Just as it says in the title. Genuinely curious.

Difficult, if not impossible to balance, leading to completely broken PvP. Imagine your Remlik challenging my guinea pig. You’d be pwned in short order without a lot of ways to counterplay your way out because of what I can cram into its spell set even though it’s a lower tier pet. It probably wouldn’t be a ton of fun for you to be ground to paste like that. Now imagine that against an actual top pet rather than my dumb joke pet.

Keith actually asked about PvP in discord and you can see some responses here. Battling would need to be redesigned to make PvP not be a miserable bloodbath where pets are stomped to death in a single turn.

But in this scenario, I was the one who challenged you. That's my own fault for challenging a pet that would obviously destroy me. Also, what's stopping you from declining my challenge? Is that to assume that when challenged you are immediately expected to fight that pet, instead of them being added to your "secret challenger" page? I'm not gonna fight The Mage any time soon, but he is still there waiting for me. Neopets had a system like that; where you could be challenged and see what pet is challenging you. If you didn't think you had a chance, you could easily decline.

both players would have to be there to play. Things are still broken and it’s little more than a contest between who has more Shrieks, Gifts, Voids, and the blessing of RNGsus.

What is wrong with that? If you are fighting with friends you could simply coordinate when you could fight one another. I'm sure that there would then be a need for a sub-forum for battle challengers that could be done in almost real time if people are responding fast enough, and if not, then you can just coordinate with the new friends you have just made responding to the post. Yeah, there are obviously broken mechanics to EVERY PvP system in EVERY game. But does that mean that we should withhold it from the general public just because there are a few cracks? Don't like the way someone plays? Don't take challenges from them anymore. I'm not meaning to sound argumentative; I just don't see the real issue other than "It's broken because we say it's broken".

It would take a lot of coding, even if they didn't try to do anything to balance. There was a short time where pvp existed (forget if it was released for all or just on test server) and it constantly broke the whole BC. So regular battles didn't work while it existed and when it was lost in a server crash it didn't seem worth it to start again from scratch.

I would guess they asked about it lately because the entire BC is being rebuilt in new Subeta. Building it in from the start would hopefully keep it from making everything explode.

I like and support this idea. It is so much more challenging to battle an actual human - in a good way. I, too, played Neopets for a short time ages ago and I fondly remember the tournaments we had. It was a bit like chess, being required to think about your next move and surprise your opponent.

If it can be coded into the new Subeta without breaking it every other week....
Non battlers should have an easy way to opt out of being challenged, as having challenges popping up when you just want a relaxing place to escape could be stressful, if not triggering, for some.

Yup, that's the whole idea. No real reason why it couldn't be a reality.

This is just an opinion, but I think there is also a certain amount of toxicity built around any PVP game. All it takes is one good blast or stealing all of the other player's weapons to make the game unbalanced. What is the incentive? Just to battle for fun? Without there being something like money, experience, special items or achievements, there really is no reason for PVP when we have a huge pool of computer opponents in the current system. If there are incentives, then you know people will be pulling out their best weapons and scroll sets in order to do anything to win. The same strategies for PVE don't change in PVP with the current system unless there are some stipulations in place. Unless there is a complete change with the battle system and how players can battle, PVP just sounds like a frustrating mechanic 99% of the time.

It wasn't that PVP broke the BC. It was that when one of the programmers was updating the site they accidently overwrote the code for the PVP part of the BC on the test server and lost all their work.

It actually worked fine.

The balance was just awful though. Truth Serum and Recycle Blaster made it so that even a small pet could just get lucky and destroy a pet 4-5x larger. So I don't think they really bothered to rebuild it since very few people were even testing it.

It broke the BC. I know because there was constantly trying to fix things. The same way reflection would cause seemingly unrelated weapons and mechanics to not work properly. PvP itself did work even while the regular BC was glitching. Odd all around.