Welcome to Gaia! ::

Well going to put in my 2 cents.

First and formost gaia is free. They provide serves, admins, etc. So you're still getting all the stuff you come for.
To be completely honest avatars are just a side thing, if the avatars where here without the forums you wouldn't stay for more than a week (if that), however if the forums where here without the avatars you'd likely stay much much longer.
The avatars are just a little fun bonus to play with on the side, so items really aren't that important if you want to get technical.

Now yes, the introduction of real world money has basically made the economy for other players damn near impossible to survive in. That said you can't really blame gaia, they're a business like anyone else, updating and maintaining gaia costs them time and money so I can't get mad at them for trying to capitalize on it. Overall it was sort of an unavoidable outcome of community growth.

The in shop items are reasonable.
Now I have no qualm over them providing more in shop items, but they have to mostly be lamer than what they're producing as cash items or people wouldn't bother with cash (ie no incentive).

As for the cash items being reasonable gold wise, they really have no control over that as it's all supply and demand by the community. The only real big mistake I think they made was providing gold for cash, THAT broke the market more than the cash items did as it made gaining gold through other methods so dwarfed as to make free gold spending useless.

no not really, there are a number of pretty items in shop that cost at least 100k gold and it totally doesn't look like an item worth that much seeing as its a single pose item which doesn't even layer all that well. for expensive items over 100k they should make them a little more like cash items. maybe a couple of poses, of course not as awesome or more awesome than cash items but still a fair level awesome to price ratio neh.

and that why I said it was unrealistic cause you cannot control that part really.

Good Morning all

o-O thanks.....
how goes it?

Not as awsome...
Boss is starting to piss me off and love life is 50/50 due to issues not needed to be mentioned
But other then that alright.

That is at once true and false at the same time.

Gaia has always been a forum and a forum first, but the gimmick that makes it different from other forums is that avatar. The reason I stay here on Gaia instead of wandering over to some random forum made with the invisionfree boards is because I have Gaia Gold, and I can sometimes use it to purchase Gaia items.

But that isn't really the case anymore. I mean, I could still use my Gaia gold to buy Gaia items, but since I originally joined before the implementation of the marketplace the Donation items which used to cost 4k gold when they were fresh have become monthly collectibles that cost 100k gold when they are fresh. I used to be able to keep pace with the donation items. Hell, even when they had climbed up to 25k gold at fresh, I could keep pace with them, but now it is a very different story.

Now items that you can pay real money for come out once a week. There are evolving items, there are cash shop items, there are monthly collectibles. Only about half of them are of the same quality that the items used to be. Barely any of them feel fresh, after all, there have been two new items every month for how long now?

The items and avatars were what Gaia was about. I could show off to people that I have been around for however long. Veterans of the site were rewarded by having wicked cool avatars, and all of the noobs looked at it and went "look at how wicked cool that guy's avatar is. He must be really cool."

Now anyone who has 5 american dollars can have a 'wicked cool' avatar, and anyone who doesn't have five dollars to pay into the system can spend 100,000 gaia gold to pick up the latest donation item.

But it's cool, right? Gaia needs all of that money to keep the whole system running, I mean, it isn't like there are advertisements all over the place or sponsor events constantly showing up.

Oh wait.


My problem is that Gaia used to advertise itself as free, both to participate in, and of advertisements, and unlike most 'free' games out there while you could benefit from buying into it, you didn't actually have to buy into it because there were ways to make gold to trade for the things that you wanted. Now Gaia has become Adventure Quest. Sure it's free to make an account. Have fun being level two until you open your wallet.