The 10 to 20% effective guide to pay your Neo Taxes

     Hi there, my name is Calcious, and welcome to what I ambitiously call a guide for finding those evasive Tax Beasts and Dr. Sloth random events!

          1.- Introduction

      If you're like me (and even if you're not), you'd like to collect every single avatar and trophy your User Lookup can fit in, but sometimes come up short given how many of them are luck based and overall too hard to get the younger your account is. Between them, three trophies are the definition of luck-based and almost top the list of the hardest trophies to get in a relatively new account (The top 2 being Food Club Bets and Grarrl Keno).

      Of course, this guide works with every kind of account, young or old, I'm just referring to the newest players first to encourage them to aim higher in their collection spree, so everyone is welcome to give it a try!

           If your account is aged and just want to know my strategy, you can skip to the 3rd section of this article. And if it is somewhat young, let me introduce you to the basics:

          2.- The Tax Basics

      So, what exactly are the Tax Beasts and the Sloth's Invasion Tax?

      Basically, when you're browsing through every page of Neopia, you get a tiny chance of getting a Random Event, or RE for short. These RE's can be positive and give you some rare, expensive items or Neopoints; if they're Neutral they give you... uhm, nothing, but hey, sometimes they make Mortogs rain!; and finally they may be Negative, and could make your Neopet Depressed, Sick or take away some Items or Neopoints from you (Easy come, easy go, I guess?)

      Those Negative events are what we're aspiring to get, specifically those which take NP's away from you.

      "But, hey! Why would I want such a bad thing to happen to me?" You may ask. The short answer is: A shiny pretty Golden Trophy to brag about! :)

      There are 5 events that take away Neopoints from you, all of them take a percentage off the Neopoints you cave on hand, listed from lowest to highest they are:

     1.- The Tax beast, which will kindly take away 10% of your neopoints; ***

     2.- The Shenkuu Emperor's Festival, which you give 16.67% of your money to fund but never attend;

     3.- King Skarl and his Marrow Tax (does that even exist?) deducts 20% of your Neopoints;

     4.- Dr. Sloths Invasion Tax, where you give our Space Overlord a 20% contribution for his invasion;***

     5.- The Angry Tax Beast, just like the other Tax Beast, but angry... and takes away 25% of your Neopints.***

      Although it would be logical for all of them to award a trophy (Pretty please, TNT? *-* ), only those marked with *** award one. As their name implies, there's no way to know which Random Event you're getting, so you'll have to embrace them all and hope for the best. So, what's the big strategy? Let us begin:

          3.- The Strategy

     3.1.- Building up Neopoints.

      Don't be discouraged, you won't need an incredible amount of Neopoints to achieve this goal. Optimally, around 2 Million neopoints in your bank account would make the cut anywhere during the month, but for the first week or two, you may be fine with just 1 Million. This can be easily done by playing games (also, have you already played Ghoul Catchers? *wink* *wink* ). After one or two months of dedication (and luck) you'll be more than ready to take this challenge ;)

          3.2 The math.

      Alright, so you got a couple million NP to welcome those beasts, but don't want to be reckless and lose too much in the process, right? Then let us take the optimal path.

     For this, you'll have to check the Highscore Board for all three events:

     * ← Sloth's Invasion Tax

     * ← Tax Beast

     * ← Angry Tax Beast

      Now let's say the minimum score for the Gold Trophy is at 250k, 200k and 400k Neopoints when you check it. That means you need 5 times 250k, 10 times 200k and 4 times 400k Neopoints in hand to qualify for either gold trophy if they hit you, meaning that by this moment the minimum required amount to have in hand is merely 2 Million Neopoints. Pretty neat, right?

      If you're worried about this affecting your Bank interest, just deposit those NP by the time you're done for the day and first thing in the morning (or when you return to Neopia), collect your interest, take out your calculator and the optimal NP for that day and hope you get lucky today!

          3.3 Summoning the Beasts

      So, enough of the technical details, How do we call in those Tax machines?

     Sadly there's no definitive way to obtain a RE consistently, so the short answer is: Browsing A LOT. But luckily there's a way to optimize your chances.

      In my experience, some pages have zero or close to null chance to give you a RE. I may be wrong but, for instance, flash game pages have never gave me a RE (the one where you actually play the game), The Neoboards, Neopian Times, Petpages and Guilds, are some instances where I have never seen a RE occurring so they may just be programmed to not have them.

      On the other hand, games like Go! Go! Go!, Pyrmids, Solitaire, Cheat!, Kiss The Mortog , Neoquest and overall, those browser-based games, are said to have an increased chance of getting you a RE. Nothing is really proven, but for maximum optimization I can suggest you the following:

          3.4 Try to get some other trophies in the process!

      This may look a like counter-intuitive, but let me explain. You can just open some random page and start pressing F5 all day, but this will get you frustrated in no time. Dropping your desire to get your Lookup shining, so why not get another trophy while you're at it?

      As I said before, some games look like they have an increased chance of giving you RE's:

      Play Neoquest, Pyramids, Beat Punchbag Bob, Cellblock, Snow Wars... so many games that will get you another trophy while you're waiting for those events. You may not get them first, not even soon, but give them some time and they'll eventually appear. Who knows? You could (and wil) even get some faerie quests, codestones and random map pieces in the meantime!

      For instance, currently I'm aspiring for the Pyramids cumulative trophy, hoping for these REs to show up again eventually, because I wasn't prepared for them when they came for my money, but I'll be now.

          4. Final Thoughts

      As you may notice, this hardly qualifies as a guide but most likely is a compendium of tips designed to optimize this tricky trophy hunt. Invoking REs is obviously the hardest part and can be time consuming, but I can tell that it will feel so rewarding to finally get it, and the idea of getting some other trophies on the way always motivates me... so don't give up!

      I made this article hoping no other Neopian will have to share my sorrow of paying taxes and not being rewarded for it. So be prepared, gather some neopoints and get those bills paid!