I don’t need to see a picture of every damn step. A bowl of flour. A bowl of flour with 2 eggs in it. Just give me the recipe. I do t care about the history of when you first made this with Grandma that one Christmas when the dog got stuck in wrapping paper and it was so hilarious. And make the damn thing printable without it being 5 pages!

I got an ultra speed for Christmas and I instantly fell in love with it. I love how it takes a 3s lipo stock and performance is great with a ludicrous rate of fire... I just wish it could take half darts. and that sentiment is what I hear echoed back and forth through the community. Whether it's Walcom or some random joe on the internet but I can't seem to find any mod kits, no mod guides or anything for ultra speed despite fixing this issue being widely sought after and easy to fix.
So does anyone know if there's any 3d printed/printable parts or anything so I can make this shoot half darts?
And if not I'm also myself trying to fill this odd gap, does anyone know anything about making 3d printable nerf parts? I can't seem to be able to get geometry right with the posts to fit it in. I'd love some help with it. I have pretty much spent the last 3-4 months trying to get this stuff to work.

I've had my P1S since Christmas and use it almost everyday and this is the first time I've really run into anything I'd call an issue.
I'm using overture marble PLA and I decided to do a temp calibration before using it. I used this https://www.printables.com/model/462335-bambulab-p1p-temperature-tower to calibrate, printed as is. Most of the temps looked the same, but I know the temp was changing because I monitored it while it printed. I thought 235 looked best so I picked that but I also increased the minimum temp to 215 from 190.
Could I be getting clogs because my temp is too high or is something else going on?

I am looking to using my Anycubic M5S to print an ITX case from either a downloaded one designed to use a filament printer or, if not possible to convert to my surface area and style of printer, create my own. I would like some advice or instructions on being able to convert a filament designed for use on a resin and what kind of resin would be suitable for this kind of project. I know heat is an issue (former PC tech) but things have changed so much in the PC world that while I know heat has increased since I was in the field, I do not know how much it has increased. Plus I built on full ATX cases with plenty of airflow when ATX and larger where all that was available. MATX, ITX, and the like are a new creature to me.
My goal is to build a Mini-NAS and I’ve found a few pre-mades that will do great (looking at the MASS case on Printables), but they were made for filament printers. I do have one, but it is a TOYBOX and that build area is way too small for anything other than small parts. I’ve always wanted a resin printer after seeing the quality and last Christmas bought me one as my own gift. But I have never used it, so have no experience with it, but do know the basics (how it works, cleaning, curing, etc.) What I don’t know is converting (other than supports are needed and it’s a top down process instead of bottom up, so I would think gravity can be an issue).
So any advice would be appreciated or even links to builds that work on this type of printer “out of the box” with no conversion needed (supports and everything included in the design).

I can't tell you how excited I am to make one of those hobbydrama posts with an incomprehensible title that makes perfect sense by the end.
In my previous post, I gave a broad overview of some of the stranger parts of the history of Neopets, going back pretty much to the site's founding. Now I'm back again, to document some newer drama that's unfolded over the past year-and-a-bit. But first, some background.
What is Neopets? I went over this quite extensively in my previous post, so please refer to that if you want a detailed rundown. In brief, Neopets is a browser game, founded in late 1999, in which you create virtual pets and explore the fictional world of Neopia through them. The site has changed ownership several times over its history, which I'll discuss later.
Neopets is akin to a sandbox game. There are many different activities which can be explored separately from each other. Most players dabble in a bunch of different things, but many also have one or two aspects of the game that they're especially involved in. New content gets released daily, and for a site with 24 years of history that's a lot of content.
A few notes that will become relevant:
TNT: Short for The Neopets Team, the group who work on the game. Includes programmers, artists, moderators, and so on - even a company lawyer at one point. Someone in the comments of my previous post described the relationship between TNT and the players as parasocial. While this was more true 10-20 years ago, it remains a good descriptor - players have an odd fascination with the various staff members and their roles. At its best, this creates a sort of synergy, with memes and in-jokes forming a bond between players and staff.
Neopoints: Abbreviated NP, the in-game currency. Mainly used for buying and selling items. To provide a sense of scale, a casual player might get 20,000-50,000 NP per day from dailies. In many ways, it's significantly easier to earn NP now than in earlier years of the site.
Items: Many parts of Neopets revolve around obtaining different items, which you can keep in your inventory (which has limited capacity) or store in your safety deposit box (which is effectively infinite and protects you from random events). Items can be bought and sold using NP. Some items can be bought from NPC shops, others are available from other sources. Users can also buy or sell items to each other.
Some item types include books, which you can read to your pet (but each can only be read once); food, wearable items to customize your pet's appearance, paint brushes to change your pet's color and aesthetic, weapons for battling, and stamps and other collectable items. These last two categories will be major points of this post. Stamps can be put into a stamp album, and other users can view your collection. The stamp album is divided into different pages, each following a theme, and each stamp occupies a specific spot on a specific page. Currently there are 43 pages, with 25 stamps each (although not all pages are complete - which is to say, there are spots for which no stamp currently exists).
Items have numerical rarity levels, which will also be a focal point several times in this writeup. I'll put a brief explanation here; skip this quoted block if you don't care about the technical details.

Items with rarity 1-99 are buyable from the main, NPC-run shops. Items appear (restock) in these main shops at semi-random intervals several times an hour. The higher an item's rarity, the less often it appears. Rarity 99 (r99) items barely ever show up, and as such can be very expensive on the secondary market Items with rarity 101-179 are "Special", a broad category that refers to any items not available from the main shops. These items may be obtained from dailies, events or plots, random events, and a variety of other sources. The vast majority of Special items are r101 - since there's no distinction between items in this rarity range, the dev team can afford to be lazy here. There are a few other rarity categories, but they won't become important here.

Most aspects of the game have a wide difficulty curve. In other words, activities are very easy to get into, but become very, very, very hard to excel in beyond a certain point.
Want to read books to your pet? There are about 300 books priced at 1000 NP or less. You'll probably get 2 or 3 books for free just doing your dailies. But if you want to get your pet on the monthly high-score table for the number of (unique) books read? Be prepared to spend several years and hundreds of millions of NP just to get to the very bottom of the top 100.
Want to collect avatars, which are basically secret achievements that double as icons you can use on the on-site messageboards, the Neoboards? You can rack up like 60 in an afternoon with a bit of clicking. Want to, again, get on the monthly high-score table - which comes with its own avatar? Better get to playing those old Flash games really well, because avatar scores are absurdly hard.
Want to collect stamps? Again, you'll probably pick up a few doing your dailies. Want to get all 25 stamps on a single page and earn the associated avatar for that page? That sound you're faintly hearing is the entire playerbase laughing at you while also sobbing.
Now, this all sounds like a good way to keep your players motivated - after all, there are always more goals to strive for! But consider how both the demographics and competitors have evolved over time.
Back in the 2000s and early 2010s, we were all elementary and middle school kids making our first accounts. We had all the time in the world to pour into getting really good at a game. And Neopets' competitors - other browser games - all had more or less the same idea; just think of the kind of dedication people (still) put into Runescape. But the Neopets playerbase now is pretty much the same as it was back then (albeit dwindled a lot). Most people have been playing a looong time, and we're adults with jobs and kids. We no longer have the time, or indeed the energy, to work as hard as we used to on something that's supposed to be fun. The gaming market has evolved, too - mobile games reign supreme on the casual gaming scene, and that simple gameplay and achievable goals are what Neopets now has to compete with if it wants to keep its players - or Fyora willing, get new players.
Players leave, but very few new ones join, so the number of active players keeps declining. Among other problems, this means that anything valuable on a dead account - be it desirable pets or rare items - gets removed from the potential pool of circulation. So that old retired item you have your eye on will just keep getting rarer as the people who might sell it to you stop playing. Add to that the problem of wealthy players artificially driving up prices by buying and hoarding loads of valuable items, and the lack of money sinks that would remove NP from the player economy, and the site has a serious inflation issue.
How bad? Just between 2021 and 2023, the price of many desirable items increased 2-3 times, or more. People who spent years saving for an expensive stamp or powerful weapon found the object of their desire now selling for twice what it was just a few months ago. Once again: achievable goals are fun, impossible goals aren't.
TNT clearly saw this problem. And the way they're choosing to deal with it is at once extremely obvious and absolutely bonkers.
Give the People What They Want
One of the oldest recurring annual events on Neopets is the Advent Calendar, which runs for the entire month of December. Every day, users are treated to a short seasonal animation taking place somewhere in Neopia, along with a small sum of NP and 2-3 items. The prizes are different each day, and as a rule, those prizes are new items made specifically for the Advent Calendar, as opposed to preexisting items. Most prizes are junk that go straight into your safety deposit box, but it's still a popular site event - because who'd argue with free stuff and cute daily animations?
(The next few paragraphs have a number of links; first to Neopets itself, and then to Jellyneo, a major fansite. While most pages on Neopets require an account to view, this doesn't seem to be a problem for the ones I'm linking here.)
In December 2022, the Advent Calendar started as normal, but people quickly realized it was a bit... different. The animations were much simpler than past years. Rather than 10- to 30-second videos from recent previous years, we were instead treated to the likes of animated comic pages and short loops. This wasn't too surprising since 2021 had already started the trend of simpler animations. But some days didn't have animations at all, opting instead for mobile wallpapers or even printable coloring pages. This was well-received overall - the longer animations were starting to look pretty janky, so shorter was better there. It was also well-known that TNT was understaffed and operating on a shoestring budget, and a set of 31 complex animations for an event that doesn't earn the site any money would be a pretty big waste of resources. (Most other events have tie-in activities with real money to get wearable items, but the Advent Calendar has always been completely free.) Plus the wallpapers and coloring pages were cute, and things you could actually use.
But what really caught people's attention were the items. Mixed in with the Advent Calendar-exclusive items were some preexisting ones. Like with the animations, this could have been attributed to TNT phoning it in on the event. Except people quickly realized there was a pattern to the items chosen: most of them were from long-ago site events or other defunct sources. The first day had Baby Holiday Scarf, a wearable item from the 2013 Advent Calendar. Day 2 had Snow Faerie Doll, a toy item that had been discontinued and was selling for around 5 million NP, and then quickly dropped to about 25,000 after being handed out as a prize. There were a few more surprises over the next few days, such as the book Guide to Snow Rolling, which went from 3.5 million NP to around 10,000 within a day.
People who already owned the rereleased items were a bit salty because of the perceived loss of value, but most were quite pleased. Many people collect faerie dolls because they're pretty, and cheap books and wearables have widespread appeal as well. Whereas in past years the Advent Calendar was a nice and pleasant but ultimately inconsequential tradition, now people were actually excited to see what the prizes might be each day.
And ohhh, they were not disappointed.
Consider the scene: It's December 11. You crawl out of bed. Sitting down at your computer with a morning beverage, you navigate to your favorite virtual pet site to see what wintery goodies await you. Pausing just a moment to appreciate the mouse-shrew-thing hiding from the snow, you click the button to collect your prizes.
It takes a moment for you to register what you see. That can't possibly be right, can it?
Convinced there was a mistake, you check your inventory. But sure enough, there it is.
The Sticky Snowflake Stamp
Worth 160 Million Neopoints
Sticky Snowflake Stamp is an r99 item, so while technically obtainable from the main shops, it hardly ever restocks. There are very few of this stamp in circulation, and stamps in general are highly sought after. And TNT just... gave one. To every single user. For free.
The playerbase erupted. Unfortunately the fallout on the Neoboards is long since lost to time, but neopets watched gleefully
(Parentheses are my own additions.)

I am truly living for this chaotic energy from TNT. Let's see who else they fuck with before the year is over.
imagine being the person who bought it for 162 million not 2 weeks ago holy moly
165M (million) to 500k (thousand) in a week. RIP restockers.
Na restockers would still be happy to grab a 500k stamp. Resellers that bought them for 100mil and instantly put them back on the TP (Trading Post) for 150+ are the ones that will be hit the most, and I’m all for it!

A brief note on terminology: Restocking refers to waiting at one of the NPC-run shops, refreshing the page until new items appear (or restock), and then frantically trying to buy the most valuable items before anyone else. Reselling refers to buying items from other players, often in bulk, and then turning around and selling those same items at a large markup. Restocking is regarded favorably (or at least neutrally) by the playerbase, and is generally considered the single best way to earn money in the game, provided you have the time and patience for it. Reselling, meanwhile, is considered by most players to be vile and despicable and a scourge on everything that is good. I'm only slightly exaggerating - resellers are considered to be one of the primary driving forces behind the rampant inflation Neopets has been struggling with.
Which brings us to an important point: the price of a Sticky Snowflake Stamp went from an already-hefty 90 million NP in December 2020, to almost double that just two years later. It was very much a victim of the inflation problem. So if the previous item re-releases weren't enough, this really made the message clear:
TNT was combating inflation by giving away price-inflated items
Suddenly nothing was off the table. If TNT were willing to give out an outrageously expensive stamp for free, there was no telling what else they might release. People speculated that the other two super-expensive stamps in the Snowy Valley album page (where the Sticky Snowflake Stamp goes) would also be released by the Advent Calendar. Ultimately, nothing else that season quite matched the panic and excitement of Sticky Snowflake Stamp, but there were still a few more exciting releases. The Snow Candychan and Christmas Meowclops, festive versions of expensive and popular petpets (pets for your pet) made a number of people happy; as did a brand new petpetpet (a pet for your pet for your... pet, because this game gets just a bit silly), a couple of incredibly good new weapons, and a paint brush to give your pet a holiday flair. In any Advent Calendar until this point, any one of the items in the previous sentence would have been the absolute grand highlight of the event, and possibly one of the highlights of the entire year. But here, they were little more than footnotes, which should drive home just how monumental this was. In 24 years of the game's existence, nothing like this had ever been done.
People were calling this the best Advent Calendar ever, both because of the amazing swag and the delicious tears of resellers, but this turned out to be just the beginning.
The Magic Stick
2023 started on a high but tumultuous note. Players were viewing TNT rather like Florida Man: you were expecting them to do something unpredictable and a bit crazy, but you didn't know what, or if it would be bad or good.
In March, a mini-event called Lost Fragments ran. Intended as a tie-in/promotion for a new Neopets mobile game, it was very simple: navigate between a couple of pages and click on some conspicuously-placed crystals, giving points that you can redeem for prizes. Do that every day for a week, and you rack up the maximum possible points. For an event that simple, the prizes were... good. Really good. There was the popular Faerie Paint Brush to give your pet a pink-and-purple-butterfly aesthetic, and a few strong weapons. The Advent Calendar shook up the stamp collecting scene, and this made it look like TNT was aiming to disrupt other parts of the stagnant economy as well.
In June, news was released that Jumpstart - Neopets' parent company since 2014 - would be shutting down. And Netdragon - Jumpstart's parent company since 2017 - would be dropping the site. Speculation abounded as to what would happen next. Was this the actual-actual end for our weird beloved relic of the mid-2000s?
Then a hero descended, like an angel - or maybe an angel investor. Word got out that Neopets was bought in its entirety by Dominic Law, a former NetDragon employee who oversaw the (gratefully defunct) Neopets Metaverse project, and was also an old fan of the site. The dude being tied to the Metaverse debacle wasn't the best news, but at least this meant the site wouldn't be doomed just yet. Moreover, Neopets would be privately owned for the first time since 2005, so TNT finally had complete creative control!
And they were damn well going to use it.
In October, we got the Faerie Festival, an inconsistently recurring event centered on the (mostly) benevolent, semi-godlike semi-rulers of Neopia, the Faeries. This event was merged with another recurring event known as Charity Corner. Charity Corner had players clearing all the junk items out of their safety deposit boxes and donating them. Earlier versions of the event directly rewarded randomly selected items in exchange for donating, while more recent iterations gave points that could be redeemed in some way or other. This time was a mix of the two. You could donate a certain maximum number of items per day, and each donated item earned you points based on the item's rarity value. You also got a randomly selected item each day for making the maximum donations.
To make things more interesting, there two different faerie characters hosting the event this year, and each had their own prize shop. The two faeries were Illusen and Jhudora, and now I need to go into some lore. You can skip the following quoted block but you'll miss some of the context.

Illusen is an Earth Faerie, a nature spirit in tune with the trees and animals and all that. Jhudora is a Dark Faerie, meaning she occupies a nebulous space somewhere on the scale between "evil" and "misunderstood". Both characters offer daily quests with similar mechanics.
Once a day, you can accept a quest from one of the two faeries. You're asked for an item, and have a time limit of 1000 seconds (16 minutes, 40 seconds) to find it. The "level" of the quest increases each time you successfully complete a quest, but resets to 1 if you fail. There are 50 levels total. Every few levels you're awarded with a prize (prizes are always the same and in the same order), but the rarity of the requested items increases, so they become more and more expensive and difficult to find. By the time you reach level 30 (for Jhudora) or level 36 (for Illusen), in every single quest you're asked for an r99 item. This is where the quests get truly difficult; because the time limit is so short, you're unlikely to find someone who will sell you an expensive item in time, and then you're all the way back to the start; so basically the only way to have any hope of winning is to have a stockpile of super-rare items already on hand.
However, if you manage to persist and get all the way to level 50, you're awarded with an extremely powerful weapon: Illusen's Staff for Illusen's quests, and Wand of the Dark Faerie for Jhudora's. Illusen's quests are marginally easier, due to the highest-rarity items being asked for a bit later, and so Illusen's Staff is the less powerful of the two. However, both are considered to be endgame-level weapons due to their effects.
Canonically, Illusen and Jhudora are rivals, for reasons that have never been explained. If you accept a quest for one, the other will refuse to give you a quest for the next 24 hours.

Let's review: A pair of female characters with an unspecified rivalry. One a hippie-dippie nature lover, the other a goth bad girl. Now they're co-running an event, or rather, each is hosting their own version of the event because they just totally can't get along you guys. The duo's interactions during the event hinted that they used to be close but something went sour between them. And Neopets as a whole in the past few years has gone out of its way to be inclusive, including a boatload of Pride-related wearable items. Do you see where all this is going?
From the fanbase came a collective cry of "They're lesbians, Harold." Granted people had already been crying this for years, and also there aren't many other options for an all-female species, people were nevertheless running with it.
This was immediately overshadowed when the prize shops were released. Each faerie had a separate prize shop, with items that could be redeemed for donation points. Some items were the same between shops, others were unique to one or the other. But the item that caught everyone's eye...
Illusen's prize shop had Illusen's Staff as its most expensive prize. The going price at the time was difficult to pin down, but somewhere around 200-250 Million NP. Not only that, but people quickly calculated that a player who earned the maximum possible points could buy two Staffs, and still have points left over.
Now for a brief note on battling mechanics on Neopets. Again, skip this block if you don't want the technicals.

Battling is turn-based, either against another player or an NPC. You can equip 8 weapons, and each turn you choose 2 of those weapons to use, along with a range of abilities. Weapons deal damage based on icons, of which there are 7 types: air, fire, earth, water, light, dark, physical. Damage is dealt based on your pet's Strength stat - from 0.5 Hit Points/icon for a beginner, up to a maximum of 16 HP/icon. There's no distinction between icon types (an icon of air and an icon of water do the same damage) but there are also defensive weapons that defend against different icon types. 2 player battling gets very strategic, as you need to predict what weapons your opponent will use so you can defend against their attacks while also breaking through their defenses. Some weapons have other special effects such as healing, freezing your opponent for a turn, or reflecting damage; but these effects are less common, and weapons with them can be very valuable.

This time, it was the hardcore battlers who pitched a fit. For years, a certain subset of fans had grumbled about damage inflation, as more powerful weapons steadily became cheaper and more accessible. But this was unlike anything else - Illusen's Staff had spent a good 20 years squarely in the list of the most powerful and desirable weapons in the game. The whole situation had the same energy as "If we raise the minimum wage then burger flippers will earn as much as me!"
But the absurdity didn't end there. Before the event began, TNT released a guide showing the number of donation points could be earned by each rarity of item. As was typical in the past, r90-99 items were worth the most points, and accordingly people began stockpiling these items - since daily donations were limited, people wanted to maximize their points.
But then, with just a few days to go before the start, the rarity guide changed. Now, to the confusion of absolutely everyone, the highest point category was items with rarity 102 and above. As stated earlier, items with rarity 101 or higher are "special" (available from sources other than main shops), but the vast majority of such items are r101. There are relatively few items r102 or above.
Except for omelettes. The Giant Omelette is a daily that gives you a piece of an omelette which can be eaten 3 times. Try to take more than one slice a day, and you get yelled at. This hallowed tradition is one of the more well-known parts of the game, and oddly suitable for political humor on TwitXter. Several different types of omelettes were r102 or above, meaning the stacks of omelettes going bad in your safety deposit box were suddenly your most valuable items.
The absurdity of the whole situation was brilliantly summarized by a quote I unfortunately can't find the original source for:

The price of Illusen's Staff is now 120 omelettes

There wasn't ultimately much fallout here. The event proceeded as planned, and sure enough Illusen's Staffs flooded the market and are now selling for a still-respectable 10 Million NP each. This didn't change much in the battling scene either, because people soon realized that the Staff... isn't actually a very good weapon for most players. Its special effects (icon reflection and a conditional, percentage-based multiheal) make it extremely powerful in competitive battling, but aren't very useful for your standard casual player who just battles against NPCs to farm their daily 15 item drops. And the damage it deals isn't very good by current standards. None of that really mattered though, because the real point can be summarized as "Omg I can't believe I actually have an IStaff, 12-year-old me would freak out!"
As for IlluDora, fans continued to be baited with some "aww they really do care about each other" scenes, and hints at a future plot. We'll have to wait and see where that goes.
The Pea
Here we go. The spark that began this post and my previous one. I hope you're ready.
The site becoming privately-owned was a very big shift, and people recognized it as such, being heralded as "A New Era for Neopets". Among other initiatives was the announcement of a community ambassador program. To quote the above linked article,

This brand ambassador program in particular will help to bridge the gap by enabling key members of the Neopets community to serve as liaisons to TNT, helping make Neopets better for everyone by advocating for the wants and needs of players

Basically, certain players would be appointed to act as voices of the community to TNT and vice versa. People were quick to point out that the full list of duties was very extensvie for what was basically an unpaid internship. Still, better lines of communication between players and staff could be a good thing. Ambassadors were chosen and announced in October (scroll to around the middle of the page). The list of ambassadors included a number of well-known players - notably including several staff of Jellyneo, arguably the foremost Neopets fansite.
Nothing much happened with the ambassador program at first, and things stayed mostly quiet until the Advent Calendar rolled around once again.
Hype was MASSIVE for the Advent Calendar this time around. We had just had a year of TNT gleefully disrupting the Neoeconomy, pissing some people off but making dreams come true for many more. What would they do next?
In true Florida Man fashion, it was something no one expected.
One part of the Advent Calendar I didn't cover earlier was the daily bonus prize. Every day, there's something small to click on - a hidden image in the daily animation, or more recently a character popping up on the side of the screen and briefly waving at you. Click on the image before it goes away, and you get a prize randomly chosen from a pool of preexisting items.
The first day of prizes were rather unexciting - a wearable background, a cookie, and a snowglobe toy. However, reports quickly began popping up about an unexpected item in the item pool of daily bonus prizes: the Seasonal Attack Pea
The Seasonal Attack Pea (SAP) is of three weapons sometimes collectively called the "Pea Family", also including the Super Attack Pea (SuAP) and the regular, unadorned Attack Pea. SAP is the middle child of the family, more powerful than the Attack Pea but not quite as strong as the SuAP.
Or put another way, it's the second-strongest offensive weapon in the game.
Like with Illusen's Staff, TNT was mass releasing the slightly less powerful version of an endgame weapon. But unlike the IStaff which has limited use outside of competitive 2-player battles, SAP has universal appeal as a purely offensive weapon.
Moreover, the Attack Pea family are all released through the Smuggler's Cove. Unlike regular shops, Smuggler's Cove items are released in limited numbers - for most such items, only 100 exist on the entire site, making them extremely exclusive. (There are likely more of the various Attack Peas than this, due to a glitch some years ago that allowed users to duplicate items. But at the same time, many of these are stuck on frozen or inactive accounts.)
The elite battling community worked itself up into a frenzy while most of the other players rejoiced, but that's to be expected by now. What wasn't expected was the insider trading.
The following is a narrative pieced together as best I can understand it. Sometime late on December 1 or early December 2, reports of people getting SAPs abruptly stopped. After a few hours, Jellyneo staff released an announcement that the SAP had been removed from the prize pool, after several individuals in the ambassador program entreated TNT to remove it. However, after some time on December 2 or 3, people again started reporting SAPs, supported with screenshots - it appeared that the Pea was still in the prize pool, but with a significantly reduced droprate. Some time after this, Jellyneo issued a retraction and a lukewarm apology for jumping the gun.
All clear so far? Aside from the ambassadors taking it upon themselves to ruin everyone else's fun, nothing here is too hinky just yet.
However. On December 1, when SAPs were actively being given out, certain individuals were seen buying them up in auctions left and right, for around 80 Million NP each. After Jellyneo issued its announcement that the Pea was removed from the prize pool, the price shot up, and these individuals began selling the SAPs they bought for 2-3x what they paid. When Jellyneo issued its retraction, the price settled down again.
The users in question were both ambassadors AND Jellyneo staff.
Immediately, people began criticizing both Jellyneo and the ambassador program. Jellyneo is a valuable resource for information on the game, and people have relied on it for years. Meanwhile, the ambassador program was meant to give the player community a way to have its collective voice heard by TNT. This was a massive violation of trust on BOTH fronts: a select few players effectively used their privileged positions to artificially manufacture an economic bubble, earning themselves massive amounts of money at the direct expense of other players. (On top of that, billionaires using connections with those in power to make themselves richer is exactly the sort of real-world bullshit we play Neopets to get away from.)
But at least people got to spend a few days talking about "flipping peas" and "white-collar neocrimes", because the absurdity of our beloved game is not lost on us.
To my knowledge, the users involved are still both ambassadors and Jellyneo staff, having avoided any repercussions just like real billionaires. But players' trust in both institutions has been deeply damaged.
As for the rest of the Advent Calendar, this one was arguably even better than 2022. Candychan Stamp was released on Christmas Eve, which along with the previous year's Sticky Snowflake Stamp finally made the Snowy Valley stamp album page a widely obtainable goal. There were some other cool things as well, and ultimately the SAP settled to around 100 Million NP, down from the 1 Billion NP price tag it had previously.
The site is still loaded with issues - technical, administrative, cultural, economic. But for the first time in many years, it seems like TNT is not just trying to improve things, but succeeding. There's a long way to go, but the Neopets Renaissance might yet blossom.
Up next: NCUCs, or how TNT gave people what they've been asking for for 17 years and did it in about the best way possible, but some people still managed to get upset about it. Stay tuned!