Welcome to Gaia! ::

Also... I'm pretty aware of the complaints against the boxes, and there's not much to be done on my part other than small things to make it nicer... But one thing I have been seeing lately bothers me. It's the complaint that the items in boxes are merely "tossed" or "shoved" into them. For the record, most RIG items, at least as long as I've been working on them, have been made specifically for that particular RIG. They are not usually items that would have been made anyway, much less actually released, with releases already being as tightly controlled as they are. I love the RIGs because it gives many of the artists a chance to just make stuff they want to make, things that otherwise might never be made, and we can put it out right away. Not to mention, the brainstorming that goes into the theme and types of items we want to make. At least on my watch, items are never stolen from other projects or in any way casually added to a box. It's fine if you get upset that an item you really wanted appeared in a box, because that's understandable; but please keep in mind that item might not even exist without the box.

That said, we're definitely always working on making boxes more user friendly. My major goal right now is to start weeding out gold shop items as our rares inventory grows, which I've already started with this box. Hopefully we'll keep moving towards that good place, guys.

Been very busy lately and part of it involves doing some research about Gaia. It's funny that I'm doing research on my own site, but it is because I've been with Gaia all this time, that I'm so deep in knowing how everything works that it's difficult for me to "un-learn" the site and see what Gaia is like for someone who know nothing about it.

For the past few years we've constantly been building new stuff for Gaians as every new feature is something fun to do outside of the community, and by now we have about 30 different games or features that keeps Gaians entertained. The problem is that for new users, we're looking at a website with 30+ features, and no where do we clearly point to where everyone is doing.

Clearly Gaia is a community, so we'll start making some changes to clearly state this is how we started and the best part about Gaia is all about meeting new people and hanging out.

While this focus is great for new users, for all exsiting Gaians the good news is that we're going to bring more forum community features once again. It's been a while since we worked on the forum, as the past few years we've been busy with database and backend work for the community forum to stop it from crashing under the weight of almost a million posts a day. Guild will also go through it's final stages of backend changes so that it'll share the same features as the main forums.

These changes are a long time coming, and I hope that it'll answer to a lot of the enhancement requests from Gaians and bring more fun to the forum community. Stay tuned for more details!