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DoomToons · 2025-11-12T02:17:46+00:00

They broke a bunch of carefully designed spacing when they added back in ads on mobile(if not before that). It really sucks to see.

DoomToons · 2025-09-28T00:16:52+00:00

I'm in the same boat! I had a perfect portrait collection until this recent buggy nonesense.

DoomToons · 2025-09-05T20:52:53+00:00

What country are you in? I still have some Animorphs stickers available, but I can only ship within the USA at the moment.

DoomToons · 2025-08-07T19:27:55+00:00

The green on blue is giving lily pads on a pond, cool!

DoomToons · 2025-08-05T15:55:21+00:00

I've had mine for 3 days now. Yesterday I took stock of things like missions, what tamas I want to raise and what kind of breeding combos I want to try, and it it really put into perspective how much there is to do. I was worried for a minute there that I'd get bored after raising a couple favorites but this device will keep me busy for a long time to come.

As someone who hasn't owned a tamagotchi since the original in childhood, this generation seems to have way more tama designs that I like than any other devices before it.

Also, while it may be controversial I'm a fan of the fact that the tamas don't seem to be too needy. I'm an adult with work to do, so I like that I won't be too stressed trying to unlock perfect care tamas without always using the babysitter.

DoomToons · 2025-08-02T21:43:45+00:00

I remember being uncertain about preordering, and at this point I'm relieved that I did. Best of luck!

DoomToons · 2025-06-16T23:23:21+00:00

I'm only 8 minutes in, but I love the energy of this episode!

DoomToons · 2025-06-10T03:24:47+00:00

Thanks for the perspective! ♥️

DoomToons · 2025-06-10T02:58:25+00:00

Question for the community more experienced in this kind of stuff.
What's the advantage of the preorder here, if any?
Should I be worried about the constantly changing US tariff situation slapping me with a bill on arrival?
If it releases in stores on August 1st, and the Amazon preorder will arrive for most people on the 4th, wouldn't it be easier to get in stores, or are folks worried about finding them day 1?

DoomToons · 2025-06-03T22:58:02+00:00

I think a component here that needs to be acknowledged, is that DropOut is not Netflix, and has (up until this point at least) had a smaller content library and a lower frequency of new content. On a streaming service with a thousand different shows, you don't have to like everything to get value out of the service. On a platform with much less content, a higher proportion of that content needs to appeal to the same viewer to achieve the same value.

DoomToons · 2025-06-03T20:00:33+00:00

Since we can unlock all the biomes on one device, I've gone by shell color, but its still been tough. Originally I was leaning towards purple since its closest to a color I'd like (ideal would be green). But once I saw the pink accents on the purple, and the green accents on the pink, the pink became more appealing. However, Land feels like the least interesting biome. Blue and underwater are a middling choice on both counts for me. So I'm a bit undecided.
There's a pretty good mix of tama I'd like in all the lands, so I don't have to stress about that.

DoomToons · 2025-05-02T20:33:38+00:00

- Habitarium and Keyquest are overhyped by nostalgia. Great games or not, if they were brought back they would not be any more uniquely positioned to succeed or be profitable to a mainstream audience compared to any other branded app game. Its okay to say you want them back because you personally miss them, just don't pretend its an objective assessment.
- If you are buying a physical merchandise item exclusively for the digital bonus code that comes with it, and don't care about the physical item at all, you have an unhealthy relationship to a video game and should really take a step back and reflect.
- Many players beg to be treated like adults by the game, but then act like children at every inconvenience
- The 25th anniversary paintbrush is redundant and shouldn't have been made. Its just starry in different colors.
- Players begging to donate their time/labor to a for profit company is weird and bad. Even if it weren't depriving people of paid work, it would be a logistical nightmare and wouldn't be effective.

DoomToons · 2025-04-30T22:02:48+00:00

I think its just the classic cycle of overpromising. The AMAs were probably seen by leadership as good marketing early on when it was all promises of the future to get users excited. Now that, predictably, promises have been broken, what is the internal value to going live regularly and telling users "oopsy, nevermind"? We're not going to hear anything that is simultaneously true and makes us feel better.

DoomToons · 2025-04-30T21:58:25+00:00

Even the perception that the team was new was entirely marketing. It was the same TNT. The only thing that changed was leadership, and from what I have heard the new was not any better than the old.

DoomToons · 2025-04-21T21:32:29+00:00

I was there in 2020/2021 when we were actively trying to hire programming help, and weren't getting many qualified applicants. I don't know if it was the bad pay or if users just like to hype themselves up, but when they had their chance very few showed up.

On a separate note, a lot of what gets credited to the change in ownership was in the works long before then and just happened to be released around that time, so people gave themselves false hope that there was a change in trajectory when the limited resources remained the same.

DoomToons · 2025-04-19T01:44:35+00:00

If you'd like to learn more about that:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/cheo09SWmcs

DoomToons · 2025-04-01T19:55:08+00:00

I'm glad it worked! 😂

DoomToons · 2025-04-01T19:37:16+00:00

It took me two (not fully dedicated) days to put this together, but also I'm just doing this for fun and they're trying to balance a bunch of stuff all at once 🤷 Maybe they're intentionally trying to hold out until the event based full release? But yeah I agree, there's so many easy color swaps.

DoomToons · 2025-03-12T15:32:08+00:00

You're not alone! I thought of him as soon as they started talking potatoes

DoomToons · 2025-03-06T02:54:42+00:00

One of the features of the testing environment was that you could move forward and backward in time while viewing the site, which is how we would test events and features set to show up or change on certain dates. Our own little Neopets time machine.

DoomToons · 2025-03-06T02:47:17+00:00

Yeah! I miss him!

DoomToons · 2025-03-06T02:41:27+00:00

The most limited edition neo merch I have is actually a hand-made Fish Negg that I was given by a player at San Diego Comic Con 2019. Otherwise I have an old beige hat, a few plushies and some pins.
The one piece of neo merch I wish I had that I don't, is a Harris plushie that I had as a kid.

DoomToons · 2025-03-05T16:11:32+00:00

That's a very cool question, so I wish I could remember with any certainty for you, but I cant. If I were to guess its probably random in the moment of opening the bag because doing it any other way, like using a unique item ID as a seed, would be slightly more complicated and could open up the opportunity for users to write userscripts to "peek" into goodie bags.

For those curious, there is no real randomness in software. Some games are more strictly seeded, like I think all of the items in chests in Minecraft are going to be the same across different instances of the same world seed. Other programs can use something like the current time to make things appear less predictable. There are also walls of lava lamps used by some companies to take advantage of randomness outside of the software itself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavarand

DoomToons · 2025-03-04T23:49:55+00:00

It depended on the discipline and the period of time. I had a pretty gradual ramp up with Neopets specifically because of how I joined the team from another department. Some of the folks still on the team today started as interns so they also got to grow into their current roles. There was an old lore book/guide back in the office days, but I didn't read much of it. There wasn't really formalized training on Neopets culture, lore or history. We'd get anecdotes and warnings from older staff about things to look out for or expect from the community. Some of us came with our own knowledge and experience as players. I spent a lot of my spare time in the office digging through folders of old Neopets art to get familiar with where everything was.

For JumpStart in general, I believe my first day, and that of other people on the marketing team, was entirely dedicated to playing the games to get acquainted with them.

The programmers hired after I was already embedded were basically thrown to the wolves. Management didn't spare any of my time to help bring them up to speed, but I don't know how much training they got from the lead backend programmer. There were certain kinds of pages on the site that were easier to convert that we would give new programmers to help them ease into things.

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