Change for Change's Sake

Sometimes I wonder about the Neopets Team.  For everything they do to make the site better, faster, and more fun, they also spend far too much time "tinkering". 

It's not that I don't like change.  Several new games are introduced each month, new foods, new pet colours, new neopets themselves.  In the last few months, no fewer than three new pets have been introduced: the bori, the ruki, and the yurble.  Two of these were produced purely for commercial reasons.  The Yurble first appeared as the "Mystery Pet" in the McDonald's Happy Meals plushie promotion.  If you wanted to see the new pet, you had to run out and buy a Happy Meal (or just the toy).  Similarly, the bori was first made available only to people who downloaded a Yahoo toolbar, and would only be available in Ice to those same people.

Commercialism is nothing new to Neopets, and I'm not knocking it.  At any given moment there are "paid advertisement" games for TV shows, movies, and products like toothbrushes, deodorant, and the Cartoon Network.  Ads run in the small ad space in the yellow toolbar.  Neopoints are given to people who sign up for surveys and other websites.  Neopets employs a technique called "immersive advertising" that they actually invented, which allows an advertiser's product to be integrated into the site.  Instead of annoying pop-ups and banners, users can swing by the Disney Theatre or play the General Mills Cereal Adventure.  It's purely by choice and has been proven to increase a product's profitability.

 While I'm not crazy about the ads, I know they keep Neopets free, so I'm not actually complaining about them. 

But it's the other changes that bother me.  Unnecessary pet makeovers, for example.  The old moehog was sheepish and sweet while the new is cartoonish and showy.  The Kougra's makeover was so unabashedly awful that it spurred enough kougra owners to complain and caused the Neopets Team to allow users to choose a new design.  It takes a lot of complaints to make Neopets respond.  I'd have been happiest if we could have gone back to the original- my kougra was my first neopet and I chose her because I loved the way she looked.

Similarly, the new yellow toolbar arches across the top of the page and flashes large animated ads.  It cheapens the look of the whole site, making it look like so many other pop-up- and banner-driven websites.

And while making changes to databases, Neopets often crashes, sometimes for an entire day.  Other times items go missing from shops and Safe Deposit Boxes (takes all meaning out of the word "safe", doesn't it?), neopoints disappear from bank accounts, and neomail vanishes from inboxes.

I'm not saying that change is bad.  Part of the reason we love Neopets is its innovative side- new games, new items and avatars to collect, and new storylines keep the site refreshing.  But I wish Neopets would deliver some kind of test market system.  Wouldn't it be better to see how a representative group of Neopians reacts to a change before springing it onto the group at large?  Beta versions of games such as Plushie Tycoon are run, so why not beta versions of pet makeovers?

And while they're at it, can't they ensure that their site won't crash every time they want to upgrade?