Thoughts on this overpay trade?

Let me first start off by saying, this entire comment is not aimed in your direction /u/goofyspouse. I respect you and feel we have disagreed on many issues but still can discuss it in a cordial manner, so please don't take this as an attack toward you. It's a general comment about a lot of the "hate" JN's Item DB receives on Neopets and here on the sub in general.


First, JN is bullshit

Okay, so this really frustrates me for a lot of reasons. You know, I devote quite a bit of my time (as does the rest of JN Staff) to volunteering for the site and doing work. We don't get paid and often times we put in the same amount of time as a part-time or full-time job.

We are damned if we do, damned if we don't.

JN is a completely thankless job (and I'm not asking people to thank me for it. I do it because I love Neopets) and every time I come to the sub or go to the neoboards, it seems there is a non-stop barrage of comments saying how much people hate JN, people accuse us of changing item prices to benefit ourselves for profit, (which is beyond offensive. Saw a popular Charter user actually make this accusation just a few days ago. Looking at you ramotswe) the list goes on and on. Enough people complained about how we priced unbuyables, so we started going by TP Asking Price.

If you don't like our current prices for unbuyable items, you have only one group of people to aim your distaste toward and that's traders/resellers. I will say, if you see a bad price in the item database, send us a report and tell us. Mistakes are made because we are humans and not every staffer knows everything about every item or sometimes 0s are left off.

We do what we do to help people but we can't do it alone. I spend the majority of my time going through price reports on accounts to ensure we don't have users using multiple accounts to try and manipulate prices, ensuring that we don't have resellers trying to inflate prices in our DB (which happens often), etc. I enjoy making sure people aren't trying to use our database to screw over other people.


because all they go off of are prices posted on the TP...not what was actually paid by real buyers

What else can we possibly do? It's 100% impossible to know what someone sells an item for on the TP. Yes, people can report to us "Hey I sold this item for this amount of money" but where's the proof? Resellers would abuse that system beyond belief and we would get attacked more than we do now.

How would we possibly know what "real buyers" pay for items on the trading post? We certainly can't just take people's word for it. If we were to do that, we might as well just hand the item db over to resellers to manipulate for their advantage.

So it's really a double-edged sword. Do I think our prices are 100% accurate? No. Do I think people should take our prices as fact? No. Do I wish that people, when they see a bad price, would report it to us? YES.


All I'm asking is that the next time you say "JN is bullshit" that maybe you tone it down a bit and if you see something wrong, TELL US. We spend a lot of our time devoted to this website and trying to help people only to be met with nasty comments and hatred everywhere we turn. We can't do anything without making someone mad.

I see people complain on the boards all the time "This item's price is bad" or "Look at the history here, it jumps in price. It was obviously inflated" yet strangely, not a single one of those people complaining had ever sent in a report telling us this information.

It's just disheartening and frustrating to constantly see people saying the work I do is shit. :/

/r/neopets Thread Parent