2012
It all started with the Shop Wizard, who seemed to be feeling a little under the weather.
Searches made came back with some strange results. Wrong search terms, odd prices, the works. Note: If you actually entered a shop, the item you were looking for was there. It just made the user believe they weren't getting through this way.
So, the shop wizard is no help to you. Where next? Aha, the Trading Post! Except, that wasn't working either. The Trading Post was being run by Hoka, a Tyrannian Kacheek, and he seemed to have a penchant for Tyrannian items.
The problem was, anything less than dung and 1000 NP confused him. If you bid dung and 1000 NP, your pets, all your on hand NP's and all your SDB items were put up for trade. (They weren't 'actually' put up for trade but it sure convinced a lot of people!) After noticing what had happened, your next move would be to run and cancel that offer, correct? Except, when you were asked if you wanted to cancel, it was done like this:
How good is your Tyrannian?
Well, the shop is out, and the trading post is no help, so what's left? Auctions! Problem solved.
Well, no.
To make matters worse, when you tried to bid on an item, Nigel the stockbroker would outbid you, so no one was actually able to purchase anything on the auctions.
The prank included the lab ray, which suddenly started handing out amazing transformations, to things like faerie or maraquan, except it was choosing the pets to zap all on its own, frustrating and annoying a lot of users. What the user didn't know is that only he/she could see the change. To all other users, the pet hadn't changed at all.
On the Neopets facebook page, a poll was taken on a new design for the first ever male faerie. For obvious reasons, #5 was the chosen faerie.
However, the finished product wasn't quite what users were expecting.
But, the most startling effect of the day was this announcement.
NOTICE - Due to increasing numbers of Neopets causing core dumps on our database servers, we had to make some changes to how the site performs. Unfortunately, this means we will have to purge some Neopets from the system. Starting on Monday, each account will only be allowed three Neopets rather than four. In the next few hours, we will be sending Neopets into the Pound and purging the Pound itself by the end of today (Sunday).
If you would like to help us out, please visit the Pound and send a Neopet of your choice to it! If one is not chosen by the time we start running the Automated Pound Transfer script, a random Neopet will be chosen for you and taken to the Pound to be purged. Please stay tuned for further updates! We apologize for the inconvenience.
Panicked users scrambled to decide which of their pets they would have to discard. But, when they finally made that decision and headed to the pound, this is what they found.
For those without xray vision, the red writing says the following:
"Due to the recent overload of abandoned Neopets, the Pound has been closed until capacity issues can be addressed. A modest proposal is currently being considered. We hope to have the Pound up and running again by the end of the countdown. Stay tuned!"
So, you couldn't abandon your pet by the time they would choose which pet to abandon.