Right now we have the job agency to collect an income for pets, but not very interactive. My proposal is to have a subeta pet academy where your pet can earn skill points towards a particular trait. [new edit] This would be a new system in addition to the current job agency. I am not proposing to replace currently available jobs [end edit].The skill points go towards a new job at the job agency. For example, if you want your pet to have a job as a teacher, they would go down the teacher track at the academy and if you want a stock broker pet they would go down the economics track at the academy. Your pet has to complete a level of school before applying to the corresponding job. This is done by earning enough skill points to complete a level of school.

Academy career paths - pets need to first select a career path of your choosing. This is where you can see which pets are currently enrolled, what path they have chosen and what level they are at. Your pet needs to “enroll” in classes for each level. You can select which pets you want to enroll and for how many days, the same way you would put pets into the resort in veta lake. Just like school, you pay for how many days you want to enroll. Depending on how many days or the career path, the amount you pay will increase.

Levels of education - each career path will have a number of school levels that need to be completed. In order to complete a school level, you need to meet the required number of skill points. Level 1 might require 20 skill points while level 2 requires 50 skill points. You can choose to change career paths at any time, but doing so will set you back to level 1 with 0 skill points for the new career. Skill points are earned by completing special quests. Each quest completed earns your pet 1 skill point with a max of maybe 5 quests per day. No money is rewarded (this is school after all!) Skill points are cumulative and don’t reset as you go up in levels. You also don’t need to complete all 5 quests, but you need at least 1 quest completed for each enrollment day.

Enrollment - The number of days you choose for enrollment corresponds with the number of days you must complete at least one quest to earn skill points. Missing a day means that your pet forfeits all remaining days and needs to re-enroll. There is no penalty for breaks in between enrollment days. For example, suppose you need 15 skill points and decide to enroll your pet for 3 days. You can complete all 5 quests each day and complete the level or you can do one quest per day, collect your 3 points and enroll again at a later date. When you choose to enroll again doesn’t matter. If instead you forget to do a quest on day 2, your pet will automatically drop out, forfeiting day 3, and need to enroll again at a date of your choosing. You will still have your day 1 points saved, but cannot get the sP back that you spent for the 3 day enrollment. Choosing the number of enrollment days gives you the flexibility to determine how many days you can actively be involved and not penalize people for having real life things pop up.

Jobs - new jobs that correspond to the academy skill points. Entry level jobs will require at least 1 level of school completed. This can be something like apprentice, intern, etc. Promotions are then based on more levels of school completed with the highest job position requiring the highest level of school completed. The jobs themselves could either give sP payout or other currency depending on the cost for school, how many levels, etc.

Thoughts?

I love this idea. Any more focus on pets sounds great to me and it could be a lot of fun! Support!

I concur, this is a very interesting idea! Personally I'm not into fighting my pets, battle just isn't my thang (ok now that I'VE used that phrase it's totally uncool). But I like that you can put your pet onto a "career path" where they can, one would suppose, get recognition for things other than their fighting prowess.

I'm not sure what difference this Suggestion is from what's happening now. Time spent at a job is abstract of your pet studying of that job by doing it, only it isn't labeled as such. Nothing stops you from writing about it on your pet's Profile as if something more complicated was happening. Is the goal to promote your pet at their job without improving any of your pet's stats at all?

The stat-requirements never were meant to be about making your pet battle-ready. Before stats were included getting a promotion was pure random chance and doing the job just got you a teeny amount of sP even by the non-inflationary standards of the day. While there were minimum stats needed, nobody knew what they were, we had to guess. My memory says that for most of the jobs available then they were pretty low though.

Users Suggested that time-at-the-job should matter to your pet more than just that small amount of sP. This was live at the meet-up in Disneyland and STR and INT were talked about at that time because we segued into that conversation from battling.

In between then and now the sP reward was boosted (after quests and games were boosted) so as to allow you to train with your income gained, and new jobs were added that weren't so time intensive and some even more so.

This is giving me Neoschool flashbacks.

So right now promotions are linked to the number of days your pet has "worked" a job, which is passively accumulated over time. If I'm understanding this suggestion correctly, you want to replace that system with a daily quest that awards skill points instead of sP/items. You also need to pay sP to "enroll" your pet to be able to do this quest in the first place?

My first impression is that this sounds like a pretty major startup cost to even be eligible for a job, so job payouts would probably have to be re-balanced. If it takes too long to recoup your investment once you have a job, then people might not be interested in the first place. On the flip side, if you make your sP back too quickly, why even bother putting an sP gate on it?

The idea of enrollment, in its current form, seems... meaningless? Doing a quest a day for 3 days is trivial for most people, and there doesn't seem to be a real penalty for failure if you can carry over your points and just start again immediately. I could see it working if your points were banked until you finished the "course", and failure to meet the requirements would cost you everything. I'd also probably add a greater incentive on longer courses, so completing a full 15-day course would earn you significantly more points overall than doing five 3-day courses. It might also be good to have an sP payout here that follows the same format (banked until the end; failure means you get nothing). That could fix the balance issue I mentioned before.

I have to say, the idea of committing to a daily task for a set number of days is probably my favorite part of this suggestion. It's like a mini version of the Bathhouse, but you get to set your own goals. That could easily be reskinned to work just about anywhere if it isn't used here.

So when I first thought of this idea I was trying to think of ways people could be more interactive with their pets that doesn’t involve battling. Not everyone likes to battle or train their pets and with the current job agency you only gain promotions through time and training stats.

I haven’t been to neopets in a long, long time but I’m not surprised as this is not a groundbreaking concept. I am not saying to remove the old system, only add this new one as an option. For the school portion it would be an sP sink, yes. There can be options that don’t require a lot of sP and options that do require a lot of sP. once you are able to get a job with the skill points, that is when you can start gaining sP again or maybe the job gives out currencies like wizard tokens, CSC, blue building points, etc. and yes the idea is not to make money right away. The highest level jobs could be but the low level jobs would just be helping recoup some money back.

I like your idea of penalizing more and is actually along the same lines of what I was originally thinking, but I didn’t think people would like that idea. I like the idea of having more points awarded for longer consecutive days, anything to give people incentive to be active. I would say maybe give a discounted price for enrollment cost for longer streaks instead of awarding sP.

Maybe as a future looking/phase 2 update is to apply for “financial aid” if you have less than 1 mil sP to your account and get money back from course completion. However, I can see people abusing this. Another option might be to apply for a “scholarship “ that requires your pet to have intel stats. The scholarship is free to apply for once per enrollment, but based on % chance. If you get the scholarship, that would reward you sP at the end of course completion.

I love the idea of investing into your pets' abilities so they can do certain, more lucrative jobs. Right now, the sP that my pets earn at their jobs is pretty meaningless. Maybe it could be a way to earn either exclusive prizes/items, or rare, hard-to-get currencies. It'd be especially cool if particular academy jobs gave you different rewards than other ones--for example, a track job for battling/weaponry gives you stat boosters, but a track job in banking gives you currencies. A librarian job can give intelligence-boosting items, a culinary arts job might unlock exclusive recipes at Fantine's, etc.

I can see a pet job academy being more effective if it ties into other aspects of the site. One way to make this something to really invest in--rather than something that's exclusively a sP sink--might be to add certain goals that allow higher tiers to be unlocked. For example, a pet whose track is in culinary arts might have to hit a certain level in the Gourmand achievement. Low-level academy tiers would involve simpler tasks (such as hitting tier 2 as a battler), but high-level tiers would involve things that are much more difficult--such as beating a particular opponent, or defeating X number of opponents who are Easy, Medium, Hard, etc.

One thing I'd personally prefer is making each tier something you have to reach with your pet, and not necessarily as a user, but I'm not sure how particular tracks--such as banking, fashion design, etc.--could achieve tiers. If it had to be user-connected (such as having X sP in the bank, or owning X wearables), it definitely wouldn't make or break the concept as a whole for me, though.

I like the idea of jobs giving out rewards to the specific career field, but keep in mind that this is something that will be collected daily. A booster per day won’t hurt the economy but I wouldn’t give out some currencies or event exclusives because they will quickly flood the market. 5 csc per day won’t hurt but even 1 referral point per day would quickly deflate referral shop prices.

That's a good point--maybe tying it back to rewarding players who log in every day, the longer you collect your pet's paycheck, the more likely you are to receive rarer prizes. Or make it a guaranteed thing like the bath house or quest points--every 10 days you get rare currency, or a booster, or something. Another method might be making it so you only get prizes after visiting the pet at their job X number of times. After you've visited them, the pet will give you a thank-you gift, or show you what they've been working on, and you get a better prize. There are all sorts of ways to make the payout worth the time spent, but I'm admittedly struggling with figuring out alternatives that aren't already on the site.

An interesting idea but I'd only support it if it was optional and there was a separate job agency for this system. I've spent a lot of time and sP getting pets into the jobs they have now. I wouldn't want to start again with them all, especially my battle pet which is now Director of SAI.

Some of my pets have jobs which suit their personalities such as Scary Assassin and Head Harvester (Half Baked). Another pet isn't far off from being a Certified Mad Scientist.

Some of my pets just have jobs which won't be showing on their profiles when I get round to finishing them. I'd try out the new system with one or two of them because they aren't earning very much at the moment.

Thanks everyone for the feedback! I made a small update to my original post just to make it clear that my proposal is not to get rid of the current job agency. This would be an addition through a new feature

While I like the basic idea, there are already too many quests. I would much rather see this tied to games instead.