Pink Poogle Toy Forum

Unfortunately, yes. However, the problem is that this is cheating. It really is just another form of ABing....

My ever, clever husband has come up with a theory: that perhaps all of those dead accounts you see on the "a" line and some of the other lines are decoys so Neo can detect who is using these shop wiz search programs. After all, if the same player repeatedly goes to a dead account to try and buy an underpriced negg/map piece/faerie, one would think that the person is either brain dead or using a program.

Because, if you are a reseller of certain items, sooner or later, you figure out that these are dead accounts and you don't even bother with them when you are hunting on the shop wiz. You automatically remember that there are three dead accounts at the top of the "a" line when you go to search for glamour neggs, etc.

So, if Neo is keeping a list of everyone who has visited these dead accounts and sees that player x has gone to certain dead accounts 50 times a day for the past 30 days, it is somewhat obvious that the player is using a program.

I am not suggesting that any one of these frozen players did that, however.

Thats an interesting theory. I just thought that for whatever reason tnt either didn't fix the shops because they forgot, or thought they did. It does make sense that they might try to do something like that though. If they aren't or haven't in the past, perhaps they should consider putting those shops to that use now?

It still makes one wonder, why these large shop owners got frozen now... maybe there wasn't necessarily anything they were doing wrong, but some people reported them because there shops seemed to large to be true? Hmmm...

You must also keep in mind that all of the people doing faerie quests cn't use the Shop Wizard, and therefore usually go to the Trading Post or a 'mall' to obtain the needed item. That's where I think most mall owners get their cash.

As for the theory about cheating, it makes sense, though I'm not sure how many of those players would like having their missing shop as a decoy.

I think that those players that have missing shops are not real players at all. Since TNT made up the game, one can surmise that they can do all sorts of things that we wouldn't know about --including create fictitious accounts. Or if they are real players, they are now inactive or frozen. If you check their user lookups, they do not have a "last spotted" section. And most of the accounts were created a few years ago, yet the person has only played a few games. And some of those games are old games that aren't around anymore.

And, if those were active players, I think we would have heard from at least one of them on the chats saying that they still didn't have their shop back after months and months. But, I haven't seen anything like that.

I never thought of that...that is a very good theory.


Has he tried emailed neopets enquiring about it?

No, jellyoflight, he hasn't. It just came to him today when I was telling him about the big names who had been frozen and that someone on PPT had mentioned that there were downloadable shop wiz search programs. He put two and two together.

I still check those shops though because some people check the wiz to price their items, and price at that really low price, so I grab them up. They were like in the middle of the low price list, so I just assumed that people had given up before trying all of the shops. I was happy to get such good deals, hehe.

if there's really a program that buys 50 underpriced codestones in less than 5 seconds, then i suppose that's attractive enough to tempt them into breaking rules...

as for the explanation about those unremoved shop errors that Morningstar gave, it sounds like a really ingenious scheme by TNT if it's true. however, i guess it wasn't intentional in the first place. those users were probably real or you would see these shop errors for every popular "stockables" around. for example, you don't see these errors for every type of codestones, which is what you would logically do if you want to go to the extent of creating traps. i guess TNT saw some uses for these errors and leave them unattended.

Oh. You have a v.clever husband there :p



I really can't imagine those big people cheating and losing what they've gained...


I'm starting to veer towards the "pull a name out of a hat and it's frozen" theory...

But, maybe TNT was even more clever. If TNT made a trap for every ETS, then it would be too easy for people to figure out that it was an intentional set up to catch cheat programs. However, in doing it with just a few very popular ETS items--brown negg, secret lab map piece, treasure map piece, to name a few--it could appear to just be an computer glitch and not intentional. Especially if they also throw in some other dead account shops that we can't access with cheap items in them--like pyramibread and makeup.

I do agree that these were, at one time, real accounts. But, my guess is that Neo could do computer printouts of items that were sitting in dead accounts and compile a list of accounts to "reactivate" for this purpose.

And, mainly, I think they would be clever enough to do this because of their prior history. Remember the weekend when the restocks were a minute apart and the method to enter Kauvara's Code kept changing? And, then, all of a sudden no one was able to restock. Stuff was sitting in the shops but no one could access them.

I remember someone mentioning on PPT that the really high-valued items in the shops were disappearing little by little--even though no one could get at them. And someone else suggested that perhaps this was Neo's way of catching autobuyers. And, sure enough, people were complaining left and right about getting frozen right after that. And, the talk on the chats and here on PPT was that the people who were frozen were using AB programs.

So, I wouldn't put anything past Neo in trying to keep the cheating to a minimum.

I remember someone by the name of.... Well I forgot his name. >.> But he was a popular Battledomer who was frozen due to using home.neopets.com to browse the site and restock. Apparently, this was NOT ALLOWED (though at the time, no one knew, and he wasn't even warned!) and remains frozen. Neopets is weird like that.

I used to do that, back in the day. The way I figured it, if they were going to have multiple domain prefixes, then I was going to use multiple domains and prefixes.

I stopped when I realized that very few other people used them. I periodically load one up when the server's glitchy, just to see if it's on my end or neopets's.

maybe unicron has stepped up his regime of annihilation and destroyed them in preperation for the coming fight with primus.
never say somthing like that, some ijit will always come along and prove you wrong (usually me actually?)

oddly enough all this nonsence about the shop wizard being fair is well..nonsence.
in 100 tests my SN (pipsville) showed up three times.

Wow, Morningstar, that theory makes a lot of sense. Look up Neopox pizza and look up the owners of the dead shops. They're all 45-50 months. Most of them have no last seen date. And look at 3pinay15angel86's (a person whos shop was dead) guild. It has 2 members on the council and says that it has 1 member in the guild. Has anyone on PPT actually had their shop die?