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Economics Revisited


by mookie99

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Author’s note: Some of the figures and statistics in this article are from a previous article I wrote, An Analysis of the Neopian Economy. So feel free to look at it!

Once again, I was looking at the polls. They’re pretty interesting. And I thought to myself, “Y’know, there are a few things that the readers didn’t really get in my last article. In fact, I’m actually a bit fuzzy on them too, which is sad, considering that I was the one that wrote it! So maybe I should clarify them.”

So, needless to say, I agreed with my own wisdom and decided to revisit a few statistics I came up with.

There’s one in particular that I wasn’t really sure about, which was that, “If a single Neopoint is earned by playing games, it’s spent nearly a hundred times.”

How had I arrived at this? Well, 60 quadrillion Neopoints have been saved in people’s banks, and 657 trillion neopoints have been won by playing games, which I assumed was the main way for neopoints to be created. And yet, this is still a bit unclear. Time for an example! Feel free to imagine myself presenting a visual aid right now.

First of all, I’m going to say that there are three stages all Neopoints go through, which are creation, movement, and removal.

The first stage is creation, which essentially means that Neopoints are created from nothing. This can be from games, or from Random Events.

After Neopoints are spent, they’re moved around. Maybe they go through the Trading Post, or they’re spent in shops. However, Neopoints aren’t constantly being spent, and when they’re not spent, they’re being stored in the Bank. Let’s say that someone gets 100,000 Neopoints. They’re probably going to save them in the Bank before they spend them. Then later, the Neopoints are spent. Therefore, I’m going to say that the number of Neopoints spent is equal to the number of Neopoints stored in people’s bank accounts before they spend them.

Finally, Neopoints are removed from the system. This usually is when people buy something from a Main Shop, since then the Neopoints don’t go to someone else. However, I could also say that there are probably also people who don’t spend their Neopoints, so I suppose that Neopoints can be removed when it isn’t being spent anymore.

Now let’s say that someone gets 1,000 NP from playing a game. They spend it in someone else’s shop to buy something. That next person spends the 1,000 Neopoints on something else. This process repeats itself as people receive the Neopoints, put them in their bank, and then spends them somewhere else. Eventually someone spends them in Kelp, a Main Shop, or somewhere else, and the Neopoints are removed from the system.

What does this mean? Well, only 1,000 Neopoints entered the system. However, because the Neopoints were spent many times, then that gives the illusion that there were more Neopoints in the system. So if people had spent a combined total of 10,000 Neopoints (which is equal to the combined total of how much they had saved), then that would mean that the Neopoints were spent 10 times. Because the number of Neopoints saved (which is equal to the amount spent) is 90 times as many as the number of Neopoints that have been created, then that means that a Neopoint is spent an average of 90 times before it leaves the system.

Now, you might be thinking right now that that can’t possibly be right. For one thing, what about the items that people bought and sold? If they came from a Main Shop, then weren’t other Neopoints being removed? I suppose that’s true. However, those Neopoints aren’t being moved anymore. They had already gone through that process, so they had probably also been moved 90 times. So yes, the statistic holds true.

Another thing from my previous article I’d like to go into more depth on is the correlation between gaming and being poor. First of all, I just want to say that there are definitely wealthy gamers, just as I’m sure there are poor restockers. In fact, since restocking requires you to spend Neopoints, and gaming doesn’t, you’d think that the gamers would actually be wealthier. But then again, you need to spend money to make money, so I suppose it could go either way.

But let’s see… Well, 77% of people are gamers. Additionally, roughly the same percentage of people has saved up 500,000 Neopoints or less. (Although that was from a poll that was closed a while ago. Pity there isn’t a new one… xP) So if everyone that has over 500,000 Neopoints is a gamer, then that’s at most 20% of people being wealthy gamers. Of course, according to two separate polls, one asking ‘Do you “restock” in the Neopian shops?’ and the other asking ‘How do you make Neopoints?’ about 20% of people restock. If all rich people were gamers, that would mean that the restockers couldn’t be in the top 20%, so all restockers would be poor, but once again, this is purely theoretical.

Well, if 20% of gamers are rich, and 80% of people are gamers, then about a quarter of gamers are rich. So what does a very small portion of gamers do?

According to one poll, about 50,000 out of 350,000 people completed Neoquest. That’s about 14%. If I were to assume that the same statistic were true for Neoquest 2, then that would mean that relatively few people have completed it. Additionally, even fewer people would have completed it on Evil or InSaNe mode. However, some of the prizes from InSaNe are worth several million Neopoints, so I’m going to say that a few of the rich gamers are also Neoquest experts.

Another thing gamers could do is the stock market. According to one poll, 22,000 people out of 356,000 people make most of their income from it—about 6% of people. This minority of people using it is confirmed by another poll where 14% use it all the time, so most people don’t do it. Therefore, it fits my prediction that the best ways to make Neopoints are the less popular ways. I just want to say that I personally make most of my income from the stock market, so I can guarantee that it’s a great way to make Neopoints, even if relatively few people do it.

Although I’m not sure if they’re actually games (although a few of them are in the game section), another thing few people have succeeded at are contests. According to polls regarding Mystery Pic, Story Telling Competition, Caption Contest, Beauty Contest (Which no longer awards Neopoints), Poetry Contest, Art Gallery, and Neopian Times, about 7% of people have won a contest. The contests tend not to be a consistent source of income though, especially since the main prize you get from them is just the pride of being one of the few people to succeed at it, but I know of people that have won valuable prizes from contests.

And now, I come to the final way to become rich by playing games, which is just to play them a lot. Let’s say that there are 200 or so games in Neopia. If you can make up to 1,000 Neopoints per play and play three times a day, you could make 600,000 Neopoints a day just by playing games. However, as I said in my previous article, this is incredibly unlikely, since I highly doubt that anyone is able to play every game in a 24-hour period. Additionally, I doubt that anyone could get the full 1,000 Neopoints from every game. However, I have a friend (who would like to be plugged, but isn’t going to be, so HA!) that makes over 100,000 Neopoints a day doing nothing but playing games. It takes them many hours to do it, but it’s definitely possible. If you do that every day for a year, that’s 36.5 million Neopoints, which is definitely rich.

So to summarize everything I discussed in this article…

  • Neopoints are spent an average of 90 times
  • It is possible to become rich by playing games
  • Good game related ways to become rich include Neoquest, the Stock Market, and Contests
  • Alternatively, you can just play many games for hours and hours
  • I could put a Sloth-related thing in here, but I’m not going to
  • Bullet points are fun.

Mookie out.

Author’s note: Once again, I must put in a disclaimer that this article is definitely not 100% accurate. 20% of people lie on polls, and I’m guessing 100% of people lie about not lying. But anyway, if anyone has a topic they want me to analyze, send me a neomail and I’ll try to look into it.

 
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