133TGATE:Staff INTERFERING with the MP INFLATION/TICKETS!

[Dzirus]

So they say the purchase was an accident?
But Zero said that it was legitimate when Gash first made the thread.

But then what about those other items that were bought by the same account that are insane in prices as well? Are those by accident too?

And if they are going to put it in the next gold sink or flynn's plunder or whatsoever, who would buy it for flynn higher that 133T? They inserted more gold into the system than actually make a "sink".

[justaboutthattime]

Literatic

Linshon

Literatic

Linshon

Literatic

Wait, so where did all that gold come from in the end then? I can't see a mule having
133T just lying about casually, so it was generated right? But Zero said it was legitimate in
the original thread by Gash? How can putting 133T into the system be considered okay, even
if it was for the sake of putting the ticket into Flynn's. As a mule interacting with users in the GCD,
going by their post history, they'd have been just as capable of haggling with the user on the
price instead of putting 133T into the economy.

Well the gold could have always been there. You have to think there is roughly 250 trillion gold that Flynn's Plunder collected over the course. It could have really been non-generated gold.

But isn't that gold meant to be as a gold sink? Not to be put into a staff mule account?
I'm not sure why they would keep the Flynn's Plunder gold sitting around. >___<

Well they did say that the gold was on the mule account from a previous set of testing that they were doing on Gaia.

Hmm, but a previous artist came in the other thread in the GCD and stated that Gaia had a clone
site that they used for testing. This was corroborated by various users who went through the beta
for zOMG. The testing should have been done on the clone site, no? Even if not, testing just says
to me that the gold was generated as a test, not as a legitimate means of having been earnt.
But who knows.

Ok well now you are looking at aspects of game design rather than the real issue here but the thing with that is that yes, while a beta site exists, that doesn't mean that they shouldn't do live testing either. You have to remember that everything in games is testing related to see what goes live.

You have stages right. Alpha. Beta. Live, but between these stages is a lot of other possible stages of development. Gaia is essentially an experiment (and I don't mean that in a negative way). Live testings are valuable and sometimes you need to make a live environment to test things because you cannot recreate a real world situation on a beta environment because people enter beta testing with a specific mindset. Live testing is a real valuable tool in game design.

[Vuux Bolton]

They will play everything off as a giant mistake, despite how irrational the excuse is. And there will always be white knights, and staggeringly naive children eating up every word they say because they forget that, like us, this site is run by people. And some people will do anything to make an extra buck.

Firstly, what kind of account is just sitting around with 133T+ gold? And how can you just accidentally pay for an item that expensive? If anything, I would question the reliability of a staff team that would dump that much gold into an item, for a supposed gold sink and refuse to acknowledge the negative ramifications and damage to the economy of such a mistake until the entire community is literally at their front door with torches and pitch forks? And why? Because you didn't want to just come out and say "Hey. we ******** up." Sorry when I say there seems to be far more than they're letting on.

Not to mention when Zero originally mentioned this "high" spike in gold, he claimed to know nothing about it until launching an investigation.

Really? You launched an investigation for something that you planned out in the first place?



All of this reeks to high heaven, but unfortunately this will be where this tale ends

[Literatic]

Monochrome Menace

Perhaps there was miscommunication?

Doubtful.

Here is the quote:

Zero Omega

Gash Thrashum

I'm hearing that there was a glitch in the gold gens yesterday which allowed people to recieve trillions in gold. This would explain the huge spike in the MP and all the item listings getting bought out/ABPs going up.



Does anyone know more about the situation? I don't have any confidence in Gaia clearing things up or making any sort of announcement about it.

This is not a case of gold generators. We just finished investigating this and found it was a result of one particular user purchasing a Double Rainbow Ticket for 300 trillion gold. The Marketplace graph is not necessarily a representation of how much gold is in the economy or being generated by gold generators. It tracks how much gold has moved through the Marketplace only. Lots of things can make the graph rise or fall. For example, if we had a bunch of older users with lots of gold come back to the site and purchase a lot of things on the Marketplace, it can rise. If we had a bunch of users sell incredibly high priced items, it can rise. On the flip side, if people decided to stop using the Marketplace, it will fall. In this case, a user had enough gold to conduct a large transaction like this and spike the graph. I predict it will dramatically fall back to normally levels tomorrow if MP spending remains normal.

Also, before there are concerns about hacked/exploited gold, we investigated the user in question and found that all the gold was clean. It was a legitimate transaction, albeit abnormal.

Nothing about a mistake there.

[MistressMinako]

Monochrome Menace

MistressMinako

Zero Omega

Zero. You are one of the few staff members I trust and so I write this with as much love as I can: Dumping trillions of gold into the economy and then lying about it is the very worst way to stock Flynn's Plunder. A feature which, by the way, is completely out of reach for most Gaians.

If you want to give away items, generate new ones. Your artists are employed to provide a service and the tickets are a promise of timely service. It would take months to drain away even a fraction of the gold that was dumped into an already failing virtual economy via these actions. Very few Gaians would even stand to benefit from either the gold or the Flynn's Plunder auctions.

This was a bad move. Please do not consider anything like this in the future. This includes using your staff accounts to purchase any items for obviously inflated prices. It is not charity, it is inappropriate and destructive to a virtual economy barely stable as it stands.

In response to the bolded text:

Yeah, if the recipient chooses to actually use the ticket.

This person chose to sell it.

The person who received it could have thrown it away, if they wanted to, of just hoarded it and never used it.

Once it's on the marketplace, it's fair game.

Actually she didn't chose to sell it, it was listed for a high price because she was taking reasonable offers for it.

The point of my wording there is that a ticket is a promise of service. That promise cannot be circumvented just because the staff that generated the ticket and charged real life money for a chance to own that ticket suddenly decides they no longer want to do the work. I feel that this was a poorly planned deceptive plot that thankfully has a happy ending in that the transactions are being reversed to save us from the larger impact of hundreds of trillions of gold being dumped onto the Marketplace.

Sellers and buyers have the right to do with their items what they wish. While Gaia lays legal claim to everything on this site, that legal claim does not give them the moral authority to cause a huge mess because of a backlog on the end of their artists.

If the ticket was bought through auction at a reasonable market value, I would have no issue with this whole situation. The fact that the ticket was never intended to be sold as is and then the sale was further represented as legitimate is what sticks in my craw as you can see. I do respect the staff of this site on a certain level and I am glad that fault was admitted, responsibility has been taken and action is being taken to make it right. That does not excuse the fact that this was a mistake.

Do you have any other questions?

[Zandy]

I don't get what the big deal is with staff trying to remain anonymous on accounts to test features with. It's sketchier to lie than to be just straightforward from the beginning.

And to be honest, generating one extra double rainbow ticket isn't that much of a burden. They should've done that in the first place. Gaia pumps out tons of recolours each week so an extra ticket wouldn't be too much of a hassle. Interesting how Gaia feels like them releasing tons of tickets over the course of a few months wasn't excessive when they were gaining money from it, but one extra ticket meant to go towards the site was their tipping point to say, "Nope, we're just gonna use an existing ticket. Too much work."

Not to mention, how can one mess up on spending 133T on a ticket? I mean heck, I don't know much about the project tickets to begin with, but I know they're nowhere near that amount.

There's a lot of inconsistencies in what is being told to be honest and I personally don't believe the staff.

[Rabid-Turtle]

I don't mind the basis behind what they did but thats shady as ******** and for Zero Omega to come into the forums and omit the truth to say "nah guys we looked into it, its all good".

I will never be able to trust in what he says in regards to future issues. I guess gaia really has no integrity left.

[Literatic]

Linshon

Ok well now you are looking at aspects of game design rather than the real issue here but the thing with that is that yes, while a beta site exists, that doesn't mean that they shouldn't do live testing either. You have to remember that everything in games is testing related to see what goes live.

You have stages right. Alpha. Beta. Live, but between these stages is a lot of other possible stages of development. Gaia is essentially an experiment (and I don't mean that in a negative way). Live testings are valuable and sometimes you need to make a live environment to test things because you cannot recreate a real world situation on a beta environment because people enter beta testing with a specific mindset. Live testing is a real valuable tool in game design.

I can't claim to know too much about that side of things, I'm sure live testing happens and that's
fine, but it doesn't seem like a good move to use what we can all only assume is generated gold
(since we've established time and time again that accumulating that amount of gold over the past
six months is fairly impossible and highly improbable) to buy a highly expensive item, likely the most
any item has ever sold for on Gaia I'd imagine.

I'm glad it's being reversed but it really shouldn't have happened at all. gonk

[Charizard]

Vuux Bolton

They will play everything off as a giant mistake, despite how irrational the excuse is. And there will always be white knights, and staggeringly naive children eating up every word they say because they forget that, like us, this site is run by people. And some people will do anything to make an extra buck.

Firstly, what kind of account is just sitting around with 133T+ gold? And how can you just accidentally pay for an item that expensive? If anything, I would question the reliability of a staff team that would dump that much gold into an item, for a supposed gold sink and refuse to acknowledge the negative ramifications and damage to the economy of such a mistake until the entire community is literally at their front door with torches and pitch forks? And why? Because you didn't want to just come out and say "Hey. we ******** up." Sorry when I say there seems to be far more than they're letting on.

Not to mention when Zero originally mentioned this "high" spike in gold, he claimed to know nothing about it until launching an investigation.

Really? You launched an investigation for something that you planned out in the first place?



All of this reeks to high heaven, but unfortunately this will be where this tale ends

A+

[xFyex]

AKB0048

xFyex

Monochrome Menace

Quote:

However, we made an error in purchasing the Double Rainbow Ticket, in particular, for 133 trillion gold and we will be reversing the transaction.

I feel like people aren't reading this part. Or maybe they're just not understanding that the person made a mistake.

Wait a minute. So they made an error, but wait for this thread to be made to reverse the transaction? I'd assume that damage control would be something that takes immediate attention.

If they made an error, they should have reversed the transaction. And considering that there were multiple extremely questionable transactions made during this incident and they lied about it MULTIPLE TIMES and tried to cover it up as normal user activity, there is no way they "accidentally" spent that much gold.

I can't believe people would buy this. The error they made was getting caught.

Oh. I must not be presenting my tone very well. That's on me I guess since it's my job to get my message across.^^;

Kay, how about this version:
It's rather suspicious that Gaia would wait for a thread that puts the transition on full blast to reverse the transition. What's more, Gaia didn't take immediate action and instead they opt to give a false reason to the rise in the graph.

That better?^^;

[xxrainycloudsxx]

I would love to see Zero explain why the mule pretended to be a regular user and went so far as to pm Gash explaining why they bought it and what items they would like to recolor.

Why can't you guys just own up to things instead of trying to make excuses and sweep things under the rug.

How are you guys still employed? Your excuse is always We will handle this internally or We will change our policies.

Whats internally? you don't do it again because you got caught? Real great policies.

[Free Killz]

Buying tickets and items from MP with gold generated from an unknown source just to put them same tickets and items in a gold sink that would sink almost the same amount of gold that was put in circulation by the staff's mule. Seems like a pretty illogical way to sink gold to me.

Not saying it's fully wrong, but there are other, more productive ways to sink gold without making such a mess, they could at least spread awareness and try to state their intentions to the community about the next gold sink, it's a social site after all.

(If AtA were to be alive right now, it would explode with different questions regarding these kind of matters, because this site clearly lacks interaction between the staff memebers and the users. It makes it seem like the staff have some kind of an inhibited behavior towards it's user base.) mad

[Euphonious Cantabile]

XxRainyCloudsxX

I would love to see Zero explain why the mule pretended to be a regular user and went so far as to pm Gash explaining why they bought it and what items they would like to recolor.

Why can't you guys just own up to things instead of trying to make excuses and sweep things under the rug.

How are you guys still employed? Your excuse is always We will handle this internally or We will change our policies.

Whats internally? you don't do it again because you got caught? Real great policies.

If the mule account doesn't belong to Zero, he can't actually speak about why the mule account acted that way. It's up to the actual owner of that mule account to explain that themselves.