My First Day as a Neopian

I was actually creating a neopet and not knowing what ‘neopet’ even meant...! Alright, now I’m ready to begin my journey, which I thought it would be appropriate to begin by clicking the ‘explore’ button. There it was, the overwhelming feeling yet again; having to choose between all these lands seemed very stressful at the time, and let me tell you Neopets is a site with a LOT of options to choose from, the lands, the shops, the items, the boards... All kinds of stuff you have to decide from and that can be pretty messy for a newbie user, but anyway! After a random click, I was in Faerieland. All I can remember is thinking “WOW. This is pink... and... rainbowy...!” I was literally afraid that the whole site was gonna be like that, but thank god it didn’t turned out to be all pink.

So after doing some exploring around Neopia, I thought I had to be informed about what was happening on the site (just like the real world people should read the paper every day) so I clicked on the ‘news’ button! Oh my, the questions I had on my head had been triplicated, at least! I didn’t understood why the date was set on the next day, or why it was important to know that a new set of books was being released at something called ‘Booktastic Books’, or even what was a ‘Lenny Conundrum’! And that’s why I decided to look over into the Neoboards; maybe someone could put an answer to all my questions, but sadly that didn’t turn out very well.

Unfortunately all I received was the word O-T from every single user! I didn’t understood why people were being so mean to me. What I didn’t know was that I was asking all these newbie questions in the Battledome board! Hmmm, maybe that’s why I didn’t get a lot of feedback, right? :P So, if I could get a picture of myself back then, it would be the one of a newbie that doesn’t understand a THING about Neopets, and was recently rejected by postings on the wrong board! Sad, huh?

Well, I thought that nothing else could get worse so I decided to head over to the shops! I thought that maybe with 2000 NP I could buy tons of food for my pet! (Yup, back then I was so naive.) I bought some red apples and ran out of money, but then some kind of message appeared under the taskbar, saying something about having found a mystic codestone! Imagine my surprise when I went to my inventory and found out it was ‘just a rock’; back then I didn’t know what they are for or even their cost, so after trying giving it to my pet (with no luck, of course xD) I decided to sell it for 1 NP! I mean who in the world would want to buy a rock! I thought that the rock was gonna be in my store forever, but surprisingly people bought it VERY QUICKLY. :O!

Anyway, I was happy after selling that useless rock so I was in the perfect mood for some gaming! Oh zippity zap ther are a lot of games to have fun with! But for some random reason I found Kass Basher the most appealing of all, so I played... A LOT, and after sending one of my highest scores, I received a weird message saying that something had happened o_O? I don’t know, I thought it was some sort of joke,but it said that I was eligible to use the Kass Basher avatar in the neoboards or whatever! What on earth does that mean? What’s an avatar? (After some days I finally found out what were avatars, so it was pretty odd to discover that I already had earned one and didn’t even know about it!).

After confusing myself with Neopia’s lands and news, almost being kicked out of the boards, selling a mystic codestone for 1 NP and getting a secret avatar without even knowing it, I finished my day the way only a newbie could do it! I learned that my pet could have a petpet, so with the little amount of money that I got from playing Kass Basher, I bought an Abominable Snowball to give it to my Yurble, Century_. So I went to my inventory, I clicked the Abominable Snowball, and I accidentally picked the ‘discard item’ button! Imagine my surprise when I went looking for the petpet on my Yurble’s lookup and found out it was missing! I went so crazy looking for that petpet that I even asked on the boards again, just to get all these horrible people saying to me that I was on the wrong board! It was such a nightmare, so I finished my day all sad because I didn’t have my shiny new petpet.

Nowadays every time I remember all of this, I can’t help getting a little angry for not knowing what I was doing, but after all, my first day as a Neopian was one of the greatest days I’ve had in Neopets. Just the experience of discovering this whole new world was just incredible; it was like entering this new society where people are not allowed to use foul language, where people with more avatars are likely the most experienced or the most skillful, where suddenly a pet is the main focus of everything you’re doing and where people get together and just have a good time!

I’ve made a lot more newbie mistakes since my first day; I mean who hasn’t even believed in a copy and paste? Or asked if one could buy a FFQ with 5.000 NP! But in the defence of all newbies out there, it’s hard to begin anything in life, a job, new school, and even Neopets! But with time you’ll learn how to avoid making these things, and will become decent Neopians.

What I’d recommend to everyone out there, newbies or not, is that the key to success is tenacity and the will to progress every day that we sit down to play this game, but most important is to enjoy the ride to the top and make friends along the way, because at the end that’ll be what will put a smile on our faces every time we’ll remember our days here. So good luck to all of you that happen to find this little story of my neolife. I hope that at least this will entertain you for a few minutes and remember: follow the rules and have the greatest of times here at Neopets; I know I will!