New Neopet Event: "Tarla's Tour of Mystery"

If you game at Neopets then you are painfully aware of the new site / world event, Tarla's Tour of Mystery. I am sure that the site has seen a complete explosion of page views. To make things interesting, when I started writing this review of the event there were 886,459,370,000 page views. At the end I will add the new number and how long it took to write it.

"Tarla's Tour of Mystery" is comparable to the quests that were issued during the Festival of Neggs where you had to search for something based on hints and clues. This time around there are no hints given so it is dumb luck that you happen upon her. Oh, there are a lot of people who are sitting there working on refreshing pages where she has been seen, tracking how often she is spotted and trying to come up with a game plan to find her. I spent two hours, yes two hours, hunting for her the first day and had no luck. One of my Neofriends sent me a link to where she had been spotted and I missed out it catching her. Suffice it to say, there are a lot of sore gamers at the site right now.

The basic concept of the "Tour of Mystery" is to find Tarla somewhere at the site. She will appear and offer to "clear the mist" or offer a prize or Neopoints; you have to choose one or the other. If you opt to clear a little bit of the mist away you are one step closer to having an image revealed. Most people say to clear the mist when you have the chance because it isn't something that she offers all the time. Yes, as usual, there are people posting on the message boards that "they know" all there is to know about the event. Take it all with a grain of salt and keep in mind that there are people posting fake sightings. TNT / The Neopets Team has been freezing people for multiple offenses and sending warnings about those types of posts being considered spam.

Neopets can be extremely sluggish at times because of the new event as well as it being the beginning of the month and the game scores being reset (to try and get a trophy for a high score) as well as the addition of the New Game Challenge "Ugga Drop". Combine that with it being the weekend and a lot more younger players online and all the page views going on looking for Tarla and you have the potential to have a real mess on your hands.

Some of the speculations about Tarla's Tour of Mystery involve how often she is spotted, if she repeats a visit to a certain area, if she sticks to certain lands, how long she makes an appearance and what she is giving out as prizes. There is also a lot of talk about a end-of-event prize if you clear all the mist, find her every day of the event and so on. Since TNT was rather vague with details about the Tour of Mystery a lot of people are posting things that may or may not be true. Also, the chatter about backgrounds or mega prizes for completing the entire event is getting louder every day.

As expected, there are Neopet scams involved with this event. People are "offering" to tell you where and when she will next appear for a set amount of Neopoints. Another scam involves you giving your password to someone so they can find her for you using a program. Neither are true; no one knows where she will appear next and the event is only a few days old so there is no way even the most advanced hacker will be able to write a program to sniff her next location out. If you give someone your password to your account you will never see it (or your items or Neopets) again. They will change the contact email and password and you will be locked out of your account.

A myriad of prizes have been given out to players who find her and opt to take a prize instead of clearing the mist or an undisclosed amount of Neopoints. Some of the items include "Question Mark Cupcake", "Mapping A Mystery", "Tarlas Mysterious Travels", "Traveling Tarla Garden Gnome" and the "Tarlas Travel Photo Album". Not everyone that chooses the box will get something that is an event exclusive. Some people are getting common items that are already available at the site.

When I started writing this there were 886,459,370,000 page views, now there are 886,465,790,000. That means that in about 30 minutes there have been over six million page views. Wow. That is a huge number. So why did Neopets make it so hard to find her? Some say it is to increase page views and revenue from the adverts. They only make money if people click on them so if anything it is a lure for future advertisers. They can say, "During this event we had (insert number) page views every hour". In the world of online advertising the more page views a site has the more potential there is for people to click on something that may interest them.