Neopets controversy

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The online game Neopets has been involved in many controversies. Off the website, issues have been raised from its immersive advertising methods, gambling-based games, and its connection to Scientology. Users have complained about various security holes or glitches and problems with user interaction.

Groups of people believing that Neopets treats users poorly and who are also against the immersive advertising have formed anti-Neopets websites expressing their views. These groups have bought domain names for their movement, talked about their movement on the Neopets forums, and have even reported Neopets for what they believe to be potential copyright violations. ^[1]

Contents 1 Advertising and revenue 2 Australian gambling controversy 3 Accuracy 4 Scientology 5 Accused plagiarism 6 User criticism 6.1 Hacks and glitches 6.2 User experience 6.3 Formatting issues and disorganisation of new features 7 References

[edit] Advertising and revenue

Neopets is sometimes seen as a liberal placement and promotion of their sponsors' products, a technique sometimes dubbed "immersive advertising". ^[2]

Much of the company's revenue is gained through promotion of sponsors and their products and they had long accomplished this without a single banner or pop-up advertisement. However, in October 2004, a considerable number of banners that link to external websites such as eBay (instead of linking to various areas on the Neopets website itself as they had previously) were introduced. These banners are displayed on many site pages in several places: one at the top of the page, and one at the bottom, and on the sidebar, making avoidance of advertisements increasingly difficult.

The primary method of advertising is still through creating items based on sponsor products (such as "Baby Bottle Pops," a real candy found in many stores worldwide) or offering rare items, Neopoints, or, in one case, a special pet (the "Ice Bori") in return for downloading a free sponsor's toolbar for Internet Explorer. Neopets also features many games for sponsors, such as "The Incredibles Split-Shot".

While immersive advertising is doubtlessly effective, some believe this constitutes subliminal advertising and is therefore immoral, particularly considering the target demographic is children, although the initial demographic was college students. Others disagree, pointing to the fact that not only are many of the sponsors' offers now grouped on one page and are somewhat avoidable, but that no user is ever required to sign up for these offers. Neopets claims these offers and sponsor ads are only to keep the site free.

Controversy also surrounds the creation of various Neopets features that users must pay in order to use. It has made more people worried about the possibility of Neopets becoming "Pay to Play" in the future, although Neopets has announced many times that they will always be "free." In the editorial for Issue 12 of the Neopian Times, Neopets stated, "We do not want to start charging people for any activity on the site as it is not fair to those that do not have access to credit cards or cannot afford to pay for it... and don't worry as you will NEVER have to pay for anything on NeoPets!" ^[3]

The first of these pay features was Coco Roller, a game that users could purchase for their cell phones. Some users were upset that a secret avatar was released that could only be obtained by using a code from the Coco Roller game. Later, Neopets Premium was released and caused more controversy, due to the extra features paying players receive, giving them unfair advantages.

More controversy was ignited when the long-awaited "other side of Neopia" was released, and it was revealed that the land it contained, Lutari Island, can only be accessed by paying a monthly fee for "Neopets Mobile." Many users felt this was unfair, especially since the service is available only to Americans who own certain types of Cingular cell phones. Some users also became upset that a "Lutari Talisman" was placed on the info page (called the "user lookup") of all users. Many view the Talisman as merely an advertisement encouraging people to sign up for Neopets Mobile, and feel it does not belong on user lookups because previously the only things placed on lookups were trophies that the user earned.

To make users even more unhappy, the Neopets Team recently announced that they would be start putting in even more features you had to pay for.

[edit] Australian gambling controversy

In October of 2004, while McDonald's was promoting Neopets plushies in their Happy Meals, a story on the Australian tabloid television show Today Tonight featured a nine-year-old boy claiming that the site requires one to gamble in order to receive enough Neopoints to feed one's Neopet, or else it is sent to an orphanage. While this is factually incorrect (gambling is not required, nor are pets ever sent to an orphanage if they are not fed), it is true that the website has a number of games of chance that are directly based on real-life games like blackjack, poker, and even lottery scratch cards. Neopets had prohibited users under the age of 13 from playing most games that involve gambling. However, there are neither blocks to prevent a child over 13 from accessing gambling games, nor any safeguards to prevent a minor from creating an adult account.

This article sparked a nationwide controversy as concerned parents voiced their complaints about the website, prompting McDonald's to pressure Neopets into temporarily blocking Australian accounts from accessing games of chance for the duration of the promotion, which ended on November 5, 2004. When this happened, a flurry of complaints appeared on Neopets itself when even Australians legally able to gamble could not access any game of chance on the website. Complaints quickly died down after users realized that by merely changing the country setting on their user preferences, the temporary ban could be bypassed.

[edit] Accuracy

Some dispute Neopets' registered users count, which has reached over 120 million, a figure Neopets often cites in promotional campaigns. A large percentage of these users are multiple secondary accounts owned by one person, frozen accounts or accounts no longer used. On "very rare" occasions, the Neopets staff clean out frozen accounts^[4], such that many frozen accounts are never deleted. Some accounts that have not been accessed since the creation of the site still linger. In their Press Kit, they state there may only be as many as 60-70 million players.

[edit] Scientology

Neopets CEO Doug Dohring is closely affiliated with the controversial Church of Scientology. Dohring has been quoted as saying "Having used his technology in every business activity... Mr. Hubbard's organizational concepts are always with me" ^[5]. In December 2005, a self-proclaimed former Neopets employee said that Scientology had impacted the administration of the company and staff, but had not affected anything on the website itself^[6].

[edit] Accused plagiarism

There has also been some debate over Neopets possibly stealing games or game ideas from other sites, such as Orisinal. Games, such as "Turmac Roll", "Warf Rescue Team", and "Nimmo's Pond", are similar to Orisinal's "Panda Run", "These Little Pigs", and "Hydrophobia" respectively. The Orisinal founder briefly noted a similarity between his game "It Takes Two" and the Neopets game "Hasee Bounce" on his news section. Some games from PopCap, such as Typer Shark and Bejeweled, have similar Neopian equivalents too.

[edit] User criticism

Some users believe that they are poorly treated and considered nothing more than mere statistics, that the site has lost its friendliness over the years, and that the quality of customer service has degraded considerably. Some users believe that the Neopets staff freeze accounts too often without good reason. One problem results in families in which more than one person plays Neopets. If one member of the family downloads and uses an illegal program and is caught, everyone in the family is frozen because they use the same IP address. Users that have had their accounts frozen may be able to recover their accounts by filling in and submitting a form.

Accounts may also be frozen because of actions performed by others when they gain access to a player's account. The staff at Neopets state that their site has never been hacked; they argue that users can only be tricked into giving out their passwords, or have their own computers hacked and their passwords stolen via keyloggers.

The Neopets rule that slash, shounen-ai, or any other type of homosexual relationships cannot be roleplayed (or even mentioned) has been criticized as discrimination, although Neopets does state that all types of romantic content are against the rules. More recently, Neopets has published multiple editorials in The Neopian Times to remind players that romance is forbidden. In addition it has also been made clear that the only content allowed on the site is that relating strictly to Neopets; romance as well as other subjects, such as religion or pop culture, are not to be discussed on the site.

Religion, in all shape and forms, is entirely banned from the site. This makes certain users unhappy that they cannot put any religious symbols, such as crosses, on their User Lookup. Neopets claims that this is the easiest way to make sure there are no disagreements.

[edit] Hacks and glitches

Although scams do often occur, Neopets has had glitches and vulnerabilities since its beginning.

One of the first cheats to be used to any great extent was programs that submit fake scores for Flash-based games on the site. After almost a month of uninhibited use, Neopets finally took action in December 2000 and froze the accounts of at least 200 members^[7] known to have been using the cheat. Cheating in Flash games has become harder since then.^{[citation needed][verification needed]}

Neopets has also used legal threats against those creating and using cheat programs, adding clauses to their Terms and Conditions requiring authors of cheats to pay damages of US$50,000, and users of said cheats to pay US$500 per use. ^[8].

On July 25, 2005 (now known as "Dupe Day"), a coding issue allowed items to be duplicated by users by sending specially modified requests to the server. The timing and the duplication and release of cheap, common items (supposedly to implicate innocent users) fueled speculation of a concerted attack. Hundreds, possibly thousands of users were frozen, but accounts were not returned.^[9] In October 2005, a glitch in Neopets Premium (involving mathematically valid but non-existent bank account numbers) allowed hackers to get free premium service. The glitch caused the temporary removal of EFT payment^{[citation needed]}.

On Friday April 4, 2004, (now known as the 4/4/04 disaster) a bug in the lost password request form allowed anyone to view the email address and password for any account. Many accounts were logged into by intruders. Neopets did not correct this until the next business day, Monday, April 7th. The staff tried to fix the problems of stolen accounts and items, but there was still the problem of privacy; some players used the same password for different websites or had their email addresses exposed. ^[10]

A user with the name "Ad0" once was able to hack into the site, and alter many pets' statistics, something Neopets said was caused by a misfiring lab ray[1].

Between November 2005 and January 2006, a hole in the filters allowed users to include JavaScript on customizable pages such as shop descriptions and user lookups. A group of users, spearheaded by two crackers under the alias of "Kaos" and "InfamousX241", used this to read the login cookies of anyone who viewed those pages, which allowed them to log into those accounts. The hole was patched, but over the next month "InfamousX241" found another way past the filters, and the same attack happened and at one point, took over a moderator's account and abused the forums locking powers.^[11]

^{[12] [13] [14]}

A very powerful HTML filter to stop cookie grabbers and other malicious scripts was implemented by Neopets on April 26, 2006. The filter ensures that HTML syntax is followed correctly by checking coding such as brackets and quotes. This filter is said to be impossible to bypass, but known ways of bypassing the filter to include links to outside websites have become increasingly common. Being able to include links in a forum post is essential in using a Cookie Grabber on the forums, and this shows just how close some programmers have came to another Cookie Grabber incident. ^[15]

Also, on and around the weekend of June 17 and June 18, 2006, a series of glitches occurred. These include auctions that took days to process^[16] and game scores that would not return Neopoints^[17]. Also, Neopets stated in their news page for 20 June that "If you have noticed a few quirks with the site over the weekend, they have been fixed!"^[18]

On August 26 to August 27, 2006, some component of Neopets webpages was infected with a virus called value[1].wmf and a trojan downloader called bl4ck.com. This caused Neopets to be temporarily blacklisted in Australia by some ISPs. All viruses were localized to Temporary Internet Files folders. ^[19]

[edit] User experience

Several complaints state that the site has become too focused on merchandising, with many of the recent plots having trading card game (TCG) tie-ins, and some online items and avatars being obtainable only through the purchase of real-world Neopets merchandise. Neopets also began to refer to their world events as "plots" rather than "something happening in Neopia", which may affect users' suspension of disbelief. ^{[citation needed]}

The creators of Neopets had promised never to allow pop-up ads on the site^[20]), but as Neopets uses third-party advertisers, some pop-ups have appeared due to Neopets' inability to control what external links may be shown to its users. Some of the ads may contain inappropriate content, and while Neopets advises users to report such things to them, there is the possibility of a delay before removal.

Other examples of user experience complaints include:

• Items/pets/Neopoints lost due to a glitch.
• Trojans being found in banner ads from 3rd party companies.
• Delays in certain aspects of an event, such as rewards being released months after the event took place.
• Sponsor Flash games showing inappropriate content, such as a sponsor game for Le tea that showed girls getting thinner and prettier as they collected bottles of tea.
• New rules to prevent scamming placing a hindrance on users, such as a 4 month age limit to use certain aspects of the pound, or an HTML filter preventing certain HTML codes to be used on user lookups.

[edit] Formatting issues and disorganisation of new features

There have been accusations of Neopets' disorganization, including pages that show pictures of previous, outdated versions of Neopets, spelling mistakes, and broken links. The site has been criticized for delays and for not telling users about activity behind-the-scenes. For example, in the "Lost Desert" plot, the prizes were not distributed until January 30, over two months after the end of the plot. Neopets has said that they were triple checking every account's amassed points in the plot to be certain of accuracy. ^{[citation needed]}

The newest world release, Altador, was delayed for unknown reasons. In the Neopian Times issue 199, ^[21] Altador was said to be "the other side of Neopia", and the description was accompanied by a promise that the entire Neopian world map would be redrawn to include the mini-worlds. In Issue 115 ^[22], a land called "Talador" was described as "the continent on the other side of the globe". Talador and Altador were confirmed to be the same place in April 2006, when Neopets said the name change was due to legal reasons^[23]. The other side of Neopia has been mentioned several times, and the first detailed notice on its release ^[24] promised it for summer 2004 along with a major plot, neither of which materialized. In issue 139^[25] it was hinted that the other side of Neopia would be released in 2005. In late 2004, Neopets claimed that a completely redesigned map would be released in the coming months. It would allow users to "spin the globe around and see the other side" ^[26]. In early 2006, Altador appeared, but the map had not yet been redrawn. Neopets still claimed, in issue 229 of March 2006, that "the other side of Neopia (and a few other surprises) are coming very, very soon" On June 23, 2006, the other side of the world was introduced and the whole map was redrawn.^[27]. However, besides Altador, the other side of the world contains an area called Lutari Island, which users can not access unless they pay a monthly fee to sign up with Neopets Mobile.

Scurvy Island, a place "where only the nastiest pirates in the land visit" was set for release in 2005 to coincide with the return of Maraqua, but never appeared. In issue 178 of the Neopian Times, ^[28] Neopets made it clear that the island was to be very different from the existing pirate-themed "Krawk Island", and that users "will be seeing quite a bit of it very soon". Scurvy Island was set to be a dark contrast to the light-hearted Krawk Island, and Neopets had insisted there was a need for both. Yet, in issue 180 ^[29], they announced the scrapping of Scurvy Island due to its similarity with Krawk Island: "It doesn't really make sense to create Scurvy Island as a map when we have Krawk Island already."

"Neoschools" are a believed to be cancelled feature, for reasons unknown to users. The URL for the Neoschools is http://www.neopets.com/neoschool/class_info.phtml. Neoschools are mentioned as early as issue 91 of the Neopian Times, when they were said to be released "very soon." ^[30] In issue 95 ^[31] (Summer 2003) Neopets added "Very soon we promise... I know its been a while but we are just finalising the artwork and making sure they are loads of fun at the moment," in response to a question about the release date. In issue 106^[32] Neopets announced that users would be able to register their pets the following week and that the term would start on "The 8th day of Gathering" (September 8, 2003). In issue 119^[33] they claimed to have been too busy to release it in September, despite having supposedly only a week's worth of work remaining, and promised a January 2004 release. Five months later, in issue 139 ^[34], they said they would be "back on track with it soon". In issue 164 ^[35] (about 18 months after the first mention), they said that the project was "on hold" and would not happen in the near future, but also that it had not been cancelled. In the Neopets video game for Playstation 2, The Darkest Faerie, a tombstone can be seen which reads "Neoschools."

The colour purple for Neopets has the unusual quality of also including orange. The orange is usually included as spots, but can also be used in manes, stripes, or other features. Some users ^[36] feel that the color should not have spots, or that the spotted pets should be renamed as another color. The plot that was supposed to explain this strangeness was postponed for the Hannah and the Ice Caves plot, since allegedly many users had lost interest in the plot. The plot was to be named "The Return of Dr. Sloth," and was to include a war on Neopia's Moon, Kreludor, between the purple and the orange Grundos (an alien-like Neopet). When both groups of Grundos realized they should not be fighting each other, they united to fight their true enemy: Dr. Sloth. ^[37].

Controversy has arisen from the changing of the addition sign (+) to a "dagger" (†, †) in most of the places for users to post messages. The character can be seen as a cross of the Christian faith, though in fact it is a typesetting character used like an asterisk for footnotes. The change was meant to break any script or exploit that uses the + character, though it is ineffective. The + characters now do not show up at all on most areas where users can type descriptions and the forum.^[38]

[edit] References