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Nutrinopets disappears

On September 24, 2009 the news broke that Nutrinopets has poofed which means it has disappeared from the world wide web. What does that mean? We’re not sure, but we doubt that Nutrinopets will return to the web – as they probably didn’t find a right buyer, or never sold out all. Kuit was a friend of Kady’s because of Valin’s and Kady’s divorce, which means Valin wasn’t the one behind Nutrinopets day to day operations – which means, Kady failed to pay all coders and artists that were working for them, which is sad.

How do you guys feel about Nutrinopets disappearing? Were you a fan of NUP? We know NUP has been around for years and has had great success up until this year – when they ran into problems with staff and paying artists, but that’s besides the point – and Nutrinopets is gone now – and hopefully not for good, but we know that its returning to a parked domain page – which means either they’re playing us like fools, or they actually found a new buyer, but we doubt that.

Because they were seeking 300k for buy out price and we doubt it that someone would offer that much for a site that wasn’t making any money and was lacking customer support.

So, how do you feel about this? Do you feel heart broken that your favorite pet game is now gone without any news?

Nutrinopets asks for 300k for buy out price?

One of our oldest pet games, Nutrinopets has recently put their pet game up for sale, however, its far from being your normal sale. They want at least $300,000 for a buy out price which is very absurd. Not only did they send out a mass email to potential buyers, they really believe they’re worth that much because of past revenue – which is ridiculous. Here is their email found on the nutrinopets sale thread.

I’m Blind Carbon Copy (BCC) mailing all of the recipients of this message. As you can see, Kady is the only visible recipient.

Firstly, to those who offered $2,000 or about the same value…I’m sorry you got taken in by the rumor some kids started. Why should we sell Nutrinopets for less than it can earn in a single month? That would be foolishness in the extreme. I’m sorry, but you will need to think a bit bigger than that.

A couple of you have offered some respectable deals, however the added terms of the deals, such as requiring that I remain on retainer for the next 2, 3, or in one case, 5 years, is unacceptable. Kady and I wish to make a clean break with Nutrinopets once sold, and the site transferred.

What is for sale exactly? Well, here you are:
Nutrinopets, it’s trademarks and copyrights.
The Nutrinopets.com domain including the domain for the NuPzine and 1 or 2 other nutrinopets related domains.
ALL Nutrinopets code. Live, or experimental.
ALL of the Nutrinopets Database, including the prior 7 days of backups from the date of shutdown, post sale.
ALL Nutrinopets images, flash and other multimedia resources, live and unreleased.
My personal aid in adapting NuP to whatever server enviroment you intend, or my aid in explaining how it operates in it’s current server enviroment should you choose to assume it’s existing hosting account on it’s dedicated server.

Should you be truly interested in pursuing the purchase of Nutrinopets, for a small “good faith” deposit, I can release to you site performance information, financial data, and other such items to aid you in making your decision. Such a Deposit would be counted toward the final purchase price if you opt to buy NuP, and if you chose not to, would be then kept by us. Furthermore, by paying the good faith deposit, you gain temporary exclusivity to this information and our attention. Other offers will not be considered until you have made a desicion to buy or not to buy.

It is true that in the last year, and a bit more since my cessation of active work on NuP that it has declined in terms of value, but by all means it is not worthless. Furthermore, Nutrinopets still carries the remnant of the debt Kady and I ran up from when we first acquired NuP and had to give up normal jobs in order to recover the site from the original owners. We cannot sell for less than this value, as it would be unfair to us to sell, and still be paying for NuP…and then receive no recompense for our work and effort at having built Nutrinopets into what it became.

By the 5 year and even 3 year rules, Nutrinopets.com is worth a good deal more than $300,000, but we of course are willing to consider a sale price of far less in order to achieve a relatively quick sale. We are willing to consider owner financing, though of course we’d much prefer to have the total sale value in a lump sum.

One last thing…a bit of trivia. Neopets.com, when it sold, went for $160,000,000 to Viacom. Yes, Neopets.com then was considerably more successful then than Nutrinopets.com is now, however, petsites are far from worthless in any condition.

–Ticondrius

What do you guys think about Nutrinopets being for sale?

Is Marapets becoming more corrupt than Neopets?

Marapets used to be a beacon of hope to many of us; a virtual pet site that was actually fun and had a great community. Unfortunately, in my opinion, Mara is more dead by the day. Is it too early to make a joke? Well whatever… anyway, I want to get to the point. Marapets should be called Neopets, Jr. at this point. Ads cover the site and the staff is starting to slip.

Mara is in a panic. Older members are quitting daily. Pretty soon an ID of 3,000,000 will be a senior player because all of the older members will have moved on to a different site such as Lurapets. You can’t go into the forums without seeing a “QUITTING GIVING AWAY ALL” topic in a forum. It the mean time, it’s a relief the smarter players are leaving the dying site.

The staff is in total disarray: one day someone might be staff, the next they might not be, or maybe even banned! One incident is when the role of Main RP’er was taken from Lavie and given to Samuri. Lavi convinced an admin to terminate Sam’s mod status. My friend had this to say about Lavie: “You’re a mod. Step down from your soap box, because you can’t ban accounts.”

This was also found on Lavie’s profile:

“The thought crossed my mind to simply ignore all my maramails, but after some thought, and a little bit of rest, I have decided that this is not a very nice thing to do, even though 99.9% that mail is simply a waste of my time anyway.”

She honestly needs to get over herself. Not only does she abuse her power to the max, she is the opposite of what her role is supposed to do. Interact with members and help them witch problems. She just isn’t staff material, to put it plain, she is a nasty snob. As much as I love to bash Lavie, I have better examples.

During the Summer of 2007, my first account, which I usually say was “bricked”*, was banned, most likely because I frequently critiqued Mara and wrote a critiqued filled review of Mara. I usually pretend that my relations with the Mara staff are smooth, when in fact they aren’t. So yes, I’m coming out and telling the truth as well. It’s time for Ian to tell us where all that money goes…

Of course, in reality we’ll never know. Of course a staff team can’t be perfect but they can damn well try, but the Marapet’s staff team doesn’t try at all to better themselves. They abuse their power and are rude to the members, even on VPL they act as if they are superior to everyone.

*Bricked: Bricked refers to the deletion of email account or an inaccessible email account and the forgetting your password. I.E. Beckie deleted the email, and forgot her password, now her account is bricked.

This post as been brought to you by, Casee.

Marapets final phase of maintenance

Ian posted this on his blog:

Final Phase of Maintenance

The final pieces of our new system are being shipped this friday and will be at our data centre on Monday or Tuesday.

I’m leaving London on Friday to go to Canada and stay with Laimay for a couple of weeks. We will be able to work together, on the same timezone and fix the rest of the site.

We’ll get the Undying Festival going and lots of other great stuff we’ve had planned for ages, which will be SO MUCH easier and a lot more FUN when we are in the same country and the same room working together. It’ll be the first time we work together in the same place too!

With Ian finally returning to marapets, we will finally see quality updates coming from Marapets’ again. It’s also great to hear that Ian will be going to Laimay’s house to work on Marapets – it shows dedication and when Ian & Laimay work, Marapets grows and continues to succeed.

Did you guys see the Piracy event? It finally started and you can play via battling and restocking.

Ole launches solar virtual pet site

As the owner of Ichumon and Palawind, Ole decided it was time to create virtual pet site software, which is known as solar virtual pet site which means users can now create their own pet game with the following:

Information on solar virtual pet site as seen on the solar virtual pet site thread

solar virtual pet site

The package is coming along nicely

So far thats done-

Backend clases-
main – contains lots of cool functions to help programmers program
pet
user – user functions (givePoints, giveItem, deleteItem etc)
connet – connect to the database.

layout coded in CSS/Tables.

Register
Login/logout
Updates – Allows you to post news updates and have other users post comments
Create A Pet – create a pet; give it a name, select its colour and gender.

Working on inventory + some quick game XD

There will be a mail system It’ll either be included in a new patch update (which you’d automatically get) or it’ll be a separate modification addon (which you’d have to buy separatly ).

I put it at 28188182481 SVPS cash so users dont think the download is up XD

I can’t put it up until the art is done, soo… go mass PM romance to get it done

Admin has been fully coded xP

Options-

Restock Shops (restocks shops based on rarity)

List Members | Search Member | Give Item To Member

(can edit member info via search and list. Can make multiple admins, ban user, edit points etc)

Add Item | Edit Item

(can add item. Values: itemname, image, description, rarity, type, shop, price). ATM the only type is food, but more will be added with new mods and such

Add Pet | Edit Pet | Add Colour | Edit Colour | Add Pet Colour | Edit Pet Colour

(Allows you to add pets so users can create them. ATM, the default colour is the first colour you add (when you install it will be green, but can be editted to something like Common). Its nicely setup so that all data is normalised.)

I’m going to set up the download package and test out the shop on Solar XP Yay for coding all day zzz

What do you guys think about solar virtual pet site so far? Do you like it?

The Winding Roads of Digi-Petz

The Winding Roads of Digi-Petz
Looking through the years, it is fascinating to watch all the virtual pet sites that have come and gone, traded hands, and some which are still around today. When I originally started Digi-Petz in 2005, I was merely an amateur web developer. I had no real interest in making money, only building a pet site to call my own, which to me was simply a hobby. I wasn’t a skilled programmer and could hardly call myself a web designer.

In the beginning, I started off the site using a variety of open source scripts. The site may not have been completely original, nor was it advanced. The early stages of Digi-Petz were entirely driven by a great member base that respected one another and enjoyed talking amongst themselves for hours on end.

As the site matured from the startup it originally was, it quickly reached over 5,000 members in less than five months. Keep in mind, the site at this point had very little to do feature-wise and the art quality could blind you. To my surprise, there were days where we’d go from 3 online users… to 50 online users. Members entertained themselves by playing hours of tomato bounce and socializing with one another on the message boards. We didn’t even have some of the features that some would consider mandatory; private messaging, usable items, avatars, and you couldn’t even feed or play with your pets. The reviews were appalling, yet they only make me more determined to improve.

I had a desire to make Digi-Petz a better site, one which at the minimum had some entertaining features and could get decent reviews by the critics. This slowly drew me into learning the basics of PHP and MySQL. I started making modifications to existing features until I eventually had enough knowledge to begin writing my own scripts. I started with the basics, knowing that at the least, the site would need these if we ever wanted to succeed further.

When Digi-Petz was just about to peak 7,500 members, I decided I wanted to release a whole new version of the site. I turned the site around quickly in the fall of 2006, basing it on a lot of the programming from the “Kronik” scripts. Sadly, I had to delete the entire database and start from scratch, losing all of our hard-earned members. Around now is where I began to take off faster with my PHP programming, and due to high criticism, I quickly customized every inch of code I had initially used, and made the site appear much more original than it had in the past. The site finally was getting more entertaining, yet the art was still a major downfall.

These were the days where you could get amazing looking pets drawn for just $2.00 a piece, or even an entire map for a mere $4.50! [Bless you Emma (MissEStudios)]! At the time of course this seemed like a lot of money. Could you only imagine what the industry would be like today if art was still so affordable?

Digi-Petz continued down the same path for a while thereafter. I slowly improved the site all around and developed more features each week. What I loved about the site is how loyal the members were. The most active members all seemed to be those who had been with Digi-Petz from the start. It still feels that way today. As I continued to run Digi-Petz, I began to expand a bit and begin developing other websites. Eventually I founded a web development company called BTW Media.

In 2008, I decided Digi-Petz needed some major renovation to keep up with the modern industry, so I gave the site an entire facelift, renovated all major problems, and added some new features such as flash games, a battle area, and more. I decided to call this transformation Digi-Petz v3. The name just kind of caught on and became known as v3 for short. By now, the site has climbed back up to over 10,000 members.

I was blessed to have an aspiring young moderator who was determined just as much as I was to build up Digi-Petz. His name was Chase Ginther. He soon became my assistant administrator, earned his way to becoming a head admin, and eventually I appointed him as the Vice Executive Director of my company. We worked together enhancing Digi-Petz, and also worked hand-in-hand developing more websites and brands for our company. I remember talking for hours on the phone with Chase about what we could do to expand the site and make it a better place. We grew quickly into industries including web hosting, layout sites, web design, and more.

I began losing interest in virtual pets near the end of 2008. I was more mature and my interests were more of a business-mind than a game-mind. I resigned from Digi-Petz later that year, and put Chase in charge for a few months until later when both of our lives became more hectic, and attention was turned away from Digi-Petz. Chase later resigned because I just didn’t have enough projects for him anymore. Soon enough, I ended up selling Digi-Petz for a low price to RevoMedia, LLC in January 2009. I took a little break from the web, and closed down BTW Media a few months later.

In April 2009, I reopened what used to be BTW Media, brought some old sites back to life, and founded a new company which now operates more successfully in industries including internet marketing, web development, telecommunications, and internet service providing.

RevoMedia, LLC forgot to renew the site’s main domain in March, and the domain was hijacked by a parking company. Around this time, Digi-Petz began to go downhill (as you can see here: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/digi-petz.com/). They eventually bought out the domain digipetz.com, which overall is a better name anyways. However, 50% of the site did not work for months due to broken links which were never fixed, some which are still broken. Updates are now scarce, and the site hasn’t had any new activity in months.

It’s sad to see a site which I used to love and foster, in such a pitiful state. But, it brings a smile to my face to look back through the years and see how far we came. I enjoyed reading some of the messages that members posted recently on a forum titled “Looking Back on the Years”, where members said things (and I quote) such as “Digi-Petz is what got me into computers and digital art in the first place. If Digi didn’t exist, I probably would have never found my love of computers and my talent for digital art. Thanks you guys! x3” It’s touching to see how much these things really do influence people.

I just would like to thank all those who helped me with Digi-Petz, and those who were such loyal members. Hopefully the site will live on for many more years.

It’s been so much fun bringing back these memories and telling our tales to those who are just getting started. Digi-Petz may not have made me rich, it didn’t make me famous, but it did make me who I am today. For that, I am so glad I started Digi-Petz when I did.

Benjamin L. Thomas,
Founder—Digi-Petz; CEO—
Thomas Media Enterprise

Guest post written by Ben

Virtual pets now die again on Rescreatu

Rescreatu has turned the ability of virtual pets dying again back on. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Source: Rescreatu pets dying.

This is a very important update. As of today, your pets can now die again. We have given everyone more than enough time to sort their pets after the release of v2 and to take care of anything that needed to be done.
Only pets located on your profile will be able to die. Each day, your pets lose hunger. If you are not feeding them either manually or through the Food Pen, they will eventually be “dying”. You will be able to see this next to their hunger status. Once your pet has had 10 consecutive days of “dying”, it will die and be sent to the graveyard.
You will then have up to 15 days to complete the Resurrection Quest and revive your pet. If you do not revive the pet within 15 days, the pet will lose it’s name. You can still revive it afterwards, but you will have to rename it upon revival.
If you have any questions about the process, post them here and I will be glad to answer them.

Why did Neopets receive a makeover?

Our fellow blogger, Chloe spencer recently posted about Neopets’ makeover, but couldn’t go into details of a makeover – we believe Neopets received a makeover because Viacom wanted Neo’s source code to be up-to-date with web standards, and also; up to par with other virtual pet communities, however, after the makeover, that left a lot of neopets’ users going “wtf?”, but that means – they were confused.

Just look at old neopets and the new neopets.
Old:

New neopets:

Thanks goes to Neopets redesign.

So are you a fan of Neopets’ old design or a fan of the newer Neopets? Or are you a fan of the customizable pets and the new features that were brought onto Neopets, after the sale to Viacom? We all know that Neopets is currently playing catch up to Webkinz, and well, they got beat at their own game.

They came into a market when nobody wanted to test the waters, but this is 2009 and we feel that Neopets can never reach its former status as being a pet game where nobody was frozen for no reason.

So, why do you think Neopets received a makeover? Was it because old neopets looked too childish?

Also information on Webkinz and Neopets’ competition[through traffic]

Webkinz’s stats:
Unique visitors 5,183,917
Yearly change -20.20%

Neopets” stats
Unique visitors: 1,374,522
Yearly change -19.48%

So, do you guys feel that the new layout has helped Neopets flourish among its fans?

Marapets makes two million a year?

Marapets has been a pet site that was hyped-up a lot so to say, but now its slowly dieing a horrible death – its owner, Ian[Simon] said he was back on a post July 26, 2009.

UPDATE
I’m back!!! Sorry for the lack of news recently, but I’ve been busy dealing with private, personal health issues. News and updates will be coming out more regular now and thanks for your patience. Here are the missing mummy, prison, zombie and mutant pet colours for some of the most recent pets!

He wasn’t back, he was just telling the users that he was back so they have some faith in the game – and to milk the users for cash cows like they were before. We also know that Marapets’ advertising campaign back in 2006 helped them “gain” legendary accounts – such as surpassing 2 million users, which was due to their Neopets’ advertising campaign. What?

Well, they used Google adwords to attack Neopets’ fans into the heart and win them over with content – which means, they strived to become an entertainment portal – as seen from their dress up games and the like, but wait…. Didn’t you say they earn two million a year?

Ya, they more than likely do. They average 83,000 monthly uniques as seen by their compete stats and that means – everytime they generate 1,000 impressions – their ad networks are paying them well. For all we know Marapets is still generating well over 5 million pageviews a day.

Let’s do the math.
They currently have 983 players online at 11 pm CST, which means, a thousand pageviews in less than ten minutes. Call it what you want, but we see Marapets as a cash cow for Ian[Simon] and it won’t stop there.

So, we’ll just embark on Marapets and attract its fans via our unique content skills – we hate it when people milk our users, but we also hate when updates and fake promises are hyped around a site’s owner – we feel that Ian is sick of Marapets and won’t be returning anytime soon – staff said 4 months – which means, expect Ian’s return sometime close to the holidays, but will it be too late?

Can Ian save Marapets? Or is it too late? You discuss and let us know!

Subeta staff being paid?

Sources of information:
Subeta’s wikipedia
And anonymous’ Lies of subeta.

Most of that money was going personally to Keith and his staff. Keith buys things like $250 sunglasses, and even a new car
. He has no formal job and sits at home all day, on the days he isn’t out partying, with his Valium and watches his own hair grow.
Why were you never told this? Easy. Tax fraud. If it was kept under the radar, his ass wouldn’t be on the line. He constantly denied paying anyone and banned any user who kept asking too many questions.
Please note that the below is an edited Payroll given to Keith by ‘Kandy’, a person who helps run Subeta and has close relations to Ender/Simon. It is not 100% accurate but it is still proof of Payment.

Staff claim “it’s enough to quit my day job”, but look guys – how much were they making at their day job? Day jobs = 40 hours = which means, 40 hours without overtime.

So, let’s see their skills here. They put in the work – so more than likely each staff member is getting roughly $250 to $500, which is average for 40 hours – or they’re getting paid from the donations, which means, more than that so $500 to $1k.

I know my game and I have knowledge in the field of money – so how much do you guys think Subeta staff are earning of their product? Why do you think they’re not focusing more on the game – just putting out items updates and some features once in awhile? They’re getting paid for what they do – why should they care about the rest of the content?

Also, why isn’t all these donations being re-invested into the game? A business is what Subeta is.
How do I know? A business is why Subeta’s staff members are getting paid. They’re allowed to get paid huge amounts like anonymous stated in the lies of subeta:

RE:Kandy

Here’s what I propose. This has been a DAMN rough month for all of the
employees — they’ve been busting their asses — the Artists, the UA’s,
the coders, everyone. They’ve all been running at full capacity and if
they’re anything like us, haven’t gotten much sleep. So by way of
compensation, I propose a bonus for each staff member.

For the AA’s and UA’s, give them a $50.00 bonus. Seems like a lot –
but it’s better than giving them another raise [which they just got] in
this case. [A raise is over time] This should ONLY be for the
AA’s//UA’s who ACTUALLY participated.

For the Artists, I don’t believe they did as much — but correct me if
I’m wrong — so a $25.00 bonus should be good for them. Granted — this
should ONLY be for the Artists who ACTUALLY participated.

For the minimods — a month gold account and some sP [you determine the
amount, I'm not sure how this usually works]

Everyone else, 15% of their monthly wage added to the May 1st pay period.

So what follows is what needs to be paid on the first. If I’m still
going to be handling the staff payments from now on, I need to be given
access to that Staff Payments section of the Admin Panel, or given
everyone’s PayPal address so that I can do it that way. I’m not sure
how you usually do the payments with David, but let me know so that I
can have everyone paid first thing in the morning on the 1st [and
subsequently the 15th]

* You will also notice David is in here. His severance pay. He never
DID sign the contract, but he has been with you for so long, I thought
that you may want to give him his due, regardless. If not, please
disregard.

** I need to know the adjusted total for Softlayer since we got an
additional server as well as memory upgrade[s] on the old server.

*** Simon said that you told him to hire two more coders, this figure is
for them, only. They [obviously] won’t be getting bonuses — so for
ease of reference, they have been separated from the regular coders.

CASH PAYROLL FOR THE FIRST OF MAY:

Keith $1,750.00 + $262.50 = $2012.50
Kandi $750.00 + $225.00 = $975.00
Ry $650.00 + $97.50 =
Cara $175.00 + $50.00 = $747.50
David $1050.00*
Simon $600.00 + $180.00 = $780.00
Softlayer $1,400.00 **
KSD Coders $2,100.00 + $315.00 = $2,415.00
KSD Coders $1,400.00 ***

Teera_misu $60.00
xoxbrokenxox $60.00 + $25.00 = $85.00
Rajani $60.00 + $25.00 = $85.00
Seosilver $60.00
Invesitle $60.00
Oi $60.00 + $25.00 = $85.00
PPassion $60.00
Vampire $60.00
Tinale $34.00
Kumama $60.00
DebiLee $65.00 + $50.00 = $115.00
XPrimalEyesX $55.00
Succubus $50.00
Mbif $50.00 + $50.00 = $100.00
Lavabeast $42.00
Fallenangel $42.00 + $50.00 = $92.00
Cesium55 $42.00
Jessyta $50.00
BrokenKat $ + $25.00 [for some reason, I do not have the writers base monthly income...]
PymaJac $ [for some reason, I do not have the writers base monthly income...]
KaoriKamaria $ [for some reason, I do not have the writers base monthly income...]

VIRTUAL DONATION PAYROLL FOR THE FIRST OF MAY:

Exhibited $48.00
Kaydee $48.00
Aqua $60.00
Mythica $60.00
Graelin $60.00
Sooki $60.00
Rah $60.00 + $25.00 = $85.00
Hagane $60.00
Squidiot $45.00
Miriam2204 $50.00
Arbor $50.00
Dokuja $50.00
Sierramist $50.00
Nataku $50.00
Quagthistle $100.00 [does she still code? If not, do we still pay her for this month? I haven't seen her online to speak with her..]
saze $50.00 [Is {s}he still on staff? They're down as a coder... but I've not seen any code?]
Excalibur $50.00 [Is {s}he still on staff? They're down as a coder... but I've not seen any code?]

Also, I think — at least until this thing is over — that we need to
hire on another Admin for the servers to help out. Simon’s definitely
still able to handle everything, is actually enjoying himself [he loves
a challenge] but he’s literally not getting any sleep [which he also
seems to enjoy @_#]. So if you give me the go-ahead, I’ll look for
another admin to work with him starting the first. [@$700.00]. If not,
we should consider giving Simon a raise//huge bonus.

I’ll have the rest of it ready for you [the actual budget] within the
next couple of days. I just had time to do the QuickList so that
everything could get paid for and organized, preferably, by tomorrow so
that on Tuesday EARLY AM, everyone can be paid. Have a look through it
so we’re ready and on time.

I haven’t spoken with Cara yet, the UA’s and artists that have a bonus
are just the ones that I, personally, have seen working. There HAVE
been UA’s and Artists that have been working that haven’t been in IRC or
just not been in contact with me for any reason. The bonuses,
therefore, are not complete. Please keep that in mind.

Contact me as soon as you’re done with this [: Thanks!”

So is it us or is Subeta more than a business than a virtual pet site?