Tansee
Vickicat
But with the way Gaia is run now with the focus all on money and how much they can get out of all of us, I question if I'd even enjoy another site created by Gaia.
I feel the exact same way. It's all about money now. I'm getting sort of tired of Gaia anyway. There are just too many nasty hateful people on here, not to mention others with fake acts pretending to be nice
but making fun of people behind their backs. Maybe there's another site that's friendlier, with kinder people. When I joined Gaia there were some really nice people running things here, but they've all been laid off or quit.
That's quite some projection, there. If you don't like the staffing, then simply leave. What's happened has happened. Sisky and Uncle Kenny have been incredibly insightful (Way more than Gaian staff in the past), and are as professional as possible (Though Sisky tends to drop that when talking to friends, which isn't a problem). They've helped clear a lot of confusion and panic, and work their asses off to ensure we know what's going on, why it's going on, and how we can possibly help improve on it to make it better.
If you want to go back to a time where answers were never really given whatsoever and where the items were absolutely atrocious in design and function, where the only people around were Narutards and weeaboos, and the only people worth a damn were the ones with 100k gold (You know, ACTUAL elitism this site suffered for a long time as opposed to now?), then go to another site. Gaia has improved, and through their improvements money is needed. It's a business. Getting angry at them for trying to sell us great products to keep them afloat is like getting pissed that Goodwill offers items above $20 in their store. It's asinine, and incredibly (ugh I hate using this word for how much misuse it's been getting lately due to the video game industry) self-entitled. zOMG was declared dead because no one else was willing to work on it, and they couldn't find anyone to replace [JK] on top of finding programmers who had the qualifications and desires to step up to the plate. They couldn't afford to keep it alive. If they tried, we would have lost all of the virtual spaces, and most likely all of the events too.
RIGs have become central to Gaia because they give us a storm of items (15 at least) every month on top of the bundles and the monthly gold shop updates. They will always be here, and I like that. My favorite items are RIG items, personally. I guarantee you, if the RIG items were gold shop items, the rare ones would be in Dernier Cri for a good 400% of the markup that's priced on the marketplace, with some exceptions.
REIs have given artists a breath of air from EIs and their incredibly strict nature. It's allowed them to place smaller themes, and experiment different poses and combinations without hyping up a huge item to be a major disappointment (Prince of the Sea, anyone?). EIs still exist, as two are up right now as we speak, and REIs have been helping with broadening horizons.
If Gaia were to make an 18+ website, it would be a lot less red tape-y on many subjects and themes that otherwise could not be present. For example, Don Kuro's story and the deal about killing gods is slowly becoming more and more violent and mature, and as a result cannot truly blossom under a PG-13 ruling considering the direction it's definitely heading. Gaia can easily bring a schism between more mature and more friendly themes between sister-sites. It would honestly do a lot of good, and allow even better regulation on the main site due to how sketchy some subjects can be under the ToS.