Virtual petsite
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Contents |
[edit] Overview
A virtual pet site or VPS is a website where people can adopt virtual pets, buy items, play games, earn virtual money, explore lands and take care of individual pets. Many have guilds or clubs, as well as forums, mailing systems and adding friends. Bigger sites have auctions, trading and battling arenas.
[edit] Pets
Each virtual pet site revolves around the ability to adopt a pet. Some, like Neopets, allow as few as four pets. Others, like Marapets, allow as many as 12.
Some pets are created in themes, like 'Fishland' which allows you to adopt a fish. Others, like Neopets and Marapets, have several types and species of pet.
Various pets include dragons, unicorns, fish, pigs, aliens, cats and dogs. Many of them are completely unique creatures, with only slight resemblance to real life animals. Sometimes an artist will merge two animals together to create a new type and original look.
[edit] Shops
All virtual pet sites usually have shops, you can buy items such as food and toys. Virtual money earned from playing games is required to purchase the items.
[edit] Restocking
Restocking is when you buy an item from the shops and then placing it in your shop higher than the original price. Restocking usually will only be used on bigger pet sites as there is not as many players on small pet sites. This means the stocks of items will be higher which will allow you to buy the item faster.
[edit] Clubs
Clubs are a very popular feature in virtual pet sites. On some virtual pet sites clubs may be known as clans / guilds or cults. Clubs are usually made up of an index page, club forums a member list and a admin panel. Some pet sites may have a donation page for funds to run contests or giveaways. Some clubs have off-site websites which contain information on events that are related to the club.
[edit] Forums
A big draw to virtual pet sites stems from the interaction between other players, either through games or through forums and clubs. On large virtual pet sites such as Neopets, thousands of topics are made each day, on other pet sites only a few topics are made each day. In some sites like Neopets, you can collect avatars that represent you on message boards. To unlock an avatar you will usually have to complete some sort of quest or mission. You can usually edit the html in your post and you can also have a forum signature which is displayed under your post.
[edit] Exploring
All sites have an 'explore map', where you can visit other islands, and land that make up the whole pet site. There are many places to explore and all places are unique and have a theme (eg. Haunted Tower)
[edit] Games
Games depend on the website hosting them, ranging between flash and shockwave. Of the major pet sites, puzzles, chance, and action games tend to be the most common. Due to the amount of money it costs for flash games to be made, most virtual pet sites will create games in PHP or JavaScript. On most sites you are rewarded with the currency of that website for points accumulated in each game. They often put limits of how many times you can play each game per day, and how much currency you can acquire.
[edit] Examples
These are different examples of virtual petsites.
[edit] Neopets
Neopets was created in 1999, and is one of the biggest pet sites on the web. with the most users and high traffic. It allows the player to have four pets and do a lot of variety of things on the site. This site is very controversial compared to others.
[edit] Subeta
Subeta is also a very good site. They have user made items which are carefully picked from thousands of submissions. This gives the site a more refined look. They have unique pets, allowing you to keep several pets, and a human avatar.
[edit] Marapets
Marapets was first opened on August 2004. The graphics are not high quality as Neopets are, but they are adequate for the users. Games are flash, embedded in the site. The layout on Marapets is original, during the day, Marapets has a bright layout with animals that are awake but during the night it shows pets sleeping and the layout is darker.
Their owner, Ian, is the best and should be more liked. He is not anywhere near as well liked as he was when the site first started.
Ian has grown the site larger with many more members and many more features and continues to do so. Even though some may complain that he is slow, programming takes time and he is doing a great job so far.
The site also has some original Marapets Flash Games now and is growing by the minute!
