Still an uproar

Things are still not back to normal at Neopets. People are still flooding staff with angry messages. The boards still show how much people are not pleased with their pets. I was looking through all the changes last night and I think I got off easy. My pets really weren't changed too much others pets are really not cute anymore and the mutant pets aren't really ugly.

Many are calling for Neopets to give us a choice in what our pets look like. People are getting more sophisticated with their means of complaint. They are now calling for everyone to send in feedback about specifically what they don't like. Banners are being placed on many accounts telling the powers that be that we really wanted a choice. Neopets has told us that having the 44 pets in 2 ways times the numbers of colors and poses would be too much for the servers. Many of us would just like a vote on what the "main" look would be. Some of these new pets are just ugly. :(

Here is an example of the before and after look. The thing to note is that to have a royal pet owners have purchased a 1,750,000 np paintbrush for the privilege.

More on the protest

More developments. It seems there is now a petition with over 700 signatures against the new layout. I have copy-pasted the petition explanation below.

"Hello Neopians. Once your name appears on the list, please pick up the banner below to SHOW that you signed the petition! (THIS IS MORE OF A LIST OF PEOPLE WHO HATE NEOPETS BETA, NOT SO MUCH A PETITION!) The disgusting neopets Beta is ruining coding, and is hard to manage. I mean the layout is cool, but I'd like the old neopets back.

Top Three Reasons to Sign:

1. It's ruining our HTML and CSS!
2. The pets are HIDEOUS!
3. It's hard to find stuff on the new layout!

Those in favour of signing the petition (we know petitions don't work, but I have nothing better to do with my time) neomail ME! AND ONLY ME! Just click the neomail button to sign! I will put your username up! Thanks for the support! "

More information about the petition for Neopets players




As well as the petition there are also players trying to get out information about what the changes exactly are like. The graphic below links to a petpage that shows various redraws of pets and paint jobs. I find this information very useful although I'm really hoping that some of the really ugly ones will get redrawn.

Community in protest

Neopets has decided to radically change their user interface. Not only did they change the look, feel, and navigational system but they also redrew many of the pets. This change came out of the blue. In the past we have received warning and were even able to vote on what a new pet would look like. This time it was BAM – in the morning things were normal, in the afternoon everything was changed.

People are not impressed – actually pissed is probably a better term. Some of the new pets are ugly. In fact my beloved biscuit chomby looks extremely vectorized. She’s just not cute and the cookies are all angular. Not all the redraws are bad, but the suddenness and the enevitable glitches are causing people to protest in many ways. People are threatening to leave Neopets, others are saying they will quit premium, and still others are making pests of themselves on the discussion boards complaining about everything. I am interested in how so many people threaten to take their ball and go home. It would seem to me that voicing our opinions through putting in error reports and suggestions will have more success as paying members. They wouldn’t want to disenfranchise their customer base (the adults who are long-term players that will pay for premium). Young children will join and leave in droves, but the adults are the core of the community. It seems that others don’t see it my way because even members of my guild have decided to cancel premium after less than 24 hours of the new system. It will be interesting how this all shakes out.

Measure of membership

My year anniversary with the guild was in February. Somewhere in that time I’ve managed to move from a newcomer to an old timer in AGW. Still I find myself feeling new when new people join the guild that everyone else seems to know that I don’t. AGW is my first guild that I have ever been actively involved with. Most of my guildies have been involved in other guilds and have previous relationships developed. New people come into the guild and although they are new they may have more deeply established relationships with particular members of the guild than me. I find it an interesting dichotomy of being old yet newer than many.

I have started to keep an eye out for new members based on people posting they are looking for guilds on the discussion boards. A few weeks ago I found someone who was posting they were looking for a guild and it sounded like he was describing us. I sent him a message and he ended up joining. The exciting thing is how well he has ended up fitting in our guild. This makes me happy because he’s happy and because it means that I am evaluating our guild culture appropriately. He and I have ended up talking via IM quite a bit and it has been fun getting to know him individually as well as part of the group (it is fun to watch Grey’s Anatomy and chat about the stupidity of the characters).

Since the start of this project our guild leader has redone membership ranks. Ranks are designed to be a measurement of activity. Originally rank was determined by number of posts. New people could quickly move up the ranks by getting involved with discussions. After the guild was around for awhile this system wasn’t working so well. Some guild members have chosen to leave the guild to join another and then come back (for example some guilds battle other guilds and one of our members likes to battle so he hops in and out of our guild as the wars begin and end), some have had account problems causing them to lose their status, and finally people that were active and have 2000 posts can disappear and still have a high rank.

To fix this problem ranks were changed to reflect overall activity in the last month. People can be ranked as daily, weekly, monthly or vacationing. The expectation is that everyone should be weekly (show up 2-3 times a week) but real life sometimes gets in the way so the other ranks exist for temporary issues. I never have a problem because I chat everyday, but it has dramatically changed who’s what rank. It also makes you aware of the expectations of the community. If your rank is not weekly you are not eligible to participate in giveaways and fun events – many people only show up when events are going on to collect the goodies and then disappear again.

Just how active am I in the guild? If you take my number of posts divided by my number of days in the guild I average at 9 a day. I don’t know whether to be sad or proud. LOL

Hanging out on the premium discussion boards

One way to measure the commitment that someone has to Neopets is by determining whether they are premium members. Premium members means that the person is addicted enough … erm, committed enough to pay for the privilege of not having ads on the site. I decided to go get premium when the ads started to talk at me! Grrrr.

Premium membership also gets the user other perks like an email address, random events of neopoints and items, a scratchcard on Fridays, and access to the superwiz – a way to look up the lowest prices of items in other users’ shops. Because I play so often these features are completely worth the 20 cents a day that the service costs. Another feature of premium are the premium discussion boards. Everyone on the site has access to discussion boards, but the premium boards are restricted to only paying members making them mostly adults who can afford the service. This makes the premium boards a lot more useful and less prone to teenagers looking for a boyfriend or pointless boards begging for items and points.

I visited the premium boards originally because I discovered that they had a board for people to post pets that were up for adoption. I had been lurking on that board for more than a month when I started to visit other boards that commonly appeared. Most people that are premium are tied into the Neopet community in a number of ways. Many belong to guilds as well as being actively involved on a board or two of their choice. What I’ve discovered is that many sub-communities have formed on the premium boards that overlap with one another. They have people that watch for over-inflated items (where people are trying to raise the prices of an item inappropriately), a group that talks about the stock market, another that talks about training pets, lending pets (for avatars), quest help, buy/sell/trade board, restock chat, etc. all have loyal followings. There are people that hang out a lot on the charter board where I’ve gotten so I recognize their usernames.

Discussion groups have evolved on a bunch of the boards premium and regular. There is also a discussion group called the OLDPD that I have lurked on, on-and-off for years. They are currently on their 3945th board. (Boards go kaboom after 30 pages – or around 500 posts.) They formed during the Lost Desert Plot in 2005 and it is still going strong. OLDPD was an abbreviation for “Obsessive Lost Desert Plot Disorder,
” but since that has been over for ages they now say it means the Obsessive Latest Darn Plot Disorder. This is just another example of how the community has managed to form and maintain itself even when there isn’t a plot going on to discuss (like right now). Makes me realize that Neopets is much more than just a site with pets and games.

And 5 hours later

I am, admittedly, not big on phone calls. There is nothing wrong with them per se. I’m just the type of person where it never occurs to me to call people. The phone has become a functional object – an object for community maintenance rather than community formation. I talk with old friends occasionally, my boyfriend on a scheduled basis, and my family members as news occurs. Ideally the phone is a scheduling device to find out if we are still meeting for breakfast or to find out if someone wants to hang out on the weekend.

One of our members runs an event where the main character has disappeared. It is a mystery and I had to cause trouble. So when I saw my guildmate online I had to ping her to find out if I could add to the chaos. She did something that no one has done before (and I’ve IMed with lots of guildies), she asked to switch mediums to the phone because it was easier for her to talk than type. Five hours later, when both of our cordless phones started to beep we hung up.

So what the heck happened that led to our phones finally time out our conversation? We were long overdue for creating personal bonds. We’ve both been part of the same online community for many, many months but had never talked privately. Because of our online community we had shared experiences, common interests, common friends, and a common culture. We just had tons to talk about and the conversation just snowballed into a conversation that bisected the personal, public and online lives. I discovered that she had actually read my blog (could have knocked me over with a feather) and had misunderstood some of my comments. This just reaffirms my hatred for blogs (a rant for another time). The thing is it wasn’t until hour 4 in our conversation that my blog even came up, even though she had found it offensive.

It seems like the building of trust is both corporate and individual. Although we all tell of personal happenings on a daily basis it seems that we don’t always have the individual trust required to confront someone when something seems off. I find this to be an interesting truth that deserves more time for reflection and analysis.

Prepping for and attending a class in SL

Again I ventured into SL with slightly less dread. I decided that I wasn’t going to be the idiot that couldn’t find the classroom on Monday. I used the link that was provided to port myself to the educational island and started to explore.

The good news is I had procrastinated so long there was absolutely no one on the island because it was so late at night. I wandered around and found the lecture hall and various meeting areas. I even ventured far enough to find a cow and to find a building with a coffee maker and a grand piano. I tried to take a picture but I was too tired to figure it out. The good news was that by the end of my travels I was confident I wouldn’t make an idiot out of myself by failing to show up for class.

At class time I did something unique – I managed to be in 2 classes at once. The class I am in F2F was still meeting but I could keep SL running and keep an eye on what was going on in class and type a quick message while still following the general conversation in my F2F class. Pauses in conversation give the opportunity to scan the written conversation allowing me to participate in both places in a reasonable way. This of course isn’t ideal, but it was better than non-attendance in one class.

I really expected the chaos that ensued. Any class where you investigate new technology the class becomes more about the technology itself (IMHO) than about the subject of the day. I answered more questions about where I got my shoes and who I was than about any course material. The conversation went really fast and was not cohesive.

It was an experience – it is the first time I’ve ever been in class with a fox. The classroom experience in SL was anything but smooth. People had different Internet speeds causing the movie to finish at different times, conversation in groups was impossible, once people started to move getting attention to change instructions was chaotic, moving from place to place caused people to get lost, following the flying guy doesn’t work, and tables don’t seem to work as advertised. With that all said, the class was still fun in a novel sort of way. One of my classmates from my F2F class ended up hanging with me for almost an hour watching our antics; I think it is fair to say that it was an entertaining thing to watch.

My conclusion is the technology isn’t ready for education to occur in SL and we as students aren’t really ready for it either. Getting to know each other is hard enough online without using different names and avatars that you have to keep straight. Perhaps as students grow up with these environments and technology advances these environments will become very practical. But for now I will stick with environments where foxes don’t show up to class.

Evicted from Second Life

After my first horrific experience with Second Life I found myself avoiding thinking about our assignment to play in Second Life. Unfortunately, Second Life seemed to be pursuing me. An old friend of mine contacted me via IM and started talking about the fact he wanted to get an account to explore SL for educational possibilities. I can’t tell you how loudly I groaned. Somehow I got talked into signing on to explore with him.

We never found each other but I did manage to learn about signs, how to get into a go-cart, how to set up a friend in SL and how to find that friend. Ended up we were about 80,000 miles apart (or something equally insane) so I decided to fly. I ran into a few buildings. I saw some other people flying occasionally. I also found out that some evil people had security in their air space! I finally ran up against a private island where I couldn’t manage to get out of their air space before I was forcibly evicted and sent to a telapad. Only problem was I was clueless on how to use the telapad so I ended up getting kicked out of the game. LOL

The good news is the updates SL has made makes it so I don’t seem to get sick anymore. The game runs at a more normal speed and doesn’t jerk like it did before.

Slashdot and Adoption boards in Neopets

Posting err, yeah, that would be good. I’ve spent a lot of time in the last two weeks goofing around in either Slashdot and Neopets. (And SecondLife- but that deserves a separate post.)

Our Slashdot presentation is today. I ended up reading quite a few articles and spending time on the boards and in the FAQ sections trying to get a feel for the community. Although I have never commented on Slashdot, I plan on still checking in on the discussions from time to time. I am interested in technology but I’m not sure that I have enough expertise to add to the conversation yet. I guess I will be a peripheral participant for a while before I attempt to join in the fray.

In Neopets I have been trying to learn more about the community outside the halls of my guild. There are many discussion boards that are available and groups that form using the discussion board. Recently I have been spending time on the premium boards. I started doing this to look for some pets for an alias account. There are a number of people that make a habit of adopting unwanted pets in the attempt to change their color and make them more desirable. For example, since I have the labray, I adopted a blue shoyru from the pound and ended up with an island kacheek. I then put her up for adoption and one of my guild mates who dreamed of owning an island kacheek ended up adopting her from me. Only basic colors (red, green, blue, yellow) can be created – every other color can only be earned by purchasing the very expensive lab ray (unlimited uses but you have no control), by buying an expensive paintbrush that is one use or by doing a fountain faerie quest (a random event I have never received) to get the color.

I have been looking for a biscuit chomby on the boards. It ends up there are a number of adoption related boards – some are the no chat variety while others advertise particular pets and want you to chat with them if you want to adopt. The no chat pounding boards are much like wanted or job ads. A person posts if they are pounding or looking and what type and color of pet it is. Agencies will also be advertised where a group of people who have pets up for adoption will list all the pets on one webpage. The individual pet(s) boards will only be offering a pet or two owned by the same person. You might see Ghost Lupe and Starry Xweetok UFA. People will post to the board which pet they are interested in and will stick around to chat and find out what the requirements are. Some people require applications, petpages (a website explaining why you should get the pet), or have requirements that the pet go on main account, not be labbed, or be on an account of a certain age. Sometimes the requirements are extensive wanting pictures, role playing, and a petpage – it is so ridiculous that a group has formed named STIR (Stop The Insane Rules). Others times you can adopt with just a simple neomail answering some basic questions. I have adopted a fire chomby and a mallow grundo without spending more than a few minutes of time.

There appears to be a community that has formed around the placement of unwanted pets. The same people post pets on the no chat boards and adopt more pets to put UFA. Many of these people keep records on pets they have adopted out and check up on them. They expect you to contact them before repounding the pet or giving them away because many will adopt him/her back from you. People that disobey these “rules” can get themselves put on lists that no one will adopt to them in the future. It is clear that this community believes they are providing a service to the Neopian community at large.