Kadoatie Feeding: Lessons from the Kadoatery
I recently made a big accomplishment! An insignificant one, but an achievement nonetheless. I finally got the Kadoatie Avatar on Neopets! And it only took me about six months to do it.
Now you might be wondering, “You still play Neopets?” or “What the heck is Neopets or a Kadoatie?”
To answer those questions, one: Yes, yes I do, and happily have been for nearly 11 straight years. (And that’s after a long hiatus I took after avidly playing as a kid in elementary and middle school.) And two: For those who don’t know, Neopets is an online virtual pet and game site that’s been around since 1999. A Kadoatie is a petpet, a pet for your Neopet – and yes, there are petpetpets, but that’s where that ends.
Neopets and Avatars
One of the many things one can do on Neopets is collect avatars. They’re essentially little boxes of animation that you get for completing specific tasks, winning games, “Random Events,” and so on. Some are super easy and clickable by visiting a specific page. Others are challenging, time-consuming, extremely random, and very expensive.
Luckily the currency is just Neopoints and not actual money, but that doesn’t inherently imply ease. For instance, you can earn avatars for completing certain stamp album pages. Except some of those stamps cost millions, if not hundreds of millions, of NPs. For some stamp pages, it can cost almost a billion Neopoints. That is if you can even find all of them, as they’re super limited. But I digress.
I consider myself an avatar collector, with 311 earned since I started my new account back in high school. I’ve entered the point where I’ve collected all of the easy and most medium-tiered avatars, leaving the difficult and expensive ones – primarily, game and stamp avatars. One of the avatars that I had put off attempting was the Kadoatie avatar. (I’ll explain why in a bit). Here it is:
Isn’t it adorable?
Anyways, over the half a year that it took me to earn this incredibly tedious avatar, I learned a lot, which I didn’t expect when I started working towards this avatar. To be honest, I assumed it’d be an avatar I’d never be able to acquire. But when I ran out of the easy ones and decided to try this one, I quickly got the hang of it. And, I found that I enjoyed it!
Acquiring the Kadoatie Avatar
To first provide some background information on this avatar, to acquire it, you must feed 75 Kadoaties (a.k.a. Kads) in the Kadoatery. The Kadoatery is essentially a petpet daycare specific to Kads. Feeding them is a lot more complicated than it sounds. There’s only 20 total, and there are many people who avidly feed them. (I’m talking about people who’ve fed thousands of them).
Refreshes
Now the trick to the game is that the Kads refresh on a loose time schedule. That is, when they refresh, the next refresh will happen in at least 28 minutes. Sometimes they refresh, sometimes they don’t. After about a minute or so, if the page hasn’t refreshed the Kads, it switches to a seven-minute loop; every seven minutes, it either refreshes and restarts with the 28-minute schedule, or it goes another seven minutes repeatedly until a refresh occurs.
The longest I’ve heard about a refresh not happening was reportedly two hours. This means that every seven minutes, the Kad feeders were refreshing the page for a minute at a time, every seven minutes, hoping to catch the refresh.
When it finally refreshes, you have to be quick if you want to feed. Like anywhere from 10 seconds to maybe a minute, if you’re lucky. Oh, and sometimes the refresh splits, which means not all the Kads request an item at once, and two separate time schedules suddenly go into effect until they loop back up again.
Feeding a Kadoatie
On top of that, there are thousands of different potential food items for the Kads to request. When you’re supposed to only hold 50-60 items in your inventory, it adds to the difficulty. Most people stock up on a certain amount of a specific item, like things with the word “hot dog” or “pizza” in the name, and feed Kads from their Safety Deposit Box (SDB, where we keep our extra items in).
There are multiple strategies to use, but I employed a mix of the three main ones: inventory, SDB, and Shop Wizard feeding, in that order. I kept certain items in my inventory that I noticed Kads appeared to request often, kept a tab for my SDB open ready to search things, and the Shop Wizard tab up if I didn’t already own the item requested.
Beating Out Others Trying to Feed a Kadoatie
Remember that to feed a Kad, I had to be able to do so before anyone else. And when more than 20 people are all trying to feed at once, you not only have to catch the refresh right when it happens, you have to beat out an unknown number of people for the same feed. Luckily though, a person can only feed one Kad per refresh.
In the beginning, I averaged about one to three Kads a week, if that. There were even some times there where I went a couple of weeks without catching a feed. So when I say it took me six months to feed 75 of these things, I wasn’t exaggerating. It was absolutely frustrating in the beginning.
Now I’m a little sad it’s over. I could keep feeding for fun, but I can’t afford to do it avidly like some people with how time-consuming it is. (Though, I did manage to feed another one after checking the Kadoatery on a whim and happened to catch a refresh.) But, as I said, I ended up learning a lot from this endeavor.
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What I learned From Kadoatie Feeding
Over the months of working toward the avatar, I ultimately worked on three main things: patience, teamwork and camaraderie, and appreciation. Not that I didn’t possess these traits to a certain degree already, but there’s always room for improvement!
Watching and being a part of the collective efforts of other people whom I didn’t even know was wonderful and taught me a lot.
Patience
As I said, at first, feeding Kads was incredibly frustrating. Starting out, it was hard to understand the refreshes and how everything worked. Once I understood, actually catching a feed was the next challenge. I believe it was late November or early December when I fed my first Kadoatie. I think the next time I fed was about two weeks later.
There were many times when I just barely missed a feed by a second or two. Even more frustrating was the number of times I missed the refresh by a few seconds; especially, after a long repetitive seven-minute cycle with no refresh. Like of course I missed the refresh after I’ve been waiting an hour, checking it every seven minutes, the one time I forgot to refresh or had to step away from the computer for a moment.
Instances like that, over and over, made me think it’d take ages to get the avatar. But, soon after, I better understood the process and started feeding more frequently. I got faster at searching for items in my SDB and getting them out in time to feed before someone else. Then my frustration turned into more of an “ahh shucks; I missed it” feeling.
After months of working on such a tedious task, it became enjoyable, and the idea of getting the avatar was no longer unattainable. I just had to be patient.
And I was! I gave myself a goal of getting the avatar by the end of June, back in February. As it turned out, I fed my 75th Kad on April 30th – two months earlier than anticipated!
I felt so proud of myself for sticking to it, not trying to rush it, and just enjoying the experience of working towards something.
Teamwork and Camaraderie
The great thing about feeding Kads, despite the semi-random time schedules involved, is the dedicated community of people on Neopets that “time-keep” for other Kadoatie feeders.
On the Neoboards, the forums on Neopets, all the feeders congregate to a single ongoing board where people alternate keeping track of the times and refreshes and what the Kads request. With this collective teamwork, newbie feeders like myself and veteran feeders alike benefit from knowing when to expect the next refresh and if one recently happened.
After I got the hang of it, I helped out when I could if no one was already there timekeeping or the last person had to step away. I also helped answer questions for other new people that started feeding after me. It was awesome to feel like part of a friendly little community working towards a similar goal, whether feeding for the avatar or feeding to increase one’s total.
On top of that, the people in that forum celebrated each other’s successes. When I would share a feed that I got, someone would say congratulations to me and maybe say some words of encouragement as I got closer to certain milestones.
When people made their first feed, we might say, “Conkads!” in place of “congrats.” And when someone got the avatar, we’d say, “Conkads on Pink!” And we all related to each other when we barely missed a feed or missed a refresh. Even the veteran feeders missed refreshes, which made it easier not to feel as frustrated.
It was such a wonderful thing to feel a part of. Everyone just helps each other out just for the sake of wanting each other to succeed.
Appreciation
Lastly, feeding Kads and working towards the avatar ultimately gave me an increased sense of appreciation. Appreciation for the experience; for having a community there actively working together to help people achieve the collective goal; and for myself.
As I said before, I originally thought it not possible for me to ever get this avatar. The times before when I looked into the process of trying for it, it looked so confusing, I gave up before giving it a shot.
This time I not only tried, but I also succeeded! I didn’t get frustrated to the point of giving up in the beginning or lose interest and stop trying. I kept at it, despite how long it took me to reach my goal. And now, I have a shiny new avatar to show for it. I feel a bit of pride when I see the avatar, which I’ve kept as my main since I earned it. I appreciate my perseverance and dedication to this task, even if it’s inconsequential to real life. And, I managed to do it in a way that didn’t distract me too much from my actual work in the process, which is another accomplishment!
Moving Forward
In addition to the sense of accomplishment after earning the Kadoatie avatar, I feel much more confident now about giving some of the other harder avatars a try as well.
I’ve actually gone through my list of the ones I still need and reevaluated how difficult they’d be to work towards. A few look more promising now that I’ve gained some perspective on the potential of me earning them.
While I haven’t yet actively recognized a real-world impact of completing this goal, I like to think that to some degree, the things I gained from this experience might help me in some way, whether significant or seemingly insignificant.
Though, I’m sure that any work I do on traits such as these will compound those characteristics regardless. So I’m confident that some benefits will arise from this endeavor and other similar accomplishments in the future.
Worst case scenario, if working towards collecting avatars does absolutely nothing for me that’s “beneficial,” I am still having fun and enjoying the experience. And I think that matters more than anything.
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