Smurfy Sailor's Neopets Experience
Year 3
Written by Smurfy Sailor
Well, it has been about a year now since I last posted a Neopets Experience article for you to read. And now the long awaited day has arrived and here is my Neopets Experience article for my third year of having been at Neopets.
If you have not read my previous years experience articles, I strongly suggest you read those before reading this article, as in this article I will be referring to things that were in my previous articles.
Click here to read the first article. If you have already read the previous articles then please do proceed reading on this page.
Ok, well lets start off with an email I sent to my friend Belldandy which was from a post that I had made in the guild messageboard shortly prior to the email. (This email is from near the end of October):
>>>
Ok people, here is the sitch.
*gets ready for people to send hate (neo)mail sent*
I'm sorry everyone if I offend you from the content of this message but I am saying what I feel I need to say. Hate me for it if you must.
Belldandy: I love you very much hon, you have been a most wonderful friend to me these past few months, and I have enjoyed talking with you very much during this time that we have been friends. That makes what I am about to say so very difficult for me to do. It is nothing personal. I still love you and respect you very much, don't forget that.
Ok, here I go. Belldandy, I am aware of what has happened here at Neopets to you. You and some other people have told me what has happened and I have thought a lot about it. Note how I didn't post anything about this until just now.
What you are going through hurts a lot. I know the feeling, I have been there twice. It bites when bad things happen to good people. It happens. But truth be told, you did violate the terms and conditions of this website.
Furthermore, last night it occurred to me that you had said something to me a few months ago about having gotten a warning from Neopets Staff. I had a feeling it had to do with something that was similar to the reason that you got frozen. I was curious exactly what it was about so I looked it up in my email folder. (I save almost all emails sent to me by friends or email that I don't wish to delete for eternity)
Here is the URL to the email that you had sent to me regarding the warning that the Neopets Staff had given to you in the month of June of this past summer:
warning.html
Belldandy, you had been warned by the Neopets staff about this before. I really feel as though you had been fairly warned about this matter in the past.
The Neopets staff had every right to freeze you for what you did.
Since they had warned you about it and you did it again, justice was served.
Please don't think me heartless or incompassionate with you.
But you know what?
You were given a luxury that I never was given on my original smurfysailor account.
Had I been given that luxury of a warning on my original account to stop cheating by making accounts, I would have stopped doing that immediately, and there is almost a 100% chance that I would still be on that account to this very day had I been warned to stop. I wouldn't have wanted to lose my account. On my original account I didn't even realize fully that what I was doing was cheating and that I could be frozen for my actions. The second time on the other hand....
Well, read my Neopets Experience articles to read about all that stuff if you haven't read them already.
Neopets Experience Year 1:
ssnpexp.html
Neopets Experience Year 2:
ssnpexp2.html
I am not sure if they have changed their policy on giving people warnings before freezing them or not. But let me tell you this. I wish they had given me a warning so long ago on my original account. It would have made a big difference in my life.
I do realize now that I had violated the Terms and Conditions that I had agreed to when signing up at the website. It would have been nice had I gotten a warning though like you did. Also it would have been nice had they caught ALL people cheating, especially the top referrers list upon which the top referrer has credits for referring more people than the entire population of my whole CITY that I live in!!!!!!!
Neopets Staff: Why don't you just delete that high score board since it is so full of cheaters? It lets people think that they can get away with cheating like the people on the list did. People used to be able to get away with (cheating) doing all those referrals (back in the day, lonnng ago), but now it is too hard to be done successfully without being caught. I am not suggesting to get rid of the referral program, but at least get rid of that high score list for referrals. Please & thanks.
Belldandy, you are welcome to rejoin Neopets on a new account, and I would love for you to rejoin this guild on a new account. For right now I am saving your place on the council for you too. (After awhile if you don't reclaim your position then I will give it to someone else)
I hope that we can still be friends Bell. *cries* *huggles you tightly*
Everyone: I hope you understand why I said what I did. As for messages, I strongly suggest you not try to word your way around the filters. Is it worth permenantly losing access to your account over? Let us all learn from what has happened here. Life will go on.
If you haven't already thoroughly read through the Neopets Terms and Conditions, I strongly recommend you read them thoroughly to make sure you don't accidentally do something that would be in violation of the terms and conditions.
If you break them it would be nice to be able to know that you would get a warning first, but from my experience, you can't count on crap, lol.
http://www.neopets.com/terms.phtml
Its been awhile since I last read throuogh these myself.
OMG, I am very sorry to say this but it appears that the contests that I have been holding have been against the TOS. I am sorry but I must discontinue the contests and giveaways immediately for this guild. I hope that you will not leave but if you do greedily decide to leave then just go ahead and do it now. Please understand why I must do this. I will not take away the titles you have won in your profiles. You may still be eligible for winning more titles too, I just am not allowed to give you Neopets related prizes for it. Don't worry, I will give you presents from time to time though since you are so cool and I love you guys so much. But these presents will not be as part of a guild contests, raffles, lotteries or any kind of giveaway. If giving a present to a friend is against the TOS then they should remove the ability for people to be able to send items to other users on the site. NOTE
For those of you too lazy to look at the TOS here is what they say about it:
"6. You understand and agree that you will not post any:
Any kind of promotions offering prizes of any sort anywhere on our site. Promotions could include contests, raffles, lotteries or any kind of giveaway. Anywhere on our site would mean anywhere a user could post, including our messaging areas, pet homepages, shop fronts or guilds. "
And from the long version: "The Forums and NeoMail may be used for noncommercial purposes only. You are not permitted, without our express written approval, to distribute or otherwise publish any Postings containing any solicitation of funds, endorsements (including of a religious, political, *censored word* orientation, or social cause nature), promotions, or advertising (free or paid in money or Neopoints or Neopets' Items), or solicitations of any kind or nature. You specifically acknowledge that soliciting other Neopets' users to join or become members of any commercial online service or other organization or group (profit, non-profit, religious, social, political, or otherwise) is expressly prohibited. "
I am going to fix this violation immediately. Not only could I have gotten in trouble for this but probably you, my beloved guild members as well.
There are many guilds in Neopia which offer promotions and such (which are in violation of the TOS) so I hope that the staff will not come down on me especially since I am drawing so much attention from this post to them, and since by the time this post is in the messageboard, I will no longer be in violation of the TOS. ;-)
Neopets Staff: I think it is very nice of you to warn people of being in violation of the TOS first before just outright freezing them. Especially if they aren't aware they are in violation of TOS before hand and/or the offense is unintentional. Those people who continue to violate the TOS after having been warned should be taken care of.
I will try to not be in violation of the TOS ever again. But if I ever should be, please have a heart and warn me about it first like you did with Belldandy. Thanks.
Ok, now that I have all that off my chest. Now to see what everyone else has been saying since my last post....
>>>
It was after I had posted this message in the guild messageboard (which took several posts to post the entire message, lol) that I got a neomail from the Neopets staff giving me a warning myself. And they also deleted the message and every other message previous to this message that I had posted in the past week from the guild messageboard. From having read my previous articles you might predict that I would have gotten pissed off from that. Quite the contrary in fact...
I was most grateful that they had given me a warning instead of outright freezing me... Read my next messageboard post for the 411 on it.
*In the above email I see that I put "TOS" and I am guessing I was thinking of Terms of Service and what I meant to say was "T&C" for Terms and Conditions. Just to clear it up for you.
Ok, this next email I sent to my guild members by email within 24 hours of having sent the previous email above. I felt badly for what I had said to one of my best friends. The reason I sent this message by email instead of posting it in the guild messageboard was because at this time I was scared to shit about posting anything at all in the guild messageboard for fear that I might accidentally say something that would be in violation of Neopets Terms and Conditions.
>>>
I feel really badly about what I said to Bell. I know she meant no harm in what she did.
I looked up the convo in which I had with her back in June (ya, I save convos too, lol NOTE)
I remembered from reading that convo more in detail of what had happened for her to get her warning from the staff.
She had used a word (which I don't think was censored at that time) which she uses very frequently. She even has a guild title for it, lol. The word that she used was misinterpreted by the staff I believe. I think they thought she meant that word one way when she had meant the word to have the following definition: Excited with merriment; manifesting sportiveness or delight; inspiring delight; livery; merry.
I tried to post that word now (to see if the word would not be allowed to be posted) and it is as of now a word that the censors will not allow to be posted. (I was posting it clearly so it would not be violating the Terms and Conditions of course, lol)
Had the word been censored at the time that Belldandy was given a warning (which I do not believe the word was not allowed to be posted at that time), then Bell would have had to try to get around the censor which would have been a violation of the Terms and Conditions and warrant the warning to which she recieved.
However, since (to the best of my recalling) that word was allowed to be posted (without having to change the spelling to get past the censors), and also since she did not mean the definition of that word which would have been against the Terms and Conditions, I do not believe that she should have been given a warning back in June of this past Summer. I don't even think she understood why it was exactly she was getting the warning.
Ok, since I am continuing this post after having gotten the warning and am not going to post it in the guild messageboard I can say things freely now.
Ok, Bell used the word "gay" She is a very gay person. The Neopets staff thought she meant it as homosexuality gay and thus they warned her and deleted her posts then.
Since the word was not censored (at least back then), she did not understand why she would be warned like that. So I don't think that should have counted as grounds for a warning.
I feel that this time around that she was in violation of the terms and conditions and that this would be grounds for issuing a warning.
Summary: I don't think she should have been warned the first time she got warned. The word wasn't even a word that the censors would not allow to be posted back then.
This past "porn" incident where she worded to get around the censors is a clear violation of the terms and conditions, and I think that she should have gotten a warning for that. Not get frozen over. The thing is, since she had recieved a warning previously, even though I don't feel she should have gotten that original warning, so that is why the staff logically decided to freeze her since they considered her to be a repeat offender.
Ok, you know what? I have now been warned myself personally by the Neopets Staff.
Here is what the neomail from the Neopets staff said:
>>
From The Neopets Staff (theneopetsteam)
Sent 26/10/2003 12:20pm
Subject Neopets Warning
Folder Inbox
Message Body:
You have received an official warning from the Neopets Team for violating the Neopets Terms and Conditions. Neopets is not the place to discuss the size of anything on your body, the weight and size of other people or any such topics. Do not discuss anything sexual on this site. If you continue to break the rules, your account will be permanently frozen. To see a list of Neo Rules, please visit http://www.neopets.com/chatrules.phtml. Please do not reply to this NeoMessage.
>>
I believe they are referring to the post where I said that I am very fat in comparison to Alice. I didn't even realize that they considered height and weight to be sexually oriented. o_O
I am so glad they gave me a warning instead of outright freezing me. I am very thankful that they did that.
I don't think they gave Alice a warning for having talked about weight since it was her who brought up the subject to begin with... NOTE
I mean seriously though, I mean probably if they really wanted to they probably could have found each and everyone of us to be in violation of something from our posts (those of us who post in the messageboard that is)
Is there unfairness still at Neopets. Absolutely. But they have improved a lot from what they used to do thank goodness. For that I am glad. Otherwise I would most likely be in the same boat as Belldandy right now. They still have room for improvement.
Well anyways, after all of this, I really don't think I want to post any more in our messageboard. Honestly, I am scared of what I might say that they might find to be in violation of their Terms and Conditions.
I am not stopping any of you from posting in the messageboard, but I am very scared for you if you do.
I would hate to see any of you get frozen. I am sad that such a wonderful person as Belldandy got frozen and I want to see no more of this happen to any of us.
We have worked too hard for what we have at Neopets to lose our accounts over something stupid like this.
What has been done has been done. The damage has been done. There is no way ro undo it. Let there be no more. We should find another way to communicate to one another that is SAFE.
Not have to be limited in what we can say, be able to post as much as we want, and for Pete sakes have some fricking active clickable links!!!!
Wow, the Neopet staff must have read like every fricking word I said in every fricking post that I made. O_o
Why am I not surprized that they would do that? LOL
I must say though that I must have really stood out though, I mean with my 18 posts in a row, and for goodness sakes I even posted to them, lol.
Belldandy, please forgive me for what I said last night. You are wonderful and I am very sad that you got frozen. I think you should have been warned instead. I don't think the warning you got in June should have counted for anything. My opinion clearly differs from those of the Staff though.
But like I said what is done is done. There is nothing we can do to change the fact that you are frozen hon. I feel for you, and I feel your pain.
I really hope we can still be friends.
>>>
Ok, well after that email I sent to my guild members, for awhile most of us were too scared to post anything in our guild messageboard for fear of violating Neopets Terms and Conditions. It took some time but eventually we got back to posting in the messageboard again. We just had to be very very careful in what we would say to each other...
Ok, now the following happened towards the end of January of 2004:
This all started with a post in the guild messageboard from my friend aka Hamtaro:
>>>
well im bak yet again after reformatting ^^; st0ck mark3t crash or someone hax0red me and stole my money? im down to 247,000NP from well over 1,000,000NP. how disappointing.. neopet pride goin down down down i prolly wunt be on that much after this injustice -_^
but i shouldnt be too surprised this is neopets afterall.. the place where millions of little children are held under a vicious tyranny...
>>>
This message was followed by a response from Sarah:
>>
What a drag! I probably wouldn't even play anymore if I had that much np and they just took it all away like that.
Yes, children ARE under a vicious tyranny. I have friends who play who are so stressed out about it, when neopets is supposed to be a FUN site, where children work hard to get all the cool items, but they have FUN earning all the np by playing games! GAMES = FUN + NEOPOINTS + (EXPENSIVE ITEMS + OLDER CHILDREN) = STRESSED OUT/SAD CHILDREN! One friend is quitting because it's no fun for her anymore. Quite sad.....;_;
>>
I replied to Hamtaro about what had happened to his stocks:
>>>
check your stocks buddy.
Cuz a night or 2 ago I thought my stocks were a bit low too.
And like I thought that I had more than one set of stocks in some companies.
I just checked and it looks right now and I wasn't paranoid about it.
The reason why my total stocks was so low was cuz some reason it was only counting one set of each kind of stock that night....
Weird, ne?
Glad things are set right now. :-)
>>>
The next day is when I decided to speak my mind on the topic:
>>
Sarah: There was something where for a day or 2 only 1 set of stocks were showing up regardless of how many sets you had.
Whatever caused that has been fixed. I had that problem too. It was much more noticeable to Hamtaro because it affected him a lot more than me since he is so much richer than me and thus had a lot more of sets of stocks in companies than do I. NOTE
This site is not a vicious tyranny that I am aware of.
This is the funnest website there is on the WWW.
Is everything fair at Neopets? no
But then again is everything fair in real life? definitely not.
Neopets is constantly working on ways on which to improve the website.
I must commend them on all their efforts.
This website is a lot better than it used to be and each day, they keep working at making it even better.
When I got frozen on my old accounts, I was in violation of the Terms and Conditions of this website.
It would have been nice if I had gotten a warning first.
And it didn't seem fair that other people had gotten away with a lot more cheating than what I had done while I was to get caught and frozen for my actions which were minor in comparison to what other cheaters had done.
But compare this to the real world.
There are many people in this world who go above the posted speed limit on streets/highways/etc.
Are all of them going to get caught and punished for speeding? no way
Will a police officer let some people off with a warning and others give them a speeding ticket?
That doesn't seem fair does it?
Why should some people get off with no penalty while others have to pay the price of a speeding ticket?
Is it fair for someone who speeds every day whenever they can to get pulled over and get a warning from the officer, while the next car pulled over by the same officer is someone who never speeds, and accidentally went 5 miles over the limit by accident and he has to pay a $500 speeding ticket. Now tell me, is that fair?
There are many other examples I could relate, but I don't think its neccesary to illustrate them all. You get the idea of what I am saying, correct?
It is your choice if you want to speed or not or if you want to cheat at Neopets or not.
Will you get punished for your actions? Maybe yes and maybe no.
But you know what? If you choose to not speed or to not cheat at Neopets in the first place, then you really don't have to worry about whether or not you will get punished for it since you didn't do it.
Oh, and about me not realizing the first time that what I was doing was cheating, a police officer doesn't care if you don't know what the speed limit is because you couldn't see the speed limit sign cuz branches of a tree made it so you couldn't see the sign. If you are going over the limit, even if you don't know you are doing it, you can still get in big trouble for it.
Another thing: If you can't have fun at this website then you shouldn't be here in the first place.
Neopets is a website where you should have fun. No one is forcing you to be here. You are at this website by your own choosing. If you don't like it, then go somewhere else.
Neopets is a very competitive website. It is a website for all ages of people.
Most 5 year olds don't stand a chance at getting a high score on a game when going up against a teenaged professional gamer.
That is true here at Neopets, and at any other competitive website, or at your local arcades, your local gaming tournaments of whatever kind.
Can't get a high score when you are 5 years old? Just have fun with the games at this age. The more you play games the better you get at them. One day if they keep at it, they most likely will be the teenaged professional gamer racking up a nice huge trophy collection and getting loads of neopoints and stuff.
When I was 5 years old and going to arcades I never used to get high scores on competitive games.
As I got older and kept playing the games, I got better at the games and was able to do better and get high score entries and stuff at the arcades.
I'm not saying either that a 5 year old couldn't do it cuz some 5 year old kids are pretty good at games you might be surprized. Age doesn't usually matter much. I think it is more experience, wisdom, reflexes, and that kind of stuff that plays the big role on success on many games and whatever in life in general. It just happens that many 5 year olds lack most of these skills. NOTE
Please don't be offended about what I said. I hope you will agree with me too. Oh, and thanks for getting me started on writing my Year 3 Neopets Experience Article. :-)
***cheers to Neopets, the greatest Virtual Pet fun website on the planet***
>>
Well, enough about that. You want to know all about me, eh? Well, I will tell you plenty but I am not going to tell you my current username and such and you can thank my stalkers & my harassers for that. On my old smurfysailor account I got quite a few stalkers & harassers who had read my article and were stalking &/or harassing me and I knew about it and I hated it so thats why, cuz I don't want déjà vu of that. NOTE
Well, I must say that it has been quite a year for me at Neopets this past year. A hell of a lot has happened during this time. Where should I even begin? lol
Ok, well... As you may have already realized, this year I am not frozen as I have been doing my best to adhere to Neopets Terms and Conditions. I have had my good experiences along with some bad experiences too.
Neopets is constantly doing things to improve upon their site. I must commend them on that. They continue to improve upon the site each and every day.
Ok, well I remember several months ago I had a lot of problems with sending my score on the Neopets Flash/Shockwave Games on my Macintosh computer. Ever since they added the Shockwave crap to the flash games so often I would get screwed out of being credited for for playing the flash/Shockwave games. The games themselves would play fine (when they loaded properly assuming they didn't make my computer crash first...), but when it came time to send my score I would click to send in my score and so often it would say Score Error. I would click on the link and it said something like "Upon further review your score has been declared ineligible for posting. Please play again soon." This was really very irritating and frustrating for me. And I know I am not the only one who had this problem. I have read several people commenting about that in the guestbook and others told me of the same problem when I talked with them on instant messenger.
This was a big problem for many people. I think Neopets was trying to stop people from cheating. It was not as effective as they had hoped that it would be, and to make things worse, they were screwing people who were playing fairly on Macs out of their hard earned neopoints and score credits. I am glad they eventually got the sense of all this and got rid of the Shockwave crap that they were using. Honestly, I don't think they tested it very much before implementing it on the citizens of Neopia. I felt like they were experimenting on us with the Shockwave stuff. But anyway, I'm glad that is all in the past.
Well, back to me I have become very accomplished over the past year. As of the time I publish this I currently have well over 30 trophies in my userlookup and I have scores in well over 160 games!!! I have a guild which is by far the best I have ever had with all of my bestest online friends. It hasn't been nearly as easy to get my Neopoints since I no longer cheat but I seem to be getting by fine.
I have created a brilliant Neopian Adventure which I created using the Neopain Adventure Generator.
Something new in the past year is the addition of avatars to the website which you can use when you post in the neochats and when you post messages in the guild messageboard. I have accumulated quite a many of them.
I am quite proud of myself.
Oh, another thing that Neopets has done that is really nice is how now each month they reset the high score tables for the games. This is nice because it gives people a better chance of being able to win trophies from the high score tables who would not be able to get the trophies if the tables were not reset. Also, resetting the tables removes cheaters and other rediculously high scores from eternally ruling over a high score board and thus preventing others from being able to win them.
Neopets is constantly adding new things to the website including games, special features, and so much more.
Neopets is truly an amazing website. No wonder so many people get so addicted to it.
No not everything is fair at Neopets, but then again not everything is fair in the real world either so what about it? They are constantly trying to do their best to make the site better and more fair than the site used to be.
I am certain that many exciting things will await me in the upcoming year which I will have to write about next year... ;-)
Until then...
I'm outie.
And don't forget to share your thoughts and comments on all that I have said. :-)
So tell me, what do you think? I sure have changed some of my perspectives, ne? Please let me know your thoughts. Feel free to let Neopets know your thoughts too, just don't expect a reply
from them, at least not anytime too soon. You can surely expect a reply from me within a few weeks.
Thank you for reading this extensively
long article.
If you forgot to read my previous neopets articles then it is not too late to read them now.
Click here to read my first year Neopets article.
Please click here to read my 2nd year Neopets article.
Smurfy Sailor's Neopets Experience Year 4
Do you have a Neopets Experience that you would like to share with the world?
Let me help you to publish what you have to say.
Please send me a link to your article or submit the text to me in an email so I may put it on a page hosted at my website for you.
SSCU
