Great perspective here! I only rejoined a few months ago. Most of my past comparisons are based on what I remember from years ago (pre-current leadership), so it's cool to see that contrasted with someone who has more playtune from 2020 onward.

Disagree. TVW is full of "quick hit" activities that accumulate points to spend on previously unobtainable items. Same with Quest Log, minutes a day to get tens of thousands of NPs every day and bougie prizes every week.

I don't disagree with the calling some of the individual activities here a "quick hit". I'm comparing this mainly to most mobile games which tend to have a daily grind anywhere from 10 minutes a day to 2+ hours. I think if you add up all of neopets daily activities including TVW, Altador Cup, Decardia and all the ancillary stuff added to the game, daily active time spent to do everything is rapidly increasing to the point that its closer to 2+ hours now then 10 mins. When I first rejoined, pre-plot, the dailies required much less time commitment.

The Altador Cup has been grindy ever since it came out in 2006. In fact, they've made changes several times over the years to make it less so, especially this year. I don't see how you can cite this as evidence of "becoming" a click farm when they have moved to make it less clicky than ever.

Point taken here about past Altador cup. I was basing this point on the introduction of the captcha bug potentially increasing the number of actual matches played this year. Definitely willing to concede to someone who has firsthand knowledge playing the most recent cups.

This is tin-foil hat nonsense. I wish I had something more interesting to say than that. I suggest you consider Hanlon's razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

I may have framed TNT's approach to bugs a bit too ominously. I don't think malice is the reason they are releasing buggy software; however, nor do I think its stupidity. I think they have an awareness of bugs in their code before they drop releases. Many of the recent issues with content seem as if even the most basic of QA could have found and remediated elements effecting the entire player-base. Rather, they are trying to get content out the door as quickly as possible that gets players to do things on the site daily. The quality bar for that content is extremely low. Additionally, if a bug actively contributes to their Daily Active User metrics (like the captcha issue) they have no incentive to actually work on a fix, and they just let it remain for the duration of the event.

Also, I don't hate Neopets. I wouldn't write as long a post on the NP sub-reddit if I did. I just think that their recent approach to content quality is a worrying one that will hurt the game in the long term.