Secre

Well, I maxed three games yesterday. Except only 153 games of SOSD counted. Oh and 1 MSN. I've raised a ticket and contacted TNT on Facebook, so I'm hoping they'll give me my darn games. It's the problem with being eight hours ahead of TNT. By the time TNT fixed the issue at like 1pm NST, it was nearly bed time for us. So my options were play and hope the retroactively credit the games or skip the day.

I'm sat somewhere between excitement and dread. I like the prizes. But I hate how time consuming the event is and it always clashes with my summer reading event that rewards me with actual books and Amazon vouchers! I did really well 2020 and 2021. Lost the will to live last year and so only did about two weeks of it. I figured that if it wasn't bringing me joy, it wasn't worth it. And then absolutely kicked myself when the prizes came out. Still made 85mil off the stamp, but why is the year I didn't hit All-Star the one with the fantabulous prizes!?

I had the same issue originally and had to go find a post on Reddit to work it out. http://ncmall.neopets.com/mall/shop.phtml?page=&cat=#load_items_pane-browse-37 will hopefully work. But otherwise go to the NC Mall and click on Spring in the headings section. They all come up then Oh, how beautiful! All of the items are very nice, which along with the fact that they were rare and retired made them valuable I suspect. Nobody cares about ugly retired things! I haven't done anything with mine yet. I will have to update customs though!

I spent way too much NC. I bought everything and dupes of some things for possible trading fodder later down the line. I now need to buy a handful of them on my sides...

Today TNT woke up and chose chaos! All these items are for sale in the NC Mall for this week only. Nearly all of them have ... or had shall I say ... a value of over 15 GBC's. Some like the Radiant Sunflower Arbour were 25+ GBC. So if any of these retired items were on your wishlists, go and grab 'em quick! Values will decline significantly, but as they are only on sale for a week I suspect they will creep back up again at some point!

What on earth happened with that outfit. It's psychodelic! It's a pity the gems falling from the headpiece aren't seperate. The headpiece would be awesome without them!

It's still open if anyone missed it yesterday! How do I know? Because I ummm... missed it yesterday. Only had my staff contest points left to spend so wouldn't have been the end of the world either way, but pleased to get the books regardless!

The colour of the pet moves with the species change providing the pet you are morphing into has that colour. So a Woodland Kau could become a Woodland Hissi. There is however a workaround to get a pet of any colour through the perk. If the species you are morphing into does not have the colour your pet is currently painted, then you can pick any colour you want. So the Hissi for instance does not have Sketch as a colour. So if I morphed the pet I wanted to change species into a Sketch Acara, then started the Premium Perk and picked Hissi, it will tell me that the Hissi doesn't come in that colour. I can then pick ANY Hissi colour I want. Including lab only colours like Chocolate. That's how I got my MSP Poogle.

The colours a tad simplistic but is certainly striking. I do love the clothes though. Particularly the metallic costume which is really, really pretty. But the rattle snake is also cool! I've now got two hissi's on my bonus side. I need more pet slots on my main side and baby side to move them across. HisssyFits is going to be my baby and I'm not sure what I'm going to do with Hissdras yet, I already have Voldermorts who is Halloween/Transparent cross. I do like Candy and I don't have any candy pets, so that's a possibility...

Kiko Lake Carpentry Another bath bomb for me. Surprise surprise! But a cute petpet to make up for it! The NC prize for today is very nice though. That makes two items I like the look of.

Don't forget to click on the 'I can help' message in the text bit. It takes you to a tarot card 'mini game' which you need to play three times to progress the text.

Miracles never cease! Back up stamp for the SDB!

I suspect baby and mutant pets won't be able to use them as they are handheld rather than foreground items.

I kinda like the Relic... but not enough to want one. It's certainly striking. And it doesn't seem as... messy as the Kacheek with the different styles of rock. The Kacheek would have been better with just the stomach gem. The looks like a cross between a Haunted Woods idea and a drag queen? On the plus side, the claws and fangs are removable - I imagine there's going to be some fantastic cross paints out there! The eyes are stubborn. I've gone through most of the contacts and they look ridiculous or just don't work. However the Rolling Fog contacts make the red look less... severe and more like it's hiding beneath the stone. So @LekkerLekker89, this might be more what you were after? I do like that outfit. May have to be picking that up for my Royal/Halloween Lupe. May also zap random Lupes to see if I can't get those teeth from the Relic...! I like the addition of bonus items as well! Very cute!

Snowglobe. Well, its better than my tenth bath bomb I guess!

So having done some extra sleuthing on Facebook and Reddit, it looks like both are true. The team did indeed make it so you couldn't discuss anything non neo related and there were a couple of days where staff were warning and silencing players. However the backlash has been (predictably) severe and they have walked the policy back pretty quickly and the description has also been changed. There was also a certain amount of passive aggressive 'word but not spirit of the rule' keeping with people very obviously finding neo words to describe real life things. The problem is that there are so many better ways and no other site uses the idea that you need the 'original' email because it just doesn't work. People change emails, servers get deleted. Over time, the average adult may keep their email but children certainly don't and many people created accounts in childhood! Even with adults though, there are some things I've used a work email to set up and no longer have access to the work address because I no longer work there! The previous policy was that you had to know what the original email was - still iffy given people may have been like 7 when they opened accounts, but more doable. Now you actually need to send an email from the account... which has a reasonable chance of being defunct.

Yeah, I have 8000 NAKR which I'm holding. I only saw the SMUG high as I keep certain quantities depending on how high it goes: 500 for 60+, 250 for 70+, 50 for 80+... possibly need a 5 category for 100+....

Oh, I'm definitely around for the nostalgia now. I had a long hiatus and came back during COVID and lockdowns in 2020. Spent a small fortune on the site - I'm really not joking. I went from virtually no NC to most of my wishes complete and a trading list that still makes me wonder how much I really spent... (http://impress.openneo.net/user/44099-Secre/closet). I spent hours on the site collecting 100k from Flash games Monday to Friday. Managed All-Star 2020, Double All-Star 2021 and then started to lose interest in 2022 only managing level 14. Now... I spend months without playing and even when I am 'active' like now, it's mostly half an hour for dailies and occasional NC trading. There just isn't much to do on the site and it's boring. With that in mind, why oh why are they restricting one of the few areas of the site that actually works further!? I'm clearly out of the loop as I just found the Sorry Mummy Sorry thing stupid when I clicked on it. Not sure I want to Google it to find out why it's inappropriate though! ... You aren't even meant to have a Reddit account until you are 13 years of age. So how is linking it child friendly!? Oh, TNT have been making bad decision after ban decision lately. NFT's aren't really their fault. But the chaos of the AC, games that hadn't been fixed since the previous year when they were broken, rampant cheating and shadow bans definitely were. As is the new policy of requiring access to the ORIGINAL email used to set neopets up if you can't gain access to your account. Even my BANK doesn't require that and my bank has my actual pay cheque being deposited into it! People set accounts up as children. They used parental emails, discarded emails, emails that have long since been defunct as the server that hosted them no longer exists. If they have updated their account settings, then the current email is what should be required. Then you have the lack of events (Charity Corner), broken promises (Premium sale)... and now this. It's seriously like they want to destroy the site.

Well, that's going to make the Altador Cup even more tedious than normal, isn't it?? The team chats are full of off-topic nonsense inbetween scoring and suchlike. I remember having a full discussion about what we did whilst also playing endless SOSD last year that divolved into a full book recommendation list... Are they trying - I mean, really, actively trying - to destroy the site? I don't spend much time on the boards admittedly, but many of those who do are the most committed long standing players. Why are they trying to chase them away!? And child friendly until we look at the NC Malls Gatcha mechanics with capsules. Spend a fortune to not necessarily get the items you want and gamble on a low chance of getting the special edition item. Exactly how is that child friendly??

I've seen better run websites than Neo kick the dust, so my hopes aren't particularly high for a long term future anymore. If anything, I'm frankly amazed they've lasted this long. They have no understanding of their customer base (mostly adults now, not children), so are gearing things to the wrong audience - except NC which is definitely geared towards adults with money to burn with gatcha mechanics and gambling, so somewhat hypocritical to boot. They have very poor customer support and processes (new process meaning you have to have access to your original email to gain access to lost accounts is ridiculous - very few people are able to access twenty odd year old emails and half the server addresses no longer exist.) They know it's stupid and they don't care. Most of the site doesn't work and there is very little to do unless there's an active event going on. I'm in and out in twenty odd minutes unless it's half price day and I'm trying to stock my shop. Events are thin on the ground, cancelled (Charity Corner), broken (Altador Cup) or so simple they can barely be called events (Faeries Ruin). We're all waiting on plots that have been promised for over a year. But the Premium Sale was promised for the end of last year and that never materialised, so again, low hopes here. As I said, I've seen far, far better sites run into the ground due to mismanagement and stupidity and that does seem to be the way neopets is going now...

Should have held off before selling SMUG. Think I sold at 70 something. It's now over 100. Doh!

I've got it coming up at 32k odd on SSW for me. I'll bite the bullet and buy it if I have no luck by the end of the event. I'm just peeved that I have so many duplicates of stuff that I don't want!

It's usually because someone complained about junk littering the money tree. I guess it's inconvenient because you have to have less than 20k on hand to use the money tree to collect np? Maybe? Who knows. Because yep, 100np is worth more than the 2-6 point CC items I tend to fish out of there!

So far the only interesting looking prize is the snowbunny background. I'm waiting to see the final options before jumping. Last year I bought a 15 day pass and didn't particularly like any of the darn items!

Could be worse, I suppose! Looking forward to Lupe and Hissi day. I may have to create a Hissi for an eventual baby pet...