Let Me Tell You About: Shutting down Neopets

Special Guest Djworksafety & Deadeye Tell their story on how the manged to shut down the website neopets.com , They explain the state of the website at the time, the things learned when they were there (like learning economics), and what happened that lead to the shutting down of the website.
The first part they explained on how Neopets was, like having different tiers of people: the baby players who had nothing to do and had no friends, or the hardcore players that also had nothing to do and had no friends as well. They also explain on how the economy of the game worked. One of them was “Restocking”, where stores in game would restock their limited items every once in a while. The rarer items would sell quicker and then be resold for more, mostly because they were useful and of its rarity value. They also explain that the increase of in game currency was very unbalanced, because there’s was a lot of money going around but not much of it being used.
The second part was explaining on how inconsistent was their WIFI internet. And how he tried to find ways to make a lot of money with the handicap he had. One problem was moving items from inventory to the storage box. Because of the design of the website all of the storage stuff was in a different page. This problem in the infrastructure of the website lead to an exploit that caused item duplication within the storage box.
”So you have to move stuff from your inventory to your store and from the safety deposit box from your inventory, and those were all different web pages, so you have to refresh the page. So what I would do is I went in, select a whole bunch of different things that I wanted to bring from the safety deposit box into my inventory, and then I hit OK confirm. And the page doesn't load, its taking forever, its slow. So I do what any normal kid does, and I hit the transfer button a ton of times… after doing that the page finally loads, and it auto brings you to the inventory page, and I noticed that I seem to have a lot more items that I was original planning to bring over, like a lot more. I went to check if those were real or just like an artifact, and they turned out to be real! They are all real items, they been cloned!” -Deadeye
He already planned to make a lot of items, and make a lot of money with it. It seems that it required two different items: one junk item and one target item. He also explains how the mods of the website were very trigger happy, and would “freeze” an account for no reason other than a small report from another player. He tried to hide his activities of cheating to not arise suspicion from mods and other players. One problem he went through was selling “Dubloons " which was another from of currency from the game. He realized that having and selling high valued Dubloons were worthless, because either people bought expensive items with lesser valued coins. The problem came when he kept selling those higher valued items for less, so it aroused suspicion. He later found that buying and selling trainer items for the neopets was more valuable and it would be less suspicious, because more items are in circulation than the Dubloons.
“I a space of two or three days I went from one hundred thousand point to about sixty million.” -Deadeye
His biggest downfall was buying everything expensive, and showing all his friends on how to do it.
“I was 14 so I had at least a bit of restraint. I wasn’t just like constantly selling, I was pacing it.” -Deadeye
“I was fucking 11, I flooded that bitch” -Djworksafety
The Neopets administrators found out that 4 to 5 accounts made a lot of items, and money, a lot than needed. Those accounts were banned, but he thought ahead and made fallback accounts where he would dump items and money in case of this happening. Those accounts were also banned. He tried to make a new account, and those accounts were banned immediately. After that the entire website went down for 3 days, without any warnings of it happening. Once it came back he wasn’t banned. What they did was add a button that caused it to keep from exploiting the cloning glitch.
The rest of the podcast is the things they learned, like learning about money laundering without even knowing it, and economics.
“I would set up trade deals and they I would buy them with dummy accounts...” -Deadeye
“Then you have the dummy accounts buy things at ridiculous prices from the original account, like buying one common things for 30 times what is worth…” -Djworksafety
“Then you would buy junk items from their store, so you can transfer funds without sending them directly...” -Deadeye
“Clever listeners might notice that this is literally what the mob does!” -Djworksafety
And the rest, is them talking about other times that they got banned, like in 4chan , and the one time they send an email to the Homestar Runner show: Strong Bad Email , and that email sent got turned into the episode 118 – Virus . Which lead to nobody believe him that he sent that.
“We loaded up the fucking sbemail, and you came fucking running, like holy shit! Holy shit! Holy shit!” -Djworksafety
Eventually ending with the teaser of the next episode .
Category:Episode
Category:Special Guest