Howdy. I always wanted to ask you questions but I was too shy to.
There’s something causing a bit of a stir on Neopets so I thought I’d go to the presumed source for the answer.
TNT revamped Random Events around 2012/2013 or whenever the Coincidence Event happened. We noticed that some events like the Color Changing Pet Events were removed while others, mainly taxes, were added. Do you happen to remember why the team removed the Color Changing Events and doubled down on the Taxes? Someone (who I suspect is a troll but non-the-less) is arguing that since TNT removed Color Changing Events they should remove the other bad Random Events (taxes, stat loss, item loss) too. I’d say that defeats the purpose of having ” Random ” Events.
Can you perhaps explain the thought process behind deciding which Events should stay and go?
I’m not snarkie so I can’t answer for sure but for taking away the color changing REs, I believe because it caused a lot of controversy to people who got expensive colors changed, especially when they already had a “boochi shield” pet as their active and took it off for one page for an event for their active pet and got hit on that one page they loaded with it (like fishing), and the occasional UCs getting hit (even though they were supposed to be immune to them for a while before the REs were taken away at all) and TNT didn’t want to deal with it anymore. I’m not sure if TNT talked about it on their own boards/platforms at the time they did change the REs but if they did, jellyneo or some other fansite might have some more information on it.
Howdy, Mobotropolis. Thanks for being brave! The short answer is that we removed colour-changing REs because we felt like they’d just become way too mean over time.
The long(er) answer…
Adam first added them as a bit of interesting meta gameplay, making your Neopet turn blue/red (sad/angry) as punishment if you hadn’t taken care of it. Then some others were added as indirect money sinks. And also because Adam is a huge troll. ? (I say this with love and because when I went to go disable them a couple years before we even released the new REs, the programmer comments in the code decreed as much so it’s obviously fact.) Paint brushes were fairly “cheap” (relatively) and you could recover from this setback with a bit of effort. As time went on though, you could obtain rare and limited colours in increasingly difficult and exorbitantly expensive ways. Since the meta game of Neopets is, for the most part, to make your Neopet awesome in any way you see fit, a random colour change could potentially be catastrophic to your progress. Boochi blockers were a very clever solution by players but defeated the purpose of having said awesome Neopet. You should be able to set your favourite/prettiest/strongest to active without fear, taking it around the site with you and showing it off on the Neoboards, etc. So we just decided these particular REs were no longer fair gameplay and removed them.
(Fun side note: The Boochi event in the new system was actually supposed to present you an option to dodge it. Basically, it would ask you if you wanted your Neopet painted baby. That way people could still experience the fun of a baby Bruce randomly trying to shoot your Neopet in the face with a laser but without the colour change if they didn’t want it. And we’d probably add other ones back in eventually as well for very rare free paint jobs if you wanted. It turns out that the programmer never actually coded the dodging bit in the new system, so Boochi always just misses. I’d been going around telling people that they didn’t have to worry about Boochi hurting their Neopets anymore but that he might still show up with a surprise… except there was no surprise. THANKS, MR. INSANE. It was my fault but it’s more fun to blame him.)
There are other REs that could have a big impact, like item stealing if it happens to catch your expensive weapon or Petpet before equipping, for example. However, these items usually don’t (and shouldn’t) sit around where they could be grabbed and aren’t catastrophic 99.999999% of the time so we decided to leave them in. Tax REs are helpful money sinks and were made a percentage on purpose so that it couldn’t wipe you out and the most money was removed from people who could most likely afford it. However, we did decrease the chances of “Rare Bad” events occurring overall and even more for those two types in particular.
The overall goal of negative REs was to provide some interesting storytelling and immersion, establish that not everything that happens in Neopia is sunshine and rainbows, “encourage” players to use various tools and features on the site (like SDB and Bank), and provide challenges and setbacks. These are all good things for the overall health of the game, which is why they stuck around in the revamp!
I hope that was helpful! If you have any more questions, please feel free to ask. ?
Yep. I figured that the concept behind a Random Event was that the impact on you was indeed Random and not always positive or negative. And that there’s sufficient protection for most users against most types of negative events.
Thanks!
I’ll see what the user says about this, but wonder if the response will be maybe we should be given the option to be taxed and to have our items taken away. /TrollLogic