The Sneaky Shop Wizard

by Battlemaster67

I have been playing NeoPets almost a year and the same thing has been happening only on a greater scale. When I started playing NeoPets there were 400,000 other people playing. Since there were less people there was less competition and it was more likely to see your name on the Shop Wizard. But the problem was and still is the same, the Shop Wizard has been giving you different answers for how much an item cost and who is selling them. Now, do you want to use this to your advantage or disadvantage?

The Shop Wizard is nonetheless a computer. He is told what to do like a computer and he does it but he doesn’t always tell you the same thing. At the time I wrote this I bought a “Blue Uni Morphing Potion” earlier that day. I thought 10,000 Neopoints was a good price and I decided I would resell it. I looked it up in the Shop Wizard and it only listed one and it cost 99,999 Neopoints so you couldn’t buy it. I sighed and click the magic refresh button. Instantly, six appeared in the Shop Wizard costing anywhere from 29,000 NP to 49,999 NP. I hit refresh again and there was only one for sale and it cost 75,000. Refreshed again and two were selling for 99,999 NP. The lesson to learn here is to look at least twice before buying something and at least three times before selling it.

I admit I made the Shop Wizard sound really evil and that he is always hiding the best deals and all but he is like a book. He knows a lot but he can’t think. Say you were pricing an item and you saw eight for sale with the prices ranging from 999 to 4,000 Neopoints and then you hit refresh and the same item was there but there were only four of them selling from 6,000 to 10,000 Neopoints. Now how do you make sure you get on the bottom of that list were the cheapest one is 6,000 and not on the top of the cheaper list. The Shop Wizard generally sorts prices in groups and he kind of had expensive ones, middle ranged, maybe another middle ranged, and a cheap.

Your goal is to get to be the cheapest on the expensive list so if the most expensive one in the middle ranged one was 5,000 Neopoints, and the cheapest one in the expensive one was 7,000 Neopoints, then price it at 6,999. This will make it appear as the cheapest one but in the expensive list so you can make lots of money. I call this the 99 effect and some people go a step further and would use 6,998.

These tricks work almost all the time and can maximize your amount of NPs. If you know these two simple tricks there will be no point in getting a size 500 shop so you can be in the market place. With all the people reading the Neopian Times this will not be a big secret. Happy shopping and use that wizard!