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Elocutionist

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Anti-Ling
congratulations
this is nothing I haven't seen
but it was more wordy
and somehow more wrong as a result

You, like too many oldbies, seem under the assumption that gaia has and will always be catering to a single audience
It's an easy mindset to keep in the GCD where we treat the ******** in rally/VH as if they were the minority and nostalgia flows like sewage

But the sad truth is while the majority has changed significantly ,the minority has near always been those that refuse to just casually play along
The people that still mourn the failures like zOMG
The people's whose only enjoyment in this site seems to come from throwing their joindate and old stories around

It's a bad thing to assume what you've read is the majority's voice
This being an entertainment site, many people having fun don't really feel obligated to constantly thank the staff for doing their job
It's only when something doesn't meet their expectations when gaians really speak out

we're also in a dawning creative era for the internet
people who just casually checked their facebooks a few years ago are embracing sites like instagram and tumblr
customization and creativity are in demand
gaia doesn't really have to do anything but advertise well/repeat its past successes and it can grow substantially
With its inventory alone it's already well ahead of its competitors

so yeah
moreso than the site dying
I think places like the GCD are dying
and to be honest it's about damn time


You're assuming I haven't looked at those places.

The most popular areas were rally, GD and CB, but now they're not anywhere near as packed as they used to be.
ROMVLVS
Anti-Ling
congratulations
this is nothing I haven't seen
but it was more wordy
and somehow more wrong as a result

You, like too many oldbies, seem under the assumption that gaia has and will always be catering to a single audience
It's an easy mindset to keep in the GCD where we treat the ******** in rally/VH as if they were the minority and nostalgia flows like sewage

But the sad truth is while the majority has changed significantly ,the minority has near always been those that refuse to just casually play along
The people that still mourn the failures like zOMG
The people's whose only enjoyment in this site seems to come from throwing their joindate and old stories around

It's a bad thing to assume what you've read is the majority's voice
This being an entertainment site, many people having fun don't really feel obligated to constantly thank the staff for doing their job
It's only when something doesn't meet their expectations when gaians really speak out

we're also in a dawning creative era for the internet
people who just casually checked their facebooks a few years ago are embracing sites like instagram and tumblr
customization and creativity are in demand
gaia doesn't really have to do anything but advertise well/repeat its past successes and it can grow substantially
With its inventory alone it's already well ahead of its competitors

so yeah
moreso than the site dying
I think places like the GCD are dying
and to be honest it's about damn time


You're assuming I haven't looked at those places.

The most popular areas were rally, GD and CB, but now they're not anywhere near as packed as they used to be.

point taken

and while I don't have numbers
I still stand by there being a more casual audience frequenting the site
we don't have many that spend hours a day on here anymore
but that seems more reflective of a changing web than the site failing

people are constantly flitting through all sorts of social media at the same time
it's only natural that gaia would fall in the chain

Dapper Regular

Anti-Ling
ROMVLVS
Anti-Ling
congratulations
this is nothing I haven't seen
but it was more wordy
and somehow more wrong as a result

You, like too many oldbies, seem under the assumption that gaia has and will always be catering to a single audience
It's an easy mindset to keep in the GCD where we treat the ******** in rally/VH as if they were the minority and nostalgia flows like sewage

But the sad truth is while the majority has changed significantly ,the minority has near always been those that refuse to just casually play along
The people that still mourn the failures like zOMG
The people's whose only enjoyment in this site seems to come from throwing their joindate and old stories around

It's a bad thing to assume what you've read is the majority's voice
This being an entertainment site, many people having fun don't really feel obligated to constantly thank the staff for doing their job
It's only when something doesn't meet their expectations when gaians really speak out

we're also in a dawning creative era for the internet
people who just casually checked their facebooks a few years ago are embracing sites like instagram and tumblr
customization and creativity are in demand
gaia doesn't really have to do anything but advertise well/repeat its past successes and it can grow substantially
With its inventory alone it's already well ahead of its competitors

so yeah
moreso than the site dying
I think places like the GCD are dying
and to be honest it's about damn time


You're assuming I haven't looked at those places.

The most popular areas were rally, GD and CB, but now they're not anywhere near as packed as they used to be.

point taken

and while I don't have numbers
I still stand by there being a more casual audience frequenting the site
we don't have many that spend hours a day on here anymore
but that seems more reflective of a changing web than the site failing

people are constantly flitting through all sorts of social media at the same time
it's only natural that gaia would fall in the chain


This.

Hot Student

i spy chris

Dedicated Loiterer

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I've seen dying and dead forums.

This is nowhere near that.

Maybe in the future, sure.

I'm not going to worry about it.

Rainbow Tycoon

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Maybe not dieing but some other word...

I wonder if there's anything we as users can do to makes fourms more exciting again.
I want to be able do something.

Vicious Brawler

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Angel Serene
I'm an oldbie myself, and I've noticed a decline in users as well, despite what the newbies think. Gaia was way more active back in the day. A lot of the newer members would be surprised if they went back in time to 03-04 and saw what it was like back then. Yeah there were a lot of bots, but those bots were not what made the threads pop. You could walk away from a single thread for a minute and come back to a good 30+ pages to catch up to. (Slightly exaggerated but not by much). Though back then all we had were chat forums and the arenas. There was not a Towns, or Rally or any games for that matter. It was all about the threads.

You just answered a lot of the reason why Gaia seems inactive now, and a lot of the reason why I haven't been out much in GCD for the past year or so. (But you excluded guilds from that, which provides a lot of the fun of the forums but with greater control over who's allowed in the cool kids' club.)

Technically speaking, current Gaia is actually many times more active than '03-'04 Gaia. (The maximum users at peak time back then were...1k or 2k by the end of 2003, and I think 5k or 10k at the end of 2004? As I type this - on a Saturday morning on the east coast of the US (so a lot of Californians, who make up a significant portion of the userbase, aren't even up yet) - there are 9,344 Gaians online. That's still a lot (although pretty far off the '06-'08 numbers, although I think much of that was affected by botfarming). It's just that Gaia then was a much smaller world than Gaia is now.

To pivot to Anti-Ling's most recent post: ...actually, that COULD be construed as a sign the site is dying! (Or that its obsessive userbase is growing up, but "dying" sounds more dramatic.) If Gaia isn't capturing the imagination of new people the same way it captured older users' in the past, then that could be a problem.

Yes, the Internet has changed with the proliferation of social media sites, but not THAT much. If you're not still capturing peoples' imagination, then...well, yeah, you might be doing something wrong (or you might just have become the new old trend - in Gaia's case, it's both).

clarion's King

Super Model

Myrielle
I guess. I was metaphorically connecting it with the title. Gaia is dying according to one faction's point of view.

Faction? Still holding onto Krylyr's itty bitty hands, huh?
I know the feel, sweetie emo

Devoted Heckler

I'm struggling to bother with a reply beyond "s**t happens"

Gaia is monetizing the site in a way that is more relevant to the ways we access and use the internet now. Ad revenue is a dying source of income, anyone with half a brain uses an Adblock feature and ads are not prominent on most sites accessed through a mobile device.
Everything we pay for on here is optional and we should be grateful for that; there are some sites where whole areas/marketplaces are inaccessible to non-paying players. The closest we came to that is the Oni Set (still obtainable via RIGs in the MP) and that area of zOMG (tickets on MP).

I'd rather have the option of a feature I don't necessarily want to use than Gaia going bye-byes.
Prophecies of DOOM have been around since near the very beginning and we're still going 10 years later.

You can borrow my special flap-floss if you wish to unbunch your panties.

Cool Cleric's Queen

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Gaia dying? Highly unlikely. If it does, I guess I'll have to find another addiction to feed me. emo

The whole firing thing though... it is happening all over the country. More and more people are being "let go" by their companies because they cannot afford to keep the staff they had compared to a few years ago [either because they literally cannot afford their staff or they are penny pinching greed sucking bastards who want to skimp on everything just to keep their own fat bonuses. That is my own opinion though.] so Gaia is no different and is not immune to this.

Yeah, they re-released the halo, so what? For a paultry few times in the entire event you could grab the halo for $1000. It was not a way to make money because if it was, the halo would be there the entire event for everyone to buy. They were re-circulating an item that was pretty much EXTINCT [seeing as there are not that many halos to begin with site wide]. It was tactic to get the halo back into the populous even if it was for a staggering $1000.

I'm not saying Gaia isn't perfect though. Their constant CEO changing, their obsession with making new games instead of trying to work and fix older games, dropping projects after only being out for like a few months, etc. They are trying to make users happy, but in the end they end up making others unhappy. It's a losing battle sadly.

I guess what I am trying to say is, well... Gaia doesn't seem to be dying. I mean hell other forum sites have died out, and Gaia seems to be the strongest to keep going this long. As an avid forum dweller I have seen many forums die out or get shut down because the people who ran the sites couldn't afford it, or moved on, or they were shut down due to things they could not control. Gaia still has a chance to keep going, we just have to keep some faith I guess.

P.S. forgive my rambling...
sweatdrop

Man-Hungry Fairy

You know, I was actually thinking the same thing a few days ago (I came back from hiatus recently). Nothing really compares to the glory days of 2009. blaugh But, I mean, this thread got to 7 pages in 2 days. Maybe Gaia isn't as popular as it was a few years ago, but I wouldn't say that it's dying. In fact, considering that this is the era of Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, I'd say that it's doing quite well.

Man-Hungry Fairy

Hi-Potion
ROMVLVS
Jin Love
If they released the halo out of being desperate for money, why would they not have just made it stay longer in the cashshop? It was there at random times for a short time. If they really needed to pump money from it they would of just left it there for the whole sale without removing it.

Plus it was the 10th year anniversary for the halo, I kinda see that as a big enough reason to want to re-release it. There aren't many either and it is something that a lot of people have asked for over the years. Companies to tend to hold sales to fork in extra money, just business really.

I don't think any user can fully say if gaia is dying for sure or not. Sure somethings might seem a bit slower in some areas but we don't know how well they are doing financially (yes there were layoffs but there are times when companies need to downsize when things hit them hard). My point short is though that unless we see posts rarely ever being made in any forum, and hardly any activity at all, I don't think we can be so certain about how long it may be around.

There have been threads as far back as 2005 (or more) saying gaia would shut down in 1-4 years, and yet here it is still going.


That'sthe thing though, I don't really remember users asking for it. They wanted them, but that was because it was a status symbol. The ultimate quest, the I only knew 4 users who had one kind of special. They didn't need to re-release it, people are perfectly happy buying new RIGs every month, new bundles, recolored EIs, etc. There really shouldn't be any reason that there were summer sales to begin with, theoretically, they shouldn't need it.

But, the thing is, the forums are slow. This thread went 12 minutes before it got a single reply. Spam threads used to get 10 posts in 5 minutes by people telling them not to spam, at 3 AM.

The GCD is so slow now that a snail is a poor metaphor for it. It needed it's oil changed 20 years ago and now the engine is seized. Even the CB is slow compared to how it used to be. Rally is even dead.
If Gaia REALLY was hard up for money, then the halo would not have been 1000 dollars, only a small few people could afford that. If they wanted cash, they woulda priced it at $300-500, that way more people would have bought the halo. Gaia isnt dying, I'm disappointed that a GCDer would even make this topic.

Sorry, I totally missed the Halo being resold. $1000?! eek

Professional Novice

I think it all depends on what you mean by "dying", or what you mean by "Gaia". I have no doubt that the "Gaia" I joined back in 06 is long since dead. It's just not the same anymore. But I don't take that as an indication that the site will close down in 2 years.

Are there fewer people on the site these days? Maybe so, but I'd wager they are spending more money than the user base of years past. I don't think that a person joining the site today would look around and see a dying site, just a few long time users complaining about change.

For me, the hold that Gaia once had over me has greatly diminished. With all the new items and features we get today, it feels like sensory overload. If every day is Christmas, it's never Christmas. We used to hunger for new things a lot, but when we finally got something, it was exciting.

Anxious Loiterer

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Yorugami


I agreed with everything you wrote! 3nodding It really does feel like we (the community) just sit around and wait for the next RIG to arrive, and repeat...

Honestly, if Gaia just stopped releasing items tomorrow and just updated with the manga, NPC storylines/interaction and events I would be satisfied! Comapred to other avatar based forum sites we really are spoiled for choice in regards to equippable items.....

ETA: Well tbh, I would prefer new items but maybe only once every 2-3 months so that there would be a build up like with the first EIs. It was so much fun to watch them evolve and speculate on what was coming next. REIs are just that for me - too rapid. whee

Gaian

Websites and games such as Gaia don't ever truly die. Usually, another company either picks em up and publishes it again with some changes, or the idea itself is used in another direction.


Ideas don't die, they either move in a different direction or evolve.

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