Fading Firefly
Prophet
B e a r i s a l
Fading Firefly
Prophet
B e a r i s a l
Fading Firefly
Prophet
baen242
Zseigh
OG Member
Andromeda Phoenix
Shy Gaian
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taxidermy jesus
Profitable Prophet
Sand Dancer Shaka
Special Snowflake
Adnama Lavode
Verge is really just the most recent example of Gaia's poor execution of a new feature, if you can call it that. It's the newest and easiest thing to reference, but really, Gaia's been doing things like this for a while now. Not particularly with this much money involved until now, but things that seem shady/money grubbing, awkwardly released, half-assed, or just out-of-the-blue things that nobody wanted.
Examples: Releasing event items in a bundle for sale, which makes events pointless (They fixed it after people complained, but they shouldn't have even tried it. Poor decisions that have a lasting effect in users' minds.)
Not actually putting the things into Towns 2 that people petitioned for/asked for, like new bugs and flowers. Simple things to make it more interesting. Instead they made it bloated, somehow more laggy and without new flowers, bugs or features that were asked for.
This new slew of social games that nobody really plays much, because they only focused on functionality, flashiness and money making potential, not so much making it fun or fair to play. Heralds of Chaos for this. It seemed to come out of nowhere and was kind of boring. Still is, honestly and I don't see too many people playing it unless they want the achievements.
Then they have some good ideas but screw it up by bringing too much of a money element into it. An example of this is Rumble Kitten. Art was great, story was decent, theme; loved it. But there was no way to get some things in the game without spending a lot of money. You literally could not earn enough in the game by playing the game. By a lot, I mean more than $100 spent on a iPad/iPhone game. And half the time it was broken.
They make zOMG and pour a ton of resources into it, connect it directly to Gaia's storyline, shops and other things, then discontinue work on it. Partly because the Dev that worked on it left, but honestly, if the feature was seen as important like many users did, they would've found someone to update it and keep it running. It could have been so much more than it was, but instead we get updated Rally and Towns 2.
There's a slew of other games that were started and were closed shortly after, which makes me wonder if new games are even worth playing. They may be gone in a couple months. Examples: Summer Springs and Backyard Monsters. (Then Monster Galaxy came along, but how long will that be around? It seems to be currently bugged out or broken.)
The recent stuff with the A. Halo has caused people to question Gaia's ethics, saying one thing and doing another for the sake of money. Even in the most innocent context of "giving people what they want", the Halo re-release is a poorly executed way of re-introducing small amounts of the Halo into circulation.
Then, after people complain about Gaia pricing things too high, they release Verge. A club to exclude people based on their real world economic status (since you buy with real cash) and "reward" people who buy things with more things to buy at vastly higher prices. And then within a day or so, the prices on the horns are slashed in half at random, the people who potentially bought them at full price are screwed, then are hastily given a bonus (whatever it is, I haven't seen it) to make up for it as if to say "Hey, we screwed up again, here's a thing so you won't feel cheated." It's even the default store on the store page now and they don't shuffle anymore, so I'm a bit tired of it being shoved in my face. The "Don't like it, don't buy it" has some application to Verge too, as it does to anything, but the extra effects of the store's release may be more damaging than just a failed store attempt. Verge may end up being shuffled aside, but people will remember all of the above if they're still around on the site.
All of these things and more have contributed to the waning of morale of users on this site, not just Verge and it's exclusionary nature. Verge is just the most obvious and most telling feature to crop up so far. I think it's a direct reflection of Gaia's management and how disconnected they are from the users. They don't listen to us, and they don't listen to the Gaia employees that are connected with the users. And as a business, that is a very bad road to go down.
Also, you didn't come off as accusatory or whatever, so it's cool. 3nodding
Edit: Now this is a new interesting thing. Gaia is giving actual gifts people who start buying Gaia cash for the first time. Good ones that actually seem like rewards, though everyone else who has been spending cash all along either gets excluded from a guild/shop for not paying enough, or have paid enough to get into shop/guild so they can spend more.
They're just doing things tactlessly and a** backward now. emotion_facepalm
Examples: Releasing event items in a bundle for sale, which makes events pointless (They fixed it after people complained, but they shouldn't have even tried it. Poor decisions that have a lasting effect in users' minds.)
Not actually putting the things into Towns 2 that people petitioned for/asked for, like new bugs and flowers. Simple things to make it more interesting. Instead they made it bloated, somehow more laggy and without new flowers, bugs or features that were asked for.
This new slew of social games that nobody really plays much, because they only focused on functionality, flashiness and money making potential, not so much making it fun or fair to play. Heralds of Chaos for this. It seemed to come out of nowhere and was kind of boring. Still is, honestly and I don't see too many people playing it unless they want the achievements.
Then they have some good ideas but screw it up by bringing too much of a money element into it. An example of this is Rumble Kitten. Art was great, story was decent, theme; loved it. But there was no way to get some things in the game without spending a lot of money. You literally could not earn enough in the game by playing the game. By a lot, I mean more than $100 spent on a iPad/iPhone game. And half the time it was broken.
They make zOMG and pour a ton of resources into it, connect it directly to Gaia's storyline, shops and other things, then discontinue work on it. Partly because the Dev that worked on it left, but honestly, if the feature was seen as important like many users did, they would've found someone to update it and keep it running. It could have been so much more than it was, but instead we get updated Rally and Towns 2.
There's a slew of other games that were started and were closed shortly after, which makes me wonder if new games are even worth playing. They may be gone in a couple months. Examples: Summer Springs and Backyard Monsters. (Then Monster Galaxy came along, but how long will that be around? It seems to be currently bugged out or broken.)
The recent stuff with the A. Halo has caused people to question Gaia's ethics, saying one thing and doing another for the sake of money. Even in the most innocent context of "giving people what they want", the Halo re-release is a poorly executed way of re-introducing small amounts of the Halo into circulation.
Then, after people complain about Gaia pricing things too high, they release Verge. A club to exclude people based on their real world economic status (since you buy with real cash) and "reward" people who buy things with more things to buy at vastly higher prices. And then within a day or so, the prices on the horns are slashed in half at random, the people who potentially bought them at full price are screwed, then are hastily given a bonus (whatever it is, I haven't seen it) to make up for it as if to say "Hey, we screwed up again, here's a thing so you won't feel cheated." It's even the default store on the store page now and they don't shuffle anymore, so I'm a bit tired of it being shoved in my face. The "Don't like it, don't buy it" has some application to Verge too, as it does to anything, but the extra effects of the store's release may be more damaging than just a failed store attempt. Verge may end up being shuffled aside, but people will remember all of the above if they're still around on the site.
All of these things and more have contributed to the waning of morale of users on this site, not just Verge and it's exclusionary nature. Verge is just the most obvious and most telling feature to crop up so far. I think it's a direct reflection of Gaia's management and how disconnected they are from the users. They don't listen to us, and they don't listen to the Gaia employees that are connected with the users. And as a business, that is a very bad road to go down.
Also, you didn't come off as accusatory or whatever, so it's cool. 3nodding
Edit: Now this is a new interesting thing. Gaia is giving actual gifts people who start buying Gaia cash for the first time. Good ones that actually seem like rewards, though everyone else who has been spending cash all along either gets excluded from a guild/shop for not paying enough, or have paid enough to get into shop/guild so they can spend more.
They're just doing things tactlessly and a** backward now. emotion_facepalm
I agree that there does seem to be a slew of recent changes that don't appear well thought out. The majority of these problems isn't so much the idea, but the lack of user consultation beforehand. The event items being sold wasn't a good idea just because it should've been remembered that when links were pushed out after X-mas which allowed users to collect any missed items (thereby negating the X-mas event participation) there was a lot of user backlash sweatdrop So it makes no sense to have re-released it that way.
Communication is what's lacking on all fronts in my opinion. Really, what is needed is to have a frank discussion with everyone at the table, managers, staff and users. We need to push for greater interactivity (like we used to have), to save Gaia from making costly mistakes they need to ask us (some, if not all) if they want to push out something controversial.
I feel that the social games should be thought of as separate to Gaia itself, most of them weren't even accessible to Gaians through Gaia, and I think it was a mistake to have had them connected to Gaia in any sense. Gaia and social games are what I consider to be the polar opposites to each other: Social games by nature always require money at some point, Gaia can never cost you any money if you don't want to. In most of the cases the social games maintenance is controlled by outsourcing to other companies, and Gaia's made the mistake of tagging their name to them instead of making a "sister company name." Social games have a short lived life-span for pretty much all of the apps (which aren't puzzle based) so canning them is only a matter of time, social gaming makes it's money from the initial cash grab and as users get bored it's abandoned; different to gaia in that Gaia is a site that is based on longevity. While it can be argued that Gaia abandons it's games too, I think that they get a lot more flack for it that other sites because they leave the games up for us to enjoy instead of just ripping them down (like other sites) so that users eventually forget about them, and newbies never know about them....
I feel, that the social gaming aspect should be treated separately to Gaia as entities, although I acknowledge that, yes, some of the money generated by Gaia would've gone towards them, but they would've had to have gotten the money from here whenever they try to expand. HoC was something that they tried as a test run on Gaians before launching into FB or Apps, I never really saw it as a "Gaia" game, because I never felt it was targeted at us, it was always targeted at someone else. It's not an excuse for Gaia, it's just why I've never felt that the social games applied to Gaia myself.
I think there were many more reasons why zOMG was put into maintenance mode, I think that users were passionate about it- but juuuust not enough users. There were a lot of issues with modernising it to make it more able to be "ported" to different platforms, etc... While it's s shame it's not updated now zOMG was one of those games that was actively advertised outside of Gaia and still failed to gain enough popularity (I saw it advertised in various manga magazines and anime based magazines). I like zOMG don't get me wrong, but I don't think that Towns2 is necessarily a bad thing. Towns 2 is still not really fully ready yet, once Towns 1 goes then I'll judge it against other features, doing so now kind of feels like I'm not giving it the chance. Lots of users have been asking for an updated Towns so I feel they're finally doing something that others asked for, it'll just take some time to figure out bugs before new content can be added.
I have to agree on the bad timing of pricing Verge so soon after Halo though. I feel like ... Gaia needs to stop, for even just a minute, stop looking at the schedule, stop working on whatever it is that's being worked on and ask, "Is this a good idea?" While it's always the people at the higher end of things that don't listen, we as users need to be more active in pushing to be heard. I think threads like this are a part of that change that's beginning to happen with users realising that something isn't right, and that something needs to change. I genuinely think, genuinely, that if we keep pushing now while we have user momentum we can finally be heard.
(Thank goodness! Whenever I post these things I never know how it comes across!! sweatdrop )
As for the new bonus for first time buyers, it does sound backwards, but if you're going to give incentives to first time buyers it has to start somewhere. I do think, though, that the reward should be retroactive to all those who bought in previously, or that those users should be given something else as a retroactive bonus just to even everything out sweatdrop This new thing sounds more along the lines of user bonus for supporting the site. Perhaps it's an idea that came out of all of the Verge mess? It feels like it's a step in the right direction in any case. To move forward we have to forgive Gaia for it's mistakes, but it doesn't mean we should forget them either.
edit: that last new Cash grant was a good idea until I found out you can also redeem with mules sweatdrop ... and that it went out to so many people.... 500k is a bit high, for $5 you get a worth of 1M?
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Liveing Life-x
