Psypets
PsyPets claims to be a virtual pet site that is based on psychology. However, the amount of psychology it actually contains is less than a 1st year student's "intro to psych" course. Despite failing at it's premise, Psypets used to have potential.
It was....
- Not a Neopets clone
- Balanced market system
- Make your own items and pets (that were cheap!)
- frequent updates
- Players could add new ideas to a Wish List to be voted on and eventually added.
- Game ideas forum was regularly checked and replied to by staff
Then it fell apart.
Apparently the site's popularity went to the site creator, Ben's, head. Who knew that having dramatic 16 year old girls like you would be so important to someone old enough to drink? The life of a sad basement dweller who has never worked anything outside of minimum wage must be very lonely, eh Ben?
Now Ben is a lulzcow just like the rest of the teenage girls, whom he has actually began to alienate and screw over through assorted random changes to the game. All the while he is still determined to squeeze those jew golds out of his userbase, while constantly finding new and hilarious ways to drive his users to tears over a few pixels on a screen.
Whether he is a massive fag or an extremely successful IRL troll is up to you to decide.
How the game plays
In psypets you are supposed to have up to 5 pets who go out on adventures.
These pets bring home trade goods, food, and building supplies. Some pets learn other useful skills such as crafting, smithing, and inventing which turns the base materials into trinkets and other useful things. The pets grow up, maybe have children (if female) and eventually ascend to be reincarnated or they die and move on.
However, that isn't what really happens.
People horde over 9000 pets in their little houses. These pets end up having millions of mutant offspring and bring in massive amounts of supplies and food. The player sells everything the pets make or bring home to the market causing everything in the game to devalue until it's worth used toilet paper. Did we say everything? Oh, actually, food to feed the little bastards and construction materials to give them more room for their mutant offspring is worth more than gold now.
So the market is collapsing, there is no food and pets are starving, teenage girls are BAWWWing up a storm that their pixel blobs are dying inside of houses so full of worthless inedible crap that there is no room for edible food. What does Ben do?
Well, he makes shitty webcomics and releases buggy unusable items! Well, at first anyway.
The Orange Incident
Ben introduced coconut and orange trees as things pets can find and bring home. If you built a greenhouse, you could harvest from these trees to get a steady food supply. The world was saved now the pets wouldn't have to starve!
The point of fail, however, was the orange trees. Orange trees would die after being harvested, always, but the longer you left them around the more oranges there would be. In effect, a few good gathering pets and some patience would mean you would have free food forever!
Fearing "a food monopoly" due to free oranges, orange trees were made super fucking rare, but the billions of oranges created by his lack of foresight still remained. Ben's answer? remove all tree-grown oranges from the game, even the ones still on the trees!
Suddenly the food source used to fuel the literal armies of pets was gone and pets were starving again. The users began to BAWWWW over losing their precious pixels, and the tears that flowed that night was enough to fill up the Atlantic Ocean. Twice.
Revenge of the oranges
Well, everyone was super pissed about the orange trees. Their pets were dying because Ben didn't think things through. Not only that, all the materials, time and effort that were used to make the trees grow and keep growing were wasted.
A billion angry teenage girls took to the wish list and demanded that a better answer be made.
Ben said STFU and changed the wishlist by removing all watchers and making it so only he could add things to it. The girls tried to circumvent the dick move by putting things on the to-do list, only to have Ben not only restrict access to the to do list to the point only he could go there, he also locked the game ideas forum permanently to prevent further feedback from his users.
Now to have anything put on the wish list or the to-do list you'll need to directly contact Ben first (good luck with that). At most you can use one of your three meager voting points to vote on Ben's ideas. When asked why he does this, Ben simply replied "for the lulz".
Total overhaul!
When Ben was disappointed that PsyPets wasn't the game he always wanted he decided to change everything that made the site popular with it's userbase. Oh, and with the wish list, to-do list, and game ideas forums locked down, the users had zero say in things.
Once upon a time, back before the orange incident, Ben might have listened when the users said this was a bad idea. Now whenever the userbase complains it only makes him more determined to screw them over and do whatever he had planned anyway.
With a dwindling userbase and even less activity, PsyPets is a lonely place these days, but at least Ben can finally turn PsyPets into that game he always wanted.
The market system
The market system was overhauled to "make things better", when in actuality it resulted in a market crash and even worse inflation on commonly used items than before. Since buying shit has become the only thing to do in the game, apart from petting the pets every once in a blue moon and selling crap the pets made/brought in, the users kicked up a rage, telling him not to go ahead with it. Of course, Ben ignored them.
The changes to the market resulted in massive server errors and glitches. Instead of fixing these, Ben released more items to clutter the database. Eventually things got so bad that the server actually broke and the pets had to be reset.
Shelter changes
When you're getting started you have 1 pet. The only ways to get more pets is...
- Make a custom pet (costs money)
- Go to the shelter and adopt a pet
- Hope your female has babies
If you started with a male, hoping for babies won't work. In fact, just relying on a preggers female didn't even work most of the time! The only safe way to get new pets without paying jew gold was the shelter.
The few responsible people who didn't horde armies of pets happily abandoned pets in the shelter for newbies to come adopt, knowing their babies would get good homes and start families of their own. These dreams were crushed when Ben decided that all shelter pets would be neutered.
Now if you started with a male you're fucked unless you pay Ben your sweet, sweet, jew gold for a female pet. The only other option is to use an expensive sex change item on a Neutered male and hope for the best; an option that newbies adopting from the shelter can't take. This turned away many new players very quickly when they say they would never get enough pets to be self-sufficient.
Gameplay changes
Remember how we mentioned that all you used to need to do was pet your pets now and then? Not anymore! Now you have to click each and every one of your over 9000 pets to make them do things they used to do automatically! That's right, you now need to spend hours...
- feeding your pets
- Leveling your pets up
- making your pets gather experience
- Bringing in the items your pets found
- Making your pets finish items they created
- Playing with the pets to keep them happy
...all because Ben didn't want to code a better database or buy a better server. That's right: this change was created because Ben's failcode couldn't handle all the pets being updated at midnight each night even with a solid HOUR of site downtime set up nightly to free up server resources. Hell, it couldn't even handle generating and showing all the changes that happens when you log in!
Even more people quit because it was taking hours to care for their pets now.
In overview
Remember that list that used to give Psypets its potential? Well, here's what's left now...
It is....
- Not a Neopets clone- it's far worse
- broken market system
- Make your own items and pets - the only way to survive
- frequent updates with broken crap nobody wants
- Ben closed down and ignores all user suggestions in a fit of Nazi rage
- Game ideas forum also closed to prevent BAWWing
- Takes hours to do basic shit even Neopets handles automatically.
It's a broken, empty, fail-filled waste of promise.
External Links
- The site itself
- The site forums, where members whine about stuff and Ben trolls
- Psypets wiki includes history pages for tracking ben's fail.
| Psypets is part of a Series on Cyberpets |
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Psypets is part of a series on Visit the Sites Portal for complete coverage. |