[flashdance]

That's an MMORPG for kids. You can go on quests, enter contests, chat with friends, post on their forums, make guilds, do battle against other pets, solve puzzles, trade on the NEODAQ, and make a little home. Pets cost a few bucks. Honestly from googling neopets it sounds an awful lot like a better version of club penguin.

With cryptokitties we're talking about 100K for a picture of cat. From what I've read the platform is dedicated only to buying and selling these cats.

[elif]

Yea but, the thing about ethereum is its conceptually about building on top of the technology.

There is nothing stopping people from building on top of even the cryptocat system, making a game where these cats are usable for any of your listed game mechanics.

It doesn't need any kind of api-integration to cryptocats, it just needs to reference the already public cat compendium.

[RepressedEmu]

Wow this is an idea that I hadn't even considered before! That any smart contract is just a little piece of code with an API and an Ether cost. I'm getting so many ideas for cryptokitty horse racing...

[bfuller]

it was for kids in 2000 but now those kids are 20-30+. They never made the switch to mobile and that is when the site truly lost any chance of new players. In its heyday it was not uncommon to regularly see people with 10k$+ spent on their accounts.

While the site did have those features you mentioned, they were glitchy and never updated past the original 1990s php code. xss everywhere losing your account was inevitable

what people used the site for was the same as the crypto kitties. Collecting digital widgets and participating in the markets the buying and selling of those things created.

100k for a crypto kitty is pretty nuts but its the most rare and valuable not like they are commonly hitting that.

on neopets you could buy "wearables" to dress your pet but these couldn't be sold for the in game currency and buying in game points and items was illegal.

Neopoints went for $3 per million (now maybe a buck or two) on the forums dedicated to cheating which hosted off site marketplaces.

if you were a cheeky 13 year old and figured out how to use xss to steal a lot of cookies or even better their database with an sql injection you could easily amass trillions in neopoints.

When the off site marketplaces stick the price at a few bucks per million that is a lot of money you could make when you have thousands of stacked accounts with rare items and pets and neopoints.

I would say it is extremely likely someone spent 100k in a single purchase at least once. I personally saw people selling what they amassed at a bulk price of 10k many times.

The real money maker was selling hash lists and database leaks of account info. Sell accounts for a buck a piece, maybe one in 50 had anything decent, so just selling lists worked out to be a better way to make money because you aren't responsible for securing the hacked goods, and you make a profit every time even if the account is empty

gosh this makes me want to play again. maybe not violate the cfaa stealing their database, or performing xss to steal cookies, even though that is the most fun part of the game. Maybe looking for bugs to report them rather than to steal accounts items etc would be fun. Either way If you want to hang out and rum some fuzzers or figure something out let me know.

i will for sure rejoin to make bots again. writing bots for neopets (containing password stealers) was my very first taste of programming, and the code I wrote was surprisingly succinct and elegant.

[dluan]

clearly i was not playing neopets right

[bfuller]

It is a now pretty much dead fleshed out version of this. You can play all the features you mentioned of the game for free. Anything you can officially pay for is cosmetic, like clothing for your pet.

There are also entire off site communities dedicated towards selling items and neopoints

the site was bought from its founders by Viacom for 100m

I used to trade digital assets on games like this exactly like people trade crypto currencies today.

Both the interest in having a digital collectible and using electronic points as a store of value