►Stop blaming 'user demand' for your business decisions◄

[Cory Shallow]

This is a bit of a repost of a large response I had just written in another thread that got swallowed up. But truthfully, it's not so much a response to the user I quoted but a response to Gaia Online for frequently using this excuse that '"people" have been asking for xyz thing we did that you're complaining about so we're entirely justified in our decisions'.

Cory Shallow

User

Gotta side with the Gaia Staff on this one. After all they've been giving out offers and items that users wanted and begged for. I don't see anything wrong with that response* given.

No.


Gaia Interactive has been using these isolated 'user demands' as a scapegoat for every piss-poor decision they've made as a business since selling out to managers and owners who have no sense of value or knowledge as to why this site was (past tense) popular and special.
Gaia is a glorified forum site. It is not a flash game website. It is not neopets, farmville or restaurant city. It is a forum site with a dress-up commodity market and nothing more, nothing less. When Gaia tried to make profit off of 'somethings more', it lost money big time. This is why Towns sucks. This is why zOMG will never be finished. This is why everything else made in flash here is a thinly-veiled cyber hookup scene for users who wouldn't get away with the behavior in the forums.

But instead of taking a step back and acknowledging they expanded their business in the wrong direction and evaluating what kept this community together and working as a pinnacle example of what forum culture can be, they escalated their commitment to the gamble for more revenue. We used to dismiss the pure Exchange/Vend whores as missing out on what this site was all about. We used to acknowledge that the focus of our participation here was the community and not the avatars, as did Gaia staff. The forums were meticulously moderated, and the regulars had a sense of trust with moderation and the utility of the established norms.
People felt a real sense of attachment to not only their accounts (which some of us had been investing time and money in for a decade) and trust in their holdings both in on-site items and on-site rapport with moderation and fellow users.
At some horrible point during the past seven years, the voluntary contributions of us users just wasn't enough for Gaia. The barrage of third-party advertisements and corporate movie sponsorship weren't enough, either. Gaia needed more money to develop frills and fluff to maintain a facade of going somewhere, of becoming more than it was ever intended to be. (in the middle of a freaking real-world recession, mind you)

The quaint user base became fractured between those who populated the forums and those who populated the game servers and a new currency was introduced to appease the 'gaming' portion of our site. But once the gamers learned that they were spending too much of their money on upgrades for a game that would never be finished, they withdrew their financial support--and Gaia had gotten a taste for the standard of income Gaia Cash had introduced them to. As zOMG became a sprawling graveyard of level-grinding junkies, we forum users were hit with a deepening deluge of Gaia Cash ads, to the point of alienating and offending the majority of users.
The Gaia Cash currency became the apparent preferred currency of this website, to the point of the site declaring all but war against Gaia Gold. They destroyed the values of every item that had been maintained through Gaia Gold through re-releases, then pumped up the price of those items by destroying the value of Gaia Gold with inflation gimmicks, crippling the on-site economy entirely. All the art shops, all the CSS guilds, all the specialty craftspeople who made their home here on this website for over a decade were suddenly without work, and the only way to afford anything of relative value in our economy became purchasing Gaia Cash.

So to think that you swallow this blame Gaia lavishes upon its user base for their own decisions is to shirk their responsibility in a revoltingly masochistic fashion. They destroyed any means of self-sustenance in the onsite economy, they created the poverty, and then they blamed the beggars for begging and pleading. They pin their responsibility on the victims of their laughable business practices, and you're here arguing to the contrary?

Gaia staff need to stop propagating this absurd notion that its user base is at fault for being deprived and antsy, and its users need to stop treating this like it is an acceptable excuse.

[Whip]

Do you have concrete evidence that Gaia or Gaia staff use this excuse frequently?

Edited as per request, to refer only to this thread.

(aaaah! I get it now, thanks! I misinterpreted what was meant by excuses. I understand the subtleties now.)

[Cory Shallow]

VVhip

Do you have concrete evidence that Gaia or Gaia staff use this excuse frequently?

(much obliged for the edit!) heart


If the expectation is to quote mine every instance a mod or developer came up with that excuse as a security blanket, I could do it but it would be a waste of time.
The actual direct responses to our complaints were extremely few and far between but most if not all of them brandished this essential excuse, If you haven't experienced it yourself, it's probably because you haven't had the pleasant history of having to bait and lure representatives including our dearly departed Uncle Kenny into actually responding to complaints in this forum.

To the point that well above a dozen threads were authored in SF during the past several months discussing the topic and we still have users aimlessly parroting it as if it were a valid reason to be treating this website's future as recklessly has it has been.

[Andromeda Phoenix]

*le sigh* (take the sigh as you wish.)

Using Gold Generators as an example because the site was pretty much fine before they came out.

I did have proof of ZeroOmega saying Gold Generators were being sold because users kept buying them, and that no forum poll could be considered actual proof that users hate gold generators, but he keeps going back and editing his posts to save face 'cause those words aren't there anymore.

There's also Sisky.

Speaking of which, releasing Club Verge and then taking over six months to release Loyal's Bazaar instead of releasing both at the same time, doesn't even need the words of a staff member to show what that implies.

[Cory Shallow]

(Guys, not trying to be a thread nazi here but I don't want to have to report or ignore any of you for derailing my thread.

I have PM'd the three of you with the link to that thread.

Have the Narumi discussion in the proper thread.)

Thank you all!

[Bluecandescent]

I'm glad someone's finally said it. The staff have of course said that they'll keep selling GGs as long as people keep buying, but do they acknowledge that we never even asked for them in the first place? They made us want to buy gold. They injected those thoughts into our heads, that buying gold would be a cool thing to do, and then they're like "lmao well we can't stop now, look at all the people that want the product!"

no

if FB was never sold, if all the GGs that arose from FB were never sold, none of this hyperinflation would have happened. The economy would rise and fall as normal. No one asked for this, Gaia thunk it up for more money; we all know that they could have just pumped up the frequency of item releases and rereleases and made money that way, but no they needed to take a more drastic route first.

Gaia started it, and we're continuing it.

[Jayce Reinhardt]

I don't know, this seems more user feedback really.

The group that is ok with just about everything Gaia does, even if it's a stupid a** decision realy isn't that big in my opinion. I highly doubt they'd be able to take on the financial burden of completely supporting this website all on their own.

And Gaia basing cash prices on what things are currently is ridiculous, prices reflect what a person spent on them cash-wise and this is directly influencing the prices in the market.

[Cory Shallow]

VVhip

Do you have concrete evidence that Gaia or Gaia staff use this excuse frequently?

Andromedia Phoenix very helpfully provided some examples. wink

Andromeda Phoenix

Using Gold Generators as an example because the site was pretty much fine before they came out.

I did have proof of ZeroOmega saying Gold Generators were being sold because users kept buying them, and that no forum poll could be considered actual proof that users hate gold generators, but he keeps going back and editing his posts to save face 'cause those words aren't there anymore.

There's also Sisky.

Speaking of which, releasing Club Verge and then taking over six months to release Loyal's Bazaar instead of releasing both at the same time, doesn't even need the words of a staff member to show what that implies.

[Cory Shallow]

Bluecandescent

I'm glad someone's finally said it.

The staff have of course said that they'll keep selling GGs as long as people keep buying, but do they acknowledge that we never even asked for them in the first place? They made us want to buy gold. They injected those thoughts into our heads, that buying gold would be a cool thing to do, and then they're like "lmao well we can't stop now, look at all the people that want the product!"

no

if FB was never sold, if all the GGs that arose from FB were never sold, none of this hyperinflation would have happened. The economy would rise and fall as normal. No one asked for this, Gaia thunk it up for more money; we all know that they could have just pumped up the frequency of item releases and rereleases and made money that way, but no they needed to take a more drastic route first.

Gaia started it, and we're continuing it.

Exactly. And thank you for your thoughtful response.

There's a big chicken-and-egg victim-blaming paradox that Gaia Interactive seems to be maintaining when they assign blame for people making these purchases and for requesting more like them.
When you destroy the gold economy, the resulting dependence on Gaia Cash Currency and gold generators isn't the fault of the victims. So they continue to destroy the value of gold in exchange for a heightened dependence on the Cash system, essentially all but forcing users to make their purchases with real-world money and not personal investment in the forum culture that made this community desirable in the first place.

[Cheapskate Bruce]

New management seems more retail/figure orientated so it probably rings true from a seller perspective.

i.e.:
Girly frills sell the most, Imma sell more girly-frill items.
GGs sell a heap, Imma sell more GG items.
So on an so forth.


From a retail perspective it makes sense.
While we need big sellers, it also needs a bit of re-balancing to get it right for site economy.

I don't think it's an excuse, so much as valid business sense. You sell more of A, make more of A. From a user perspective- yes, it sucks.

[Cory Shallow]

Jayce Reinhardt

I don't know, this seems more user feedback really.

The group that is ok with just about everything Gaia does, even if it's a stupid a** decision realy isn't that big in my opinion. I highly doubt they'd be able to take on the financial burden of completely supporting this website all on their own.

And Gaia basing cash prices on what things are currently is ridiculous, prices reflect what a person spent on them cash-wise and this is directly influencing the prices in the market.

While they may be a small minority, 'that group' is a loud one and it gets the benefit of aligning itself with what's purported to be the official stance of this website and take all criticism in stride. They're not worth ignoring for that reason, along with being the sole justification used for all of the most hated changes the site has underwent during the past few years. What they need to appreciate is that they are scapegoats for bad behavior, and not simply good-natured participants in a temporary 'bump' in site culture.

[Slick Southpaw]

Phoenix reminded me of the site wide vote that asked about whether or not users wanted centered formatting or not, and while the deciding majority was 'undecided who the ******** knows', userbase response was used as justification for centering--and when ads were cited as the influencing factor for forcing site wide centering despite userbase response being ambiguous at best, it started a slippery slope of justification of "well users wanted this so we did it"

Ever since the cash shop came out people have been asking for gc to gold conversion, and those people were shut down wholeheartedly and with good reason. Just look at the ******** economy.

I wonder where the "userbase wanted this" bullshit justification became a rallying cry and a commonplace marketing tactic.

Admin had said that they weren't going to do anymore bundles

shortly after [when people pointed out that bundles were better bargains and deflation in the jacked economy], we had bundles within bundles and then some.

Some stuff, I get, like the lure of custom items [though making them not-so-subtle gold gens was a kick in the head]. That kind of marketing made sense to me.

But the gold gens? the MC reselling? That just baffled me completely.

[Cory Shallow]

Cheapskate Bruce

While we need big sellers, it also needs a bit of re-balancing to get it right for site economy.

While I agree with the most substantial portions of your post, this bit is something I don't feel can be taken for granted.

For a long time (and with a larger regular user base, something that is worlds apart from the number of registered accounts) advertising revenue and voluntary donations were more than enough to keep Gaia Online expanding at a stable rate.

The reason why it 'needs' to meet larger and larger sales quotas probably has more to do with their commitments with Warner and the maintenance of obsolete portions of the site.