Your post is long, so forgive me for being brief. I'm addressing several issues, mostly ones that have appeared since the first thread, or ones that have something to do with what I do on Gaia.
[ .NK. ]
You say you're concerned about the safety of your users but you add a texting message. Most of the people you appeal to
are tweens! You used to tell us to NEVER give out ANY personal information, but now this new
feature/sponsorship is encouraging them to do exactly the opposite! What's going on, Gaia?
Text messages are perfectly safe - neither the sender not the receiver see each other's phone number.
[ .NK. ]
You released a game and didn't tell us about it for two days
This is called "soft launch", and is a form of an open beta test.
Shame on us for testing things before fully releasing and announcing them.
[ .NK. ]
We STILL don't have a lot of the things that were promised to us.
Great! It means that Gaia has not only a past and a present; Gaia has also a future to look for.
[ .NK. ]
- You promised us that this site would be free to play and enjoy, but that, too, was a lie. How? Because the only decent items you release cost cash. The items we've been requesting for years. Panda slippers, for example. How about the
orphans? Oh that was a great way to milk us. EIs cost far too much, and they're the best items on the site. They far outshine the recent MCs. They give us things we've been asking for for a long time. But we can only have them if we fork over more of our hard earned money. What about the people that collect the items, and want them all? It's bad enough that we'll likely never get the old DIs, but now we can't even keep up with all of the CS items. One EI after another comes out, and you promised us that they'd be cheap and affordable, but they're not. They're barely obtainable with gold because the users are greedy (I would say that that's not your fault, but you knew damn well it would happen because of the tax you put on the MP. You knew EIs would go for several hundred thousand gold, only to patter out at around 100k). I used to get items easily because I had an art shop, but even then I couldn't keep up with all of the CS items, and I had a very good gold income at the time.
Gaia
is free to play and enjoy. The biggest proof of this is the small percentage of Gaians who pay Gaia. Very small percentage. Dig up old Geeza's posts in the previous thread for more details about this.
[ .NK. ]
You keep releasing stupid features that no one wants (Cinemas, used mainly for your sponsorships that are annoying as hell, or VJ or whatever it's called which is overrun with porn and s**t no one wants to see. And let's not forget Gaia IM which is really rather pointless.) while neglecting features that people love.
[ .NK. ]
... You've yet to miss an EI update (maybe postpone it for a day, but you haven't missed one) but yet you've completely forgotten New Movie Mondays and several of the updates mentioned above, it seems. How is that fair to the people - your users - that you depend on?
I'm not sure I can construct a constructive suggestions from these two...
[ .NK. ]
Here are our official suggestions on ways to greatly improve this site.
- Advertisements and Sponsorships.
- Work harder to get rid of the "illegal" ads. These are the ones over PG-13, the ones that get in the way of posting (the Circuit City ads), the ones with music, and the pop ups. I've seen the process for reporting these ads, and it's something that your average user won't be able to do, or want to do. It's a long, complicated process. Let mods work on them while browsing.
As the guide for reporting these ads says, different people see different ads. Even if we decided that it's the mods' work, they could be refreshing pages all day long and not see these inappropriate ads. Unfortunately it is true that the average user won't be able to report the ad. (even though I do believe, as you said in the original post, that "We're smarter than you think we are" ). But we don't need
everyone to report
each ad. We only need a few, or in some cases - one report.
[ .NK. ]
Just because all items eventually end up on the Marketplace does not mean we can get them without paying cash.
I respectfully disagree.
[ .NK. ]
- No more Mythril Coins or anything like it. You're going against yourself with that, and all for a quick buck. Those coins may have gotten you a lot of money, but it also
destroyed the Gaian economy, making us suffer in the long run. I know that Lanzer didn't want to put the 2% tax on the market place. And I'm sure you all argued about it. But you just wasted all of your time and effort doing that by releasing "get rich quick" methods. In the end, it only ensures more money for you, because things inflated so much, so quickly, but the amount of gold that the average user (as in, users unable to buy cash) didn't increase in the slightest. You tell us to just buy the items off the Market Place, but we can't when we don't have any gold, can we? That means that if we want the item, we
have to pay with cash. It's as simple as that.
The effects of the mythril coins disappeared almost as fast as it came. The second time they were around, the effect was so small, it was barely noticeable. Gaia's economy was not "destroyed", and the 2% MP fee had nothing to do with it (it was implemented
8 months before the bag of win).
Prices in the MP are determined by market forces. If we gave everyone more gold, prices would just rise to compensate for it. It's as simple as that.
[ .NK. ]
- You lied to us about never changing the gold prices, and yet you did.
It had something to do with it, and I had a whole
journal entry about it.
The gist of the story: we had a pricing error, that made potions' gold prices inconsistent with all other cash to gold ratio on Gaia. We fixed this problem a couple of days after releasing potions, by lowering the gold price of potions. Shame on us for fixing our mistakes. Shame on us for lowering the price of two items three days after they were introduced.
[ .NK. ]
- You said you would never interfere with the economy when we asked you to help lower MC prices, but you always mess with the economy. You added a tax; that's messing with the economy. You manipulate the Daily Chance in way that manipulates the Marketplace prices.
Gaia is evolving. New features grant gold. New items serve as "gold sinks". Every single change we make on Gaia affects the economy.
Still, we do not intervene directly in the marketplace: we do not limit or influence the prices. Prices are determined by buyers and sellers.
[ .NK. ]
- Moderation
- This site is poorly moderated. Considering the fact that you don't even pay your moderators (as all sites don't), we think there should most certainly be more.
Not paying our moderators makes it
harder to find good ones, not easier.
[ .NK. ]
- Bannings
- Though this somewhat goes hand in hand with moderation, we have a big concern about the mass bannings. We should not be afraid of participating in the website, fearing that we'll be banned when we've done nothing wrong. Mass bannings should not happen
unless you have substantial evidence that it wasn't just your screw up. On top of that, you should be able to
immediately unban those there were unfairly banned. To ban someone that was truthfully innocent, and then never unban them is wrong, especially when it's usually a committed, paying customer. This leads us to further think you don't care about your loyal, dedicated users. If you think someone has a hacked or botted item, don't immediately ban them, but try to figure out where the item came from first. A lot of people - even those that pay the insane cash shop prices for you - are banned unfairly over this every day. We should not be afraid to accept generosity.
Now I'm hearing stories about users that were banned unfairly, and are being told that they'll never be unbanned, even if found to be innocent. What is that? That's not fair at all.
We don't ban people for hacking, scamming and the likes without sufficient evidence. In the rare occasions when innocent users are banned, there is a mechanism for appeal. We take no joy in banning innocent users - why would we?
[ .NK. ]
- Bots
- The bots problem needs to be fixed. This is causing more problems, and costing more money, for you. The only thing to suggest is banning them, really, because more captchas only hurt those of us that are innocent. You need a team of moderators dedicated solely to scouring the Arenas and forums for bots, starting with the most common places.
We spend immense resources on banning bots. If you've seen any bots, in the arenas or elsewhere, report them. We're working on complementary anti-botting measures, and we're improving all the time, but CAPTCHAS are still the best solutions for some problems. We're still tweaking the frequency of CAPTCHAs, and will continue to do so to minimize the effects on real users. But unless some new invention comes along, CAPTCHA will stay with us for a while.
