker. One of these items was the Baby Paint Brush.

Paintbrushes are highly coveted items that dramatically transform your Neopet's base design. Baby Paint Brush (BPB) turns your Neopet into their baby variant, which is both a cute effect and very unique, as it super adjusts the silhouette and size of your Neopet. In a game about taking care of your cute lil guys, the ability to get the kitten/puppy/calf-variant of them was HUGELY desired, making the BPB easily one of the top-three popular brushes of all time.

More importantly though, BPB was also a VERY stable asset. Its price always hovered around 600k, in part because of its reliable demand AND there being a price-capped way to obtain one a day in an in-universe store. This made it an ideal choice to use when trading for items valued over 2 mil NP. If you wanted to list an item worth 6 mil, you didn't have to use an auction house, you just had to accept an offer of 10 BPB. Just about every trade in the trading post used it as a stand-in for NP after hitting the 2mil cap--it was everywhere. In addition, the item was below the 1 mil price cap, which meant that your BPB was significantly more liquid than higher value items, since you could sell it in your storefront either to be used for trading or to paint a neopet. In a game with a notoriously volatile economy, BPB was the perfect stock for 23 YEARS.

That was until Neopets released an update to the trading post. Alongside changes like auto buy/sell, Neopets also bumped up the NP cap from 2 Mil to 20 Mil NP.

What appears like a long-overdue QOL change was disastrous for users that had a stock of BPB to barter with. Their primary currency, which use to represent 30% of the possible NP offered at the trading post, now only represented 3% of that limit. Why bother trading for an item that you yourself will need to sell if you can just exchange flat cash? As a result, the value of PBP has dropped 33% of its value already.

Many people are speculating on if the price will rebound once the panic wears off or if a higher-value, rarer paintbrush will take it's place. The only item that was somewhat comparable in usage to BPB was Cool Negg, but even that lacks BPB's demand (typically an item that's only popular amongst Negg collectors) and is more volatile to the games random chance events (obtaining it requires much much better RNG than BPB). Tbqh, I think the market is going to be SO oversaturated with BPB that lost their primary use that it'll take a LONG time for it to stabilize via users wanting to paint their neopets alone. But who knows!

Trading Post

The Salute: The Indians Receiving the Governor Outside Fort Douglas

Artist: John E. Cawse (British, 1779-1862)

Date: ca. 1823-1825

Medium: Oil on canvas