Ask the admin (05/23/2011)

[Lanzer]

Hello everyone,

After months of development Monster Galaxy is finally at the quality in which we can present to Gaians. I hope that for those who enjoy our artwork and storyline will give this new game a try.

The new friends chat feature is also close to completion. Be sure to keep your eyes peeled for our announcement coming later this week.

Fanime is happening this weekend in San Jose. Hope those who are in California can make it!

[carbonphyber]

first post!

[scullylam]

yay ata!!!!


hey lanzer! did you like the new pirates movie? i saw it and it was soooo good. if you were a pirate, what adventure would you take?

since gaia is going to be at anime expo, you should try to either interview hatsune miku or try to give everyone a hint as to what her concert will be like. http://mikufes.com/

when will zOMG be given another full update? will buccaneer boardwalk be completed later this year or due to the staff that can implement the update is working on Moga, that the undate will be forever delayed? and lanzer, for fun, you should come to a zOMG dev meet on a friday. actually, any staff that would be interested should come.

also, is zOMG still being connected to the main site? is that plan still in the works? here already nicolae and cresento, two characters introduced from the game, so it would make sense for zOMG to be a part of every day gaian life too.

[Anaella]

Hey, how's everyone today? :3

-There's been a whole lot of debating about Monster Galaxy and zOMG recently. Many are annoyed that so much effort has been put into a simplistic pokemon clone over zOMG, but I'm not here to nag about that. I understand that zOMG is slowly dying because it isn't turning enough profit, so I have a suggestion to help boost both games. Why not make it possible to use the monsters you get in Monster Galaxy to help fight with you in zOMG? It will give the monsters in MG a practical use for Gaians (as the game really doesn't give us much in terms of rewards) and more incentive to play zOMG.

-Will Monster Galaxy ever be made available to users who do not have nor want a facebook account?

-Will we be seeing more of the classic NPCs during the Summer events? We haven't seen a lot of them in a while.

-Is there any chance we'll be seeing the Easter Bunny again this year? It is the year of the rabbit you know. wink

[Pie]

Hi, Lanzer! It's been a long time since I've had any questions for you, but after Monster Galaxy's "release" to Gaia and zOMG getting demoted to second fiddle for this game, I'm all fired up!

As I understand it, two of zOMG's three devs were moved off the game and over to Monster Galaxy. As a result, zOMG is now struggling to survive, as we've seen with the Easter event being a whopping three weeks late despite being a repeat of the years before!

In light of this, I conducted a poll here in the GCD on which game Gaians would rather see prioritized, zOMG or Monster Galaxy. At the time of this post, with over 450 Gaians voting, approximately 75.0% want to see resources moved back to zOMG, while only 10.7% want to see Monster Galaxy take priority. (The remaining 14.3% opted not to choose between them.) Okay, it's probably not as accurate as, say, a site-wide poll posted as an announcement, but you must admit the data says something.

The player interest is still there. Gaians want to see fresh content for this game.


With that being said, my questions are:

- When are we going to see developers moved back to zOMG?

- Are we going to see smaller updates of content in the meantime?
-- Specifically, are we going to see new zOMG recipes that are not holiday treats? I don't think we even need to see new areas or animated for this, just new items fitting the area themes... at worse, some new ingredients dropped as well. Heck, you could just release recolors of the old recipes, and players would go wild for them! (I would go crazy for color variants of the Pearls! And I know from the start there's been a demand for color variants of the Kokeshi Kimono, as well as green and gray variants of the Lionfish Tail to match the Emeraldback and Diamondback items.)

- Speaking of the recipe system, could you pass along the suggestion that crafted recipe items should be taken out of zOMG's daily freebies?
-- I have felt for a long time that this is a major reason why people are not bothering to play zOMG. After all, why complete the Ninja quests when you can receive a Ninja Sword just for showing up? The markets are oversaturated with these items, making recipes worthless! On top of that, it's been making Nicolae slack off on his job... I mean, look at the manga! With no one regularly crafting recipes, he's running around in a floating city, presumably leaving only his horse to watch the shop. And that's just terrible.


Thanks in advance! Hope you have an awesome week!

[Tevokkia]

Jambool Blog - February 28, 2011

While this work is underway, we made the difficult decision to close new signups to the Social Gold platform today and will discontinue all payment processing on May 31, 2011. Existing developers will be able to continue processing payments through Social Gold until the end of May and log in to the Social Gold merchant console through September.

Because Social Gold payments will not be accepted after the end of this month, how will AutoCash be affected? Will the program be suspended until Jambool has finished its transition to Google (so far, I haven't seen any info on their blog on how long that may be), or is there some kind of backup in effect?

My husband and I got booted out of the system when we had to change our payment methods (our old cards expired), so we're a little sad we haven't been able to get our AutoCash for awhile.

[Platonix]

USEFUL LINKS

The home of past Ask The Admin topics: Ask the Admin Archives subforum

AskED the Admin: Answer Compilation (built and maintained by yours truly)

[Cyndelle Maxwell]

Certain items that are listed in Sam's Body & Parts are shown as "Available for Scion XD, Scion XB, and Scion TC", but when I purchased one of them (a set of rims), the Garage says that they only work on the Scion XB model. Can something be done to fix this, so that they (and any other items with this same error) can be equipped on all three models like the shop says?

[Platonix]

I don't have a Facebook account.

I don't want a Facebook account.

But I do want to be aware of what's going on on Gaia.

So now that Monster Galaxy is (kind of) on Gaia, I took a look at the Monster Galaxy forum to see if I could find some compelling reason to make a Facebook account just to be able to play. And in that forum's FAQ, I found this:

admin

Q. Why has Gaia been building this silly game on Facebook instead of updating stuff here?
A. There are different teams at Gaia focusing on different projects. Monster Galaxy is brought to you by the team working on new initiatives, especially delivering great games to people in different places and ultimately bringing them back to Gaia. There is a separate team working on Gaia Online focused on improving the site. Ultimately all teams are working towards the goal of growing Gaia and making it successful.

...this issue needs to be cleared up once and for all: The "Different Teams" Excuse Is Dead. It died back when Gaia Staff first publicly admitted that the building of Monster Galaxy's team involved gutting zOMG's team. Please give us an actual answer to the question of why Monster Galaxy was this important; has there been a noticable increase in people joining Gaia from Facebook because of Monster Galaxy?

[PQ and Retrostacja]

Hey everyone! I haven't been to one of these in ages! After I got my job, I don't get home until 8:30pm EST and I miss out on all the fun.

Meka from Monster Galaxy is awesome! I wish my computer handled the gameplay better though. I'd like to see MG incorporated into Gaia in terms of story plot. I'd like to see zOMG put back on the front burner even more so.

I have some quick questions that I hope can be answered. ^_^

1. Will any upcoming events involve the mechanical beings of Gaia? And if not, would it be considered?
2. Can there be clarification as to the legality of robots outside of Aekea? Liam has said that only Aekea has a deal with the government to have them exist, and yet we have had mechanical NPCs from every other town save for Barton.
3. Can we have more Vesper items? The Vesper Core doesn't have is helmet and that's the best part!

This isn't a question, but The Robots of Gaia want to say thank you to warrior_of_boognish and all the other artists yet again for supplying us with amazing upgrades.

[plasmafire]

How long till the next chapter of zomg is ready?
We have been waiting for it for two years now...


And Has any progress been made in forming a Gaians Gone Wild softball team for this year?

[DJ Helsing]

Hi everyone!

Just dropping by to say Hi!

[CleoSombra]

A lot of people are upset about "The Raptor is Coming" forum.

For me, this isn't about Christianity or religion. It's nothing to do with the body of a religious figure and the copy-pasta of a dinosaur's head. It's about making fun of people's beliefs. Like "LOL, there are people that are so crazy that they think the world is going to end! They're all like 'The Rapture is Coming!' Lol! YEAH RIGHT! TEH RAPTORS R COMING!!11'

It's not . . . funny. People being with their families, eating what they feel is going to be their last meal . . . that's not funny. It's not something to make fun of. People quitting their jobs, giving away their money and their house . . . that's not funny. The belief might be ridiculous, but it's not something to mock.

I was okay with the forum's existence, because this May 21st rapture thing IS a hot-topic. It's gotten a lot of threads. There's been lots of talk about it. What I didn't like was the forum and the item. It was turned into an "event." To me, that was taking it too far. That was dramatizing it too much.

This isn't about Harold Camping. There are a lot of people who have heard his message and fell into believing it. People are insulting other people in that forum - Camping, Christians, or the people who fell into believing in this.

It just strips people of their dignity.

People try to say that Raptor Jesus is an old meme on the internet. But the thing is, Gaia is not like the internet. On the internet, you're allowed to post porn and gore. You can be vulgar and nasty to people. You can insult anyone you want to. You can't do these things on Gaia. Gaia has rules that prevent people from making fun of, harassing, and insulting others. Do these rules apply only to other users? If I want to shame entire groups of people on their ethnicity, I'd be called racist. If I wanted to shame people based on their sex, I'd be called sexist. But it's okay to "poke fun" at religion?

I have a sense of humor and I can chuckle at some high-brow stuff. At least with Southpark and Family Guy and shows like that, they mock anything and everything (that their network doesn't block). But with Gaia, it's not like that. On Gaia, you can be banned for trolling and flaming. Avatars that are considered too vulgar, that use Gaia's items, even without glitches, can be reset.

If someone went around posting a picture of a Raptor Jesus in a Religion/Morality thread, they'd be warned for spamming and for trolling. For posting material meant to annoy, bother, or irritate people.

Why is it that Gaia doesn't have any religious symbols - no images of Christ, or Buddha, no star of David or Pillars of Faith, but it's perfectly fine to post memes making fun of what beliefs Gaia prescribes as being "silly"? If we're going to mock anyone who believes the rapture is imminent, then why not mock anyone who believes in Jesus or Buddha or God? These beliefs can all be seen as irrational or crazy or strange. By making fun of some and not others, it's like saying that some are stupid and others are not. It says that some are worth showing dignity and respect to, others are not. Why is there no "Zombie Jesus" hot-topic forum during Easter?

[plasmafire]

Could we get an EI that has nothing but "I AM" poses for all the zomg creatures or various animals?