133TGATE:Staff INTERFERING with the MP INFLATION/TICKETS!

[Head Up Your Astronaut]

wow. this is rather baffling to read. eek kudos to the OP for an easy to follow, informative post.

11 pages and no word from staff... that's interesting. conspiracy or not, the radio silence on the staff's end is honestly not going to soothe any tension between community and staff whatsoever.

they need to get someone in here talking fast because this is pretty suspicious. while some users may find this whole kerfuffle pointless, i think there's enough people demanding explanations to warrant staff action

[x-Garethp-x]

Minty-MANZANA

x-Garethp-x

Why does this matter? Are Gaia staff not allowed to have personal accounts?

Not the point at all.

If the person IS a personal account: Why would it has so many gold? Why would it buy a ticket meant for normal users, if its the account of an artist that can do whatever item it wants? Why waste so much gold with the promise of a evolving item recolor?

Too many questions that the thought that them having normal accounts does not answer.

Considering that Gold Gens have payouts in the hundreds of billions, why wouldn't an account have so much gold? Hell, I have 2.5b, and I don't sell art, buy GC or vend in any way. That's 2.5b just from the daily chance (And I haven't sold any of my items from DC in a while too)

Why wouldn't it buy a ticket? Staff shouldn't be barred from participating in events just because... um... sorry, why should they? From what I gather staff don't get free reign to do whatever they want. No one in a company does. If they have an idea that's been shot down time after time, then yeah, getting a ticket would be a good chance to get their idea out there. Just like any other user.

Also, the first post doesn't even conclusively prove it is a mule. This whole thing just reeks of a witch hunt

[Euphonious Cantabile]

Whispers of Delusion

peach tea latte

Whispers of Delusion

So odd that none of the admins or the person in question have replied yet.
Then again, quote summoning in first posts don't work, but I figured someone would've seen it or have gotten linked here since it was said they replied in another thread so fast.

I did notice that the person buying the ticket spends ALOT of GC if you look at the post history, also seems to advertise alot like saying "WHOA I JUST WON … FROM …!", "OH THIS ITEM IS ON SALE!!!" in almost all of her posts.
What did make me suspicious is that most of these posts are about CIs and gold sinks.
And that the staff member in question has this in their journal:
"I work together with our Gaia art team to make lots of gold sinks, mini-CIs, and lovely sets for all of the lovely people out there."

And that their way of posting is similar, but that can be a coincidence.

I'm not gonna dismiss the fact that this theory might just be possible.

One of the staff members the OP quoted, lowkei, hasn't logged onto Gaia since June 12, so there's no way that they would know that they've being quoted. After all, it's impossible to know if someone's quoting you if you've been AFK and haven't touched your account for a long time, especially since you need to be online to see the quote notification.

Then again, they work together in an office
Wouldn't something big like this come up?

Not sure if Gaia still hires contract artists (after all, PRISM used to be a contract artist before she was hired full-time), but if they do, and lowkei is a contract artist (don't know if she is or if she's a full-time artist), then she wouldn't be working in the Gaia office since contract artists aren't required to do so. The only requirement of contract artists is that they live in the US and able to meet deadlines, I believe.

[x-Garethp-x]

Super Fightin Robot

x-Garethp-x

Why does this matter? Are Gaia staff not allowed to have personal accounts?

Did you take a gander at this thread?

I'm looking through. It's morning where I am, it takes a while for me to catch up on these things, they always happen when I'm asleep. I'm not seeing what the big deal is

[Euphonious Cantabile]

Head Up Your Astronaut

wow. this is rather baffling to read. eek kudos to the OP for an easy to follow, informative post.

11 pages and no word from staff... that's interesting. conspiracy or not, the radio silence on the staff's end is honestly not going to soothe any tension between community and staff whatsoever.

they need to get someone in here talking fast because this is pretty suspicious. while some users may find this whole kerfuffle pointless, i think there's enough people demanding explanations to warrant staff action

Since it's alleged that the mule account in question belongs to an artist, it's probably best that that artist step forward and confirm whether or not that account really belongs to them or if the mule account is a friend's. But artists seem to rarely venture in SF unless they're looking for new ideas.

[IggyTwig]

Bluecandescent

We can't even trust our beloved Admin Lead anymore and that is really sad

I haven't trusted him since last year when he posted this insulting drivel at one of the ATA's:

Quote:

Are you going to re-release Flynn's Booty/Chest again?
Yes we will be. We know that there are some users that do not like this item, but there are actually a lot of users who do like this item.

[Minty-MANZANA]

x-Garethp-x

Minty-MANZANA

x-Garethp-x

Why does this matter? Are Gaia staff not allowed to have personal accounts?

Not the point at all.

If the person IS a personal account: Why would it has so many gold? Why would it buy a ticket meant for normal users, if its the account of an artist that can do whatever item it wants? Why waste so much gold with the promise of a evolving item recolor?

Too many questions that the thought that them having normal accounts does not answer.

Considering that Gold Gens have payouts in the hundreds of billions, why wouldn't an account have so much gold? Hell, I have 2.5b, and I don't sell art, buy GC or vend in any way. That's 2.5b just from the daily chance (And I haven't sold any of my items from DC in a while too)

Why wouldn't it buy a ticket? Staff shouldn't be barred from participating in events just because... um... sorry, why should they? From what I gather staff don't get free reign to do whatever they want. No one in a company does. If they have an idea that's been shot down time after time, then yeah, getting a ticket would be a good chance to get their idea out there. Just like any other user.

Also, the first post doesn't even conclusively prove it is a mule. This whole thing just reeks of a witch hunt

You know that GG does not give always the same number of gold right? It would take at least 133 big prizes at those GG+ (yanno, the expensive ones) to get at least 133T. Because the big prize was just one trillion.

And 133T for one recolor!? Not reasonable enough, sorry. It was talked a bit before but not even one of the richest user on this site has reached that amount of gold here.

It can be a witch hunt but its one that has some arguments to its favour, more than just "oh, they can do what they want discounting their strange MP gold influx/sells and messages on forums".

I want to see this resolved.

[Zero Omega]

Hey Gaians,

We would like to explain the details of this situation and share what happened. To be direct, yes, we purchased this ticket along with other items from the Marketplace. The reason for this purchase was to put some of the items into Flynn’s Plunder and put the tickets up into our next gold sink event as a personal tier reward. Allow us to explain:

We opened up the possibility of donating items to Flynn’s Plunder with our LQI policy. We wanted to add some higher tier items into Flynn’s Plunder without expanding the current stock of existing items. We decided the best way to do this would be purchasing the items off of the Marketplace and donating them to Flynn to sell. As for the Rainbow Tickets, we wanted to add these tickets to our next gold sink event. They would be a personal tier run exactly like the ones we’ve done before where if you reach the tier, you have a chance of winning that ticket. We are currently overwhelmed with tickets and, as a result, we did not want to generate a new ticket to add to our backlog. Instead, we decided to purchase an existing ticket and use that. Any items put into Flynn’s Plunder that generate a ticket have been added from an existing stock.

We used a mule account so we could make these purchases. It would have looked weird for a staff account to actually purchase a ticket. We decided to use this account as it had enough gold on it from various tests we did in the past. For clarification on what this means, we use our mule accounts to interact with the community without the attention being drawn to the fact that we are staff. However, sometime we use them to test new features and products when we need to see what the experience is as a regular user, not a staff member. However, we made an error in purchasing the Double Rainbow Ticket, in particular, for 133 trillion gold and we will be reversing the transaction. We have contacted the user about this and we will be handling this as a separate issue.

Unfortunately, this did not pan out exactly as we imagined. The intent of this was to make a good will effort to the user base and give users a chance to get some pretty awesome items. The items will still make their appearance in Flynn’s Plunder tomorrow, the ticket will make its during our next gold sink event.

With that said and us coming out with the information, we want to let you know that we will be editing out the information posted here that identifies staff accounts. We do this not to censor our community, but for the protection of the privacy of our staff members. This is the same courtesy that we would extend to any user who wishes to have their information removed. We understand that situations like this can cause the community to want to figure out answers to their concerns, but that does not give anyone the right to spotlight the information, even if it is publicly available. We hope you understand why we are removing this information.

We do want to sincerely apologize for any distrust we have caused throughout the community by taking these actions. We have already implemented new policies internally to ensure that this situation will never happen again. We hope that this sheds some light on what why this occurred and we thank you for your understanding.

[Whispers of Delusion]

Teabo Milk Tea

Whispers of Delusion

peach tea latte

Whispers of Delusion

So odd that none of the admins or the person in question have replied yet.
Then again, quote summoning in first posts don't work, but I figured someone would've seen it or have gotten linked here since it was said they replied in another thread so fast.

I did notice that the person buying the ticket spends ALOT of GC if you look at the post history, also seems to advertise alot like saying "WHOA I JUST WON … FROM …!", "OH THIS ITEM IS ON SALE!!!" in almost all of her posts.
What did make me suspicious is that most of these posts are about CIs and gold sinks.
And that the staff member in question has this in their journal:
"I work together with our Gaia art team to make lots of gold sinks, mini-CIs, and lovely sets for all of the lovely people out there."

And that their way of posting is similar, but that can be a coincidence.

I'm not gonna dismiss the fact that this theory might just be possible.

One of the staff members the OP quoted, lowkei, hasn't logged onto Gaia since June 12, so there's no way that they would know that they've being quoted. After all, it's impossible to know if someone's quoting you if you've been AFK and haven't touched your account for a long time, especially since you need to be online to see the quote notification.

Then again, they work together in an office
Wouldn't something big like this come up?

Not sure if Gaia still hires contract artists (after all, PRISM used to be a contract artist before she was hired full-time), but if they do, and lowkei is a contract artist (don't know if she is or if she's a full-time artist), then she wouldn't be working in the Gaia office since contract artists aren't required to do so. The only requirement of contract artists is that they live in the US and able to meet deadlines, I believe.

That may be, but bluealaris is online at the moment, so is zero. Lowkei has very little to do with this other than the deviantart account as far as I've see.

[Minty-MANZANA]

HAH, it WAS an admin/other mule account.

Ok then~

[Euphonious Cantabile]

Whispers of Delusion

Teabo Milk Tea

Whispers of Delusion

peach tea latte

Whispers of Delusion

So odd that none of the admins or the person in question have replied yet.
Then again, quote summoning in first posts don't work, but I figured someone would've seen it or have gotten linked here since it was said they replied in another thread so fast.

I did notice that the person buying the ticket spends ALOT of GC if you look at the post history, also seems to advertise alot like saying "WHOA I JUST WON … FROM …!", "OH THIS ITEM IS ON SALE!!!" in almost all of her posts.
What did make me suspicious is that most of these posts are about CIs and gold sinks.
And that the staff member in question has this in their journal:
"I work together with our Gaia art team to make lots of gold sinks, mini-CIs, and lovely sets for all of the lovely people out there."

And that their way of posting is similar, but that can be a coincidence.

I'm not gonna dismiss the fact that this theory might just be possible.

One of the staff members the OP quoted, lowkei, hasn't logged onto Gaia since June 12, so there's no way that they would know that they've being quoted. After all, it's impossible to know if someone's quoting you if you've been AFK and haven't touched your account for a long time, especially since you need to be online to see the quote notification.

Then again, they work together in an office
Wouldn't something big like this come up?

Not sure if Gaia still hires contract artists (after all, PRISM used to be a contract artist before she was hired full-time), but if they do, and lowkei is a contract artist (don't know if she is or if she's a full-time artist), then she wouldn't be working in the Gaia office since contract artists aren't required to do so. The only requirement of contract artists is that they live in the US and able to meet deadlines, I believe.

That may be, but bluealaris is online at the moment, so is zero. Lowkei has very little to do with this other than the deviantart account as far as I've see.

You quoted Sakura Latte's post where she mentioned lowkei, so I thought you were still talking about that particular artist.

[Adnama Lavode]

Minty-MANZANA

You know that GG does not give always the same number of gold right? It would take at least 133 big prizes at those GG+ (yanno, the expensive ones) to get at least 133T. Because the big prize was just one trillion.

And 133T for one recolor!? Not reasonable enough, sorry. It was talked a bit before but not even one of the richest user on this site has reached that amount of gold here.

It can be a witch hunt but its one that has some arguments to its favour, more than just "oh, they can do what they want discounting their strange MP gold influx/sells and messages on forums".

I want to see this resolved.

I think that's what most of us want. Almost all of the thread participants are discussing it pretty calmly and rationally while waiting for an explanation, though for some reason a few people from this thread and the GCD thread say these threads are witch hunts. Am I just not seeing it? Nobody's calling for the artist to be fired or threatening them or any of that. Most people are either shocked, intrigued, disheartened, disappointed, or all of those things combined, but in a pretty peaceful way.

And I really hope it stays that way until we get an answer. They don't need to be given any reasons to lock the threads.

[Euphonious Cantabile]

Adnama Lavode

Minty-MANZANA

You know that GG does not give always the same number of gold right? It would take at least 133 big prizes at those GG+ (yanno, the expensive ones) to get at least 133T. Because the big prize was just one trillion.

And 133T for one recolor!? Not reasonable enough, sorry. It was talked a bit before but not even one of the richest user on this site has reached that amount of gold here.

It can be a witch hunt but its one that has some arguments to its favour, more than just "oh, they can do what they want discounting their strange MP gold influx/sells and messages on forums".

I want to see this resolved.

I think that's what most of us want. Almost all of the thread participants are discussing it pretty calmly and rationally while waiting for an explanation, though for some reason a few people from this thread and the GCD thread say these threads are witch hunts. Am I just not seeing it? Nobody's calling for the artist to be fired or threatening them or any of that. Most people are either shocked, intrigued, disheartened, disappointed, or all of those things combined, but in a pretty peaceful way.

And I really hope it stays that way until we get an answer. They don't need to be given any reasons to lock the threads.

Look a few posts up. We actually got a response from Zero. He point blank admitted that it was a staff member's mule (along with admitting that they use mules to interact with users when they don't want anyone to know they're staff), but also said that they did it with the intentions of releasing it into Flynn's Plunder. Though I don't understand why they couldn't have just done that anyway, without having to actually buy the Ticket?

[Nitro Virus]

Teabo Milk Tea

Adnama Lavode

Minty-MANZANA

You know that GG does not give always the same number of gold right? It would take at least 133 big prizes at those GG+ (yanno, the expensive ones) to get at least 133T. Because the big prize was just one trillion.

And 133T for one recolor!? Not reasonable enough, sorry. It was talked a bit before but not even one of the richest user on this site has reached that amount of gold here.

It can be a witch hunt but its one that has some arguments to its favour, more than just "oh, they can do what they want discounting their strange MP gold influx/sells and messages on forums".

I want to see this resolved.

I think that's what most of us want. Almost all of the thread participants are discussing it pretty calmly and rationally while waiting for an explanation, though for some reason a few people from this thread and the GCD thread say these threads are witch hunts. Am I just not seeing it? Nobody's calling for the artist to be fired or threatening them or any of that. Most people are either shocked, intrigued, disheartened, disappointed, or all of those things combined, but in a pretty peaceful way.

And I really hope it stays that way until we get an answer. They don't need to be given any reasons to lock the threads.

Look a few posts up. We actually got a response from Zero. He point blank admitted that it was a staff member's mule (along with admitting that they use mules to interact with users when they don't want anyone to know they're staff), but also said that they did it with the intentions of releasing it into Flynn's Plunder. Though I don't understand why they couldn't have just done that anyway, without having to actually buy the Ticket?

▌▌▌▌▌▌▌▌▌▌▌▌ ʕ •ᴥ•ʔ ♥

Zero said this is why they bought the ticket:
"We are currently overwhelmed with tickets and, as a result, we did not want to generate a new ticket to add to our backlog. Instead, we decided to purchase an existing ticket and use that."