I can't add anything else to it, it's perfect!
Lydia V Grey
Dear Gaia,
As a member of the customer base who regularly supports you, I feel I have been more than generous in overlooking flaws most businesses would not be allowed have without rendering themselves eventually bankrupt. Allow us to go over these flaws.
1. In spite of other successful websites doing a regular maintenance (typically quarterly) you have allowed your features to become or remain broken, nonfunctional/dysfunctional, and difficult to use. Your answer was a Spring Cleaning that ignored feedback for you to improve on particular areas...few of these fixes/updates were ever implemented. You strangely found time for rolling out new...albeit often dysfunctional and incomplete NEW features, which ultimately end up just as abandoned as your other features. Shall we name the broken, abandoned, and dysfunctional features? Games (every last one of them), towns, rally, guilds, video lounge, arenas, and housing. Those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head that do not see regular maintenance or updates (Fishing did have an update but still often glitches).
2. You have a lack of customer service. When your users come to you with questions or complaints about features they are often met with silence for prolonged periods of time and usually indefinitely. Not every situation requires a customer service representative but there should be one that looks in on various parts of the site REGULARLY particularly in the site feedback where most complaints get dumped. On the occasions when staff actually choose to respond it is a direct communication with individuals who have never had a lick of Customer Service education in their lives. This often results in miscommunications, abuses toward the staff AND customer. Customers should not feel as if the staff looks on them in contempt nor should they feel that they are causing trouble by making reasonable inquiries.
3. You produce substandard work and want to charge a first rate fee. When a customer pays to buy an item whether it is an EI, comes from a RIG, Bundle, or Collectible they expect the dimensions of that item to fit to the avatar you provide. An increasing number of these items do not. More than that, many of these items are left glitched with green goo, strange lines, and other anomalies that are NEVER corrected even after being promptly reported. In any other business if you would buy something defective they would either refund your money, give you a store credit, or provide you with a new working model. You do not one of these things and yet somehow your artists feel they are providing a service that is a cut above the rest. It is clearly not when held in comparison to your competition.
4. Delays happen in every business, however your projects are often regularly and unreasonably delayed. When customers complain of these delays they are told they need to be patient. Most are. However, these delays (whether it is waiting for products, features, events, or service) happen with such regularity that it becomes hard to excuse. If you cannot complete your projects in time then you should not announce release dates for them. This also exacerbates the problem of glitches, bugs, and incomplete features that never get fixed because you allow the problems to compoud making them more costly for you and more frustrating for your customers.
5. You are unreasonable with your EIs. CoP, Timmy, Catastrophe, and Owlpocalypse do not evolve with any reasonable timeliness. Yes Catastrophe and Owl are cheap, no that is not an excuse. Catastrophe would have been excusable because it was related that the evolutions would be irregular but going on more than a year is a bit long for anything. Timmy's evolutions were locked because you only released mini evos up until recently. CoP was a fiasco that resulted in you having to unlock all the poses because...well...it rarely evolves. This is a product that is time sensitive, people don't want to wait a year to receive a full and completed product unless they have been forewarned of such conditions.
You seem to be in the habit of blaming your users for their failing to adore you but in light of what I listed (and these are not small faults for any successful business) how can you blame them? You treat your customers as if they are the reason interest is not generated in your site and behave as if they are ungrateful but when you do not provide a good service how can you fault them?
Overall, Gaia, your customers have been more than willing to overlook most of these glaringly bad traits. They endure your abuses willingly. They wait FIVE YEARS for one item that you promised would be accessable with some work and you have the GALL to tell them that only 3% of them are deserving of Back Wings because the rest of them are not "hardcore" enough to use a feature that does not allow most people to create for the fun of creating and that you made difficult and unfriendly from the start?
You...have some nerve...you have also lost all forms of support I provide. Not because I want the Back Wings (because I have no use for such an item) but because your artists and your staff had the audacity to complain that the job was hard and therefore the customer should be made to suffer the consequence in spite of the many times I have seen the customer base praise them. Every job is sometimes hard. Many of them requiring more skill and effort. Many things, still, are a great deal harder than that. You will not get another red cent from me till you begin to actually start to behave like a business and treat your customers with at least an ounce of respect. The adblock goes on, the Cash Purchases Stop, No More Offers, and I will not participate in sponsorships...and ...I will write those companies to let them know what I think of you.
I have no issue with the artists having influence at Gaia. They should. But they should not behave as if they were asked to recreate the Mona Lisa or a Keith Herring when what the produce is the equivalent of last week's spiderman comic.
If they want people to show off their art then it should be accessible. Otherwise, they forfeit the right to complain about that. And anyone in business knows that you do not make your customers feel as if they are less important than your ego. Sales are made on making the customer feel special, not the other way around.
As a member of the customer base who regularly supports you, I feel I have been more than generous in overlooking flaws most businesses would not be allowed have without rendering themselves eventually bankrupt. Allow us to go over these flaws.
1. In spite of other successful websites doing a regular maintenance (typically quarterly) you have allowed your features to become or remain broken, nonfunctional/dysfunctional, and difficult to use. Your answer was a Spring Cleaning that ignored feedback for you to improve on particular areas...few of these fixes/updates were ever implemented. You strangely found time for rolling out new...albeit often dysfunctional and incomplete NEW features, which ultimately end up just as abandoned as your other features. Shall we name the broken, abandoned, and dysfunctional features? Games (every last one of them), towns, rally, guilds, video lounge, arenas, and housing. Those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head that do not see regular maintenance or updates (Fishing did have an update but still often glitches).
2. You have a lack of customer service. When your users come to you with questions or complaints about features they are often met with silence for prolonged periods of time and usually indefinitely. Not every situation requires a customer service representative but there should be one that looks in on various parts of the site REGULARLY particularly in the site feedback where most complaints get dumped. On the occasions when staff actually choose to respond it is a direct communication with individuals who have never had a lick of Customer Service education in their lives. This often results in miscommunications, abuses toward the staff AND customer. Customers should not feel as if the staff looks on them in contempt nor should they feel that they are causing trouble by making reasonable inquiries.
3. You produce substandard work and want to charge a first rate fee. When a customer pays to buy an item whether it is an EI, comes from a RIG, Bundle, or Collectible they expect the dimensions of that item to fit to the avatar you provide. An increasing number of these items do not. More than that, many of these items are left glitched with green goo, strange lines, and other anomalies that are NEVER corrected even after being promptly reported. In any other business if you would buy something defective they would either refund your money, give you a store credit, or provide you with a new working model. You do not one of these things and yet somehow your artists feel they are providing a service that is a cut above the rest. It is clearly not when held in comparison to your competition.
4. Delays happen in every business, however your projects are often regularly and unreasonably delayed. When customers complain of these delays they are told they need to be patient. Most are. However, these delays (whether it is waiting for products, features, events, or service) happen with such regularity that it becomes hard to excuse. If you cannot complete your projects in time then you should not announce release dates for them. This also exacerbates the problem of glitches, bugs, and incomplete features that never get fixed because you allow the problems to compoud making them more costly for you and more frustrating for your customers.
5. You are unreasonable with your EIs. CoP, Timmy, Catastrophe, and Owlpocalypse do not evolve with any reasonable timeliness. Yes Catastrophe and Owl are cheap, no that is not an excuse. Catastrophe would have been excusable because it was related that the evolutions would be irregular but going on more than a year is a bit long for anything. Timmy's evolutions were locked because you only released mini evos up until recently. CoP was a fiasco that resulted in you having to unlock all the poses because...well...it rarely evolves. This is a product that is time sensitive, people don't want to wait a year to receive a full and completed product unless they have been forewarned of such conditions.
You seem to be in the habit of blaming your users for their failing to adore you but in light of what I listed (and these are not small faults for any successful business) how can you blame them? You treat your customers as if they are the reason interest is not generated in your site and behave as if they are ungrateful but when you do not provide a good service how can you fault them?
Overall, Gaia, your customers have been more than willing to overlook most of these glaringly bad traits. They endure your abuses willingly. They wait FIVE YEARS for one item that you promised would be accessable with some work and you have the GALL to tell them that only 3% of them are deserving of Back Wings because the rest of them are not "hardcore" enough to use a feature that does not allow most people to create for the fun of creating and that you made difficult and unfriendly from the start?
You...have some nerve...you have also lost all forms of support I provide. Not because I want the Back Wings (because I have no use for such an item) but because your artists and your staff had the audacity to complain that the job was hard and therefore the customer should be made to suffer the consequence in spite of the many times I have seen the customer base praise them. Every job is sometimes hard. Many of them requiring more skill and effort. Many things, still, are a great deal harder than that. You will not get another red cent from me till you begin to actually start to behave like a business and treat your customers with at least an ounce of respect. The adblock goes on, the Cash Purchases Stop, No More Offers, and I will not participate in sponsorships...and ...I will write those companies to let them know what I think of you.
I have no issue with the artists having influence at Gaia. They should. But they should not behave as if they were asked to recreate the Mona Lisa or a Keith Herring when what the produce is the equivalent of last week's spiderman comic.
If they want people to show off their art then it should be accessible. Otherwise, they forfeit the right to complain about that. And anyone in business knows that you do not make your customers feel as if they are less important than your ego. Sales are made on making the customer feel special, not the other way around.
