MaraPets

MaraPets is a website is an online virtual pet site game that is owned by a former English college student named Ian and was released on 15th August, 2004. The artwork and graphics on the site are done by many members of the site. The Maradan population is currently nearing 6.8 million (As of April 2020).

MaraPets has its own non-animated virtual world map called Marada, virtual pets, shops and all kinds of different in-game currencies, including: Marapoints, Dukka Coins, Baspinar Points and Restock Points. The site also has its own games with pets and occasionally mythical creatures hosting them.

Gameplay and Worlds

Reviewers of the site say that it offers a wide range of entertaining and addictive activities such as quests, missions and temples. While fairies were not part of the world of Marada before, they were introduced in August 2008. MaraPets' original concept was to target children audiences, but critics believe they later became more suitable for adolescents (teens) and adults as MaraPets has gotten reviews condemning the use of violence, drinking and cruelty against pets and minipets.

As MaraPets are the subject of this website, the name MaraPets was chosen because 'mara' was a reference to death and MaraPets would die if not looked after. Over the years this was disabled simply because it was never done properly. There has been a lot of changes now and the staff brought back a lot of the original features of MaraPets. Like it or not, many features of the site have no purpose on here if the Caring for Pets is not required. Whenever we say a 'pet is not healthy' this is referring to happiness, hunger and tiredness being neglected and has NO reference to health points used in battling. Happiness, tiredness and hunger changes by 5% once every 15 hours. This only happens when you are online - if your pets are at 100% happiness and you do not login for 3 months, they will be at 100% when you come back. Each pet's happiness, tiredness and hunger will show as green when it is healthy, orange when it is unhealthy, and red when it is being neglected.

MaraPets currently has 21 different worlds with many activities in them. In activities like the Easter Egg Hunt people must gather clues and finish tasks from all over the worlds to solve a riddle. There is also the Summer Challenges, another one of MaraPets' yearly activities involving collecting badges instead of Easter Eggs. While Valentine's Day was always celebrated, in February 2009 they conducted a hunt for hearts all over the site for the first time, which led to the Pumpkin Hunt in October of that year (and all other years after that).

You may have found some games already while you Explore the virtual worlds of Marada. Each feature will give you bonus MP, items, pet stats or currency. Within the Games Room is a countdown for when can use them again. You can tick and untick which ones you would like to receive reminders or notifications for.

Missions, Temples and Goals

The MaraPets missions are somewhat different from the other pet sites' missions. Some require books, CDs, or instruments to be taught to your pets. The Temples and Pyramids are another type of mission that have countdowns, require materials such as keys and codes, and are located in Simeria and Kamilah Desert. Some missions, pyramids and quests require the assembling pieces of a map like that of Fugunzel, Wonky Pyramid, and Simerian Explorer. Temples and Pyramids do not have a time limit like missions and quests do. If you have the appropriate giftboxes, you can complete them ad infinitum.

Goals are also one of the unique activities in MaraPets. There are unlimited goals to finish per world. They require you to complete certain activities relevant to those worlds, you need to own certain pets, to purchase certain rare items or to earn certain number of quests. Only then you can move on to the next level. Users get a badge on their profile with the level of goals they've completed. Just like Temples, Goals can only be done once and do not have time limits.

Mythical Creatures

The older MaraPets Fairies are unlike the fairies that most people are familiar with. Apart from the body building Gigantic Fairy which encourages players to exercise and be in shape, the fairies are mainly evil, gruesome, aggressive, and/or lazy. Some fairies love torturing marapets, like the Decapitating Fairy, who cuts the heads off marapets, the Mean Fairy who lives in the Sundial in the Lost City of Simeria and will kill your pet with a knife to turn it into a mummy, the Lazy Fairy who is an outcast who lost her job due to her drinking and gambling; then comes the fugitive of Maradan justice, the Dukka Fairy who is a smuggler and a thief.

However, the modern fairies benefit your pet and you for performing activities and collecting stuff: The Digital Fairy is a good hacker and programmer that some say that MaraPets would be run better by her! The Glowing Fairy loves to collect Glowing Eggs and wants everyone to share her passion for colour. The Plushie Fairy spent years trying to collect as many plushies as she can and encourages everyone to collect plushies and rewards players for their efforts! The Rainbow Fairy loves colour and is happiest when a pet changes its costume. The Royal Fairy is the Queen of all the Maradan Fairies. Living high above Marada, in the cloud world of Nimbus, her heart is warmed by the kindness of others. She realises how important quests are for the economy and the every day lives of all Maradans and rewards you.

There are also mythical creatures such as Drake and Slime Boy who reward your pet for their stats. Creatures such as the former, Golem, and Satyr are powerful, Harpy is magical, Kirin is a protector, Merman and Naga are fast, and the latter is a coward.

Community

MaraPets has a large community that takes part in Maramail and the MaraPets forums. A big part of the MaraPets forums and maramail, are the site avatars. There are over 300 avatars to collect to show off in the forums. Some avatars are easy to get but some of them are retired and some are nearly impossible to get.

MaraPets forums are suitable for ages 13 and above, and users are prevented from access to the forums if they are not 13 or older. Members who break the rules of the forums will go through having their accounts set to under 13; commonly known in the community as "underaging".

The Adult Forum is another part of the community in MaraPets; users must buy access 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 them, you're given the chance to buy items to dress your doll, Costumes to enhance your pets, and stuff such as extra Marasite pages improve your account. Account Upgrade credit is paid for in real life money. Some of the Account Upgrades items (such as DNA and map pieces) you can sell in your shop or item trades for marapoints.

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.

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.

At peak times (when hunts and festivals 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 and Competition

MaraPets is, so far, the biggest rival and competitor of Neopets. When it was released they shared the same site formula: Users create pets, raise and care for them, train them for battles, or even give them jobs.

MaraPets has also been heavily criticized over the past few years since its release. Critics claim that MaraPets is a "copy" or a "rip-off" of Neopets, which has caused quite some heated controversies in blogs and message boards over the internet. It is common to see Neopets name where ever MaraPets is mentioned as people compare them to one another.

MaraPets and its elements contain examples of the following tropes:

• Absurdly Spacious Sewer: The City Sewers.
• Aliens Speaking English
• All Swords Are the Same
• Amusement Park: Slater Park.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes: Completing missions and certain games will award you with clothing.

Completing entire mission chains awards you with costumes, which you can either sell for profit or put on your pet, which makes it look pretty badass.

• Arms Dealer: The Weapon and Armor shopkeepers.
• Automaton Horses: Gonks, Viottos and Vixens. Justified, however, since you can feed them, but they won't die.
• Battle Trophy: Players who rank having won the most battles get these trophies. They appear in your profile.
• Big Boo's Haunt: Undying Woods.
• Bleak Level: Eleka's Castle.
• Brain Food: You can feed your pets brain cakes, brain cookies, and even an entire brain.
• Build Like an Egyptian: The pyramids in Kamilah Desert.
• Building Steam: The Steampunk Costume.
• Castle in the Sky: Nimbus.
• Character Name Limits
• Dem Bones: The Bonehead, Skelly and Spinestein minipets.
• Destroyable Items: Toys can break if you let your pets play with them too much. On top of that, a Carpenter can fix these if you complete one of his specific quests.
• Difficulty by Acceleration: Bounchy, Gizmo Gravity, Skyscraper and Monty's Great Escape.
• Down in the Dumps: The Trash Heap.
• Everything's Better with Dinosaurs: Zetlian, Ike and Grint pets.
• Everything's Better with Monkeys: The Addow pet.
• Everything's Better with Penguins: The Newth pet.
• Everything's Better with Pixels: The Pixel Costume.
• Everything's Better with Rainbows: The Rainbow Costume. Also, the Rainbow Fairy in Lush Lake.
• Fighting Clown: The Clown and Circus Trading Cards.
• Game Within a Game: Mini-games can be played along with the main questing/missions, etc.
• Gangplank Galleon/Global Currency Exception: The Pirate Ship near Minipet Island. Also, Dukka Town and Dukka Caves. The stores here only accept Dukka Coins as a form of currency. RP is earned by buying items in the shops, and can only be spent at Eleka's Castle. BP is earned by defeating opponents in the arena, and can only be spent at Baspinar's Castle.

• Green Hill Zone: Lush Lake.
• Level Ate: Candyland.
• Macro Zone: Gigantic Paradise.
• Palmtree Panic: Minipet Island, to an extent.
• Play Every Day: Doing the daily activities in the virtual world will reward you with MP (the currency) or items.
• Quest Giver: At least one in every world.
• Rock Steady: The Stone Costume.
• Royal Road: Baspinar's Castle.
• Slippy-Slidey Ice World: Biala Mountain.
• Space Zone: Enpiah.
• Temple of Doom: The various temples in Simeria.
• Terrible Trio: The Fates.
• Tomorrowland: Ziranek.
• Under the Sea: Jenoa.
• The Unfought: If you take part in the War, either it's Queen Eleka if you're on the Light Side, or King Baspinar if you are on the Dark Side. This also applies to Summer Challenges in modern MaraPets.
• Unlockable Content: Giftboxes, which can be bought with Account Upgrade credits, extend the use of dailies, or grant access to things normal users can't use.
• Vendor Trash: A lot of cheap items.

Another reason for criticism is the excessive adverts on the site. One MaraPets site page can sometimes exceed eight, all different sized ads. This is frowned upon many people and leaves the impression on a small number of viewers that the site might be unsuitable or unsafe to use. All ads from MaraPets however can be effectively blocked by using the Mozilla Firefox web browser and an add-on called AdBlock.

Mobile MaraPets

Turning 10 Years Old (back in August 2014) was a huge milestone. A DECADE of MaraPets. The internet had changed a lot since we started in 2004 but the way most things were done here had hardly changed since we opened. To survive another decade, we needed to make a lot of changes. One of the hardest things for us to do was to explain what MaraPets even was! If you had no idea about pet sites, it was confusing. So we gave MaraPets a story, goals, rewards, collections… and just made the site easier for everyone. We started to update our old artwork, trying to make everything more consistent. We changed or removed features that no longer made sense. We started to migrate away from Flash (which will no longer work on most of the Internet from next year). And finally, we started to go through every part of MaraPets, section by section and start again. Rather than have a site built for desktops, we started to build it for the smallest Mobile Devices.

We're now pleased to announce that MaraPets is fully Mobile Friendly and the whole site responds to the device you are playing on. If you are playing on a Mobile or Tablet, this new design will automatically load when you are in portrait mode. Rotate the device to landscape mode and the normal, Desktop Mode of MaraPets will automatically load. We understand that not every one wants a responsive design - you can switch between Mobile and Desktop by clicking the Switch to Desktop Mode link at the bottom of every page of the site.

We've had months of testing but with so many different devices and browsers out there, we can never be 100% perfect first time. If you experience any issues, please let us know at this Mobile Errors topic. Thank you for all your patience over the past year or so with places changing and constantly updating - it should finally now all start to make sense!

We ended 2020 with almost every feature on the site upgraded in some way or another. Some highlights of 2020 were the return of MaraUploads as Mara.Pics, our social media presence relaunched, email server upgraded, dolls revamped to a much higher quality and our five year plan to replace our 46 flash games with newer, better games that worked on every device was completed in only 7 months!! Every event we run was bigger and better than ever and there were even several new events like the Palladium Jubilee, our Birthday Party and new weather events.

References

This article "MaraPets" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:MaraPets. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.

📰 Article(s) of the same category(ies)

• Aidan Lockrow (TheLoLSoul)
• Nathorix (Youtuber)
• Civil Contract RPG
• Heroes of Mavia
• Valorant Flooring
• ISSAA
• TruckersMP

---