hrtbrk

The Altador Cup standings and prizes have officially been released!
 



 
Head to the Colosseum to see where your team placed and claim your prizes now!

The Altador Cup standings and prizes have officially been released!
 



 
Head to the Colosseum to see where your team placed and claim your prizes now!

The Altador Cup standings and prizes have officially been released!
 



 
Head to the Colosseum to see where your team placed and claim your prizes now!

My pets are now customised for the summer. I like how Blossom turned out the best:
 

 
While she looks more spring than summer, the colours work well and match nicely. I didn't have a nice tea setting for her, but no matter, it is still a nice garden look. And, the lovely pastel blue sun hat. If only our pets could wear a hat AND a wig together....
 

 
Shuhune wanted a bit more of a beach/shell theme, so I went out and got this background (though I know somebody else is using the same background above for their Aisha). She's still wearing the Maraqua Team Cuffs, but they go so well with a summer and beach/shell theme.
 

 
KP always has a pirate theme on him (as he is one), but now he is on Mystery Island. And how nice, somebody is offering him a lot of ice pops. So, he can enjoy those while waiting for his ship to return.....
 

 
Something a little different for Blankstarr, it's not his usual Neovian attire (which would be rather heavy for summer weather, anyway). So, now he is in something that looks a bit more modern, and has some simple objects around him. I thought the striped shirt and gold jacket went together well. And of course, he's never without his cane and pocket watch.

I won a cute background today while playing KQ and decided to use it for my pet:
 

I have re customized all of my pets since Altador Cup but my Kougra is the only one that is super summer themed so far.
 

After 25 excruciating days, the Altador Cup has finally come to a close. Yooyuballs are resting while points have been counted and Kreludor has reigned victorious! Following closely behind in second place is Mystery Island and Meridell in third place

K R E L U D O R
T A K E S T H E C U P !


 
The prize shop is now opened and if you participated in the Staff Tournament, their prize shop is now fixed!
 
On behalf of all of TDN we want to thank the hard working Altador Cup Staff for another amazing season!

There's currently a tie for 2nd place in the Altador Cup!
 



 
Starting tonight at Midnight (NST), the tie-breaking round begins and will last for 24 hours. Luckily, if you are not on a tie-breaker team, you can still play games to help your own rank.
 
Results will be posted on Wednesday, including the opening of both prize shops!

Her Yurble is a Water Yurble. Here's my Summer customization, I still need one more piece to complete the scenery for my Spotted Koi.

 
That piece would be this:

 
Island Leaves and Flowers Foreground
I have enough NP for it, and this will complete the island scenery over here.

The Altador Cup is coming to a close and your pets can relax in the summer sun!
 
Let's see your summer themed customizations!
 
Surf's up for this aisha!

 
A nice beach vacation after an exhausting Altador Cup!

 
He'd rather head to the pool than down to the crowded beach!

After spending literally two hours on the phone with AOL (my old email address, gah I don't miss that noise lol) and harassing my poor mother for her old AOL account information, AOL reset my password and I could finally log on, I actually didn't know this was the email I had originally used, I discovered I had some unclaimed money on paypal (quite a pretty penny too!) from an online zine distro I used to run as youngin' and low and behold there was a ton of password requests from neopets! So yay! I just have to wait until my new account is older than 4 months so I can get my wocky. But I'm super excited to have my old account back, I didn't accomplish much back then but it means so much to me!

Oh hey, that's me. xD
I really don't think there is anything they can do about people leaving their Habis open 24/7. I do, and everyone who isn't afraid of lock outs does as well. I can't see how that would be cheating, but they do probably mean that they only want it to run while you're active on the computer. Otherwise, it's could probably be considered having a game play for you? I'm not really sure. I always leave mine open. It's too much work to close it down, not make anything from it, and then have to repair everything when you wake up.

They're probably tired of dealing with gem locked out accounts so they say that haha

I recently got a nail art kit. I sat for a while thinking what theme I could do for my first attempt with them.
I decided on pac-man!
 
Here's how they turned out, I know I messed the thumb up :( lol
 

With the Altador Cup drawing to a close in the next few days, we've got a preview of upcoming prizes!
 
 
 

With the Altador Cup drawing to a close in the next few days, we've got a preview of upcoming prizes!
 
 
 

Something Has Happened! You are now eligible to use 'Imposter Apple' as an avatar on the NeoBoards!
 
Just had to say - yay yay yay, I got this! I got it by having the imposter apple in my inventory and it being stolen rather than the other way round!
 
yay (again) :)

With the Altador Cup drawing to a close in the next few days, we've got a preview of upcoming prizes!
 
 
 

With the Altador Cup drawing to a close in the next few days, we've got a preview of upcoming prizes!
 
 
 

With the Altador Cup drawing to a close in the next few days, we've got a preview of upcoming prizes!
 
 
 

Dear Lin,

Congratulations! Your entry (Weewoos Gone Wild) has been selected to appear in a future issue of the Neopian Times. A shiny trophy has been added to your user lookup. Thank you for contributing to the Neopian Times!
 
 
Omgomgomg, I'm so happy right now!! I was getting really nervous because I've always gotten the letter on a Monday and it's Thursday already xD. Every morning this week, I get up, go to my computer, hit refresh and cross my fingers/close my eyes because I'm scared to look xD. Then this morning I got the event "Neomail message from: theneopetsteam"... I clicked it and it was a stupid score review from sosd xD. That was a huge let-down moment, but I did get the NT email too so yay!
 
Anyone else enter for the 550th issue in hopes of getting the avatar? I haven't heard anything about it from anyone here, so I was curious.
 
Also, anyone know what past prizes were?

You will all be pleased to know that the Huggy attatched to our Krawk will be re-aged on July 11th, and therefore avalible for lending again. The Krawk/Huggy chain will be set up to ensure everyone is able to get both avatars next month, so if you're missing the Huggy avatar, you will be garunteed to get it next month if you are in the chain.
 
We apologize for having to take it off the lend schedual for a while, but these things happen. Thank you for your patience. :D
 
Anime
ALP Pet Chain Coordinator

In theory, you'd think each goal cuts of 8 seconds. But there's actually like 5 seconds of just delay while you're spamming click and waiting for the clock to start again (like I can score 2 sosd goals while I wait for the stupid delay after scoring and before the clock starts again)...not to mention delay at the beginning too. I've had games with 15 or 16 goals, and even one game with 17 goals, and it wasn't anywhere near 2 minutes.. it still comes to 2:30-2:40 at best, sadly...
 
----
 
Also, I feel like a lot of people that got frozen were legit. Just because they played an insane amount at the start doesn't mean they were cheating. Some people are on the boards like 20 hours a day, even weeks into the competition. Also, team [Removed] was talking about SSing for the side games, not SlSl and yyb, so maybe you can't SS those anyways?
 
Either way, it's kind of stupid that TNT designs a competition that is all about putting an insane amount of time and effort into and then go about freezing people who are doing what they pretty much intended.

Idea:
 
Maraqua floods Altador.
Lost Desert add some sand in.
We ask Roo Island to send purple bugs.
 
^We get an awesome beach party plot instead of the AC!

So even though Altador Cup VII is not officially over, I'd say about 90% of the players agree it's pretty much set in stone that Kreludor will win and Meridell/Mystery Island will play a tiebreaker for 2nd/3rd and that we are playing for prize points. With that being said, this year was a total disaster. Without taking anything away from Kreludor, they are a fantastic team who has had excellent year after excellent year, falling short only because of the finals, this year will go down as probably the worst year in history, which for Kreludor is unfair since they deserved to win after dominating this year as well.
 
With that being said, Altador Cup VIII is likely to still happen, and after the bracket system failure this year we can only hope TNT has a few repairs ready for this year. The problems seem to stem from TNT's reluctance to explain just how the bracket standings work. Teams sweep one another but still fall behind the losing team, even though the rules say to help your team win as much as possible. Some teams (Roo Island/Shenkuu) had the misfortune of playing each other in every single round, while others (Darigan Citadel) had the misfortune of playing the favorite (Kreludor) in 3 brackets in a row, even rematching them once for 4 (potentially 5) matchups. This confusing and erratic system led to some players protesting the entire Cup and quitting, meanwhile other good players were frozen for playing too much. Not only that, some teams will never play each other this year at all, leading some to wonder what could have happened if Mystery Island and Kreludor had been able to square off.
 
This year introduced the bracket system, a far shorter year, and bonus games. While good ideas they were poorly implemented, marring a potentially great year with it's lack of clarity and frankly just absolute stupidity on the part of TNT. Some people asked for clarity only to see their boards deleted or be silenced, leaving questions as to whether the Cup was even fair this year. According to what I've gathered, the bracket system was devises by TNT because some players wanted mid-tier teams (Tyrannia, Meridell, Kiko Lake) to have a better chance, and the year being shortened was another player request. TNT took these requests and formed the bracket system, which could have worked well when based on winning but instead appears to be based on either a Strength of Schedule setup or a Total Points setup, meaning a team could lose every match, but because they score a lot of points compared to the other teams scoring less (for example teams playing Darigan scoring much more to win but dropping activity to play a team like Altador) they could still theoretically come out in 1st place. While this technically occurred with Haunted Woods being swept by Roo Island twice but still placing 4th in their bracket to Roo Island's 5th and Tyrannia placing 4th to Maraqua's 3rd in Round Two (despite Tyrannia's perfect YYB record in the bracket), there were no major upsets for 1st. The bonus games also become questionable, there is no mention of whether or not winning the bonus game is required for the "greater payout", meaning that as long as you play the same amount of the bonus game as normal you could still be doubling/tripling your score for it.
 
In addition to all of the confusion, it appears that certain All-Star and cheating groups backed the top contenders in this year's Cup, begging the question of whether or not the Cup will ever truly be fair again. Which leads me to wonder what potential changes to the system we could have in order to try and make the Cup more fair and balanced. These are the ideas I have come up with, some coming from other ideas I have heard:
 
RANDOM TEAMS
Everyone has a favorite team. Mine is Krawk Island, and I'm sure if you are reading this you have joined your favorite team (or at least have one or two teams you like). This technique however would force everyone to join any one of the 18 teams. While you have a 1/18 chance of getting to play for your favorite team again you could easily end up on a team you dislike. However, this is the most fair way of all ideas I can come up with. There is no chance for an All-Star group to load up a team to give them an advantage and there would be no need for scoring ratios because everyone would be the same size, barring a few teams potentially having 1 more player because the total players didn't end in an interval of 18. The problem is most people don't like the idea of not being able to play for their favorite team, however if you truly want to have as close to a fair and balanced Cup, this is the only real way. People will still cheat but it shouldn't be as significant.
 
SINGLE ROUND ROBIN AND 8/10 FINALS
This idea came to me first. More and more people want to contend for the championship, but don't want to spend forever playing. Unfortunately there are a strange number of teams, so the usual system of brackets (4/8/16/24) can't apply to 18. However what TNT could do is set a Single Round Robin in place, everyone plays each other once. Every game would matter because after the Robin ends, the Top 8 (not 4) teams enter the Championship Bracket. #1 Seed vs. #8 Seed, #2 Seed vs. #7 Seed, etc. Single elimination until a winner is crowned. Now because people would dislike the inability to play or having to rejoin a new team, TNT could set it up so that when a team is knocked out they play another team that was knocked out, if the #8 Seed is eliminated they would play the eliminated team from the #3/#6 match. Winners continue to advance while losers continue to drop. As for the remaining 10 teams, they too enter a bracket, but as I mentioned it wouldn't be a perfect bracket because of it's number, however should a team be eliminated from further advancement they could just play the Practice Team for prize points. Under this system, 8 teams stand a real chance of winning, just look at how the LA Kings won, #8 Seed, they won the Stanley Cup.
 
DROP TWO TEAMS/TWO 8 BRACKET FINALS OR 16 BRACKET
Simple enough, 16 teams worksout well for brackets. The problem? Who do you drop? Well, you could drop the #1 and #18 teams from the previous year. That way the winners need to migrate as well as those from the worst team. The following year you repeat and those who sat out return. As for the finals, Single Round Robin determines the seeds, and once again you could do an 8 Bracket for the Championship and an 8 Bracket for the losers, or make the Round Robin solely for seeding and see if the #16 Seed can pull the ultimate upset.
 
SINGLE ELIMINATION/ACI FORMAT
This is self-explanatory. We return to a single elimination format where if you lose you are a out and join a new team until someone wins. Again the problem is people are loyal to teams and this may hurt their feelings. Oh well.
 
REPAIRED BRACKET SYSTEM
The bracket system was a good idea, however the lack of clarity made it terribly confusing and frustrating to play in. Why are teams that win still behind teams that lose? Why is it all luck based for brackets? It could have been random brackets to begin with but afterwards TNT should have stepped in, made the next two brackets so everyone played each other, and then randomized the final brackets. In addition, make it so that winning matters. If they want to try bonus games again they can, but winning should factor into the bracket standings.
 
These are the ideas I came up with, some of them will not be well received I'm sure (Single Elimination/Random Teams) but if you truly want a fair and balanced Cup some sacrifices must be made. People will cheat, there is nothing to really do to stop them, you can catch one but they can just make another account and do it again.
 
If you have any ideas you would like to see, add them in the topic, if you like an idea vote for it or if you don't like an idea explain why. Hopefully TNT will add a feedback option this year again, and maybe we can all give them a few ideas on how to make Altador Cup VIII a better Cup.