- For the species of Marapets featured around the site, see Pets.
Marapets is an online virtual pet site game owned by a former English college student named Ian.
Gameplay
Marapets has its own virtual world called Marada that features shops and all kinds of different in-game currencies, including: Marapoints, Dukka Coins, Baspinar Points and Restock Points.
Users are able take care of up to 13 virtual pets (up to 100 for those with Extra Pet Giftboxes), buying them items such as food, toys, costumes, learnables, and stat-raising items. Unlike other virtual pet sites, Marapets can die and end up at the Graveyard if not properly looked after. Additionally, pound pets that have had multiple owners have been known to die of stress or a broken heart.
The City of Marada Arcade offers a wide range of entertaining and addictive activities such as mini-games, quests, rewards, collections, goals, missions, pyramids, and temples, which can reward players with MP, items, or pet stats. The Arcade also features a countdown feature called Notifications, which notify the player of when their favourite games or features can be used again.
Marapets also has its own annual events such as Lost Sock Awareness Day, the Easter Egg Hunt, Summer Challenges, Birthday Party, Pumpkin Hunt, and Advent Calendar.
Mobile Marapets
As of 2020, Marapets has been made fully mobile friendly, responding to the device the user is playing on: the mobile version will show when the device is in portrait mode, and the desktop version will show when the device is in landscape mode (the user can also switch between Mobile and Desktop Mode by clicking the Switch to Desktop Mode button at the bottom of every page of the site).
History
- Main article: Maraqua
Believe it or not, Marapets first started off as a Neopets guild called Maraqua in late 2003, which had forums, play hints, items and pets release news. After TNT froze the guild for linking to a "commercial site" on May 20th, 2004, Ian (the owner of Maraqua) decided to create his own pet site, along with Laimay, who would be in charge of creating pet graphics for the site.
By the time Marapets was one year old, its members totaled 148,111. Within just two years, that number increased to about 2.1 million.
Some highlights of 2020 included: the return of MaraUploads as Mara.Pics, the site's email server being upgraded, dolls being revamped from Flash to modern code, and the replacement of all 46 Flash games with up-to-date HTML5 games.
Community
Marapets has a large community that takes part in Maramail and the site forums. An integral part of the forums and Maramail is Hidden Avatars, which can be used to show off to other users. Some are easy to get, but others can be challenging to get.
The Marapets forums can only be accessed to users aged 13+. Members who break the forums rules will go through having their accounts set to under 13; this is commonly known in the community as "underaging".
The Adult Forum is another part of the community in Marapets. Users must buy access to it with real life money as it is part of the Account Upgrades enhancements (see below).
Account Upgrades
The Account Upgrades are an optional feature of the Marapets website. With Account Upgrade Credit (which can be obtained with real money), users are given the chance to purchase stuff such as Treasure Maps, Certificates, and most importantly, Account Upgrades Sets that can earn them extra Hotel/Prison credit, minipets, Learnables, Gourmet Food, and big-time Costumes that can sell for high amounts of Marapoints (MP) in Instant Trades or Wanted Ads.
News reports show that Americans purchased $127 million of miscellaneous goods, services and merchandise online in 2007, one of them being Account Upgrades, although the amount spent in Marapets alone is not mentioned.[1]
Site Traffic
The Marapets site experiences a high number of exclusive visits daily. Although the number of users does not exceed 1,600 during the day (in the USA) at any given time, it has been reported that it gets as many as 150,000 exclusive visits each month within the months of June and July. That is roughly 5,000 visits per day (US data). Quantcast ranks it at around 9,300 of mostly teenager and female audiences in the USA.
Marapets has a much higher traffic in the United Kingdom ranked at 3,970, in Australia at 7,474; and 1,028 in the Philippines calculated by Alexa.[2]
At peak times (when events are in effect), the number of simultaneous online users can be of at least 2,000. On 30 December 2007, the online user list was of 2,671 users.
Criticism
Marapets has been heavily criticized for being a rip-off of Neopets; in fact, it is not uncommon to see Marapets and Neopets mentioned in the same breath, especially since Marapets was born from a Neopets guild called Maraqua. This caused some discourse in blogs and message boards all over the Internet, apart from in their respective sites, as it is strictly prohibited there.
Marapets has also been criticised for the offensive content around the site, some of which were slowly wiped off the site.[3] Although Marapets' original target audience was children, it later became more suitable for adolescents (teens) and adults, as the site has garnered criticism condemning the use of gore, violence, drinking, and cruelty against pets and minipets.
Lastly, Marapets has been criticised for its intrusive ads; any page on the site can sometimes have over eight differently-sized ads. Thankfully, these ads can be effectively blocked by add-ons such as AdBlock or uBlock Origin. (There was also a Giftbox that blocked preloaded ads on games, but has since been replaced by one that lets users buy from Dukka shops directly with their Dukka Coin balance.)
See also
References
- ↑ New Paths To Online Revenue http://www.forbes.com/2008/07/25/amazon-google-facebook-ent-tech-cx_kw_0725whartonwebpreneur.html
- ↑ Marapets.com Traffic, Demographics, and Competitors http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/marapets.com
- ↑ https://6608aac0cb955.site123.me/blog/why-you-shouldn-t-play-marapets