twink life-in-death

March 31, 2014

neopets is honestly a horrifying and disturbing look into the faults of late capitalism and the unfettered exploitation inevitable in unregulated economic systems
like
first you have the ridiculous inflation rate caused by the ease of which you can generate new neopoints. it’s like the post-WWI germany thing—if you keep printing money, it loses its value. similarly, as people play games, play habitarium, use the stock market, (basically any way of earning neopoints that doesn’t involve rsing from the NPC shops) they’re not actually exchanging currency cyclically like economies rely on—they’re just making it out of thin air. 10,000 neopoints today was 1,000 neopoints a few years ago. even avatar items that have been around for a while have soared from 300k to 3 mil.

inflation is further worsened by a few things. one is that there are very few neopoint sinks (only notable examples are the main shops, wishing well, paid dailies, and slots) and only ONE that works even remotely efficiently. they had the save the wheels neopoint sink a few years ago to try to combat the problem, which only fucked things up worse. in order to incite people to sink their neopoints, they offered prizes to people who donated a lot. but the prizes themselves, both during the event and after, just encouraged people to generate more neopoints to donate and get prizes.
it’s also awful because kids don’t play neopets anymore. in a capitalist system there’s always relative poverty, but the poor are disappearing. do you want to play a game where anything worth doing costs more than you could ever dream of earning? how is an 8 year old going to learn how to restock draik eggs? poverty in neopia is earning, like, 33k a day, and richness is incomprehensibly huge. we’re talking billions, trillions. wealth disparity is huge with no regulatory system helping out the lowest tier, and the rich get richer with bigger interest, bigger stocks, and more wiggle room with auction sniping
the supply/demand is so integral to everything you do, buy, or take part in. you have things like codestones that generally stay constant (in the 3-7k range, with some inflating 20-40% around war time when people are training more because hello demand!) and things like junk items that you think could NEVER inflate because the supply is so high suddenly inflating 1,000,000% or more in a day due to a site event.

and the staff actually have NO IDEA how to fix it. save the wheels? fucked up. portal plot? hilarious. there are rules against hoarding items just to raise the price, but how do you control that? bread costs less than rotten tomato salads. if you earn 16k a day (about average if you’re casual) it would take you 59 years to save up for a dark faerie wand. hell will eventually be sucked into the vortex of neopets.com and we will all despair
and i will be richer
than all of you

(via asdfae)

7:43pm | URL: https://tmblr.co/ZAk0Fy1Bm2BW8

(Notes: 38,836)

Filed under: holy shit i did not know about neopets