Wasn't Aywas created by former Neopets staff? O.o
I had never heard that. I've heard us called the "anti-neopets" though. It's aimed at the 16+ crowd (last June we had to find pink leaves for Asher's birthday. The leaves were traded in for alcohol. The alcohol was fed to your pet. Each drink was worth a different amount of points. At the end of the leaf hunt/drinking binge the points were tallied, the winners got free customs, and the rest of us got a seasonal shop where we could trade our points in for items and special pets. They do stuff like that every other month.) The site is heavily user created. Pet species, and subsequent coloration, are designed by the users. Some of our special events are user created. And a lot of our events (Scavenger hunt in July, the easter egg field, and the upcoming love letters game) require you to co-operate with other users so it's a very close knit community.
Though the ornaga up there is a custom design I just bought off another user (I'm horrible at editing lines and coloring so all my customs were commissioned or bred babies).
Oh God, and my new favorite part of the site is the mutants. If you breed two pets with a radioactive breeding device you have an 80% chance of ending up with something like this:
Edit: I do have one complaint. They had a feature called Explore that is currently being phased out for something called Adventure. Adventure is a nice feature but none of your pet's attributes carried over. So my level 2,117 explore pet is only pushing level 13 in adventure.