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.