Please be sure you have read the original first article I have written before reading this article. That article is a prerequisite for this article. ;-)
Well, it has been nearly a year since I last made an update to this section so here it is.
I have read through what I wrote the first time I wrote of my experiences and I still feel just about the same way about the website now as I did when I wrote the first article. The reason I am writing this article is because I have more to say now then I did back then and also I have almost an entire years more of experience at the website to talk about.
All right, now after I had lost basically EVERYTHING I had worked so hard for at Neopets in over a years period of time I was going through a lot of emotions. I was hurt very deeply and was very depressed. It took a little while before I decided to start again at Neopets. I had learned from the experience, and now thought I knew how to cheat by making accounts without being easily caught.
Why would I go cheating by making accounts once again after I was punished previously for it?
Well, let me just put it this way: When you have nothing, you have nothing to lose. And nothing is what I had when I started back up again. So if they had froze me again right away it would not have been a big deal for me. But this is not what happened. I had learned from my experience the first time. And this time I was cheating full well knowing of the fact that what I was doing was cheating. After all, what had playing fairly gotten me the last time? I mean that is what I did the first several months playing Neopets on the smurfysailor account, and then I decided to try out the referral program, not really knowing at the time it was cheating. I mention of this in the year 1 article so I'll move on.
Anyways, they had already labeled me as a cheater so I'm like well, if I am a cheater than I might as well live up to it, so I decided to make accounts through the referral program full time now. Instead of one referral every day or 2, now I eventually got up to doing at least 8 referrals on 8 different accounts almost every day (1 referral for each of the 8 referring accounts to make a total of 8 referrals at one time). Some days I would make more than 24 accounts (8 referrals times 2 or 3 or more), but making accounts can be tiring work. However, it was very profitable for me to do this. 10 referrals on one referring account would get me a random paintbrush. One time I was able to sell one of these brushes I had won for 300,000 Neopoints!!!
I decided it was worth the extra 2 referrals per account to get the 5-dubloon coin because the price on those had gone up to now worth more than 10,000Neopoints each. Once I had gotten the 12 referrals to continue on referring on those accounts just was not worth it. I even tried it out just to make sure on a test account (which I was thinking of trying to get on the top cheaters *ahem* referrers list until I discovered that I was no longer recieving any prizes after my 100th referral). After 12 referrals you don't get shit worth your time. I didn't get very many codestones for the codestone hoard, and I was hoping the super rare item I would get from 75 referrals would be something like a hidden tower item, but boy was I disappointed when I got a cheap ass morphing potion worth only a few thousand Neopoints!! You would think they would pay out better for the more referrals you get but it is quite the opposite after your 12th referral. I thought that I had read at one point that the referral prizes would repeat after 100 referrals but for me they didn't. Go to all the bother to refer for nothing more than to get on a list of cheaters? Totally not worth it, especially since I would need almost 400 more referrals just to get in 100th place!!!! O_O
So I gave up trying to get on the list and continued on with the other referring accounts up to 12 referrals. Once I got up to the 12 referrals it would be time for me to transfer the items from the referring account to one of my main accounts to sell or do whatever. If you were my neofriend you may have noticed that I had some cheap stuff for trade in the trading post. What I would do is to log on to the referring account and then bid all the goodies I had won on the cheap trades I had available on one of my main accounts. The next time I would log on to the main account I would accept the trade and then put most of the items in my shop or for auction. Oh yeah, and of course once I had made the bid from the referring account I would refer some new accounts upon which would become new referring accounts.
I had 2 sets of 4 referring accounts to make a total of 8 referring accounts in all at one given time. All 4 of the accounts would reach the 12th referral at the same time which made it easier for me. And the other set of 4 accounts would reach their 12th referral at a different time. That is how I was able to refer making the new referring accounts. (confusing, ne?)
Whenever I had accepted the trades from my main account I would make 4 new cheap trades set up for the next time I would have one of the 2 sets of 4 accounts reach 12 referrals and be ready to make the bid on it.
All of this stuff took quite awhile to do. And I had to be very careful so as not to get caught, which I seem to have done very successfully for the past eight+ months too. I have made millions of Neopoints from the Neopets Referral Program in the past 8+ months. I had also learned from the last experience that it is not smart to keep everything of value in one or just a few places. I made quite a few accounts each of which had quite a bit of value on it just in case I should ever get frozen again. Accounts that the Neopets staff would never think to trace to me in a million years. Meaning these accounts have no appearance in any way of having anything to do with me at all, most importantly not being in my guild. (A mistake I had made the first time I was frozen) The Neopets Staff had gone through all of my guild members and figured out all of my accounts of value from that. I totally learned from that. :-)
As you may have noticed, I have just had my main Neopets accounts frozen once again. They froze them on April Fools Day, 2003. Unfortunately, this was not an April Fools Day joke. :-(
I am glad they did not get my valuable accounts that I made a long long time ago which the staff will not be able to trace to me, which includes whichever Neopets staff is/are reading this article. I'll even give the staff a hint, they are swiss (Neo)bank accounts I made. :-) How will they be able to tell my swiss bank account from someone elses? ;-)
Not only did they freeze my main accounts, but they also deleted the Smurfy Sailor Moon and Pokemon Guild!!!!
When I used the referral program I would put the accounts that I made into the guild. (another payoff of cheating)
Click here to see the main page of the guild just after the 1000th member joined!!
Click here to see the guild poll results just after the 2000th member joined!!!
The guild was almost to 2200 members by the time the guild got deleted. I was hoping to make it to 5000 members which would put the guild in the top 3 in Cute City.
Over half(well over 1000 accounts) of the members were accounts I had made myself. How else was I supposed to get such a huge number of members to get in the upper rankings of the guilds? And don't tell me for one second that the guilds that are on the first page listings of the guilds got thousands of members without cheating. Bull Fucking Shit!
Anyone who was a member of the guild and really got to know the guild knew just how awesome a guild I had going. I would give away random free prizes to guild members simply for posting anything and/or contributing to the guild gallery, etc. I had many competitions and giveaways. One individual won 200,000 Neopoints from the Ultimate Smurf Test Competition!!!! Another individual won $20 in US cash plus a genuine Smurfy Sailor Autograph from the Sequal to the Ultimate Smurf Test Competition!!!! I had many other competitions and giveaways where I gave out many nice paintbrushes, faeries, 5-dubloon coins, and many other cool prizes!!! It was also a fun place to hang out. I personally don't think there was a better guild in all of Neopets. (If you know of one please let me know)
How could I afford to give out such nice prizes to my smurfy members? Well, I think I already answered that question. *LOL* And I sure didn't want to ask for donations or contributions from the members. It just didn't feel right to me to do that. So I shared my wealth with the smurfy people who made the guild a smurfier place to be. It felt good to give to them since they were such cool people.
I will miss the guild and the people who helped to make it a smurfy place to be at Neopets. Some of the members I have email addresses for and know AIM s/ns for and hopefully we can keep in touch. As for those whom I don't know how to contact outside of Neopets, I would like very much to keep being your friend. My email is: smurfysailor@gmail.com
Occassionally I may go on AIM as "smurfysailor"
Thanks to everyone who made the guild so smurfy. ^_^
Ok, yes, I admit that I was cheating at Neopets by making accounts. Was I hurting anyone by doing that? I think not. In fact, I would say I was doing just the opposite because I gave away so many nice prizes to people for free. Also, there are many, many, many people who cheat at Neopets. And some of those cheaters do it in a way that is harmful to people. There are some people who make webpages or whatever trying to steal other users accounts. Now this hurts people and is not a very smurfy thing to do in my opinion. The links below are of some of these webpages upon which some individuals have neomailed me trying to get me to give out my username and password so that they could steal my account from me: (these pages are not mine and I hope you are smart enough to not fall for the scam especially since I am telling you about it here)
Neopets Harmful Scammer Cheater #1
Neopets Harmful Scammer Cheater #2
If you know of more of these scams please email them to me so I can list them here.
Now you tell me which is worse, what I did, or people who cheat by hurting people. Was I justified in doing the cheating that I did at Neopets? Well that depends on your perspective. I personally feel totally justified in having done what I did and I have no regrets.
Even being as careful as I was, the Neopet Staff eventually caught on to what I was doing. I'm not sure exactly how they caught me this time but I have a feeling it had to do with the guild (especially since it was deleted)...
And like I said before, I know I was cheating, but I don't think it is fair that they got me because there are lots of people who they let get away with cheating. I dunno, maybe those people know how to not get caught better than I do.... :-/
I was going to show you how the list of top referrers (cheaters) has changed over the past few months but I guess the page has too much HTML in it for me to save it here on a page for you to see, but I will tell you this: Although there has been some change, much of it is about the same as it was several months ago. There have been no big increases in referrals for the people on the list and some have stayed at exactly the same number of referrals as they were at several months ago (and a few have been frozen for cheating by making accounts). Now this makes me think that a long long time ago when these cheaters made all those rediculous numbers of accounts, that the staff at that time did not know how to catch the cheaters and thus they were able to get away with it, and I might add very easily in fact. I have noticed over the past several months that it has gotten more difficult to refer. I am thinking that most likely a long time ago when they first came out with the referral program that all you had to do to get a referral credit was to fill out the information page 1 time, then submit the info, instantly be logged onto the account and thus giving the referral credit, click the browsers back button, submit again, and select one of the alternative usernames provided (since the previous username would now be taken) and signup, click back, and keep doing this over and over again, and without even having to refill out the information page. How convenient. (They have never reset the leader board for this, and should those on the list go about referring like they once did they would probably get frozen sooner or later)
By the time I began the referring, I could only get 1 referral per referring account each time I came on the computer. Also by that time they had figured out ways of tracking cheaters like that. And eventually, I saw as time progressed on that they made it even harder still to refer. They have now put in a security code to prevent people from making a whole bunch of accounts at one time as I mentioned above (even though at this time you wouldn't get credit for more than one). This made it so that you have to fill out the information page for an account every time which can be a lot of work. And later on, they made it even harder just recently by making it so that you aren't automatically logged in after signing up. But the payoff was still high enough for me to make it worthwhile to do it.
Well, anyways, enough about cheating. I've done much more than that at Neopets in the past year.
All right, now that I've finished confessing lets talk good stuff.
Ok, here is my user lookup and my high score entries from February 24, 2003 (in my time zone). Which was before they reset all of the game scores again. (I was almost at 100 high score entries too :*-( How depressing that they reset scores just before I could get to 100...)
I did save my stats more recently than what I have shown here, but after they reset scores it didn't look as impressive as this.
I have worked very hard to get all the scores that I have gotten. Also, when I did cheat that was quite a lot of work too. The only way I cheated was by making accounts. I do not know how to cheat at the flash games. If i did know how to cheat at the flash games and chose to do so, I would have many many many more trophies than I do now, or did before I got frozen.
Well, over the past few months there has been lots that have stayed the same about the site and also there has been quite a bit of change as well. Many games have been taken off the site and have been replaced with new games. Quite a few of the classic Neopets games still remain too. The games are fun but they still cut off at 1000NP which is discouraging to continue playing a game after I reach that point. It has gotten harder to make Neopoints without means of cheating. Games don't pay out as well for the most part in general as they once did long ago. A long time ago there was no limit as to how many times you could get Neopoints from a game (send your score and get credit for it along with Neopoints). Also the games in general had a much better payout and there was no 1000NP cutoff. When I used to get 9000+ points at bumper cars I would get close to 5,000NP from one send of score!!!
Also the site has become more commercial than it used to be. They make quite a lot of money from people who pay Neopets to have their products a part of Immersive Advertising- which is "a technique pioneered by NeoPets that reflects an evolution of the concept of traditional product placement. Through this mechanism, NeoPets creatively develops advertising programs that integrate the commercial products, services, brands, and names of its clients into existing or customized activities and scenarios within the popular NeoPets website, thereby making the product an important part of the activity or game. This method of advertising produces lasting awareness, retention and brand affinity with impressions that effectively and repeatedly convey the client's message to the intended consumer".
The web site still has many fun activities upon which you can do. But remember, Neopets is just a game. And like any game, you can do really well at it, or really badly at it, and of course game over (frozen). Over the past 2 years I have found myself to be very addicted to Neopets because there is so much to do, and it is fun, and competitive. I realized how much time out of my life I was spending at the website, and that inspired me to create the guild "Neoholics NonAnnonymous" which has not been deleted to this date. However, I am no longer maintianing it.
Not everything is fair at Neopets. I guess Neopets is a virtual version of the world we live in, only a world which you may find more desirable to live in than your nonvirtual life, thus the addiction.
Although I have been frozen, I still do have quite a few accounts of value remaining unfrozen because I had learned from the last time being frozen. But honestly, after this past time getting frozen, I really just don't feel like starting over again. I won't get anywhere fast without cheating and Neopets has taken up too much of my life the past couple of years. I think it would be best for me to do other stuff with the countless hours I will save by not playing at Neopets. Hell, maybe I could become a straight A student like I was once, some time ago. Work more on my websites, though probably not too much because I think my websites are basically all that I had ever dreamed of them becoming and beyond already. The new trivia test I am working on will probably be the last I make of its kind because it takes so much to make something like that up, and also I will have a question for most animated shows by the point I am done with it. I may still add other stuff from time to time, but like I said, the site has gone way beyond what I had ever envisioned for it to become. There are many things I can do with the extra time I save from my life by not playing at Neopets. I don't think I need to make a list for you. Can't you think of stuff I could do? *LOL*
I may stop by Neopets from time to time to see whats new there and stuff, but I just don't feel like starting over AGAIN. I am thinking of giving away some of my valuable Neopets accounts remaining in the upcoming test. Be sure to watch for it when it comes. It won't be easy, however. *LOL*
Like I said before, Neopets can be very fun and addictive. I have been there much to know this. I am not trying to say you shouldn't go to the website. Whether you go there or not is for you to decide. I am merely trying to tell you of my experiences at the website. The purpose of doing so is that I hope it may be of insight for you and maybe help you in some way, be it educational or whatever. What you do or think of what I have said is up to you. You can make of it as you will. Perhaps it will inspire you to write (and maybe publish) your own Neopets Experience. I have a link at the bottom where you can submit your Neopets Experience for others to read which will be hosted here so you won't even have to have your own website to tell your story.
Well, thank you for reading this huge article. Please email me any questions or comments you have relating to this.
Make sure you have my first year's Neopets Experience to know my Neopets Experience in its entirity.
And once you are ready, then click here to proceed onward to my Neopets Experience Article for my third Year at Neopets!!!
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Smurfy Sailor's Neopets Experience Year 4
SSCU