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Neopets was my first exposure to the "stock market". It was a very simplistic market where there was a price floor of ~$5, and prices would randomly go up and
by matthewtse 3y ago
Neopets was my first exposure to the "stock market".
It was a very simplistic market where there was a price floor of ~$5, and prices would randomly go up and down from there (it was not based on buying and selling, it was a simple random walk generator). So it taught me a very simple lesson of patience and delayed gratification, where if I simply bought stuff at 5, and waited a few weeks/months until it went up to 15-25, I could sell with a high profit.
As I acquired more "capital", I could make bigger purchases with bigger payoffs over time, and I made far more buying and selling these stocks than I could ever have performing "labor" (playing the games for points), thus teaching me the second lesson on capital leverage.
I think a few years in, they realized people were doing this, and they added a purchase floor of $15, where you couldn't buy something unless it was $15 or more, which limited my ultra-simple strategy's profitability, but I still kept doing it for a few more years before growing up and moving onto other games.
A final funny anecdote, there was this one stock called BOOM (Boom Boom Boxes), which would very regularly shoot up in value to 100s -> 1000s in price (way beyond everything else which typically topped out in the 10s). And there was this strategy to always buy BOOM when it was cheap, because it would surely multiply like crazy. And one day they announced that BOOM was the first stock to go "bankrupt", resulting in everyone losing a ton of money as it went to 0. Thus teaching me the third lesson about "bubbles".
I'm astounded I remember this much detail from a game I played when I was 10 years old.
- Huggernaut 3y agoI was one of the lucky 2,000 players to receive 500,000 neopoints as part of the billion neopoints giveaway in 2000. I was 11 and some time later gave my password away to someone claiming they would make me a moderator so you know... important lessons were learnt.
- brailsafe 3y agoAnd sometime later that password would probably show up in the leaked list of user accounts that's easy enough to find, since they stored everything in plain text
- quickthrower2 3y agoThis sounds so much like modern cryptocurrency. They were ahead of the curve.
- cfjgvjh 3y agoI suppose unregulated markets will inevitably attract opportunistic scams.
- allo37 3y agoIt was my first exposure to...scalping? I remember that for some reason, chocolate was very valuable in the game. There was a chocolate shop in the game that was consistently sold out, but if you hit refresh often enough and at the right time, you could catch it right when it "restocked" and nab one of those rare chocolates. Then I would sell it in my personal store at a tidy profit. Timing the refresh just right and grabbing a super valuable chocolate was quite a thrill, probably even more than the games themselves.
- matthewtse 3y agoAhh, I remember something similar. I remember there was a "secret fairy shop", which was a hidden clickable link. And the shop was usually empty, or stocked with low-worth items. But every 1 hour or so it would stock with high-value fairies that can level up the power of your neopet, and these prices were always significantly below market. Kind of reminds me of Rolex :) I remember reading guides as to how to time the purchase. I'm kind of surprised more enterprising users didn't write bots for this, as I always remember it being possible at human reaction time to actually pick something up, which I imagine would have been impossible if bots came along.