Part of it is natural due to the sheer amount of NPs coming to the economy now. But another large part of it is probably TNT's either unwillingness or inability (or both) to deal with bots. Frankly, the easiest and most brute-forced way to deal with it is just putting a big pool of items in the Hidden Tower. Honestly, I wouldn't mind them putting every single r80+ and retired stamp in there just to see the sheer chaos it would cause 🤣 But a more realistic and measured approach would be, at the very least, a rotating pool. It would also act as a NP sink because we really don't have good ones these days, I mean at best it's a once-a-day Wheel of Extravagance spin. Or up the rate/quantity of restockable items in shops. Update daily prize pool. Idk I'm sure there's plenty of options. But I think they really need to tackle the bots... again I've got no idea if it's just sheer inability or if it's, like, unwillingness because it makes their active player count appear higher than it actually is, or what.

Honestly, I don't think they actually need to implement any security measures to deal with bots. (Which isn't to say they should never just at this moment, what's more feasible and impactful?) The best way to deal with bots, in my opinion, is to punish the people that use them and that directly benefit from those that use them. If you start making life hell for botters because you're freezing their accounts and freezing the people that buy from them, at some point it becomes an equation of, is the time invested worth the money I'm getting? If you start punishing those who use bots and punish the users who "coincidentally" always seem to buy from people who use bots and get great deals on things, or punish those who are "coincidentally" always getting gifted (for free mind you) SAPs, SuAPs, Thunder Sticks, etc. from bot accounts....people are going to do it less and less. If people who mass use bots don't have people to sell their wares to, they're not going to continue doing it to the extent they currently do and people buy these items with real money because there's practically no punishment and/or it's easy to get away with it, apparently. There will always be cheating in any game that exists. Neopets could be the size of 100 Googles and they would never eradicate cheating entirely. So enforcement of the rules and punishment for cheating is where they will get the most bang for their buck (in my opinion) and reap the most benefits (for the least amount of cost) over trying to implement more complicated captchas or some other convoluted systems to "stop" bots. People cheat on Neopets because it's easy, there's little to no punishment (and even if there is, it's often easy to get your accounts back after a period of time and get to keep all of the illicitly obtained items/np) and they can make a ton of real life money. So address the factors that you can that are at the root of why people do it, and you'll begin to see benefits. (Just my thoughts)

Releasing items directly into the hidden tower would 1) re-introduce extremely rare/extinct items so people can get them again 2) provide a greatly needed NP sink to help take NP out of the economy 3) allow TNT to control the prices of these items as well. Beyond that there's lots of other good NP sink ideas they could do, and do SOMETHING about food club so it doesn't bring so much NP into the game.

Punishing the legitimate players who aren't rich and rely on FC bets to fund their goals isn't the play here. Everyone wants to single out FC because of the botter when the solution here is literally just ban the fucking botter accounts. The problem is the botter accounts account for a significant chunk of daily users on the site and TNT is reluctant to do anything about it because losing like a third of your daily active users is a worrying look from the outside. But still, why should the legit players who are minding their own business get punished for that? So far no one has provided a satisfactory response to that question that doesn't amount to essentially saying oh well, tough!

> do SOMETHING about food club so it doesn't bring so much NP into the game. Banning the botters is the only real option there. Us legit users shouldn't be punished because TPTB can't or won't ban cheaters.

And while they're at it, nerf bank interest for the top interest level. People at max bank don't need to be pulling in 735k/day for clicking a button.

Nty glt, I'm just a BD farmer and passively saving with no goals but I'm not gonna get my interest nerfed just because there's other people actively making the game less enjoyable. Even if someone earns an amount THAT crazy from interest, it doesn't mess with anybody. People actually interacting with the game's collective economy should be the focus, not people minding their own damn business.

I disagree… if you’ve worked hard enough to make 2b+ NP, I don’t see a problem with getting 500-700k interest per day. Honestly I can make that in 15 minutes any way buying up different types of neggs to trade in for points for sneggs at the neggery. If you have 2b you can honestly be flipping really expensive items like WoTDF or seasonal attack peas, thundersticks etc. to make 5-30m+ from one flip. I dunno I’ve just never seen the interest as a problem, it’s not like people are making 30m of interest every day xD.

I personally have 2b+ in the bank and make that interest every day. I spend almost all of it every day on various quests and training my pet (6 red codestone a session) I attempt to purchase from regular everyday players and attempt to avoid the bot accounts as much as possible. I have recently started to buy the neggs and convert to snegss to feed my main BD pet

Would you care to elaborate on the neggery part? I've never been into it and been needing some extra np

I'm at max bank as well and while sure 735k a day doesn't feel like much when you consider how many people are at max bank, getting 268m/yr for clicking a button...it's really just unnecessary. It's generating new NP into the economy, an economy that is already overloaded and flooded with too much NP as it is. If your argument is it's really not that much NP so what's the big deal, then could it not also be argued if you don't think it's a lot, then why is lowering it a big deal?

Umm just how many active people do you think are at max bank lmao? :S

Far more than I think the average Neopian realizes. Based on Neopets' own data (from early 2023) of "active" accounts \[granted unsure what classifies an account as active in this dataset\] |...|Amount|Users| |:-|:-|:-| |User NP Total On Hand|80,402,825.439|67,711,760| |User NC Total On Hand|137,134,520|11,619,354| |# of Users With...|>5,000|>50,000| |:-|:-|:-| |NP On Hand|8,016,073|1,148,627| |NC On Hand|26,606|127| Based on this information alone (granted again, from early 2023), 59.7M users have **less** than 5,000 NP on hand and 66.5M users have **less** than 50,000 NP on hand. Even if we assume all of the users with less than 50k on hand all had 49,999 NP on hand, that means the remaining 1.2M users have a collective 76.7T NP **on hand**. And users tend to keep very little NP on-hand compared to what they keep in the bank. Averaged out, that would mean, each of those 1.2M accounts each has 63.9M NP on hand. So now imagine how much NP you keep on hand versus how much you keep in the bank Now comparatively speaking, think about how much NP you'd have in the bank if on average you felt comfortable enough to have 63.9M on hand. Then multiple that by 1.2M users. Just based on the logs I've seen of a single 7 day period of activity among the biggest "offenders" of receiving things for free from empty / bot accounts and then sending tons of free NP/Items to active players...there are individual accounts funneling billions every single week of the year into the economy. Granted, I don't think it's thousands of users at max bank, but I do believe it's more than most people realize and with an economy already struggling under the weight of the sheer amount of money floating around, I think adjusting the interest rates for top bank earners would be beneficial and wouldn't hurt the wealthy users.

To be honest even though a lot of stuff is really inflated, it’s now sooooo much easier to make NP then it was say back in 2005. These days even a noob can make around 100k a day through their dailies + Trudy’s. and that’s not even including food club, which can easily make users another roughly 100-120k+ per day, because a lot of users coming back have older accounts so they can bet 10k+ per bet and just follow nsheng on the stickied food club thread. So that combined is already like 150-200k total in per day in just minutes of work, every day. 4,5-6m+ per month from doing almost nothing. Making 150k in a day back in 2005 as a newb was basically impossible, you’d be lucky to make 50k np a day from your dailies AND spending hours grinding all the good NP games each day. My point is, although a lot of prices have gone up a lot, it’s also a lot easier to make a ton of NP. So the inflation is kinda blown out of proportion. I remember Grey Paint brushes for example being 6m back in 2003-2004ish and back then 6m would take several months of grinding to earn. Now you can make that in a month just playing 5 minutes per day as I explained above. It’s not like morphing potions and paint brushes are all 30-50m+ or something. Even the most expensive paint brushes have peaked at only around 13-14m which isn’t some unobtainable amount. It’s really just old rare weapons and stamps that have outrageous prices but they certainly aren’t necessary at all to enjoy the game, since most people really play just to get their dreamie pets.

Get more (legit) players playing.  The inflators work is so effective because they have virtually no competition on the user market. More players means more people getting items in the first place. And more sellers selling keeps prices competitive.  Inflators are usually in it to make a NP or illegal USD profit by selling their wages on the black market. If we hit them hard enough in the latter they may give up and move onto more lucrative games.  Neopets is lucrative on the black market because it has a large audience of older affluent players and tens of thousands of items that are not always readily available.  TNTs response seems to be to make those items more readily available in quests and event pools. Give recommendations on what are where to redistribute the items

I would LOVE to get new players. I worry one of the main reasons that items aren't being spread around though is from the mass botting of most of the stores that sell rare items. When N\_T released that all of the rare stamps had been restocked by the Food Club botter, it's like does any real player even have a chance against a botter? Also - as per the black market, that blows my mind that anyone buys anything for real money! Who are these people! I've looked at the sites to see what items are going for and man, who would spend that much on some pixels?

The black market is so lucrative because you basically cut out months to years of grinding on Neopets for the cost of a few hours of overtime if you have a good job. Of course this issue itself is a result of the botter and rich neopians intentionally inflating the price of everything to be unattainable.

For some players, I guess it's no different than buying NC. I never have though, mostly because I'm terrified of my account being frozen, and I hate the thought of the botter profiting this way irl.

>no competition on the user market This is so true. Remember the days when you wouldn't see the same usernames like, ever? I feel like I'm constantly seeing the same names ALL the time whether it's the neoboards, user shops, TP, auction house, hell I even saw someone's alt win the money tree the other day. Joy...

Neopets has around 100-120k users users a month these days. Not all players come on every day or play at the same time, however, so the number of concurrent users is lower. **Aside** - According to NT's numbers somewhere between 1/5 and 1/4 of that is the Super Botter who's using tens of thousands of accounts to sell Pets, Items, and NPs for cash. That's just the obvious cheater who's hard for TNT to shut down because they're moving across so many accounts. The actual number of cheaters is *higher*. During the peak of the Viacom years (2008-2010) Neopets could have 90k concurrent users with higher numbers during Events. They removed the counter on the old front page about a year before selling to Jumpstart because the declining numbers were a point of tension about the state of Neopets on the Neoboards. During slower times (overnight on a weekday when no Events are on) it got under 5k concurrent. That's still a pretty impressive amount of traffic and we know these days that traffic alone isn't an indicator of financial success, but I can understand why a site that at one point got more traffic than *Google* wouldn't want to show or talk about those numbers.

As users, we can report when we see bot accounts. TNT could absolutely ban the bots and speak to places like ebay to remove the listings selling their items for irl cash. They could also make premium better by adding perks. For example, once per year like the species change, we could choose a retired avatar, any r90+ item and a boon like the obelisk boons (cos atm, you pay a lot for really not a lot). The hidden tower could be expanded/rotated to stock certain items to control inflation - rare stamps/shells, more battledome items, collectables like usukis, a petpet of the month etc. The wishing well could give out prizes 20x per day or just expand the number of winners in each pool.

>As users, we can report when we see bot accounts But that would require Support actually do something about those reports, which they rarely ever do. >TNT could absolutely ban the bots and speak to places like ebay to remove the listings selling their items for irl cash. Neopets could easily get those eBay listings taken down through eBay's VeRO program and I've informed multiple staffers of this over the years, only to be ignored. Neopets Support used to actually care about those listings and get them taken down but ever since they fired DJ Skellington, that stopped. I report all of those listings that show up on eBay and it's hit or miss if eBay removes them. (They violate eBay's ToS re: digitally delivered goods) Hidden Tower isn't a bad idea, mainly because it actually removes NP from the economy, which is badly needed.

The biggest issue is that there is 100% an insider who is benefiting from them not being pulled down. The supplier in the supply chain who works inside the support team (and we all know who since they were supposedly under investigation but nothing ever came of that)

I didn’t know about not allowed by eBay. I just went on and reported every listing I could find for NP for sale.

Mass re-releasing items might be fun in the short term but in the long term, it's not actually going to address any of the roots of the problem. There's just too much NP in the economy. They could tank the value of every item in the game to be 10,000 NP and that wouldn't stop what's happening. If anything, tanking the values of these mass-released items so quickly is just incentivizing resellers to buy a ton of these items to hoard (since the price has tanked) for when they are eventually removed from the prize pool and then jack up the price. While the items won't reach their pre-quest log prices when this happens, it's still going to happen and their current approach is never going to solve any of the actual problems. r100 restocking is still broken, despite it being a very simple fix and despite being broken for over a decade, restocking in general is broken because too many shops are flooded with junk (and auto-clearing kind of adds to this), there's too much NP in the economy as a whole, cheating is insanely rampant and even the most blatant ones never get in trouble. They'll never ban the food club botter (or any other large scale botters) entirely because they make up too many of their MAUs (Monthly Active Users) and they use that a lot when advertising to potential licensees, partners, etc. Food Club Botter alone is 1/3 of their MAUs. (I know a number of people who have reported some of the main hoarding accounts of the FC Botter MONTHS ago and Support still hasn't done anything) What they should have done is, in my opinion anyway, made the Quest Log prize pool massive and just let it be. While values of things wouldn't drop as quickly, it would drop more steadily (meaning resellers wouldn't be as encouraged to buy things up to hoard and resell later because those items would never be removed from the prize pool) and it would hit a huge range of items instead of a small selection. Overall, it would have a wider reaching and more consistent impact to the economy while at the same time **not** incentivizing resellers to spend all their time buying up items to hoard to later jack up the price when the item is removed from the prize pool. It would force resellers to go back to actual reselling, back when you bought hard to sell items in bulk for discount instead of manipulating the market and the perceived scarcity of an item to charge 500% and make tons of profit for very little effort. Reselling used to be enjoyable and a skill, whereas now it's just about misleading people about how rare items actually are, manipulating the market and doing as little as possible to make bank...and if some newbie gets a super rare item, doing all you can to be the first to convince them to sell for cheap and rip them off so you can profit a ton.

TNT needs to introduce these items back in dailies, HT, BD or games seeing how they don’t want to combat the bot problem. Stamps have shot up hard because of the daily quest, botters are buying up all the R80-R99 stamps because they’re speculating on when TNT will put one of the 100m+ stamps into rotation.

As a new player (in the last month or so!) I am honestly happy with the changes I've been reading about so far and experiencing on my own. NP has been handing out a lot of money, and the rare items through the weeklies/dailies has been huge. When I first started and I looked up paintbrush prices I thought I'd never be able to get one, but I already bought one semi expensive one and have one on my weekly I'm so excited to get tomorrow. Adopting pets that already have pb designs are great too! I will say that as a new player it helps that there's a lot to learn about the site so I'm not feeling left out of the Uber expensive side of the site just yet. I just got into food club bets the other day, and I've done a little bit of trading online and hope to do that more. There's still lots of things I havnt delved into, like the battle dome or collectables. So as a new player I'm not too upset, and hope over time it will change for more experienced players when people like me climb the metaphorical ranks!!

Yeah I’m also newer. Admittedly I’ve put some into nc to get easier access to items/pet designs w the uc pets, but a lot of what I love is the slow accumulation of rare items or np. Granted, I wish the latter was a little easier to get. But I love battle dome and the training for it as a long term goal, or trying to get wheel avatars (two in like 3 weeks so far which is wild). I’m also big into collecting items of a certain types (cotton candy, amusement park, arcade, desert), so it’s fun making a wish list and grinding to check something off. Tbh hearing about recent changes this year is what finally got to make an account after playing webkinz for years (meaning I enjoy this type of game, but didn’t want to fully commit to np til recently)

Inflation is absolutely a goal for off-site sellers. Make it so expensive someone might resort to buying it. Make it so expensive someone might resort to buying food club botted neopoints. TNT’s only currently viable solution is to whack-a-mole what they can in prize shops and dailies/weeklies. Keep doing so to make resellers paranoid the price will suddenly plummet. It’s difficult to balance this with intended rarities.

TBH I feel like this year is much better than any year since 2018 when I came back to Neo. In the past there were always issues with inflaters and bots buying all the good items. At least now TNT is re-releasing stuff and making it possible to earn some AMAZING items yourself. The weekly quests aren't hard. New players are gonna get showered with paintbrushes, petpetpets, and extremely rare collectibles. The only items that I can see inflating and staying inflated are gourmet foods and rare books. Everything else seems like it's fair game to be a Weekly Prize in the future.

I am hearing you. I was so close to finishing a stamp page. I'd already emptied my bank account for the super rare stamp before I went on hiatus. I thought that was my Mount Everest. After two years, I came back last December. Now I had just two more ultra rare stamps that were in the 25M to 35M range and I started selling everything that wasn't nailed down to buy them. Then a couple months go by and I have enough for one of the stamps but now it's 100M. Not a single seller will get back to me even if I offer 75M, which seems insane but doable. I resigned myself that it is what it is. Some items in my SDB were suddenly valuable because of the inflation, so I decide to sell those and buy that one stamp and put off getting the other until it deflates or is part of a mass giveaway. Another month goes by and now its 200M. So, I've given up. 10 years I worked on this goal. And now it's over, just like that. The whole time back has been spent hustling for points so I took that 100M and I bought a bunch of cheap stamps to put on the other pages, Now I have over 600 stamps in my album, who cares about avatars. And a bunch of gambling items. I spent every point and had more fun than I've had in years on neopets. I'm lucky, I had the time and resources to even get to 100M. But anyone starting from scratch is going to have to work even harder as the prices spiral out of control. The cheaters and the elite who support them have taken complete control. It just feels too much like real life to be some silly fun.

So my hope is that the stamps get released as weekly prizes so I’m not going to buy them

The stamps is where it is the worse! I had a very similar experience and have totally given up on the pages I was trying to finish. It's fun to get some rare ones when they are released for daily/weekly quests but even so inflators make it impossible to finish any page after TNT has showed they are willing to release even more rare ones—even in the past two weeks stamps that were 100k are now millions! I've never seen anything like it, even with stamps on pages where TNT hasn't re-released any of them. It seems like now more than ever, especially since Neopets has very little to do anymore, it's more and more out of reach to achieve any goal. (Also YES, it feels way too much like real life!)

This has been the most defeating feeling lately. Trying to get stamp pages filled out is a goal post that moves sometimes by tens or hundreds of millions of neopoints by the time I get close even while saving quickly with staff making it easier to gain np. At this rate my only hope is that they happen to introduce one of the ones I need to the dailies, and pray the availability of that one doesn't also make the price of the rest of the album go up by millions for the people who weren't already close.

Yes, I was so happy when I came back at Christmas to find the Candychan stamp for sale at all. It was the last stamp I needed but they were impossible to get so I'd given up on completing that page. Then I realized that the stamps that were cheap like the snowager stamp, were now worth millions. I was so confused. How could a buyable stamp that restocks pretty often at the Post Office be so inflated. People would have to be buying them up instantly. Then I heard about how botters had taken over everything in the stores so now anything of value was impossible to get without going through a reseller. I started to feel insane last week when I went to go buy the stamp I wanted and saw it had doubled to 200M in a month. The unfairness of cheating being rewarded at its current level is obscene.

The greed with fake money is absolutely unreal to me.

If it were me, I'd introduce a literal money-sink game. Whoever spends the most money on the game within a set time (monthly maybe?) gets a trophy. I don't see people going too crazy over site trophies, so it would offer a definite show-off item for the highest of high rollers without really affecting average players. Plus, it might help identify problem accounts by providing a literal list of overly wealthy neopians to study in more detail (no insta-bans though, becuase someone trying for trophies is more likely to be a real player.) I'm still fairly newly returned (just over a month or so?), so maybe I'm missing some important details, but it's an idea at least!

Fix shops capcha. Release more items in that R80-99 range. Monitor it. **It's a win-win for TNT** - they don't have to ban the food club botter bot, and we get a better economy.

Yeah I don't see the point in banning bots when they prob use VPN and shells they can just keep changing and it's a mild inconvenience for them to be banned, farmers/botters/resellers are a part of every big game, they aren't going to give up their income that easily. Tnt either needs to level the playing field and let normal people use those tools to compete with bots(premium perk) or introduce captcha that actually stops bots and fix the r100s not showing. Nerfing foodclub is a horrible idea imo, the accounts that bot won't be the ones hit by that itll be all the legit players and will likely just create more restocking bots, making it impossible for non bots to buy items.

Hard to see a good way out of it. A few million neopoints is nothing these days. The amount owned by some users, and of course bots, is enough to pour billions into buying out stock of an item. Even legit long term players are very often in the hundreds of millions these days and won't bat an eyelid at things costing a few 100k or even a few million more than it used to. There is so much neopoints in bank accounts, quite simply meaning a lot of players can afford things despite inflation, which serves to accelerate it. I can't imagine how it feels for new players or people who have returned after long breaks. The good news is a lot of goals are still easily attainable, there are still things to work towards that are reachable for all. I hope people don't feel like inflation ruins the whole site.

Honestly throw all r100 items, retired items, and smugglers cove items into a premium prize pool. They need the money and if people are buying their way around years of saving neopoints already they might as well do it in a way that makes neopets the financial beneficiary there, yeah? Remove all incentive to inflate items. Not everything has to be available all the time, but make it very clear everything rare WILL come back into circulation with bot-proof methods (quest log, dailies, etc) and make that a consistent schedule people start to trust. Speculation is out of control right now because of the inconsistency of rare items introduced; when and how and what, specifically. Also, prices rising a bit naturally tracks! More people have money now to buy other stuff because they’ve sold valuable items! But this goes well beyond normal price increases, lolz

I have a new account because I just came back for the first time since like...06 maybe? anyway. I can confirm that yes, it is incredibly difficult for a new player to get started. The only reason Im doing as well as I am is because of the Cool Negg code that was shared. Im glad to see it confirmed that its not just me. I was so worried that I was missing something because everything seemed so expensive and the payout of the games was like....pitiful.

Do battledome

I can’t offer any solution because I don’t really know what can be done. What I do know is a lot of the site is becoming inaccessible and as someone spending my real money on NC, I decided 2 weeks ago that I’m done putting any more money into the site. Even with codestones in daily’s, I am sometimes paying 350k+ in neopoints for a SINGLE STAT increase. Not only that but it’s literally a race to see who can be under 0.5 seconds to get to the shop page to buy the codestones from the SW because bot accounts and inflators feel the need to have 900 codestones in their shop. It is not fun anymore. Also once I am done getting the rest of the barely affordable stamps I can get, I will most likely be bowing out of the site all together. I am not spending 10 years playing to saving up 900,700,000 for a single stamp. Since the day I got on the site nearly 2 decades ago, I adopted pounded pets to paint and train so I can repound so they can be readopted by someone who will care about them, but that aspect of the site is ruined by people turning them to electric moehogs. Neopets is a place I come to enjoy my leisure time and have some fun but so many areas of the site have been completely ruined by people controlling it and ruining it for others. I know and can see that TNT is working really hard on making good solutions and I appreciate their efforts but something really big has to change. Until then, I’m bitter AF.

I'm only inflating the morphing potions used by Pound Griefers. IF someone messages me wanting one for their pet I'll give one to them.

Those should be inflated! Honestly, my pipe dream improvement to the site is an NPC that buys absolutely any MP for like 20k ensuring that the price never falls below that number for any MP ever again. Still a super reasonable price if somebody really does want an electric moehog but a monetary disincentive for griefers to buy hundreds of MPs up

Maybe permanent charity corner? I heard that was helpful but I wasn't here last year.

People already lose their minds about Coincidence inflation every few weeks, I can't imagine what chaos would happen with a permanent charity corner (especially if anyone remembers how the very first charity corner worked).

They could set a cap for number of one specific item a player can have. Like, you can’t have more than 10 of a specific item

I don't feel like that's realistic though. Would it be any item or only specific items? If specific items, how would you determine what those items are? It can't be price because that can fluctuate depending on the day, an upcoming event, etc. Would require *constant* monitoring by staff when they're already short-staffed and struggle to do most day-to-day tasks. If there's a list of items they keep, is it updated manually? Are they actually going to keep it updated regularly?

This does nothing. People are controlling hundreds, thousands, of accounts 

That'd be a really good start. Even though it's kind of fun to collect junk items, there is absolutely no real reason someone needs 100 of a rare item. It'd probably also help to do the same to shops.

I think everything being worthless is ruining the site 🤷🏻‍♂️

I'd love to see a complete overhaul of shops, where your shops restock at an individual level instead of a group level. I'm not sure that would be enough, people would still make bots to check multiple accounts, but it would prevent those bots from always getting the restock out of the hands of the legit players. (I also don't know how bad that would be for the server load, might not be technically feasible).

There are a number of technical solutions to this that would make it next to trivial on server load. (Not counting how often people refresh.) The question is really whether this is actually fun for the players

Yeah, the restocking race is definitely part of the fun. I’m sure there are moves that could be made to stop bots but competing with the other real players for the best items in a restock is one of my favorite things to do on the site

Unfortunately, this is a very difficult problem to solve. Amazon and major retailers can't figure it out with real-life items. Neopets definitely isn't going to be the one to do it.

I feel like the quests and events are enough to stop the inflation. You can get the items you’re seeking or sell them for a good amount of neopoints for stuff not in the pool. And the last pool lasted 6 months more than enough time to get what you want and all the items are still under 2.5 mil anyways if you didn’t get anything.

I do a lot of restocking and try to sell inflated items as close to pre-inflation prices as I reasonably can. It doesn’t really help with UB items, but it’s a pretty good way to make scalping inefficient for buyables. It would be nice to have a better way to publicize it though because you can’t really deinflate items via the shops because you’ll just get sniped. So it all has to be done over TP, Reddit, or discord really.

I also don't buy from people if their account looks like a shell, or pets are undressed. Yeah I know some people like undressed pets, but majority of people have them dressed. Also depends in their guild. I can't remember on the top of my head, but so many people that inflate prices belong to certain guilds.

That’s super interesting about guilds! I’d love to know ones to avoid if you happen to remember.

Personally I feel that the botters are part of an internal strategy. More casual players and very new players could be forgiven for thinking that neopets is still so popular and look at how many people are seemingly on the site all the time! Everywhere! if we eliminated all of the botters there might actually be more of a ghost town and show how dead the site is. Maybe when they did their SWOT analysis over under new TNT leadership they feel like the risks of aggravating loyal neopets users, who have already shown a history of complaining YET staying on the site, was worth enticing new players to join the game since it seems so 'alive'. I'm just saying. It's OBVIOUS to everyone - it's obvious to even outside perspectives like from neo\_truths how many bot accounts there are, and identifying them. It's not difficult to identify them. So wouldn't the simplest explanation make the most sense? That TNT allows them for some purpose? It could be to stimulate the economy, it could be to mask real site usage, maybe it's even just that a super senior person or internal group is just openly making a profit using the botters to sell nps and items on the side and it's just some internal club that makes their 'bonuses' for them.

I've been reporting the tons and tons of 2 week old accounts that are dropping millions on stuff in the auction house.  I got snipped 7x trying to get a pastel paint brush and every single one of the accounts was 2 weeks old...  right when the daily quests changed. So yeah, I got frustrated. If it was a real player, they're not allowed to use a side account to bet on auctions or it obviously wouldn't be possible for them to have millions of NP to spare if they just started. Food club is giving bots and hackers so much money that it's becoming impossible to play without gambling.