Neocolours

From here: http://www.neopets.com/help.phtml?folderID=1907

Which features will be added to the new Premium service?

The features you told us were the hands-down favourites - Super Shop Wizard, no ads, random events, Premium message boards, collectable cards, Space Faerie Charm - all will be staying. Then, based on your feedback, we'll also be adding the following new features:

5th Neopet (yup, Premium members can have five Neopets)
Premium Featured Game (just like the regular featured game... now you can do both!)
Premium Notification Bar (More details to come!)
More Monthly Neopoints
On-Site Random Events
Additional Message Boards
SSW Upgrades (more searching allowed before he... um... yells at you)

That 5th pet slot would totally make me sub to Premium again. The rest of the perks, save for SSW, are fairly meh. They're also removing a few features (portal and webmail being the biggest, I think).

This is supposed to launch "in the next few months" - exciting

Whoa whoa WHOA. Very nice! I think I may end up doing this too. We'll see. I wish they'd do like they do for Petpet Park. Bonus items/wearables., thatd be awesome.

Those don't excite me as much as webmail and Portal going away makes me sad. I use my Portal as my browser's Home page, and i use the links (both top and sidebar editable) for Neo dailies. I'm also wondering if they'll eventually re-rate current members' payments.

I'm not happy about this, but hopefully the way they implement the changes will negate what i'll be losing.

Because we are no longer partnering with a third party, and based on your input, these are the features that will be discontinued after the switch:

Webmail
Portal
Real-world Feeds
Internet Dial-Up Service
Aliases and Subaccounts

User input? Who DIDN'T want these features to at least be available?

My question is, what happens to the pet in the 5th pet slot when Premium lapses on your account? Does it poof, or do you have to ID a side account with an empty slot to which the pet would automatically be transferred? I'll be interested in seeing how they work out those logistics.

Oh, hm...good point. :-/ Maybe it'll be like Subeta and remain there.

Oh my goodness. I /just/ cancelled my premium :/

Hah, maybe you'll end up paying less than you were if you decide to sign back up when these changes roll out.

I think I'll definitely be signing back up if/when these changes are implemented. Excited for it all to happen!

How is the 5th pet slot going to work for people using a free trial?

Man. I would be filling to pay a pretty sizable one-time fee for a 5th pet slot, but signing up for Premium? Not so much.

The more i see of this kind of thing, the more i realize what i like is nothing to the owners and developers compared to the prospect of luring new people in (or luring the dissatisfied back in). Subeta did the same thing to me with revamped pets, and Neopets' customization did that to a whole lot of people. I just hope that the things i do like (aside from the SSW and no ads) are still intact somehow. I don't know how they'll implement a seamless dailies list without the Portal.

5th pet slot... tempting. SSW would be useful too. I wonder about prices though. Somewhere around five or six quid per month would be my limit. I think I'm with Wings - one-off fees to add certain features would be ideal but a rolling monthly fee might not be, since my interest seems to come and go these days.

From here it looks like all the stuff that's going (Portal, etc.) was handled by the partner company they've dumped, so I guess they would have to re-code and host everything in house if they wanted to continue it. And I'd guess there's probably some contractual crapola to prevent them doing that :/

But that 5th pet slot....

Isn't that only on your one account that has the Premium? What about the other 4 side accounts?
So in total, you'd only have one extra pet; 21 pets.

Unless the new Premium lets you have 1 extra pet per account, then it's not worth the $70 a year, even with all that other "new" stuff, which doesn't sound all that great anyways. =/

Because we are no longer partnering with a third party, and based on your input, these are the features that will be discontinued after the switch:

Webmail
Portal
Real-world Feeds
Internet Dial-Up Service
Aliases and Subaccounts

Woah, woah woah! Wait....why are they getting rid of portal?! It's so convenient. I didn't use webmail that often, but it was nice to have it. News feeds are nice, but I can (partly) see why they would want to censor it. (Maybe it could be screened out for people under age 14?) What do they mean by aliases and sub accounts? Does it mean that you can't pay $15.95/mo for your other four accounts +1 extra? I haven't had premium in over a year, but I credit their staff for unfreezing my main, and believing me when I said I paid for my other 4 sides.

I'm with Fjorab on this one. None of that other stuff they're adding compensates for removing portal and sub account loss. 20 pets is plenty enough for me.

OT: I haven't posted in a while, and I wanted to know why our images are now beneath our posts instead of above them?

Yeah, the Portal is what bugs me most. Hopefully they'll implement some of its features like dailies/quick-links and game notifications in the new system. And i know some people do use the webmail and will have to rely on something else now. It was kind-of nice to have an easy way to communicate with other Premium users without the heavy policing of Neopets site content, but that might be part of it.

Alias/subaccount basically meant that you could designate one of your other accounts to also be ad-free with access to Premium boards, and i think with the web service it meant that you could have other accounts such as family members' also ad-free. I liked having my alias, especially when my main was frozen for something ridiculous. They may make it so all your accounts are ad-free, just speculation though. If it's going away, maybe it'll be another ad-clogged reminder that i'm not on my main. I use basic color themes and different browsers for my separate accounts anyway.

(Something got messed up in the last board update here. Hopefully there'll be an easy fix to it when our leaders can get around to solving it.)