

Neopets - personjerry
http://www.neopets.com/

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ddingus
Oh man! My kids got sucked into Neopets and soon I had joined them. Back in
the late 90's, it was a lot of fun actually. The economy was reasonable, and
the kids learned a lot of very basic economic ideas. Neopets was pretty good,
"do Internet with the kids" time. We would figure the site out, make plans, do
stuff, make friends. Honestly, for a family experience, it was damn tough to
beat Neopets! And the marketing worked. We bought a fair number of these damn
pets, which the cats would shred, and we would buy more, etc... pure gold for
somebody, somewhere.

Then something happened.

We were running shops. Everybody did. You put stuff in your shop and you try
and sell it for more than you paid for it. A common item was lottery tickets.
Get one, don't scratch it off, and sell it.

People really liked scratching these to win, and distribution was limited
enough that they were always in demand. For a good price somewhere between
ticket cost and the potential pay off, they sold quick!

The competition for neopoints reached a peak, and we were all going for it. So
then I did something I still feel bad about...

Turns out, there was some latency in pricing updates in the shops. Mostly
didn't matter, but on a high demand item that would sell quickly, it did
matter. It could matter a lot.

I put a lottery ticket in the shop for 1800 neopoints, say. It gets purchased
in seconds. Cool. Paid 600.

I do another one, decide to change my mind, and I changed the price. It also
sold, and in fact was sold before I could get the page refresh to even confirm
the edit, but it sold for the edited price, and the buyer never would know,
until after the transaction completed.

The question became, "just how many neopoints are people walking around with?"

There were banks, with interest, etc... People who used them could get a nice
income stream going, but I noticed not too many people used them, so...

I list a lottery ticket for the low price of 888! Going rate was about double
that, and the cost of the ticket was 600. Sure sale. Won't last 10 seconds.

Right after listing it, I edit the price to 8888.

SOLD!

Did it again: 88888.

SOLD! What? No worries!

I had visions of completely, totally dominating my kids on this neopoints
thing. It would only take one more successful transaction...

Listed the ticket for 1020, or something like that. I worried about the 888
thing and word getting around.

The edit? 1020000. Surely there was no way.

And there wasn't. It didn't sell. So I toggled it back and forth. 1020,
1020000, etc...

SOLD!

Just like that, I was RICH!!

Then I got an ominous message: "If you don't give me my points back, I'm gonna
tell." Then a few more, most along the lines of it took me X to get all those
points, cheater, you suck, etc...

I felt completely terrible.

Of course, I returned the points and then some. Didn't tell the kids, and
stepped away, the guilty adult working the kiddies over big.

Neopets was awesome. Then it wasn't.

