| 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. |