Gaia is Dying, I know there's other threads.

[OddBird]

eh, active users decreased sharply a few years back, but they're staying pretty steady

a few months ago i saw 7,000 online, today it is 20,000 - for users online at one time that's a pretty solid population

[Drink More Beer]

I think the problem is that they keep trying to find something which will be really successful, and it just hasn't happened yet. They put a lot of work into zomg but it's pretty quiet on there these days. I know that may be because there aren't any more updates but they don't make enough from it anyway. Heralds of Chaos was a complete failure. I do think they are struggling, but I hope they don't die. sad
Also, since coming back from my hiatus I noticed the GCD is a lot slower than it used to be, which is sucky. :c

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[idaruishinee]

Tbh, I wouldn't say Gaia is dying just yet.

If the user count drop below 5K, then yes, I would somewhat agree. The user online count is at 17.5K right now, so Gaia is pretty much holding on.

[Parodius-Daryl]

I think Gaia is pretty sound! ninja

been surfing for hours with ads blockers off,
doing GC videos

[Amechan]

Gaia used to care about being a free website. Sure, spend $5 a month on a Donation Item (a reward for helping website run). This was classy. Seriously, I felt good every time I bought an DI on Gaia. I was contributing to a website that I loved.

I think Gaia started dying the moment they released the Cash Shop and changed the DIs to MCs. I also think they lost decent & fun members of the community. Before the Cash Shop, a user could get by on Gaia without paying anything. Sure, Gaia doesn't cost anything to join, but now if you want any of the pretty shiny items, you're better off spending at least $50 a month. And the lovely MCs are never good anymore. They're alright, but they're usually not worth the $2.50 I spend on them. And now anytime I buy anything on Gaia I feel wasteful and ashamed.

[Zepheros]

OddBird

eh, active users decreased sharply a few years back, but they're staying pretty steady

a few months ago i saw 7,000 online, today it is 20,000 - for users online at one time that's a pretty solid population

Considering 50,000 used to be an average with 90,000+ for a daily peak, I would very much disagree. The market speaks for itself as well. 80k active listings? That's pitiful. It used to be twice that 4+ years ago.

I don't follow this site much anymore, but numbers really do speak for themself. Gaia's biggest problem was injecting the market with so much cash crap. It oversaturated the market and never let up from there. Rarity and value of older items has barely budged in the last 5+ years.

[Sand Dancer Shaka]

Amechan

Gaia used to care about being a free website. Sure, spend $5 a month on a Donation Item (a reward for helping website run). This was classy. Seriously, I felt good every time I bought an DI on Gaia. I was contributing to a website that I loved.

I think Gaia starting dying the moment they released the Cash Shop and changed the DIs to MCs. I also think they lost decent & fun members of the community. Before the Cash Shop, a user could get by on Gaia without paying anything. Sure, Gaia doesn't cost anything to join, but now if you want any of the pretty shiny items, you're better off spending at least $50 a month. And the lovely MCs are never good anymore. They're alright, but they're usually not worth the $2.50 I spend on them. And now anytime I buy anything on Gaia I feel wasteful and ashamed.

I don't know if I'd say that I "got by" back then... it'd take a month of continuous posting to even afford one MC, and with that amount I couldn't ever even touch the Halo/Panda hat gold value back then sweatdrop

I think it's possible to "get by" by the same mechanism now, I don't feel any better or worse off compared with back then when I don't buy a CS item.... Although, admittedly, I wouldn't be able to quest any item over 1.5M realistically at the moment (without GC).

[OddBird]

Zepheros

OddBird

eh, active users decreased sharply a few years back, but they're staying pretty steady

a few months ago i saw 7,000 online, today it is 20,000 - for users online at one time that's a pretty solid population

Considering 50,000 used to be an average with 90,000+ for a daily peak, I would very much disagree. The market speaks for itself as well. 80k active listings? That's pitiful. It used to be twice that 4+ years ago.

I don't follow this site much anymore, but numbers really do speak for themself. Gaia's biggest problem was injecting the market with so much cash crap. It oversaturated the market and never let up from there. Rarity and value of older items has barely budged in the last 5+ years.

You should follow it a bit more so you can see that during that peak time Gaia had not yet cracked down on bots. emotion_yatta

[Tsende]

I think the plunge happened after the cash shop was released. I wish that Gaia went back to only monthly collectibles and advertisements to support the site. Sure, maintaining Gaia takes up a lot of money, but the site has much less users than it did before the cash shop.

Frankly, I got sick of new cash shop items appearing almost every day. That and avatars weren't my thing anymore.

[Zeroah]

The year the Ghosting &' Fountains Glitches began to rise, 07'-08' is when the "Decline" was in talks. There were users from very well known places here on Gaia that seen or just figured the site would be it's own downfall

2007- Everything was booming! Forums User Activity, games eveything!
2008- There was delcine from numerous places just wasn't evident because the populations was still in the 80k-100k
2009- Users made note of how things were changing &' on the leave of well known close friends.
2010- Population DROPPED. Users stopped showing up in their well known forums, towns, guilds, various site wide changes were implemented. Still some stood strong.

2011-Present.- Besides users leaving on their own along with the site wide clean ups. Some just felt as if Gaia became more of a by the book corporation rather than the user friendly site we onced loved. They began focusing slowly on the exchange of money for things that would please users( "Flashier Items" )but it also seems like whenever something is handed to us that we dislike, more items are handed to us as a distractions.

[Zepheros]

OddBird

Zepheros

OddBird

eh, active users decreased sharply a few years back, but they're staying pretty steady

a few months ago i saw 7,000 online, today it is 20,000 - for users online at one time that's a pretty solid population

Considering 50,000 used to be an average with 90,000+ for a daily peak, I would very much disagree. The market speaks for itself as well. 80k active listings? That's pitiful. It used to be twice that 4+ years ago.

I don't follow this site much anymore, but numbers really do speak for themself. Gaia's biggest problem was injecting the market with so much cash crap. It oversaturated the market and never let up from there. Rarity and value of older items has barely budged in the last 5+ years.

You should follow it a bit more so you can see that during that peak time Gaia had not yet cracked down on bots. emotion_yatta

Source? Links? Proof? I find it hard to believe bots accounted for all of that activity.

[OddBird]

Zepheros

OddBird

Zepheros

OddBird

eh, active users decreased sharply a few years back, but they're staying pretty steady

a few months ago i saw 7,000 online, today it is 20,000 - for users online at one time that's a pretty solid population

Considering 50,000 used to be an average with 90,000+ for a daily peak, I would very much disagree. The market speaks for itself as well. 80k active listings? That's pitiful. It used to be twice that 4+ years ago.

I don't follow this site much anymore, but numbers really do speak for themself. Gaia's biggest problem was injecting the market with so much cash crap. It oversaturated the market and never let up from there. Rarity and value of older items has barely budged in the last 5+ years.

You should follow it a bit more so you can see that during that peak time Gaia had not yet cracked down on bots. emotion_yatta

Source? Links? Proof? I find it hard to believe bots accounted for all of that activity.

Nobody said "all" of that activity, but it accounted for a large portion of it.
Here's a different topic where a user mentions the purge. (She's wrong about the user count not going over 25k in the past few months, but that's beside the point.) If you're asking me to actually go find staff postings about it, that's far too much effort to prove a point to someone in a thread who self-admittedly hasn't been around to have a basis for their belief that there weren't that many bots.

[Anabaena]

Gaia has been in a downward spiral since 2008. Less users: Well, we'll just make less users pay more money. But then again less users: just have them pay more! Etc. Etc.

You'd have to be blind not to see the signs.

Gaia has been focusing more and more on getting revenue instead of providing their users with quality. Now you might say that gaia has just been maturing to an actual company, but I do believe that in 2007/2008 gaia was pretty much grown out of the "new" website kind of thing. Things were pretty stable back then (in my opinion).
But, some bad business decisions were made. And some more. (Think about it, zOMG, facebook games and certain smaller features, all pumped full of money only to pull out the plug when they weren't succesful enough. That was money coming from us. Vanished.)
Combining that with a declining userbase (which may just have gone hand in hand with those bad business decisions) and you get.. this.

Now Gaia keeps on trying to get us distracted and maybe even sort of addicted with new shinies so they get more revenue.
But they're not understanding that with this strategy they're giving people more incentive to stop giving money.
It's breaking the economy (really, old RIG prizes are worth practically nothing, unless it involves alchemy).
It's tearing up the community into rich and poor.
It's scaring away new users (because, really, we oldies are also just moving away because of RL) while it's so vital to stimulate them to stay.
And making the users in general feel like cash cows and/or that gaia's dying.
And I'd even say the sheer amount of 'shinies' is overwhelming pretty much all of us nowadays.

There's my ramble to you.
I hope you enjoyed it. wink

[Zepheros]

OddBird

Zepheros

OddBird

Zepheros

OddBird

eh, active users decreased sharply a few years back, but they're staying pretty steady

a few months ago i saw 7,000 online, today it is 20,000 - for users online at one time that's a pretty solid population

Considering 50,000 used to be an average with 90,000+ for a daily peak, I would very much disagree. The market speaks for itself as well. 80k active listings? That's pitiful. It used to be twice that 4+ years ago.

I don't follow this site much anymore, but numbers really do speak for themself. Gaia's biggest problem was injecting the market with so much cash crap. It oversaturated the market and never let up from there. Rarity and value of older items has barely budged in the last 5+ years.

You should follow it a bit more so you can see that during that peak time Gaia had not yet cracked down on bots. emotion_yatta

Source? Links? Proof? I find it hard to believe bots accounted for all of that activity.

Nobody said "all" of that activity, but it accounted for a large portion of it.
Here's a different topic where a user mentions the purge. (She's wrong about the user count not going over 25k in the past few months, but that's beside the point.) If you're asking me to actually go find staff postings about it, that's far too much effort to prove a point to someone in a thread who self-admittedly hasn't been around to have a basis for their belief that there weren't that many bots.

All, large or none, it does not give a solid estimate on just how "many" were bots back in the days. Your word and that topic do not hold any more weight than mine does. The simple fact is the site is much slower than it was back then and plenty of users acknowledge that now, in that thread you linked and everywhere on the site. When you need to re-sell extremely old and rare items that were otherwise nearly impossible to get... lol. Also the ads, holy hell the ads. Cash-cowing up the wazoo. Market has been dropping dropping dropping for the last year. Hello Gaia depression! I really don't need to go on. It isn't news to anyone. Just those in denial.

[Virellius Corvinus]

ROMVLVS

During 'prime time' the time that most Americans are relaxing, in the past one ofthe more active periods on Gaia, for close to 10 minutes this thread got 0 replies and yet only 4 threads are higher than it in the GCD.

I can only extrapolate this as proof that the lack of users has led to the cost cutting profit increasing nature of Gaia's death.

How long do you think it will take before Gaia's servers are sold to some Chinese WoW knock-off?

^ This. I made a thread about how much this place has changed in the year(s) since I've been on, and it actually got four pages of replies without me saying more than maybe one reply.

This place is horrifyingly slow.