So you want to be a top member of the Gourmet
Club. You camp out at the Chat Boards, taking notes on all the foods
that are discovered to have rarities between 90 and 100. You stake out the Shop
Wizard, jumping on anyone who mistakenly sells his Turkey Dinner for a mere
10 NP, not realising the price skyrocket that has recently occurred. You stock
your entire Safety Deposit Box chock full of these so-called gourmet foods.
And then you go to feed your hard-sought collection of gourmet foods to your
favourite pet.
But something happens. Your pet goes from being fine, to being satiated to
being full to being bloated to the point of not even being able to think about
food without having to take twenty deep breathes lest your hard-sought collection
ends up on the floor beside him.
And you only fed him 4 items.
So how are you supposed to become a Gourmet Club member? The current leaders
are well ahead of you, by at least 30 Gourmet Food points. And that means your
pet has to have a hunger level of dead at least 3 times to even catch up to
where they are right now! And seeing that it takes at least a week of not feeding
to reach dead status, by then the leaders will have been able to eat even more
of these Gourmet foods, and take an even broader lead.
Knowing that there is a specific number of Gourmet foods currently available
in Neopia Central, we realise that at some point, the leaders will run out of
foods worth Gourmet points - that is, until new items are released. So let's
say we try to catch up to the leaders.
In our theoretical world, it takes five weeks to catch up to everyone else,
and during that time, no new Gourmet Foods are released. Therefore, by the time
the fifth week is over, everyone has a chance at getting tied with the leaders.
However, it appears that the first people to reach a level on the leader board
remain in first place until someone else beats them. So even spending five weeks
trying to catch up, we would still be in twelve thousandth or so place, and
have nothing to show for it (as far as I am aware).
And think about the repercussions of these five weeks we just wasted, per
se. We can classify these repercussions as monetary and emotion.
Monetarily, Gourmet Foods are priced between 100 and 10,000 NP each, so let's
say the average price is 2,000 NP. Therefore, those 50 foods you just bought
cost you about 100,000 NP, enough to buy your pet a nice new blue Scorchstone.
Emotionally, think about what this is doing to your pet. Every week he would
be stuffed to the point of exploding, and then starved back to the point of
death. Is this a fair way to treat a loyal pet? As well, we would have to keep
our pet away from the Healing Springs, on the off chance that the Light Faerie
might remedy his hunger, thereby losing the ability to eat as many Gourmet foods
as possible, which would put us back farther from the top of the leader board.
However, staying away from the Healing Springs means that your pet can theoretically
be living sick, or with minimal HP for an extended period of time. Again, is
this the proper way to treat your pet? Of course not.
And one more thing. How would you like to be continuously force-fed food in
order to potentially win a card identifying you as a premium member of a club?
I'm sure that by the time we get to the top of the leader board (if you ever
do) our pet will be so stuffed that he wouldn't care about winning some plastic
card, nor will he be very happy.
So what can we do about this? If you are adamant to start your own collection
of Gourmet foods, do so in order to feed them to your pet as a treat, not as
a stuff-fest to win next to nothing. Or sell them at a profit. But there is
no reason to even attempt starting with the Gourmet Food club now, because you
have little-to-no chance of winning. |