The Premise

Anyone with half a brain who plays the game Neopets realizes that it is eminently automatable. Many tasks you perform on a daily basis—whether it be pricing your shop, managing your stock portfolio, training your pet, or restocking at the main shops—are tedious, repetitive, and really not fit for a human to do. So, why not have your computer do them?

Unfortunately, Neopets frowns on this type of activity, for various reasons that I don't really care about. Fortunately, if well-programmed, programs are fairly hard to detect. There are also other safeguards you can use, such as only using programs on side accounts and then trying to transfer the gains to your main account.

The Problem

As it turns out though, most people aren't programmers, and so don't have the necessary skills to automate their Neopets activities. You might think this is no problem, since there should be a few generous programmers out there looking to share their programs—right? Think again. If you spend any time investigating, you will find that site that offer Neopets programs fall into exactly two categories:

• They're really attempting to get you to download viruses.
• They insist that you take part in their private "community" (usually a web forum), imposing requirements such as minimum posts, minimum "reputation points," and even filling out an application before getting access to their programs.

What's with that?

Another Problem

Another major problem with the Neopets programs offered by such "communities" is that they invariably, well, suck. Not that they don't do what they're supposed to—most of the time they do. But unfortunately they are usually very shoddily programmed, with bad user interfaces, a lack of options, and no ability to cope with unexpected situations. So they work, but they're not what you'd hope for.

Why is this? I can only speculate, really. At the time I was involved in a few of these "communities," most of the programs were written by people in their early teens using Visual Basic 6.0. Now, early teens aren't always the most professional software developers (not that they aren't gifted!), and Visual Basic is a pretty bad language—generally consigned to beginners only. So that's my opinion why.

The Solution

Seeing this sad state of affairs, I have taken it upon myself to create a series of Neopets automating programs. I intend them to be high-quality, polished, and most importantly free for anyone to download. There are no "communities," "memberships," "reputation," or anything else to get in the way: these are actually programs made by me for anyone to use. They do an extremely good job of attempting to disguise themselves as humans, and are always polished and helpful.

Why would I do this? Well, most importantly because I want them for myself. But also, there's a bit of an anti-authority undertone to it, to be honest. The Neopets Team is not known for their understanding or caring for their site members; in fact, quite the opposite. They freeze accounts right and left; they tightly control discussion on their site; and they attempt to steer Neopets toward more and more marketing dollars (usually gathered from newbies, thus ensuring that "serious players" are ignored). If I can disrupt their economy, or at the least enable others to flaunt their authority, then I'll gain a small amount of satisfaction.

The Programs!

Although there are further details below, I figure at this point you probably are most interested in the programs themselves, so here they are!

Released

• (New!) Neopets Sloth Plot Decoder 1.1.0.0: in case you, like me, think that programs are the perfect approach to repetetive plot solving operations! Note: it goes without saying, but using this is undetectable. You might want to mess up a few times for each one to simulate trial and error, but the excuse is really that you worked out all the math ahead of time (which is what the program does, just really fast and without you having to do any boring modular arithmetic calculations). Also: source available.
• Neopets Autopricer 1.4.4.0 (direct download): looks at the items in your shop and uses the shop wizard to price them. Has several pricing algorithms and many options geared toward making it useful beyond the simple implementation you might expect.
  
• Greedo's Neopets Library 1.4.4.0: this is not a program, but a programming library that provides the ability to access Neopets and do all sorts of neat things. It is available, under the terms of the enclosed End-User License Agreement, for you to use freely. It is a .NET assembly, and the documentation is enclosed.

What I'll Be Working on Next

• Neopets Shop Wizard Autobuyer: will buy items from the shop wizard at thresholds you set; has modes for both bulk-buying and shop-wizard sniping.
• Neopets Autotrainer: will automate training your pet, using the various training schools, kitchen quests, the lab ray, Terror Trove Scratchcards, cliffhanger, von Roo dice, and more!
• Neopets Inventory Manager: will help re-stock your shop based on your shop history, and move items between your safety deposit box and your shop.
• Neopets Main Shop Autobuyer: will restock items in the main shops, making you huge profits and eliminating the most boring aspect of making money on Neopets. Will also automate the process of finding which items are profitable, and optionally export lists of images for Adblock Plus to stop from displaying when you want to manually restock.

Notes

• I cannot give any expected release dates on these programs. I have a rather busy life, as I am a student and social person, to whom Neopets is not a very high priority. You'll just have to take what I offer or leave it: I'm under no obligation to you to provide anything.
• All of my programs are written in C#, and so require the .NET Framework Runtime (version 3.5). This also means that they will only run on Windows XP/Vista/2003 or later.
• All of these programs will make use of the perpetually-evolving Greedo's Neopets Library, a dynamic link-library that contains classes for interfacing with the Neopets website. This library is available above, along with documentation.
• All of my programs use reporting mechanisms to track their freeze rate. This tracking is entirely voluntary and cannot identify you by username or in any other way; it's simply a method of helping out my users. More details will become clear after you download a program; the first thing they do is ask permission to gather freeze rate data, and they give a longer explanation there.
• I appreciate feedback on any of my programs, but as I am busy I might not respond to your feedback individually. Constructive criticism or realistic feature suggestions are especially appreciated. Program suggestions are also taken, but unlikely to be acted upon: the programs I'm really interested in making are the ones listed above under "What I'll Be Working on Next."
• If you'd like, you may donate through PayPal or donate Neopoints to me in appreciation. This is of course not expected, but is appreciated.

Mailing List for Program Updates

If you wish to subscribe to the following Google Groups mailing list, you will receive notifications every time I update one of my programs with a new feature or a bug fix, as well as notifications when I create new programs or beta versions of them: