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I love and hate the RiGs at the same time. I love the items....I hate how easily I drop the money for the bundles.

Spider: They have a strict schedule for RiGs. They are released the week after MCs are out. They get pulled the week before next month's MCs are out.

The last RiG was pulled /early/, thus making the items even more expensive and rare, just because a bunch of cash shop haters protested against it and won. This next RiG is going to be put out late, also making the items be more expensive and rare when they do come out.

Gaia gave y'all time to breathe between the last RiG and the next one, and yet there are going to be consequences for it. Those of you who want any of the last RiG items or the next RiG items are going to have to quest more to get them because of a bunch of complaints.

I could care less about when they come out.
It's the price for certain Cash Shop items that bugs me.

The economy is rough and consumers are looking for cheap buys.
Even if it's on pixels. Evolving items are way over priced and so
are donation items. Why spend $2.50 on an item with 5 poses
when you can have 30 poses for $7.99? And then the recolors.

And I understand they are a company and need to make money.
But with all the sponsors they seem to be getting, is it really a problem anymore?

Seliece: Yes, it was the Final Reign. It only stayed out for two weeks instead of the usual three.

Kira: Actually, Gaia has over $10 mil in the bank. They no longer are in debt since some time last year. Up until that point, Gaia had been in major debt and was actually losing money keeping Gaia up and running, yet they didn't shut it down, did they?

They've paid off their debt now and are making profits in the millions. All thanks to EIs, RiGs, and sponsors. Tell me, if Gaia never came up with EIs or RiGs, and had to rely only on sponsors and MCs to keep Gaia afloat, do you really think they'd be making profit or would they still be in debt?

Just because they're making profit now doesn't mean they should /stop/ making profit. They are a business after all. Just because money isn't a problem anymore doesn't mean they're going to stop trying to make any. Otherwise they'd quickly fall back into debt.

The price for MCs are traditional. They've been $2.50 ever since Gaia started. They were the very first 'cash' items and their prices have never changed, and they never will. Gaia keeps the MCs going because of tradition. They were the foundation of Gaia, they are not going to change them.

EIs, in my opinion, are not overpriced. Considering how long it takes full EIs to evolve, most with 30+ poses, $10 is a good price. The REIs are limited to 15 poses only, and they are half the cost of a full EI, which, given the math, is how it should be. Half the poses, half the cost.

It takes longer for an artist to come up with all the poses for both an EI and an REI. For EIs, the case is they work on the item as it evolves. They also incorporate a story into the EI and sometimes provide artwork via their journals to accompany it. For REIs, the poses are preset, which is why they evolve as fast as they do. The artist had the item and story completed ahead of time, but it still takes longer, I would imagine, to finish an REI than it does an MC.

Gaia does need to incorporate the artists' time spent on the item and compensate for how much they paid the artists during the time they spent on it, do they not? Of course an item an artist has been working on for 3 months is going to be more expensive than an item an artist has been working on for two weeks. Isn't that logical?

Gaia recently came into new management, a new CEO. The old CEO was replaced. Had we still had the old CEO, it was likely they wouldn't have delayed the upcoming RiG. However, under new management, they're likely listening to users more, as it seems.

Exchanging/vending - I've known someone who made over 100 million gold just from exchanging/vending alone in under 8 months.

I myself have made 15 million from zOMG in under 2 months. I used to be able to make 250k a day from BG'ing alone, until Gaia nerfed the aquariums.

It may be a while before we see any actual changes in how Gaia is run through it's new management. At least, any obvious changes. I know quite a few contract artists have become full-time artists recently. The one who made the Checkmate REI was a contract artist and is currently moving to California to become a full-time artist at this very moment.

zOMG is very likely going to be shut down, or at the least, no longer be updated and maintained. The main coder for the game has been pulled from the team to work on other projects. While I can guess which project(s) he was assigned to (and one of them is a pretty neat idea, the other not so much), it also means that the current zOMG team consists of only 2 people.

So far, I don't like Gaia under it's new management, solely for what they're doing to zOMG.

O.o What's wrong with having a friendly discussion? If this were another guild, this thread would be 9-20 pages long by now, with members trying to prove each other wrong. XD It really is fun.

But seriously, this is the first time and place I've seen someone complain about the prices of MCs. I've seen complaints about the quality/originality, but never the prices. XD

I like having friendly discussions with people and thought I'd give it a shot here to see what y'all think but I guess this is the wrong place to do it. xP -shrugs-

Ahh, sorry about that. I use the word y'all a lot even when I'm only talking about a group of people and not the entire group so I can see the misunderstanding. xD;

I think, for the most part, Gaia is mainly keeping up with the MCs as tradition, as I said. The $2.50 price is traditional, but the number of poses aren't. If you look to see the original MCs and the first year they came out, you see there were MCs with only 1 or 2 poses, never any more than 2. Yet as the years passed, more poses were gradually added to the MCs so that now 'traditionally' MCs have around 5-6 poses. The price hasn't changed, but the number of poses has. Some or most will say they the quality has gone down, but imo, the original MCs aren't in any better quality than what we're given now.

The goti clips and the recent goti the kid MC, for example. They have the same exact quality, don't they? Same for the bani clips and the bani the bunny MC. The nightmare sash is comparable to the nightmare scarf in quality as well.

The light spirit? Comparable to quality of the light tome and lusty scoundrel. The murumasa or whatever it's called? It's comparable to the ancient katana.

While it's true all these MCs I pointed out have the same concepts, they do have the same quality as each other, despite some being 3-4 years apart.

So.. imo, the quality hasn't changed. They're giving us more poses than originally, just sometimes the concepts aren't exactly original. Of course with goti and bani, the likeness was intentional and obviously so. Same with the nightmare scarf/sash.

But with things like the light spirit and the light tome and lusty scoundrel.. it's not like Gaia tells them specifically to make a new item based off an old item in these cases. The process for making an MC is basically, Gaia gives their group of artists a prompt for that month, on what concept they want that month's MCs to be based upon. Every artist given that prompt then comes up with their own design, poses, and story based upon the prompt alone. The one Gaia thinks is best out of all the concepts, gets made into an item. So it could be coincidence that they're similar or it might not be, who knows.