[ .NK. ]
This is not directed at the mods, devs, or admins. This is directed to their bosses - the ones that are making all of the poor decisions. I know that the mods, devs, and admins DO care. I don't want Gaia to go broke. That's what this thread is all about. And I want to thank the mods, devs, and admins for taking the time to back us up, help us, and do whatever they can DESPITE this thread complaining about the site they work so hard on.
New 10/19: I've seen a lot of evidence that only proves my point further - that the people in charge don't care about their users. Apparently the staff knows about this thread - and yet they haven't listened to a word of it, and have instead gotten
worse. Again, I don't mean the devs. The people above them.
You say you're concerned about the safety of our accounts and yet you raise the chances of us losing our accounts. You say you're concerned about the safety of your users but you add a texting message. Most of the people you appeal to
are tweens! You used to tell us to NEVER give out ANY personal information, but now this new
feature/sponsorship is encouraging them to do exactly the opposite! It may not give out your phone number, but it's still unsafe, in my opinion.
What's going on, Gaia? If that isn't proof that you don't care about your users as long as you get money, I don't know what is. You aren't thinking things through. You aren't even keeping up with the evolving items anymore. I hate what this site is becoming. You use things like Making Mischief etc., to use us to get you more money, more publicity, and ultimately, more users to milk for money.
How long until you're willing to turn the entire site into pay to play? How long before you're willing to sell our information for money? How much further down will you drag the site before listening to your users for once? We love this site, we know not every suggestion is useful but a LOT of them are - you just have to listen to them, and the devs have to make them. You can put a load of effort into Battle. Let's see a load of effort get put into fixing the only parts of the site us broke users can enjoy for free.After this thread was made, more cash shop items came out and at still-insane prices. You released a game and didn't tell us about it for two days. Sagger let us know on page 10 that this is what is called a soft release; a form of open beta testing. I thought that's what SCAS was for? You're apparently skimping on evolving items by not letting them evolve when they're supposed to (heard from another user, may not be true). We STILL don't have a lot of the things that were promised to us (G-Rangers
for you Ty <3) and things are just getting worse. Things I can't talk about.
Really. Why is it all about money now? Why do you keep lying to us? You keep screwing us over, acting as though our dedication to this site is useless, so long as you keep getting money from us and sponsors. Is profit all that matters?
So many broken promises.You've promised us so many things that have yet to happen or that turned out to be lies.
- While we understand WHY this is happening, it's still annoying being let down again and again. We truly appreciate all of the hard work you're doing, and don't want you to rush Battle in any way, it's just that you promised us repeatedly that the battle system would be out by ______. You've reached the deadline again and it's still not out. Now what's the deadline that you most certainly won't miss? It's not that I want you to rush it out. It's that you're trying to be a professional business by making us pay to enjoy good parts of the site, but yet you can't be professional on other points.
- You promised us that the battle system would be free. But it's not, and it won't be. There will be premium items that make you/the experience better. You could buy zOMG boxes that could give you a ticket to be allowed to play earlier. What the
hell, Gaia? Seriously? You're seriously that cruel? What about all of the users that have been here since day one and donated entire allowances to you - WILLINGLY - but can't now because they're in college and the economy is dying? They get screwed and have to play later than others just because they can't pay? That's cold. They've waited the longest. They want it the most. They
deserve it the most.
NewYou guys did a good thing. You handled this well. There's no going back - you did screw your users over by offering the head start tickets, but you still did everything within your power to fix it, and I'm genuinely thankful. You also did it without screwing up more (as in, eliminate the tickets entirely despite people already having paid for them.) The system you set up shows me and hopefully everyone else that you do actually care, and again,
thank you for listening and trying for us.
- You promised us that this site would be free to play and enjoy, but that, too, was a lie. How? Because the only decent items you release cost cash. The items we've been requesting for years. Panda slippers, for example. How about the
orphans? Oh that was a great way to milk us. EIs cost far too much, and they're the best items on the site. They far outshine the recent MCs. They give us things we've been asking for for a long time. But we can only have them if we fork over more of our hard earned money. What about the people that collect the items, and want them all? It's bad enough that we'll likely never get the old DIs, but now we can't even keep up with all of the CS items. One EI after another comes out, and you promised us that they'd be cheap and affordable, but they're not. They're barely obtainable with gold because the users are greedy (I would say that that's not your fault, but you knew damn well it would happen because of the tax you put on the MP. You knew EIs would go for several hundred thousand gold, only to patter out at around 100k). I used to get items easily because I had an art shop, but even then I couldn't keep up with all of the CS items, and I had a very good gold income at the time. With the growing amount of expensive items, users can't get nearly the amount of items that those that can pay with cash can. We can't even afford new shop items anymore, especially since we're busy saving for the evolving items before they go off the shelves.
- You keep releasing stupid features that no one wants (Cinemas, used mainly for your sponsorships that are annoying as hell, or VJ or whatever it's called which is overrun with porn and things no one wants to see. And let's not forget the labeler, with only negative, flamy labels, The Hills, Kung Fu Panda world, Skittles World, etc.,) while neglecting features that people love. What happened to that Guild rewrite, hm? What about how long it took to fix Word Bump? Now the new Jigsaw, and the way you messed it up. Let's not forget the elusive new avatar system that would make everything better and more amazing, possibly allowing us to choose our layering. And what about the piece of crap inventory fixer that made things WORSE for those of us with gigantic inventories (which come from our dedication to the site, let's not forget)? I haven't changed my avatar in months because the inventory sucks and it's extremely slow, and by the time I switch to a new tab I've forgotten what was on the last one. There's also the trading bugs, which there are plenty of (You can only get to so many of your items to show up [so god help you if the item you're trying to trade is at the bottom of your inventory, because you won't be able to get to it] and the fact that it says you have two trades when you only have one).
- Aquariums. Yes this gets its own damn section. You completely screwed us over with this. We can't put in our hard earned fish. We can only get new fish that WILL DIE by paying you even more money. How fair is that? The entire idea was executed horribly. You took our idea and made it completely your own by making us pay (again, the marketplace doesn't count, the point is that the items would not exist if we didn't pay for them) and not letting us put in our own fish. Lots of people would have loved it with a few tweaks (such as a different way for fish to die aside from time - think about vacations or those that can't come on every single day). But now you've caused a huge uproar because of your greed. The fact that you expect us to continuously pay for these fish really makes me sick. They're going to die and die again, and we're going to have to buy them over and over again, and at ridiculous prices, too. Nearly $5 for BUBBLES? Are you insane? If you want money, that's fine. But you need to cut down the prices by a LOT.
Money comes first.I'm still pissed off about Easter. We could have easily had an Easter event, but couldn't, because too many people were working on the BS, which isn't even finished on time. AGAIN. You didn't have time to even give us a forum event, but you had time to make items that we could pay for via cash. You could have at LEAST put them in a gold shop, but no. It was all about getting more money. But people still accepted it. I can't believe how forgiving the users here are. As a site that used to exist only on the generosity of its users, you guys sure have a way of repaying them. Do you realize that almost no one complained about having to pay for donation items? That's because it was acceptable and logical. Despite the bugs which were constantly being worked on, we loved the site and
wanted to help you all out with money. I always bought 6 letters at once, because I felt that you deserved it. But now you need more and more money, that you seem to be using rather poorly. Why invest a ton of money in a feature that no one will like? What's the damn point? Do some research first, and do it beyond browsing the petitions forum to see what item/feature people want most and saying "Haha they'll totally pay for that since they want it so badly."
I've witnessed a ton of items that we've been requesting for years being released as CS items, and that's just wrong.
And before anyone says it again, the Easter event was pushed back because of Battle.
http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/announcements/upcoming-events-on-gaia-your-feedback-needed/t.39169691/ Just to clarify.
Maybe if you had done things differently. But you release more cash shop items than monthly collectibles or shop updates (and while those are more frequent than they were they still lack the quality that the CS items have) or salon updates. You're most dedicated to the things that get you more money
. You've yet to miss an EI update (maybe postpone it for a day, but you haven't missed one) (now you're missing EI updates as well, it seems) but yet you've completely forgotten New Movie Mondays and several of the updates mentioned above, it seems. How is that fair to the people - your users - that you depend on?
Are you really that dedicated to your money instead of your users?
There's a fine line between needing a certain amount of money to run your site, and screwing your loyal users over just to make a profit. And you passed that line a long time ago, and it just keeps getting worse. You're on a steep decline that I don't see ending any time soon. What next? Buy 1 million gold for cash? Oh wait, that already happened with the Mythril coins, you just made it rare so that you got even more money out of it. My mistake.
All in all, I used to love this site. It's been my homepage since 2004, three computers later. I gladly donated the small amount of allowance I got to this website because I loved it and wanted to see it thrive. But I pictured it turning out completely differently. You're trying so hard to appeal to a younger audience by making everything cool and hip, but at the same time you're straying from your original anime roots in exchange for MTV and likewise themed items. You even ruined the world of Gaia by giving MTV its own shop. And it's not because it's MTV, but because IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH GAIA. At all. It's not even anime or fantasy, or anywhere close. You don't even add the new shops to the world map anymore. We don't even use the damn world map anymore.
This site meant many things to me. It made me better at art and writing. I got my first commission on this site two-three years ago. This site was a big part of my daily routine.
I stay on this site because of how it was before you became a load of money grubbers intent on turning this into Myspace. This site is still my homepage because I want it to get better. I want to see you guys get something right for once. But I'm quickly losing hope and so are a lot of your users. But as long as you get new ones to replace the dedicate ones you lost, right?
Stop lying to us. We're smarter than you think we are. We have feelings, and we're sick of them not mattering to you, especially since we're paying customers.
New Here's a bit of proof about the lying. Some of the devs from the last thread gave us some info.
old_geeza
Prices: This may be hard to believe, but Gaia isn't currently profitable. In other words, it costs us more to run the website than we bring in. Yes, it is a goal to make a profit (as most businesses do) but for now the revenue we get goes to pay for servers, developers, mods to keep the site running and to build all of the features on the website. We're investing in Gaia, not taking money out of it. Lanzer doesn't even wear very nice clothes.
biggrin Also, most users never spend a penny on the website. We know some people can't afford to or don't have access to a payment method such as PayPal or a cash card. Also by using the site and participating in sponsorships, you all definitely help support Gaia. Buying stuff in the marketplace often indirectly supports us. It's not meant to be a complaint, in other words, just to point out that I think many of you would be surprised at the economics in running and growing the site. We spend more money running Gaia than we get.
Thanks,
old_geeza
Above is the quote from old_geeza from the last thread.
Link.
pirula
Yeah, I can see there has been lots of speculation about Gaia's business plans. So, there are a few things I want to clear up:
- Gaia is not "rolling in money". We raised a lot from investors, but that money has to be paid back! It ain't free!
- Over 100 people work at Gaia now, and that is a lot of people to pay! MC revenue does not cover it. Check out Lanzers journal for more about the business costs.
- A lot more than 8% of our revenue comes from users. (that stat was quoted by someone earlier in the thread -- I don't know where it came from, it is not accurate). When you think about it, even the advertising money comes from users because advertisers pay us in order to reach....you. (Even though not all the sponsors are appropriate to all the users) We get paid when people click a link or watch a trailer or something, so without you its nothing.
I hope that makes it clear why we really do think of the free parts of the site as the core of the business. People come to Gaia in the first place because of the forums, guilds, games, friends, and all that (none of which cost anything). Without fun, rewarding, free activities the advertising and selling of items would not hold up on its own.
The above quote is from dev Pirula.
Link.
zOMG
July 25 - Casual Content: Gaia Onlilne's Trojan Horse MMO
Not convinced about free-to-play business models? Gaia Online rakes in over $1 million per month just from in-game item purchases.
The above quote is from the zOMG tab under games.
Link.Now let's do some math. Gaia has taken out several loans - this is true. At least 22 million.
Source.
Now let's consider that zOMG quote, shall we? Gaia Online rakes in over $1 million per month. Now let's add in sponsorships. Consider this: Gaia is a huge website (ranked 403 on Alexa.com). With popularity like that, getting sponsorships would be pretty easy. Getting an average 300,000 users a day, Gaia makes a wonderful giant billboard. I would assume that would mean that sponsorships could get in quite a bit of money. Add to that the fact that advertisements rake in quite a lot of money as well, and I would
think that Gaia does, in fact, get more than the $1.5 million a month
source required to run this site AND pay off their debts. I'm not saying I'm right, but that's the conclusion I'm brought to, at least.
tl;dr - Gaia clearly doesn't care about its users anymore, instead opting for whatever makes them more money. This isn't about Battle anymore. This is about how they try to milk us for money at every given opportunity and yet they won't fix the parts of the site that will supposedly always be free.
Here are our official suggestions on ways to greatly improve this site.- Advertisements and Sponsorships.- Work harder to get rid of the "illegal" ads. These are the ones over PG-13, the ones that get in the way of posting (the Circuit City ads), the ones with music, and the pop ups. I've seen the process for reporting these ads, and it's something that your average user won't be able to do, or want to do. It's a long, complicated process. Let mods work on them while browsing.
- Now that I understand how sponsorships work, I know that this isn't easy. But let's say you get four different sponsors and can only pick one. Please, please try to pick the one that would be best for your users. HSM 3 was a huge mistake. That's all I can say.
Aim for sponsors featured around anime, video games, and other things that your users express interest in. Check the forums more.
Accord to
this article, Craig Sherman, CEO of Gaia, said:
Quote:
The company’s other revenue source are ad campaigns created to run within the world of Gaia. Before launching these, Sherman says, they solicited subscriber feedback, to find out which potential advertisers they wanted to see in the world— and which they didn’t. (Cool fashion brands got the majority nod; big American auto companies, however, didn’t.)
That should tell us something.
- Aquariums- Either make Phin Phang a gold shop, or remove it from the 'Gold Shop' list. It's completely misleading. I don't expect you to make everything sell for gold, but at least make some of the fish cost gold.
- Give us a way to put in our Fishing game fish. That's why we wanted aquariums in the first place. You took that idea and twisted it around into something cruel and ugly; a mockery of your users. You took the idea and used it only to make more money for yourselves, and it's nothing less than an insult. At least give us
another aquarium - a
free aquarium, that we can put our fishing fish in. It can be completely independant of the cash aquarium if it has to be.
- An AFK feature would make things much more fair. You would select this option within your aquarium, and during this time, it will completely shut it down. You won't be able to feed your fish, they won't move, lose or gain happiness, or get hungry. You will also not get items from the overseer. This way, users that have to travel, can't come on every day, or lose internet access will not have to worry about their fish dying while they're away. It also won't be exploitable. This will increase interest in cash-only fish, as well.
- Lower the prices of some of the items. $4 for
bubbles is insane. $5 for a fish that will die is insane.
- Cash Shop, Evolving Items, and Monthly Collectibles- $10 for one item is absolutely insane. I understand that you need money but this is just too much. There are two solutions to this problem, both of which will get you more sales. The first solution is to let us wear as many of the poses as we want, or at least, say, 5-6 at once, aside from layering issues, obviously. The second solution is to lower the price. We may be getting, say, 40 poses off of one item, but you can still only wear
one of those poses at once, so, regardless of how many poses you give us, we still are paying $10, or even $5 for a single item. Either one you choose, or even if you choose both, will very likely see an increase in sales.
- Space out all things that require cash. Everyone is suffering from the dying economy - not just you. The fairer you are about this, the more sales you'll make in the long run. But if you keep releasing so many items, regardless of the price, for cash only, people will eventually get frustrated.
- Bring the Monthly Collectibles back up to the caliber they used to be. We can tell that you aren't trying as hard on them, and we aren't buying them until they get better. We would also like to be able to equip as many poses from a single Monthly Collectible as we want, instead of having to buy five to get the whole set. That's just a cheap way of you milking more money from us. It's been annoying ever since it got really bad with the Mythril Armor.
- What you did with the zOMG! boxes was extremely unfair, and it was just a ploy to raise more money. You offered tickets that let others play earlier (like SCAS and zEta isn't bad enough [what I mean is that there are some of those users that are jerks about being able to play first, and I don't think a privilege like that should be so exploited. They make all of us testers look bad and we don't need that kind of elitism. There's enough of that on here as it is]) so long as you got money. What about those of us that have been waiting since the day you announced the idea of the Battle System? Do we not matter if we can't pay? The people that were around for the original announcement about Battle are the ones who have waited the longest, the ones who had no idea that they would have to pay for it. We are the ones that willingly forked over our hard earned money to keep this site online. We're the ones being hurt the most by this.
Just because all items eventually end up on the Marketplace does not mean we can get them without paying cash. You knew your users would charge insane amounts for Evolving Items, just like you know they charge insane amounts for Monthly Collectibles. We can't afford your Cash Shop items with cash
or gold!
- No more Mythril Coins or anything like it. You're going against yourself with that, and all for a quick buck. Those coins may have gotten you a lot of money, but it also
destroyed the Gaian economy, making us suffer in the long run. I know that Lanzer didn't want to put the 2% tax on the market place. And I'm sure you all argued about it. But you just wasted all of your time and effort doing that by releasing "get rich quick" methods. In the end, it only ensures more money for you, because things inflated so much, so quickly, but the amount of gold that the average user (as in, users unable to buy cash) didn't increase in the slightest. You tell us to just buy the items off the Market Place, but we can't when we don't have any gold, can we? That means that if we want the item, we
have to pay with cash. It's as simple as that.
New - A
premium EI? What is
that? Aren't EIs already premium?
- No more broken promises. No more lying.- You lied to us about never changing the gold prices, and yet you did.
- You said you would never interfere with the economy when we asked you to help lower MC prices, but you always mess with the economy. You added a tax; that's messing with the economy. You manipulate the Daily Chance in way that manipulates the Marketplace prices.
- You keep promising updates, glitch fixes, new features, new items, etc., but they've yet to come out. What about the contact shop, or the contacts in general? We never got them...but you managed to release some as MCs. What about the music shop? What about the game from Prom?
- The entire Gaia team is not at all in sync. One dev says one thing, and then another dev gives a completely contradictory answer. Either no one knows what's going on outside of their department, or you're so deep in lies that you can't keep them straight. Some of you say you're desperately in need of money - others say that no one ever said that. Communication is essential in any business; if it's not all lies, you need to talk to each other more so that everyone is on the same wavelength.
- Glitches and Features- Instead of working so hard on releasing new features, please, first, fix the many glitches that are greatly lowering the quality of Gaia. Fixing previous errors before moving onto a new project is always the best idea. No matter how many developers personally tell me that they
do fix glitches, I won't believe it until I see something from below fixed. These are the most annoying, oldest glitches on the site.
- Listen to the users in Site Feedback and the Q&A who are finding major glitches, and then work fast to fix them. Word Bump took entirely too long for to fix and we are still disappointed about that. Just because the features are free does not mean they aren't as important.
- Before spending so much time, energy, resources, and money on a new feature, try doing some research to see how well received it will be. This will save everyone a lot of hassle, and you will potentially save millions. Not to sound rude, or stuck up, but you don't know your users well enough, or else you would have known that we wouldn't like the Labeler, for example. After getting a ton of feedback about said Labeler, such as, "let us use
nice labels, at the very least!", you haven't even done that. You put it out, ignored our displeasure, and then promptly forgot about it, moving on to the next project.
- This one is extremely annoying. Please fix the crappy inventory system! A lot of us can't even change our avatars anymore. I have over 5 pages of shirts alone, and the loading time between each page is extremely slow, and by the time you get to the next tab or page, you've forgotten what was on the previous one. We with large inventories have been having problems changing our avatars for nearly a
year, or even more, now. It's getting old, fast. In addition, there are a lot of us that are intent on having our inventories in perfect order. We spend hours perfecting our inventories, but when we equip things, they're automatically moved to the bottom, which annoys us to no end. Those that change their avatars daily will be pulling their hair out by now, trying to keep things in order.
- Another glitch that I'm not sure is widespread or well known is the profile > equipped items glitch. You click on the item to see what it is and you get an error page. You also no longer get an alt message saying what the item is, making the entire feature useless.
- We're still waiting on the quest that will give us back wings. And we're still left wondering about the proposed quests that would allow us to get old donation items. More Gaia-oriented quests will be very well accepted.
- Aquariums brought about a glitch with signatures to where the aquarium somehow ends up on top of someone's post to where you can't read it. The only way to get around it is to use FlashBlock. Example:
Link.-Stop Forgetting ThingsHere's a list of things you've forgotten to update properly that we all miss. These are things that were supposed to be updated frequently. You need to keep to updates that are/were promised.
- New Movie Mondays
- Mini Comic (we aren't even alerted when it IS updated.)
- Word Bump Bachelor Credits/Items (has that been completely forgotten about? Is it gone now?)
- Gaia Quests. Not sponsorship quests.
- THE PLOT. We've got a lot of different, incomplete plots going on right now. How about mini plot updates between huge events, which usually start NEW plots anyways. There's the vampires, Ian x Sasha, the plot from the Olympics, Timmy, Gambino, etc. Too many.
- Events- Like I said, we are still supremely disappointed in the lack of an Easter event that was promised to us. We understand that there wasn't enough time or resources, but you should not have put the Easter items into the Cash Shop. That was an insult to your users. What's worse is that we weren't even told anything about it. Easter came, and there was no event. You basically left us hanging, not saying a word until it was too late. The damage had been done. There's no changing the past, but you can at least guarantee that it doesn't happen again. And if it does, you could at least own up to it.
- Events should come first, before new features that we aren't aware of. We don't/can't go into Site Feedback all the time and yell and demand new features that we don't even know are being worked on, so you don't need to rush everything so much. You can postpone them to work on the event, and then work on them again. Since we don't know about what you're working on, we can't be disappointed. But we
will be disappointed when the event date comes along and nothing happens, with no rhyme or reason, no announcement letting us know not to bother caring.
- Premium- We know that certain aspects of Gaia will cost money to enjoy. Gaia's "core" being free does not make us happy. We do not want to be left out of the battle system because we are poor. We don't want premium rings that make you actually decent in the Cash Shop. We don't want to have to pay to play the best parts of the battle system. That's not fair on any of us except you and the few that can afford it.
- Premium features, such as the Aquarium, are also unfair. It doesn't matter that we can buy the fish from the Marketplace or get things through the daily chance. It's still a pay-to-play feature, and we were promised that that would not happen to Gaia. The items wouldn't be on the Marketplace (overly expensive) if it weren't for being buying the items with cash in the first place.
- Anything premium on Gaia, namely features, is breaking your promise. It was promised to us that Gaia would be free to play forever. However, now we're hearing about "core" Gaia, being the forums and avatars and guilds, mainly, being free, but other things being pay to play, such as the battle system. That is wrong, and it's just a way to not break your promise by being technical. You will lose a good amount of users if you do this, and we can guarantee that.
- Updates- We want the guilds updated. They're glitchy, they need a "subscribe to thread" feature, and there's many, many more suggestions all over Site Feedback and Petitions.
- Towns is overdue for an update, and there's so many things you could do. Changing seasons that actually change with the seasons. More bugs, trash, and flowers, and from there, more craftable items. Interactions, such as waving, dancing, bowing, etc., would generate more interest as well. It's always astoundingly popular in MMOs. This will be an update for both Towns and Guilds: Guild Halls. This is a large house that would come with every guild or something. Big enough to hold plenty of members; the Captain, Vice Captain, and Crew members would be able to arrange furniture when given permission, and it'd be a great place for live guild meetings in avatar form (so, aside from GIM or meeting in a random Towns square.)
- Homes is also overdue for an update. There are glitches to be fixed as well. Let us interact with our furniture. We could turn on/off TVs and lights. Live-arrange our homes (Habbo Hotel style, doing it while people are in the home), sit on furniture, lay on furniture (don't even bother saying that it will promote cybering. Users that would cyber do not need encouragement - they'll do it regardless). Multiple rooms and floors would be interesting too. It would be an amazing gold sink that many people would be interested in, especially if we could interact with the furniture.
- Fishing could use some glitch fixes and updates as well. More fish would be a good start. More bait and rods would be good too. I don't understand why there is an Angelic Rod on the site and we can't even get it. At least remove it if we can never get it. That's a waste of space.
- We want the forums tweaked so that advertisements will not get in the way of posting. We want to see new features on the forums, such as bullets, numbered lists, the ability to press CTRL+B, I, or U for Bold, Italic, or Underscore, etc. Also, when you highlight text to add a font option to it (such as bold), once you click the corresponding button, it scrolls you all the way to the top of your post again. It's made continuously editing this post a huge pain in the butt.
Also, we could really use a "Go to page ____" feature. It's so hard getting to the exact page you need in a large thread!
Put the old user bar above the posts back! This is just one more step away from all the great things that Gaia used to be. Yes, they were confusing - for all of the first five minutes. The best part of joining something new, be it a game or a website, is learning how it works. You feel accomplished after figuring things out.- Allow us to preview items in the Casino. We've wanted that for years now. Allow us to preview things for our cars, too.
- An announcement update would be great. This could allow us to choose which announcements we get. And it doesn't hurt you in the long run if someone turns off announcements about the cash shop, because if they don't want them, they won't buy them no matter what. This could work on a 'tag' system. Announcements about KiKi's roadtrip would be tagged with KiKi. Then we simply filter it out. If email sites can do it, so can you guys.
- Increase the signature limit. Coding shouldn't take up the character limit - it's really limiting our signatures.
- Moderation- This site is poorly moderated. Considering the fact that you don't even pay your moderators (as all sites don't), we think there should most certainly be more. We need more in the forums, and we need more working on things such as VJ and Towns, working to prevent cybering, scammers, and scripters.
- You should always watch your moderators somehow to make sure they know what they're doing, what with the disgusting amount of site wide bannings as of late. We are tired of being afraid to do anything on the chance that we'll get banned for something we're not aware that we did wrong. Not everyone cheats, hacks, and exploits glitches. Some people don't even know what hacks or glitches are. You should also watch and make sure your moderators aren't corrupt. I'm not saying that any are, but it's a good thing to be watchful of.
- It would be a good idea for you to browse the forums, watch people and see if they'd make a good moderator. We know you already do this, or at least, used to, years ago, but there are a lot of us that want to be mods, and would be good at it. And they're all too willing. An example of a good moderator would be a patient person that will actually respond to PMs. Someone that can judge fairly and is always willing to help. Someone that doesn't take their stress out on others. Someone that won't lord their power of the other users or use their power to gain an army of loyal suck-ups, or use their power to get free stuff. And yes, a lot of mods definitely do the aforementioned.
- You could really use a log program for Towns and VJ. What this could do is log EVERYTHING that is said within a certain range on Towns, VJ, Rally, Hills, etc. Then check the logs very frequently, and you'll be able to see everything that's been said. Those that break ToS will be banned like they deserve to be. You may already have something like this, but just not enough people reading it. I don't know. You could even make the program have filters that will only show sentences with the word cyber, free gold, etc., in them, to lower the amount that has to be read.
- Bannings- Though this somewhat goes hand in hand with moderation, we have a big concern about the mass bannings. We should not be afraid of participating in the website, fearing that we'll be banned when we've done nothing wrong. Mass bannings should not happen
unless you have substantial evidence that it wasn't just your screw up. On top of that, you should be able to
immediately unban those there were unfairly banned. To ban someone that was truthfully innocent, and then never unban them is wrong, especially when it's usually a committed, paying customer. This leads us to further think you don't care about your loyal, dedicated users. If you think someone has a hacked or botted item, don't immediately ban them, but try to figure out where the item came from first. A lot of people - even those that pay the insane cash shop prices for you - are banned unfairly over this every day. We should not be afraid to accept generosity.
Now I'm hearing stories about users that were banned unfairly, and are being told that they'll never be unbanned, even if found to be innocent. What is that? That's not fair at all.
- And though this, too, goes hand in hand with the moderators part, we think you should have more people that can deal with hacking and scamming reports. People have been waiting for years with no results. We don't understand how, when moderators are free for you, from what we've been told.
-New Features to Consider- Long ago there was a rumored mining game that created quite a stir, at least in the GCD. Why not do that? That would be very widely accepted, I think. This is something that your users want and will actually use and enjoy, especially if becomes something like fishing to where we get new items, and with those, we can make equipable items.
- As mentioned in other parts of this post, how about updating the labeler to allow us to label our friends
nicely? That would garner more interest in it and appease the users who are unhappy with it.
- How about Gaia Tetris, like was requested long ago? And Gaia Solitaire, as well. There are a ton of games that your users want - you just have to find them.
- Bots- The bots problem needs to be fixed. This is causing more problems, and costing more money, for you. The only thing to suggest is banning them, really, because more captchas only hurt those of us that are innocent. You need a team of moderators dedicated solely to scouring the Arenas and forums for bots, starting with the most common places.
- Budget & IncomeWe understand that it's really none of our business how you spend your money, but regardless, we have some suggestions that may help you save money and earn money.
- Advertise Gaia less. Currently, you're trying to pull in a ton of new users. Right now, you're mostly getting tweens that won't be able to pay for cash shop items anyway. That being the case, don't invest so much money in advertising Gaia. Instead, put up official banners that users can put on their own websites, and their signatures on other forums. I found Gaia in 2003 via some random user's webpage, which I found through Neopets. Advertising via word of mouth is generally ignored, even though it's a wonderful, free way to spread the word. A good example would be this thread, which has become what it is ONLY by word of mouth. Put up a referral system that works by, when a user joins, ask them "Who told you about Gaia?" and allow them to put in a username. Every new user brought in earns the referrer 100 gold or so.
- Do more research before working on new features. Surprises are great, but it's sad to see things that your team worked so hard on be hated and ignored because they don't interest your current userbase. Yes, some users will use the feature, but it probably won't be enough. This will save you a ton of time and money.
- Delete old, unused information from the servers, which will free up space. Deleting threads isn't an easy decision to make because someone may be coming back to it. But you could, at the very least, delete all spam topics from the servers completely, and from there, browse old, dead threads in the chatterbox. Spam threads like "lol hi *insert emote spam here* with little to no replies. I know you have said again and again that you won't delete old users, but deleting ones that were justly banned (porn/gore trolls) would be a good idea if you can find a way to get around the problems that were mentioned. This also includes the items that are still on the server (the ones we got the day Daily Chance came out, the ones like the Angelic Rod that we can't use, but still exist).
- I have more suggestions, but they're more personal, and really, I'd feel rude for suggesting them. But all in all, you really should be more open to what your users are suggesting. There are tons of us, you know that, and some of us know what we're on about, even if it doesn't seem that way.
- Communication- Admin is cute. She really, really is. But by talking through her, we lost a bit of our communication with the devs and admins, which is a little disheartening, but no big deal. What we would prefer, however, is that we get updates more often. Updates on the progress of fixing a glitch, or updates for glitches to watch out for, or updates for things going behind the scenes. I see a lot of questionnaires in Site Feedback. But not everyone goes to Site Feedback, obviously. So please, we want to know when things are fixed via a site wide announcement (and it could be filtered out if the announcement update mentioned above is implemented). It'd be a small step to closing the gap that has formed between members and admins. A gap that didn't used to exist.
My friends and I are currently working on solutions for this.- The Layout- We won't get into how we feel about the new layout. It has very much lost it's anime roots. But at the very least, could you please, please, please,
please give us our little white wing back? Someone, not so long ago, made a very nice new logo that was just like our current one, but with the wing. A little bit of Gaia died when you denied him. In fact, he left the site completely, and he was an awesome user that dedicated so much time and effort to this site. It was not at all an impossible request. Five minutes of editing, tops.
- Choose a single demographic and stick with it!- We can tell that you are attempting to turn Gaia into the next Myspace or Facebook, and we can tell you now that if we wanted to be on Myspace or Facebook, we would be. We want Gaia to be Gaia. This was not intended to be a networking site. It was intended to be an anime website where you could hang out with people of similar interests. But you're causing a forum-wide war.
You have the original players, the anime-lovers (for the most part), and then you have the new audience you're trying to appeal to, the "Myspacers". We don't exactly get along, Gaia. And this is causing a lot of unhappiness for both the anime-lovers and the Myspacers.
On top of that, you seem to be trying to appeal to both tweens, teens,
and adults. I can tell you now that that just isn't going to work. Those of us that cuss are most certainly not going to start watching what we say because you're gradually changing the rules. And you should know that tweens won't be able to buy cash anyways.
Pick one crowd and stick to it already.
A good example of what you're doing is a cartoon show that originally targets children. But then, to widen the audience, they add cursing and sex to the cartoon in an attempt to appeal to adults. You'll certainly gain adults with the new changes, but you'll lose the children. Proof lies in South Park. If the creators cleaned up the show, it would be no where
near as popular as it is.
