Aidian Kyros
And shepherds we shall be...
I'm not yet going to say yay or nay on this, but I wanted to pose a concern about the whole situation. First I want to tell you that all of my items (except a couple of currently equipped items that I recently purchased) were items I have collected over the last ten years on Gaia (Royal Guard Aidian Kyros was my original that I retired a few years ago). I have recently been dabbling in the marketplace with buying low and selling high and now I'm noticing that there are guilds out there trying to intentionally lower the prices. While I don't hate them for it, I feel like I deserve the money I'm getting for these items I've been selling ('06, '07, '08 letters and items) because I have been holding them for a VERY long time.
On the other hand, I can still remember when a Sealed Envelope was only worth 20k in the marketplace and that was considered a LOT of money back then. Times have changed when they are selling for 11billion and I certainly don't believe they should cost that much.
I disgress... the real concern I have is that you are saying that most Gaians do not want the gold generators... well to be completely honest with you I have to say... the ones that are using them regularly aren't paying ANY attention to anyone in the Petitions section. You will probably never see them unless you are actively looking for them. These are the people with magnificent items and only 300 posts so you KNOW they're spending tons of real money to buy these items.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that Gaia will never stop releasing their cash cow when there will always be people willing to buy them. If they weren't making money off of them then they would have stopped a long time ago. Wouldn't you agree? Realistically, I can't blame them. Gaia is a business now and a business needs to make money. So what if the good roleplayers and seasoned forum veterans leave when they don't spend as much money anyway? That just means less server space is required by Gaia HQ.
At the end of the day, I would love to see prices back the way they were before. Back when an item quest only took a couple of months, and a special item quest only took a year if you were dedicated to your cause. That was why I loved this site, and so many of the people on it. I will stay loyal to Gaia because it is special to me, and the marketplace has never been very important to me anyway. If they stop selling them and the prices get back to normal, then that is excellent. If they continue pouring gold into the system I will find a way around it. Anyone want to help me open up a charity for new Gaians?
...For thee my Lord for thee
Sorry for the delay, but I haven't checked back in a while.
cat_razz I kind of figured that most of the gold generator users wouldn't be in the Petitions forum, though I honestly have no idea which part of the site they would tend to hang out instead (or even the average user, actually).
cat_smile In case they did happen upon this petition, I tried to have clear and simple explanations for why gold generators are the main cause of inflation. So I'm not even hoping the people who like gold generators avoid this petition, since I might convince some of them not to use gold generators anymore (I think I even offered alternatives way to make comparable amounts of gold at roughly the same level of effort). I'm guessing that even the people who like and tend to use gold generators don't like the inflation they cause. My theory is they either don't want the extra steps of buying and selling Cash Shop items, or they don't realize or believe there's a strong correlation between inflation and gold generators.
I think people who actively use gold generators are still going to be in the minority (but unless there's a site-wide poll or Gaia releases truthful statistics on the userbase, it'll be hard to prove one way or the other), but they're also the most likely to be the group that spends the most money on the site, given how Gaia treats them. But being the majority doesn't necessarily mean much to Gaia, if the main people funding them are people willing to spend tons of real money on gold generators.