This past year, the total amount of money I have spent on Neopets is $20.
The total amount I have spent on computer games is $85. The total amount I have spent on DS games is $110, while the console itself rang up over $130. Wii games totaled $300, with the Wii costing $250. Going out to the movies costs me $7.50, with the new 3D movies costing $9, this year totaling about $50 for six movies (Not including any popcorn or drinks).
All money spent on Neopets is completely and utterly optional. Some of you have forgotten this. At no point in time does TNT come to your house, twist your arm behind your back and force you to buy that Neocash card. They don't poke you with sticks until you click that magical button that gains you Premium. When you spend real life money on Neopets, the only person you have to blame is yourself.
Neopets makes Neocash incredibly fair, compared to other sites.
They don't limit what you can do on the site, unless you buy Premium. They only give Premium a few slight advantages. Advantages that you can easily overcome if you are semi-capable human being.
They don't take away the site completely unless you pay. Ever hear of pay-to-play? That requires that you pay a monthly fee in order to play the game. A number of online games require this. Neopets does not.
Neocash items cannot be sold to gain Neopoints. In fact, Neocash items cannot be sold at all. A number of other sites have Cash Shops just like Neopets, but you can sell those items for their money, making those with the cash to throw around in the 'elite' and the richest on site. Neopets doesn't do this, there is no real advantage to buying Neocash.
Running this website is not free, nor do the employees work for free. They all need to be paid, including bills for electricity and plumbing and office supplies. The money from Cash Cards and Premium, Ads and merchandise goes to pay for this. Neopets does not pocket all of the money you spend. It goes to, GASP, keeping the site running and profitable enough to bother keeping it running. Neopets always has been a business and always will be. No one in their right mind would continue to run a website that eats up huge chunks of their personal money. If no money was given to Neopets, there wouldn't BE a Neopets.
On August 3rd, 2009 at 7pm NST, there are 37,266 Neopets users online_
There are 240 individual games, 23 creative contests, 29 neoboards, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of pages of coding, 173,112,771 total users and 785,652,730,000 page views.
Let me be the first to say: "Well DUH, it's glitchy". NASA has a billion dollar super collider to create black holes in, billions of dollars of tax payer money and the smartest individuals in the world. Even THEY have glitches that trip them up. Neopets has glitches, yes. So do all of your computer and console games. So do all of the websites that you can get viruses and malware from, if a vulnerability is left in the coding of the site on accident.
Neopets is a hugely complicated website with limited resources, a large and growing population of users and users looking to exploit the website(Just like they do on any other website). There is no way that glitches wouldn't slip through.
Unless you can code a perfect website, shut up. HTML, CSS, PHP, Flash, servers, PCs, programmers, developers, etc. It all takes time and resources, it takes trouble-shooting and lots of man hours. Unless you can stare at this page for six hours straight just to find ONE line of bad coding, shut up. Find a glitch? Fine. Report it to TNT respectfully and be thankful the website is even here.
On average I spend five hours a day on Neopets.
I spend five hours collecting pixels, participating in Neo-related art contests to improve my art skills, and talking to people on the neoboards. Five hours a day utterly wasted.
How many people were frozen today? Neopets has rules, just like the real world. When you don't follow those rules, you get in trouble. People that don't read the rules, people that purposely break the rules, people that try to trick or hurt other users. I have never been froze, I keep up to date on the rules. It's not hard. Many of the rules are common sense. Don't scam people, don't give anyone else your information, don't put up pictures of yourself on the internet. Break the rules, you get frozen.
But all those hours! All gone! I have nothing to show for it! Well, DUH. You knew from the very beginning when you started to play that Neopets will never get you farther ahead in life, it will not get you a scholarship, it will not get you a dream job, it will not earn you money. Neopets is for entertainment value only, like a movie.
So you've lost your account? You have three options: Try to get it back, restart or leave. No one died, you're not bankrupt in real life, you're not hurt or sick. It was fun while it lasted, and that's the point. Neopets isn't meant to be around forever, nor is it a permanent cure for boredom.
Too long to read?
You get what you pay for, and since you don't pay for Neocash, you get nothing.
If you hate Neopets so much, click the little red "x" in the top right hand side of your computer screen, go outside and take a breath of fresh air. Clearly you need it.
This area is reserved for other petpages I've found that offer other looks at TNT or Neopian Life in general. They are well thought out and well argued.
The Legit List - A list of how to tell if Neomail you've received is from TNT or is a scam. This user makes very powerful points about what TNT is and what it is not.