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Loyal's Bazaar isn't too bad. I mean there are items under the 1 mil mark range that are really nice. But yeah the 2 billion and up items are too much. I just use GoFusion and gold shops as an alternative to marketplace now and very happy using both things.

I agree. I know people have to make a living, but I'd rather live in a cheap trailer and feel good about myself than make a six-figure salary where I had to hurt and upset thousands of people in order to pay for my newest sports cars. I'm mainly talking about the upper management here, but even the regular staff must be bothered on some level by the fact that they're working for a company that makes its money out of cheapening and degrading a much-loved community website, turning it into a supermarket for pixels, destroying its economy,and treating its members like trash just so they can be manipulated out of their money. This entire site has had the heart and soul ripped out of it by these people, and they seem to have no conscience about it. Perhaps they have meetings where they try and brainwash their staff into viewing us as nothing more than lab rats. If you de-humanize a person, it makes it easier to use and abuse that person. I mean, there's the idea of us as "customers" who can leave the store if we don't like it, but there's also the idea that we have been loyal to this site for years, have been part of a community, have invested our time and money here, and deserve a little respect and consideration as human beings. That's sort of gotten lost with these people, and they don't seem to care. Makes me wonder if the ones who are still working there have sociopathic personalities or if they've just been brainwashed. To me, no amount of money would be worth being part of such a company. That may be why they got rid of people like Panagrammic and Swarf. They didn't fit in, wouldn't go along, and it's possible it was more of a mutual decision based on the fact that the new corporate Gaia has no room for people who actually care. (I know, I'm rambling too much and will shut up now, but that's how I feel).

I believe the ones that could leave did leave. Within the last year two of the site founders left and another left to work from home, and a handful of the best developers that were involved with the community a lot left abruptly, namely Uncle Kenny and DJ Helsing. Some of them have said it was to follow new opportunities, which is true I'm sure, though I can't help but wonder if they knew this would happen and would hate to see the site fall this way, so instead of staying in this hole, they flew.

Their original idea might've been to shut this site down once they got tentacl up and running. Maybe they figured the older, cash-spending users would migrate over to the "new improved" site. So with that in mind, they trashed and burned Gaia for whatever short-term moneys they could squeeze out of us to fund their other website -- meaning everything went up for sale including rare items, gold, collectibles and anything they could figure out how to sell, regardless of what damage it did to Gaia, because they weren't planning to keep Gaia going in the long run. That would also explain why they haven't updated anything here or worked on anything that didn't "pay for itself."

Now that tentacl isn't doing so well and only has a small fraction of the traffic that Gaia does, they could be reassessing things and realizing they should have taken better care of their bread and butter site. Problem is, they've already destroyed the economy here and pissed off a majority of the users. So who knows what will happen now. I feel that a change of management is in order -- get rid of the CEO, COO and their Operations VP and hire some competent people. To me, that's the only route that makes sense at this point.

I looked up the posts for you to make it easier. I think the following posts raise a lot of questions with the community now regarding staff's treatment of inflation. Each person can take their own interpretation of the posts. Personally I'm aware that the staff are manipulating the MP now, so I'll continue to not use that feature viewing it like a broken feature, but I will use gold shops instead. GCD post SF post Kickstarter posts Anyway I hope this helps and sorry for butting in your conversation to share the links.