In the early 2000s, there seemed to be a large avatar-collecting community on the site. Avatars were released quite frequently, and the community would immediately rally together to figure out solutions and collect as many as they could. But starting around 2006, avatar releases slowed down significantly. Gradually falling from multiple releases per week, to maybe one or two each year.
It struck me as an odd decision, as I would expect avatars to provide a relatively high level of player engagement and teamwork with minimal development time. The change also took place around the time achievement systems started gaining popularity (such as on Steam or Xbox 360), which are fairly similar and seem to have withstood the test of time.
Collecting avatars was always important to me, and losing the constant flow of them was the main reason I ended up leaving the site for many years, so I’ve just always wondered what happened or if it was even a conscious decision.
Heya, Leek. Thanks for the great question! You’re totally right that they were a low-effort piece of content with high engagement and player satisfaction. That’s the dream for content creators, heh. But that was only true under a particular set of circumstances, and those circumstances eventually changed.
The really short answer is that it’s my fault. 🙂 The mostly short answer is that it’s a combination of my changing jobs and also resource issues that cropped up during that time. The long answer…
I created the avatar system when I rebuilt the Neoboards in 2003 and subsequently made all the avatars myself. It was basically one of my pet projects. (We all had them back then. Mr. Insane had NQ. Viola had BD weapons. Etc.) Then I took over as Content Director on the site in 2005 and slowly got less and less time to make them. We started having artists fill in for me but they’re Flash illustrators, not graphic designers, so the quality wasn’t the same as people were expecting and we got nothing but complaints about them. (This weirded me out, btw. The main difference was that I did them in Photoshop, so they were aliased and had “pixel animations”. Literally still art with letters or sparkles that had a few frames of blinking animation on them. That’s it. The artists were doing actual real animation in Flash for some of theirs! But it seemed like since I’d replicated the feel of avatars on internet forums at the time and didn’t stick to square shapes, that became the expectation and people didn’t like the change. Super interesting to me. ANYWAY.) So we swapped back to having me do them but that meant they were done sparingly when I could make them after work and such.
Then I moved over to lead game design for the whole studio (we were expanding our IPs to work on other games like Petpet Park, Monkey Quest, the Neopets MMO, and other stuff that was never announced). I was no longer working directly on Neopets and had to stop doing avatars all together. The team had artists fill in again and I taught some other folks how I did them but they were still not that well-received. At the same time, the team was producing more content than ever before with fewer resources. Since doing avatars took more time for an artist (not their area of expertise) and just resulted in complaints, no one wanted to spend precious resources on them. They became a less ideal “mid-effort/low satisfaction” piece of content, so that’s basically why they stopped. As an achievement junkie in games myself, I totally get why you lost interest after that.
So… yeah, it wasn’t an actual conscious decision. It was a change in circumstances.
I did start doing them again when I moved back over to Neopets but I’d become Game/Creative Director at that point, with even less time to spare, so avatars never returned to the frequency they were back in the day. 🙁
I hope that all made sense!
(Btw, regarding achievement systems: OMG I wanted to add a real one to Neopets so badly. Basically the avatar system was my first attempt at showing something like that could work on the site and I’d wanted to expand on it ever since then. We just never found the time because we would have had to stop content to build that large of a system… and we couldn’t actually use any of the avatar code for it but I digress. That’s why so many of the later plots had achievements in them, though! I was finally able to sneak it in that way! BWAA HAA HAAA!)