Pink Poogle Toy Forum

Unfortunately they goofed up the Neopian Times update so we can't read that. I'd love to get the new Draik egg or any egg but they are so hard to get and sell so fast I'm not even going to bother.

I really like the new Draik colors they've released, especially the pirate version! The new clothes are pretty spiffy too.

I agree! I find myself wondering how the Royal Draik would have turned out pre-revamp, though..

The new NT still isn't up...*le groan*

Probably won't be until sometime around 10 minutes to Wednesday NST at the speed they're going these days.

Hi TNT, would you possibly be able to explain the process that you follow to create a plot and the amount of work a single plot represents? I am sick of people complaining because they haven't received prizes and saying that you are lazy when you obviously have a lot of work. Thanks for all the hard work you put into making Neopets a great site. ~viking_munchkin
Hrmm... well, it basically starts out with an itty, bitty idea. Someone usually says, "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if there was a plot where Meepits took over Faerieland and stole all the faerie magic?" Everyone else says things like, "oh, splendid" and "yes, yes... excellent" and "I serve our Meepit overlords!" Then, *several* meetings are held where the creative team (which consists of dedicated creative folks, but also staff members from all around the office) gets together and fleshes out the story. This takes quite a while. We fill plot holes and generally finish concepting the story outright, as if we were writing a book. From there programmers, writers, and artists enter the fray and work out puzzles, timing, battles, chapter outlines, comic layouts... anything and everything that's included with a full-blown plot. We then schedule everything, which isn't as easy as it sounds. We want to leave enough time for folks to finish bits before we release the next chapter, but we also don't want to wait weeks and weeks for stragglers, so scheduling is a tedious process. We're always changing things, even through the plot -- we may have better ideas come up, or we may have hidden a clue *too* well and have to leave more time for its discovery. (Oops!) When you're dealing with a group the size of y'all, it's hard to lock things down.

And, of course, there's prizes. We hear about this one a lot. Basically, we don't do ANYTHING about prizes until the very end of the plot (or, more commonly, after it's over). There are two major reasons for this. First, we have no way of knowing how well people will do. You guys are waaay too fast, and clever, and we've always had our expectations exceeded for how you'll perform. So in the past, when we've tried to do prizes before the plot was over, we've gotten things all wrong. We end up with points being out of whack, prizes and trophies not being fair, items being too rare or too common, etc. Secondly, we never know how popular certain aspects of the plot will be until we release them. (For example, we had absolutely no idea that the symbols that were assigned to players during the Lost Desert Plot would become so important to the plot-goers. We'd even thought of getting rid of them at one point, but you can imagine how glad we are that we didn't!) So all the inside jokes you see in the prizes are thought up *while* we watch you go through the plot. We take the parts you like the most and we put those toward the prizes. In short, we learned quite a few plots back that we were doing things all wrong and that if we didn't wait and do the prizes *after* the plot was over, they wouldn't be as good or as fair as they could be. So no, we don't "have prizes ready at the beginning" like most people suggest on the boards. And it's not just some simple math to figure out scores and points. We really do wait and troll through scores, retool things, find ways to reward those who went above and beyond, recap what was popular and what worked, and go over feedback before we finally release prizes.

And yes, Altador Cup prizes should be coming any day now. *fingers crossed* We're basically just waiting on one or two finishing bits and we're ready to go.