Oh the unexpected...
Wow... lots of different reactions from the event so far, some positive, some negative... I thought it'd be best to explain some things to clarify.
With the grunny invasion, we wanted to do an event that would be a non stressful way to encourage people to spend their day posting with other users.
We figured that people would hang out in the Halloween Forum and discuss whatever, and all the while everyone would earn more grunnies as they discussed things.
We designed the system in such a way that, the more you posted, the more likely you would get a grunny(regardless of who you posted after). Sure, it helps if you posted after someone who had more grunnies than you(which added a strategic gaming element to the event), but it wasn't absolutely necessary.
I think everyone at Gaia was suprised when things seemed to spiral into a very negative atmosphere. People fighting and acting rude to each other. As one of the main planners in this event, I felt shocked and guilty that I had caused a gaia user to be so mean to another one.
Afterall, this event wasn't meant to be a competition at all.
The basic idea was one person posts and another posts, and slowly throughout the course of the event, everyone should've theoretically reach every level if they worked together.
We even made the items obtainable after a minimal investment of time, so that people who had other things to do this weekend could spend a little bit of time on the event, and then leave in good conscience knowing that they got the event items. And those who wanted to spend their whole weekend on gaia, could foreseeably get the status they wanted for spending the time here. Afterall, one of the core ideas of Gaia is that the more time you invest in the site, the more you get back from it.
But, after this event, we've realized that no matter how well we think we plan something, there's always something that we cannot foresee.
And though our intentions were always good, there's always something that goes wrong.
Which brings me to the situation on the state of the site during the event. We expected a huge turn out for this event as we normally do for any event.
We even implemented some new features on the backend to handle the load and were told we could support up to 60,000 simultaneous users at once. We felt confident that this event would go off without a hitch.
Lo and behold, the day of the event came, and while we launched on time, the servers started freaking out. And worse than that, our ISP freaked out as well, and no one could upload and fix code. Let me tell you, it was a friggin' nitemare. We were so stoked that we could get this event rolling, and then everything had to go wrong on that day.
To me, this is inexcusable. I know personally that I would be disappointed if an event freaked out. I also get frustrated when something I helped plan doesn't work out. But what can you do? There isn't a magic "fix it" button for our site. We are still in development and there are many things we are doing that have never been done before. And because of that, things break. The site slows to a crawl. And people get frustrated. Believe you me, when Gaia users get frustrated, so do I.
I mean, why create a site that is loved by so many and then purposefully do something to mess up those users' day? Does that even make sense?
Even now, we are all working hard to make sure at least Trick or Treating goes off ok. We wanted to simultaneously launch the Towns version of Trick or Treating with the site version, but unfortunately, our servers are still freaking out. Lanzer is currently at the server facility and will most likely be there all night trying to diagnose the problems, meanwhile, everyone else is either monitoring the current activities and or working on future developments.
It is my hope that everyone will chill and have some fun Trick or Treating together. Let's try to stay positive and treat each other with respect. It makes Gaia a better place and puts a smile on my face when I see people enjoying something that they love together. I know it makes me work harder every day because why work hard on something that people don't enjoy?
Take care and best wishes.
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