Neopets community in delight and discord over the return of original pet art

polygon.com:

For years, Neopets has had a black-market pet problem. Neopets themselves aren’t just digital pets — they’re also currency. When the website, popularized in the 2000s, got a revamp in 2007, its creators unintentionally created a new market for rare goods. At that time, most of Neopets’ pet art was updated to a new style that let players decorate their pets with clothes, props, and background art. But certain pets weren’t converted automatically, and some users opted to keep those pets unchanged. Unconverted pets only got rarer from there, creating an economy driven by scarcity.

Neopets players started trading pets using a complex system that ranks pets into 10 tiers. Players usually trade up until they get their holy grail pet, but it’s a system that’s hard to get into if you don’t already have a valuable pet to trade initially. That’s where the black market comes in; people are willing to buy unconverted pets, and others are willing to steal them to sell them off. (Neopets has had tons of problems with data breaches in the past, including compromised login information that was posted from the hacked data, making it relatively easy for bad actors to access old or “abandoned” accounts.) The black market has been a problem for years, but now, Neopets is ready to tear down that scarcity economy with the addition of readily available unconverted pets.

Unconverted pets will return to Neopets on Jan. 23, now called NC Pet Styles.

Neopets LIVE — NC Style Pet Edition https://t.co/lQqwlswZuK

Players will be able to adjust their pets using the NC Mall’s new Styling Studio — meaning Neopets players will have to pay for the process. Neopets hasn’t yet announced the pricing structure, or exactly how the update will work. However, the launch will start with just three different pet color options, which are Faerie, Darigan, and Grey. Users can change their Neopets’ colors by using paintbrushes that impact aesthetics; the Darigan paintbrush, for instance, generally gives pets a