MegaRose
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Mega Gaian
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- Posted: Tue, 04 Jun 2024 22:18:05 +0000
Monako SM
Ehh, it only has about 160 to 200 at most people on at any given time.
I'd say it's /around/. I don't think it's doing to well in terms of actual success. The sheer lack of users causes a lot of issues considering everything is rng dependent and so trading is reduced.
My guess is there must be a few actual whales keeping it afloat. That or it's currently low user count reduced the cost of hosting it.
And this is coming from someone who backed the kickstarter, it's technically alive but certainly not prospering.
As for the thing about it being a dressup game secondary. I think this is debatable. It's a pet and dressup game. So much so that the majority of "monthly updates" Are sets of clothing.
I wouldn't call them polar opposites myself, they both have a collective "pet" system. (Gaiaonline has kindred) But I would say they are very different generally. Still it is the only example aside from maybe everskies that I know of that is relevant?
I'd say it's /around/. I don't think it's doing to well in terms of actual success. The sheer lack of users causes a lot of issues considering everything is rng dependent and so trading is reduced.
My guess is there must be a few actual whales keeping it afloat. That or it's currently low user count reduced the cost of hosting it.
And this is coming from someone who backed the kickstarter, it's technically alive but certainly not prospering.
As for the thing about it being a dressup game secondary. I think this is debatable. It's a pet and dressup game. So much so that the majority of "monthly updates" Are sets of clothing.
I wouldn't call them polar opposites myself, they both have a collective "pet" system. (Gaiaonline has kindred) But I would say they are very different generally. Still it is the only example aside from maybe everskies that I know of that is relevant?
One of the petsites I frequent averages about 10 people online. They're still afloat. There's no real metric for what counts as a 'successful' browser game community but if their servers remain consistently online and new content comes through at a regular pace, I consider that to be a thriving site. Even sites we would think of as big, established, well-functioning sites aren't necessarily successful. You can just look at the history of Neopets and point to as many low points as high points. Even some of the biggest web-based businesses in the world (twitter, reddit, etc) are often failing upward in ways that might start showing fascinating, disastrous results over the next few years. Or maybe not, because it's often hard to measure the success of a website.
I think Dappervolk specifically is a complete mirror image of Gaia because of what they prioritize in both development and the gameplay loop.
The main things to do on DV are NPC quests that unfold character development and lore. The presence of pets, and the player character's ability to make those pets, is a major plot thread that influences the journey. You learn and progress by interacting with characters and raising their affection, you're always involved in the world.
The avatar system sometimes comes into play but whenever a character wants you to change your outfit it's usually to reflect a stat build or a category of item (wear my wig and play two minigames, world-hopper!) that honestly discourage cohesive outfit making. You can just stack three recolors of the same hat to get your charm up to the quest requirement. The high-detail style of the site also seems really detrimental to actually looking good; most items only match well with the rest of their set, but the sets usually just resemble the site NPCs so you usually don't want to match that far. Even the most elaborate, clever layering tricks I've seen on Dappervolk avatars usually just look like busy color blobs because there's not much else you can do.
There are games, and they are not super complex, but they are functional. There is a forum, but you're rarely required to use it (I reroll/reject quests that force human contact and rarely have a problem). New content comes out frequently, and while most of the prizes and shop items are clothes, the real content that matters is the appearance of new quests and events, new locations in the world, and a thoughtful re-evaluation and rebalance of the existing quests' difficulty. Things to do are prioritized over stuff to buy.
Gaia on the other hand doesn't really have a gameplay loop because it's a message board. We come up with our own motives and goals, usually alongside coming up with our own world and lore. Individual RPs do whatever they want, and there's no cohesive presence of 'the player character' who lives in the world of Gaia, aside from our collective activity in certain events. The NPCs have their own lives and stories but we are just an audience to those stories. You can participate on Gaia without ever reading the manga. The pet system is the same, you can ignore Lake Kindred because it's just another minigame, not an integral part of the site. You can make a case for LK capsules being vital to the current economy but that's not quite the same as the game itself being important. It's certainly not getting new content.
Meanwhile the Gaia avatar system is maybe the best you'll get outside of user-content driven sites, and even then the only thing I'd say is 'better' is mmmmaybe Second Life. And that's extremely debatable on a lot of points. But your average site with avatars, even when avatars are the main focus, won't have multiple poses on one item, often don't use consistent color schemes across items, and usually don't have cutters or full limb replacements written into the system. The simplicity of pixels also does a LOT of heavy lifting towards making different item types and styles work together. The way items are organized is a little tricky, but if you're used to that, then the only better way to make a 2d avatar online is to just draw it yourself.
The games exist in theory, but many are non- or half-functional. Even then, technically they're not necessary to the Gaia experience. I actually remember seeing people bemoan Fishing before it came out because they didn't want their message board to turn into Neopets. The forum is always the main centerpiece of Gaia. The vast scope of things you can do with a simple phpbb message board is incredible, the power of human ingenuity has given us so many weird systems of shops and games and communities. Guilds, even though they desperately need an update, add an extra layer of complexity. I'll never run out of ways to appreciate humans interacting with humans through plaintext with occasional images. I almost never interact in the forums on petsites I play, but it's not that I'm shy. Most of their forums suck in some small but crucial way. Frequently it's something totally avoidable, like a post character limit or a rule against double posting. Some forum software is just unbearable to use. I'm definitely biased, but Gaia's so inviting and easy to post on.
I know that Lanzer is working on a lot of back end stuff that we'll never see that's vital to how the forums run (the server moves, search engine updates, etc), but if you're not a forum enthusiast like me, Gaia looks like all its new development is in things to buy, and never things to do. The finance and staffing situation here is so unique that it's really not comparable to any other website community still alive online, but if you were to compare them, Gaia is like the anti-petsite. No gameplay, all community. It's easier to draw parallels between Gaia and Reddit than it is between Gaia and Dappervolk.
I've never looked at Everskies so I can't give a too-long analysis on that. The site I actually want to talk about in relation to Gaia is usually Subeta. Subeta is one of the earliest Neopets-like sites but it's been tweaking its formula and evolving through its entire existence. Its avatar system isn't quite as complex as Gaia's but it's close; the main reason I never change my avatar there is that the base style isn't quite as pretty. I don't like their forum software and rarely play their games (for a very long time they didn't add flash/html5 games to the site because they didn't want to be too close to Neopets). The pet system is arguably the core of the site but you're never required to pay much attention to that either. The avatar system and the player market economy are the big draws if you ignore the pets. Most major features of the site see semi-regular new content. I shouldn't outright SAY it, but I really wish someone from Gaia staff would go over and snoop around and make some notes. If nothing else, there's a lot of quality of life features on Subeta that you don't notice until you switch tabs to a game that doesn't have them. To my knowledge Subeta also maintains their hosting costs with only occasional hiccups. I don't know what they (or any) site pays their staff but they don't seem to be in financial danger.
Anyways, sorry for writing so much about it. I really care a lot about websites. I want Towns back, personally because I like picking flowers, but also because hangout spaces are the natural, true intersection of Gaia's amazing avatars and amazing community. You could remove avatars from the sides of forum posts without dramatically changing the functionality of the site, so by contrast having a place where you walk around as your avatar feels more 'real.' I would bet if we had a functional Towns with a few more forum-like functions (honestly just saving plaintext chatlogs would be enough for me but I'm sure others could think of some things) it would drive up the sales of new items because we'd have a proper place to use them. In Towns you feel more like that's you, and if you have a favorite outfit or style then that sentimental connection is so much stronger when you can be that way in a true virtual world.
(But also, I would like to shuffle around silently in an empty neighborhood and pick up trash and weeds, that is one of my happy places)
