Upper Deck: April Livestream
On April 24th 2024, Neopets held a special livestream to talk about Upper Deck's Neopets Trading Card Game (TCG) and Tales of Dacardia. It was hosted by Kevin (KevinoGaming, a Neopets YouTuber) and featured several TNT writing team members and TNT Dom. You can view a recording of this livestream on YouTube. This page is a summary recap of this livestream.
Livestream Timecodes
For your convenience, here's the important parts in the recorded live stream and their respective time codes- Introduction [4:30]
- Interview with Bobby from Upper Deck [6:05]
- TNT Jewel & TNT_GhotiWrangler on Tales of Dacardia [28:57]
- TNT Dom shares some important highlights [41:25]
- Q&A With TNT Dom
- When will the password reset emails work again? [48:55]
- We haven’t had an update or a single bug fix to the Battledome in over 10 years. Will the Battledome be fixed? [49:50]
- There is a bug with Grundo Warehouse that makes entering virtual prize codes difficult and confusing. This bug has progressively gotten worse. [51:03]
- Can rare item codes or retired items be re-released? It is so discouraging to play and collect when some items are not attainable. [52:50]
- Can CAPTCHAs be added to Food Club? [54:16]
- Do you intend to add more websites to the Recommended Sites list? There are fansites that also provide valuable information especially for non-English speakers. [55:32]
- We can’t mention your social media channels on the Neoboards. How is this possible? [57:00]
- The community regularly encounters issues with support, the core of which seems to be a shortage of staff. Are there plans to increase the size of the support team, or improve the workflow so that the current team can respond to tickets thoroughly and appropriately? [59:00]
Interview with Bobby from Upper Deck
- Product Manager and Game Designer of Neopets Battledome Trading Card Game (NBTCG), with Upper Deck for 2 years, in the TCG industry for 15 years
- Upper Deck has been involved with creating and innovating trading cards for over 30 years
- The Upper Deck team has been doing weekly live streams on the Upper Deck Twitch channel for several weeks.
- Dice! Custom-made resin dice that come in the starter decks.
- To create an inclusive TCG and try to bridge the gap between tabletop RPG players and TCG players, they added a dice mechanic to the card game.
- Start with a concept, which is then presented to the entire Upper Deck team. Then, it goes to game design, art/acquisition, and graphic design.
- Art/acquisition: The team was serious about going into the community to find artists who were already fans of Neopets -- by the fans for the fans. There are 12 artists for this set.
- For the first set, decided to stay at home in Neopia Central and themed around the Battledome.
- Game design starts with creating card concepts, then making physical paper versions of them and test them in battle.
- Graphic design - creating borders, text, icons, etc.
- Once everything is done, it moves to production (printing)
What can we expect at launch period?
- Starter decks: There will be 2 starter decks at launch. There will be a Starry Acara deck and a Fire Uni deck.
- Booster box: 24 packs per box, 8 cards per pack
How many different characters will be in the initial set?
- There are over 250 unique cards in the initial set. When taking into account different rarities, there are 400+ cards to collect.
- Bobby put together a list of his favourite characters and some not seen before. They shared the base Neopet set:
- Painting Neopets will be a mechanic in the TCG - a Paint Brush card and a Painted Neopet card, allows you to transform your pets:
- Weapons that can be equipped to Neopets during battles. These are brand new cards that haven't been shown off yet:
- Faerie cards - these cards are both Ultra Rare, and will feature motion coat technology giving the cards a texture-raised appearance. They have strong abilities that can change how the game is played:
- There are a lot of other cards in the set as well, including quite a few Hot Dog cards! Defenders of Neopia set has 10 hot dog cards because Bobby thought it would be funny.
- Three brand new legend cards, featuring NPCs from Neopets:
What rarities can we expect to see?
- Every pack will come with 8 cards - 3 commons, 2 rares (Starry & Fire), 1 super rare or higher, 1 foil card, and 1 codestone.
- Codestone cards will let you train your pets.
- There is a foil version for every card of every base rarity. Assuming this is similar to modern Pokemon TCG.
- The rarities are:
- Common (mainly the standard Neopets)
- Rare (food, potions, equipment, Starry & Fire pets)
- Super Rare
- Ultra Rare
- Rainbow Rare (the whole card is rainbow, and it also has the motion coat technology)
- There will be 1 Ultra Rare/Rainbow Rare per booster box.
- Wording unclear on if there is only one Ultra Rare or Rainbow Rare, or if there is one Ultra Rare and one Rainbow Rare
- Grundo Warehouse Code
- There will be 1 Grundo Warehouse code per booster box.
- Plus, there may be some additional secret card types hidden in packs!
Tales of Dacardia
- Featured TNT Jewel (Narrative Designer) and TNT_GhotiWrangler (Lead Artist)
- A trailer for Dacardia was played, it was also uploaded a few days prior to the livestream on YouTube.
- TNT Jewel
- New to TNT, but not to Neopets
- Was on the March 2024 livestream
- Building Tales of Dacardia for about 5 years
- Narrative Designer: writes all of the plot, dialogue, items, characters, and lore for the game
- TNT_GhotiWrangler
- The lead artist for Tales of Dacardia
- Did a lot of the concept artwork for things like the buildings, NPCs, crabby bots, etc.
- Leads the art team and are working to release new features and live operation content.
- What can players expect from Tales of Dacardia?
- You are called upon to restore the ancient and forgotten land of Dacardia, which had been destroyed by storms, using your home-building experience.
- Build friendships with characters as you rebuild the island, with the help of the crabby bots.
- Communication with designers - who are these characters? What notes should be hit? So lore and narrative can be supported by the art. As they iterated on the concept art, they tried to improve the characters based on the lore and what people would enjoy.
- Concept art for characters in Tales of Dacardia
- What inspired the team to create this storyline?
- When Jewel was brought on to the project, it was already decided that this would be a town-building story with mystery elements.
- The storm part had already been decided, and the story had to be expanded from there.
- The lore behind Dacardia needed to be built from the ground up, and the team decided to also try to incorporate some familiar figures from Neopia - both friendly and not-so-friendly.
- They had to check with the main site content creators to ensure the lore doesn't conflict.
- Can you expand on the tie-ins with the existing Neopets lore?
- Jewel has been a player of Neopets for a long time and was familiar with many characters from participating in plots onsite.
- There will be tie-ins to Tales of Dacardia in upcoming Neopets events.
- Team Dacardia will finally be making an appearance at the Altador Cup!
- You'll be able to see team Dacardia on the field, and be able to decorate with the team colours
- Might be able to score some goals with help of the crabby bots.
- Can’t say too much on the specifics, but there will be characters that appear in Tales of Dacardia that are existing from the Neopets site.
- In addition, some of the characters introduced in Tales of Dacardia will have tie-ins to Neopets. One of the NPCs is from Neopia Central, another studied in Altador (and is very excited about the Altador Cup), and there is a master builder who may be related to a recently revealed master artist onsite.
- For people who are new to Neopets, how does this game introduce them to the world of Neopets?
- GhotiWrangler: There is so much existing lore to draw from, and the team is excited to introduce it to both new players and old fans alike.
- Jewel: Tried to keep the same feeling of whimsy that Neopets lore evokes while making sure Tales of Dacardia can stand alone for new fans.
- When can people expect the game to be available?
- It is currently available for players in Hong Kong and Canada.
- The game will be launched globally in June.
- With the Neopass release, TNT_GhotiWrangler hinted at a lot of future potential with the main site
Highlights with TNT Dom
- Dom shared this infographic looking back at the progress made to the site in Q1 2024:
- Over 300K average monthly active users is more than triple what it was at this point in 2023
- Customer support has doubled ticket efficiency and is still working on improving the process, including better responses to tickets (versus widely used cookie-cutter replies)
- A 100% increase in tickets resolved, over 45,000 tickets answers.
- The customer satisfaction score is at 82.6%, up from around 75% last time this stat was given.
- Recently secured a master toy licensing deal and are actively working on launching new lines of plushies.
- NeoPass was released, the first step to connect the Neopets ecosystem together. Adoption is picking up. The team is continuing to work on fixing bugs that exist with this functionality.
- Hoping to provide similar updates on a quarterly basis to give updates on what the team is doing and what has been achieved.
- Acknowledging that a lot of answers in AMAs in the past have been vague or hard to determine expectations, such as “We’re working on it” or “We’re studying it”
- Product team is working in 2 week sprints, and a lot of the known issues and bugs are on the to-do list.
- Over the past few months, the team has been focused on large projects like security upgrades, the new plot, and backend improvements, which means there has not been a lot of development resources to dedicate to the list of bugs. As these projects come to an end, the team will be tackling bugs at a faster pace and will be able to provide dates.
- Are planning to do release notes to let the community know when things have been fixed.
- SunnyNeo's Note: A "sprint" refers to a dedicated development time period of various issues to be fixed. This process is part of the agile project management system and is fairly common in businesses and tech startups.
Q&A with TNT Dom
1. When will the password reset emails work again? [48:55]
- The team investigated this in March and found an error.
- The team pushed out a fix and believes this to be resolved.
- If users are still experiencing issues, submit a ticket.
2. We haven’t had an update or a single bug fix to the Battledome in over 10 years. Will the Battledome be fixed? [49:50]
- The team does want to fix the Battledome ahead of the Battledome element of the plot.
- Some fixes have been pushed already, and others are being worked on (specifically mentioned: freezing, potions, UI bugs, item stealing).
- Planning on bringing the Battledome to the HTML template?
3. There is a bug with Grundo Warehouse that makes entering virtual prize codes difficult and confusing. This bug has progressively gotten worse. [51:03]
- This bug is included in review for the current sprint.
- The team is currently trying to find a resolution.
- If the solution is found and is easy to implement, it may be released as soon as the next sprint.
- This is a high priority for the team as a lot of merchandise, both existing and upcoming, have prize code tie-ins.
4. Can rare item codes or retired items be re-released? It is so discouraging to play and collect when some items are not attainable. [52:50]
- The team has been trying to do this, but acknowledges it is a controversial topic so they want to be careful about how they are done.
- The team is also still trying to fight inflation, and re-releasing some of these items is one way they have to do that.
- Some quest items have been updated and the team plans to rotate them from time to time.
- Trying to find a happy balance to make new and returning users excited while not devaluing existing players’ collections.
5. Can CAPTCHAs be added to Food Club? [54:16]
- This isn’t a technical limitation, rather a cost limitation.
- The team enabled CAPTCHAs for the Altador Cup last year and it ended up costing thousands of dollars a week. They are looking into cheaper ways to implement this that will also be effective at stopping the botting issue.
- The team is also still reviewing additional ways outside of CAPTCHA that will help stop botting.
6. Do you intend to add more websites to the Recommended Sites list? There are fansites that also provide valuable information especially for non-English speakers. [55:32]
- Yes! The team wants to engage the community in as many ways as possible.
- There is a new application process. The team invites anyone with a Neopets fansite to apply.
- With the introduction of NeoPass, there are already planned tie-ins with existing fansites like SunnyNeo and Dress To Impress. The goal is to bring community-run projects closer to the Neopets ecosystem.
7. We can’t mention your social media channels on the Neoboards. How is this possible? [57:00]
- This is partially an outdated remnant of the old Neoboards policy.
- The reasoning behind the ban of linking personal social media accounts is because Neopets cannot guarantee the age rating of the content being linked. However, many current users on Neopets are mature adults.
- The team is looking into modern practices regarding this as well as reviewing laws and regulations with lawyers. This is a slow and costly process, so there is no ETA on when this may be updated.
8. The community regularly encounters issues with support, the core of which seems to be a shortage of staff. Are there plans to increase the size of the support team, or improve the workflow so that the current team can respond to tickets thoroughly and appropriately? [59:00]
- As shown in the infographic earlier, the support team is improving, but is still a top priority for the team.
- Most of the tickets that come in are account access related.
- An experience CS manager joined the team earlier this month and is reviewing the existing processes the team is using to make sure they are up to date with industry standard.
- Customer satisfaction score has improved and is above the average for gaming companies in the industry.
- However, there is still room for improvement across the board. The target is to reduce ticket turnaround time to under 24 hours.
Live Giveaway Code
As a reminder, you may only use this on your main account as its only one redemption per player. It expired on April 26th at 5PM NST. You can redeem this at the Grundo Warehouse.
Cool Negg
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