New Features in Neopia

[Daze]

A board for news items or changes in Neopia that may result in a event, plot or updated maps or content on Neopets.

Example:

Monday 18 April - Cooking Pot on Mystery Island - Error: Sorry, Mystery Island Cooking Pot is down for maintenance! Please try again later!

News 19 April - It seems that Jhuidah was in need of a little R&R after letting the Mystery Island Cooking Pot boil over! And while our cleanup crew comes through to deal with the mess, she will be taking a little vacation to get back into top form. Stay tuned and don’t fret - she will be back before you know it!

[Daze]

You now have to complete a reCAPTCHA form to access User Lookups.

[Pickles]

You now have to complete a reCAPTCHA form to access User Lookups.

Wow. You'd think if we're signed in, that wouldn't be a problem...but...I guess it is. Hopefully they'll set it so that it's only for looking at user lookups when you're not signed in. At least you can look at your on UL without having to reCAPTCHA...

AC XI is coming up:

Hey TNT! *throws pocky* So the AC is still on, YAY!!! But there's something I'm confused about. I've seen some people who understood it as: 'it's coming next month' where as I understood it as: 'there will be more information next month' so which is it? I'm sure you're aware that it's usually in June, but that doesn't mean that can't be changed. Also, when you say your changing the rules, what does that mean? I won't ask for details because I know you can't give them, but are you changing the format, or are we still stuck with the evil brackets? please clarify both of these things. Thanks in advance. Please remove my username. ~ username removed
Glad you're excited! So first of all, the timeline hasn't changed! We'll be giving you more information next month as the lead up to the event starts, as usual with the press days in mid-May, leading up to sign-ups and warm-ups in late May, before the Cup itself starts in June. Now, we're keeping the brackets (I swear, the intent behind them is good!), but the Altador Cup Committee is seriously evaluating player feedback, as well as the data from previous years, and we will be trying to address some of the issues with them. There's more details to come, but that's all I can tell you for now! Patience, young grasshoppers.

I figure a topic can be started once we're closer to it, but, in case y'all hadn't been reading editorials, there it is.

[Siniri]

Wow, TNT is definitely mucking around in the BD. I couldn't get it to load, but I didn't want Grainne to get stuck in a battle and accidentally lose, so I kept persisting. It loaded, but when I went to select weapons, there were two new weapons on the end of my row called "the fist." There are ten weapons slots; I'm not sure how many there are supposed to be (i.e., I can't figure out if I'm missing any weapons since I pretty much only ever use my G-bomb, KBT, and maybe my bag of healing dust and magical marbles).

The fist does 2x physical damage.

And on my next battle, the extra slots were gone. Weird.

Maybe we will be getting a plot soon, after all... Or some kind of BD update. Maybe it'll move out of beta?

Oh, excuse me a moment. Sorry, Just had to let that out.

[Pickles]

Bahahaha!
Battledome has had it's "moments" lately, where it won't load well, but most of the time I don't have trouble with it.

Daze, there was an update on your post in the editorial this week:

Hey, TNT. So I know that in the last editorial, you mentioned there is a known issue of bots causing lag on the site, which can cause glitches. That's bad. We all have been experiencing the captcha security that was implemented this week. For the first few minutes, I totally understood why you guys did it. But now I'm realizing how much work it takes to use the captcha every. single. time. I want to view a pet's lookup or a userlookup. It's A LOT! The inconvenience just makes me want to stop doing certain things on the site, which stinks. Are the captchas permanent? What's going to happen? ~ gameboyknight
Ideally, no, they aren't permanent. If/when we feel confident that taking them off won't set the bots off again, they'll be gone faster before you can wave them goodbye. But for now, all we know for sure is that they've made a huge impact in stopping these bots from running rampant on those pages, causing issues and lag, and essentially collecting lots of information about your accounts, which is bad (for inactive and active accounts, despite some popular beliefs).

Now, we know it's a lot, and we're sorry about that - trust us we are. It's been months and months of working on the backend to try to find solutions to prevent this, but we finally hit a point where it wasn't an option anymore. It was taking members of support, programming and server teams to work constantly on blocking these programs, freezing the accounts they were using (whether it was their accounts or not) and blocking the IPs these were coming from (which is also very not ideal, because IPs aren't permanent, and can result in legitimate users being IP blocked for reasons that have nothing to do with them).

Now as for the every single time part, we've had a lot of requests to make it less frequent, and we feel ya, but part of what makes this type of captcha so effective in stopping those programs is because there is no bypassing it. They can adapt to limits or timers, and often the method used to "remember" when you've already completed a captcha recently or in that session can be easily bypassed. The way these things are actually effective is when they're all or nothing, so unfortunately we had to go with all

Just another reminder on the AC, since we're now in May, and the prize shops will close - go spend your points! Most everything in the Staff shop is less than 1k, with the potential exception of the book. I should know, because I made sure I had one of everything today.
Altador Cup Prize Shop
Altador Cup Staff prize shop

[Blue]

Thanks Pickles. I almost forgot to spend all of my 15k+ points in the staff shop and all... erm 19 points in the cup shop.

I bought one of each in the staff shop and extra books, paper airplanes and crumpled paper.

SW had the book around 2.3k

[Daze]

Neomail:

Error: Sorry, but this section of the site is undergoing a quick fix or revision. We'll get it back up as soon as possible!

[Pickles]

In order to be transparent with our players and fans, we want to inform you of recent reports that have come to our attention regarding an alleged data breach to our Neopets' account database in which a large amount of information from player accounts may have been leaked to third parties. To be clear, this is specific to the Usernames, Passwords, Email Addresses, Birthdates, and Countries tied to player accounts. It does NOT include credit card or payment information.

While we know news like this might be frustrating to our players to learn, we would like to assure all that this breach in security is linked to an incident that occurred in 2012, prior to JumpStart's acquisition of Neopets. In fact, account security has been elevated since Neopets joined the JumpStart family of games. After further investigation and some quick actions by our team, it is becoming clear that a number of the affected accounts are, in fact, inactive and in some cases have already been completely purged from our system.

Although, the impact of this database hack is limited to this single incident, we want all our players to know the facts surrounding these reports and also hope to encourage active players to take the necessary measures toward keeping their accounts secure. On our end, we plan to implement a password reset for all affected players (more info to come).

We appreciate your understanding and patience at this time and invite you to reach out to us through our normal support channels with any questions or concerns you might have regarding this incident or the security of your account. As a quick reminder to avoid facing any further account access related issues in the future, we recommend that you to never share account information to any parties beside TNT and that you keep your account information up to date, resetting your password regularly. Thank you.

I'm pretty sure that was when my account was hacked. I really hope that doesn't mean I have to go through yet another mess with it. Sigh. I've only changed my password like...10 times since then?

[Daze]

NC Mall issue: ( You will see another user's info, but you are not logged into that account and everything is safe. Changing gender does not fix it).

We are missing one or more of the following:gender
Please go here to update it and get rid of this message. Thanks and sorry for the inconvienience!

You have to update your information before you can continue to play on the site!

~~~

Hello TNT! Awhile ago, long before the transition, an Editorial stated that users might soon get a third gender option. Since the "Robot" gender glitch has been happening with new accounts, I was wondering if you could create that as an option to older accounts as well? Or an option to hide gender for those of us who are non-binary or private people? Thank you! ~milkyweaselcakes
Hi, so the "Robot" gender is what happens if you don't pick a gender, which is what the glitch causes, not cool! We're looking into that to get it fixed. We're also looking at adding an "Other" option for users once we fix it (because why do it before if no one can use it?). So hang tight for a bit, our poor database Mynci's are going as fast as they can to get this on the way!

[Siniri]

Insomnia... Ugh.

Anyway, for those who can't get to Expellibox, this link might work instead until they fix the mall:
http://ncmall.neopets.com/mall/shop.pht ... eaway&cat=

(Adding the &cat= can help for other mall pages, as well.)

[Pickles]

If you haven't changed your password since the big hack, and your account was created before 2012, looks like TNT will be changing it for you soon (if they haven't already). Please make sure your password has been changed recently, and that your email address is correct!

Also, last chance on the AC prize shop! It's closing soon!

[Zilary]

Yeah, I was bouncing around Reddit at work today and ventured down the Neopets thread...then went to change my password. Now I'm all nostalgic and decided to pop into PPT.

[Daze]

Board 7 finally renamed 'Site Events'.

The defunct Petpet Park and Habitarium boards, as well as the Merchandise, Virtupets, Battledome Beta, Neohomes, Evil Things and Monster Sightings boards hve been removed.

Interestingly, the Keyquest board is still up!!

New boards are now:

Exploring Neopia
Ghoul Catchers


ETA: reCAPTCHAs have been taken off lookups.

[Siniri]

The Cooking Pot is back! Dust off your orange juices, blumaroo steaks, and gourmet cooking for your pets. Given the crazy inflation of neggs post-KQ, dust off your chocolate ice creams (available in the Central Arena), vanilla milkshakes, and cinnamon swirls, too (which can be combined with neggs to make different neggs worth more negg points).

[Daze]

BATTLEDOME

Appearance of a new arena icon on the "Choose A Challenger" page has appeared. So far it is blank and when you click into it, no challengers are available.

It could be related to an event happening soon, as was hinted at in the Editorial recently.

Hello, CQ!!! We know two things, from the last editorial: a new event will happen and charity corner will not happen. Can you tell us if this new event will be something that we already now, or its completely new?
Hi! I have two things to say to that - 1. I did not say charity corner won't happen, I said there are no plans right now. The nice thing about a changing event like the Charity Corner is that it's not locked to one specific time frame, so we can do one whenever we feel like there is a gap that needs to be filled. 2. I don't want to give away too much, so all I'll say is while I can't promise it's not related to the past, it is new, not an old event brought back.