Neopets Review

Ah, yes, Neopest...oh, that's right, it's Neopets, isn't it?  I was an early adopter of Neopets, having joined on April 20, 2002.  The site was launched online on November 15, 1999, by two college students, Adam Powell and Donna Williams, and was originally intended for college-age players, not children.  About six months after Neopets was established, it was bought by a group of investors led by Doug Dohring and turned into the first example of "immersive advertising", which is the placing of brand-name products as an essential and more or less unobtrusive part of the playing/viewing experience.  Viacom purchased Neopets in June of 2005 and promptly turned up the advertising considerably, concentrating on banner ads as well as product placement within the site's games and virtual-purchase items to use when feeding and playing with your virtual pets.  Until this time, Neopets had a reasonably friendly feel, with Adam still on staff and making occasional visits to the chat boards, maintaining his own account and pets, and the other staff and monitors visible and reachable by members to some extent. After Viacom took over and Adam left, the site began what seemed like a systematic alienation of the older members, those who had joined the site early on, supported it, and were responsible for it's tremendous growth and success.  Advertising became more and more blatant and intrusive. Many members purchased Premium membership to escape the ever-increasing ads, at least 2 and usually 3 or 4 per page.  The monitors became enormously powerful and unreachable.  At any moment one could be warned, suspended for 24 hours or frozen (meaning your account was gone gone gone).  Sure, it's a warm fuzzy site with tons of fun games for all ages and levels of expertise, the pets are adorable and varied, petpets are cute, tons of ways to earn Neopoints and spend them on food, clothing, a neohome, a neogarden, great plots to participate in, guilds to join, meet and become friends with people from around the world...I could go on and on.  BUT be careful, be very careful.  Anything you say or do could get you suddenly warned, suspended or frozen with just a generic statement that you violated their rules. Do you really want yourself or your children to spend months and years building and growing an account only to lose it on the whim of some "monitor"?  And try to find out what they objected to?  Hah! Pulling hens' teeth would be easier.  I am 63 years old, a business professional, intelligent, honorable, caring, supportive, and ethical.  Yet my account was both suspended and frozen this year. In my guild, a member mentioned on the guild board that her father-in-law had cancer.  I posted that I was sorry to hear her FIL had cancer.  Bingo! I was suspended with a canned notice that I had attempted to sneak a forbidden vulgar word or phrase by the Neopets censors by using an acronym in place of the word or phrase and that I could only have my account restored by agreeing that I had been a very bad person and would never ever do it again.  Ummm, look up Acronym and FIL and see what you get.  Not a single vulgar word or phrase is represented by that acronym.  A few weeks later I went to my account only to find it did not exist. Yup, it had been frozen.  Why? Who knows.  I sent a very strong message of protest through their inadequate on-site system, but of course there was no reply.  Two weeks later, a friend emailed me that she had checked my account name, and it was active again.  Why? Who knows.  Adam and Donna have started a new roleplaying game site called twinskies.com, and over 3,000 longtime formerly-dedicated Neopians have gladly moved over there even though the site is still in the formative stages, mainly because of the callous and uncaring so-called "monitoring" on Neopets.  In fact, one of the board threads is a hilariously funny "Act like a Neopets monitor" in which one posts a ridiculous reason to freeze the poster above you. Sadly, it is a reflection of Neopets reality these days.