hrm. here goes nothing.
for those who don't know me, i'm a developer for gaia, i've been with gaia for four and a half years, pretty much from the start of gaia being "official". many of the features that you all use every day, and/or complain about... i've had a hand in.
you're welcome and
i'm sorry. to put it in perspective... the day i interviewed V0 ran into the conference room i was talking to Lanzer in, interrupting us to cheer about hitting 600k registrations. the day i accepted the position, gaia hit 700k. today, we get twice that many people actually visiting the site
in a month.
anyways.... i'm going to attempt to "respond" to the first post, which was well written and detailed, but i'll try to keep it short. i'm not going to respond to everything, but shed some light on what i can.
there seems to be a focus in the "so many broken promises" about all of gaia's downfalls, mishaps, "stupid" features, and lack of updates / fixes. what seems to be forgotten is all the good we've done over the years, and continue to do on a daily basis. the features we design, are always meant to better the user experience. some people may not like every feature, but then again, it's evrything to we can do . some of the features released may be a little buggy while we iron things out. some are released (like aquarium) that users automatically make assumptions about, not allowing the feature to develop. it's those assumptions, and those kind of narrow views that i see when i read the first post. there was
one line of thanks for all the hard work we put in, the rest is complaining about just about everything.
we're not perfect, we don't pretend to be. we
are driven to making every feature as good as it can be, and driven to keep things moving. think of the things we've done that have enhanced the user experience that aren't even mentioned. did anyone notice that the forum that we're currently posting in has grown with the site? or all the tools to fins your friends, communicate with each other, all the different ways to
have fun? item updates used to happen once a month. sometimes less. now they happen... what? every few days? evolving items, store updates, cash shop, fish, cars, sponsorship items... those items and programming to make that stuff work doesn't come easy, but we get no thanks, only hatred for the details of it.
things have changed over time... now there's a cash shop. okay. sponsorships, sure.... what most people don't understand is that it's all part of the growth of gaia as a whole. when i started, there were
eight people (not including the 50 or so mods at the time) working their asses off for gaia. now? well over a hundred (with hundreds of mods backing us up). users online then? 6k. yeah. that's right.
six. now? 60k, all day every day. we burst to over a 100k. millions of unique users each month. if you do the math, we're barely staying afloat keeping enough people around to support how much gaia has frown over the years.
...and that growth costs money. we do everything we can to take as much of the growth pains away from the user experience as we can. does anyone stop and think how much it costs to keep gaia running? the
hundreds of servers, artists, developers, bandwitdh, support staff? none of that comes for free. so we sell items to you in cash shop for real money... has anyone noticed that every one of those items is always an uber-item? with different poses, different states... hell... some of them evolve over time. we just didn't take an everyday item, and make you pay real money for it, that's not the way things run. if the decision is made by the powers that be that we have to make items to sell for real money, we do everything in our creative power to make those items worth every penny.
do me a favor about
zOMG, don't knock it until you've tried it. i've been working twelve hour days, nights, & weekends for over a year now, pouring my heart & soul into this game. and it's not just me, the whole team has. we've created a game for you that would take a normal gaming company with twice as many people twice as long (or more). and we're giving it to you for free.
yes, free. no subscription, no startup costs, no fees. you're angry that we "promised" that we'd have it out earlier? as someone who was part of the plan, it was never our intention to take so long to get it done. we just had a hard time estimating how much time it would take, how much effort it would be to make the game we set out to make. we live, we learned, and any extra time was spent to make everything work the way we really wanted it, and adding in as much as we could squeeze in.
let me reiterate something here.
FREE.
end of discussion. the items that will be sold for cash will be things to make the game better if you
feel like paying for it. you won't need any of them, and just in case you do, we'll be dropping them as loot in game. simple as that.
for everyone who's been waiting for the beginning...
thank you for being patient. hopefully, it'll be worth the wait.
cool
...
i'd just like to point out that we
do care about the users, we
do listen... it's just hard to communicate every little detail about what hundreds of people are working on. maybe some of the features we've released aren't that popular. maybe some are due for an upgrade... believe me, we know, we've got lists of projects / upgrades / rewrites that span out two years. but, from our side, every day we have to step back and look at the bigger picture. the site needs to stay running, scheduled updates need to happen, and we only have so many people who can put in so much time to make everything happen.
we're doing everything we can. 
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