Revolution: Gaia Issue 01

By xx I Met My Fate xx In 2003 I was 13 years old. Back then there was no age limit to join Gaia but if there had been, I would just have made it.

“Join Gaia!” My friends all said. They were all in to Anime but I really wasn’t. To me, it was a fad that wouldn’t last. Of course I was wrong. Either way, I joined Go Gaia, as it was called then, under the pressure of my fellows.

Together we browsed the link list, dressed our avis up, and despaired that we’d never be able to own that pimp hat at a whopping 12,000 gold. For about a month I was interested, after that it was a big “Meh” and I quit the site, thinking I’d never come back. Once again, I was wrong – You’ll see that being a common theme here. I’m wrong quite often, especially when it comes to Gaia.

Over the next year or so I was dragged along to anime club meetings in my Jr. High and then my high-school. I even went through a minor anime phase myself but if there’s one thing that hasn’t changed about me, it’s that I’m still not all that in to anime. Either way, there was a girl I had a crush on named Michelle. She convinced me to go ahead and try signing up again so because I was 14, she was a year older and she had pretty eyes, I did it. My old account information was long gone the way of my neopets account and my “wmconnect.com” email address but I had taken to using Namea anyway by then.

That first log in I remember being a bit surprised at how different the site looked. It wasn’t just a linklist anymore and the items! I was able to make an avi that looked just like my OC from some anime or other that I was watching at the time! I was pretty stoked, why hadn’t I stayed before? Either way, I figured it was going to be a long time before I stopped logging in to the newly named GaiaOnline. This time, I was right. You can see my noobitar there on the right btw, I still use that skin all the time along with those eyes and gloves.

I didn’t stay interested in that pretty-eyed girl but I did stay interested in Gaia. After a while I got the courage to open my own art shop. I remember drawing avis carefully on paper – sometimes lined – then sneaking into my parents’ room to scan the art and put it onto the computer. At the time we only had the one in the house and it was cheap and slow. The hour a night of internet time I got was always spent on Gaia and those stolen hours when my parents were gone tended to veer in that direction as well. I discovered Roleplaying, I improved my art, and I made some friends that to this day are nothing less than family to me. Sometimes, I would save up my lunch money and mail it off in an envelope to Gaia just to get those rare monthlies! 100k was an unobtainable dream but every month I felt like I was getting closer. I could charge 3,000 gold for my art and do several pieces in a month. It was glorious.

As time wore on many things changed about the site and about me. I had some hard times but my friends on Gaia were always there for me. I love this site but even things you love can let you down. I think the first step of that began in 2007.

I was a senior in high school in 2007. I was still young but man did I THINK I knew everything. My grandparents had given me a laptop and I was able to be on Gaia whenever I wanted! There were many long nights spent there. I got hit by a phisher and Namea was hacked. After filing a ticket I created a new account. Eventually I got the Namea account back but by then I was established on Neshira-Namea.

Gaia changed its logo and its layout again but I kinda liked the more streamlined modern look. I thought things were all fine and dandy…until the announcement for Gaia Cash showed up that summer. Fresh and ready for college, I was confused by this concept of paying real money for pixels. I knew friends who played WoW or Everquest but I thought that was dumb at the time. Just as I came to learn that it wasn’t dumb to pay for something you love, I came to appreciate some of the better things about Cash. New items, better items and a great way to make gold! An easier way to buy those MC’s with my newly acquired credit card! Cash was awesome…but what about the Gaian economy? I wish I could say that I thought of that back then but honestly, I didn’t.

In those first months I am ashamed to say I probably spent more than I’d like to think. After a while it tapered off when I realized that I couldn’t grow top-ramen trees in my livingroom. I limited myself to 10$ a month. That was it. I met that quota almost every month, even if I was super poor I at least managed 5 dollars. Some of the most amazing items I own came from then, though none of them are the originals I purchased.

2008 came and with it some seriously unpleasant developments.

Three of my close friends were banned from Gaia with shady reasons.

Honestly, I chalked it all up to the fact that you can’t trust people on the internet and they must have been doing somethin’ wrong. Naiveté’ is cute, isn’t it? In that year I got a message from a mod stating that my trade pass was being revoked because my account was under investigation for illegally purchasing gold from offsite sources. I did not know what half of that statement meant but the “under investigation” part comforted me. Surely Gaia’s staff would realize that I hadn’t done anything wrong and everything would be fine. Oh look, another instance in which I was wrong. Told’ya we’d be seeing a lot of those. About six months later my account was banned. Neshira-Namea, the account with all of my amassed wealth on it was banned…what’s worse? It was banned looking like that.

Hey, I never said I had a good eye for pixelated fashion.

I’ll be honest with you, I was pretty damn devastated. I had gotten my best friend to join and we were just starting to hang out together on Gaia. I was pretty “Gaia Rich” at the time because of my everimproving art and my slew of smart item decisions.

“Smart” is relative here. Either way, it took me a month to stop lamenting my lost wealth and re-join. The new account, Neshira Namea Returns was a fresh, newbtastic look at Gaia the way I had never seen it. A lot of features had been added since last I’d made a new account including starter sets and quests. I made a few mules just to take advantage of these opportunities, and to get personalized accounts for Rp characters that I didn’t want being traced back to me. Either way, with a little help from some friends it wasn’t long before I was back in the game and going strong.

I dunno who thought of the “world of style” slogan but I’m glad that didn’t last long. While grabbing that picture I inwardly cringed a bit.

Anyway, The next couple of years were mostly uneventful, I spent too much time and money on Gaia and enjoyed every second and cent of it. The economy was starting to show the strain and suddenly, I noticed! Maybe it was the fact that I too was starting to realize that money didn’t grow anywhere unless you’re a politician but suddenly it didn’t seem very smart to spend even ten dollars a month on my favourite website. I stopped for a long time around then, instead focusing on other things and my usage on Gaia dropped as well. For a quick moment I was very involved in charities and quests on Gaia. I don’t know whether this was due to my growing wealth or the fact that I wanted a little bit of attention for my generosity…probably both. Either way, it was in one of those that I first encountered what I like to think of now as a “Super duper on the internet dickhead”. That’s code for “Troll” in case you’re wondering.

This one dude(girl? I’m not sure) made several accounts specifically to harass me. I was not happy and the harassment actually affected me outside of the site. This period of time sucked serious balls and eventually I did the only thing I could think of. I moved every single item I owned over to a brand new account. Seeing as I was apparently extremely angsty at the time I named my account xx I met my fate xx. I’ve kept the name, though not the angst, and it’s been my Gaia-home for the past four years.

In the real world I was growing up, my views were changing and I was maturing into a perfectly bit-..er…strong willed young woman. I was pessimistic and arrogant, yet somehow still fairly decent when it came to my “internet persona”. I’m nicer on the internet, I always have been and still to some extent am. Even so, I’ve offended my fair share of Gaia users and I fully intend to keep doing so until this site implodes on itself in the next year or so.

Did that sound pessimistic? Maybe I’m not completely out of that phase. Oh well. Let’s go ahead and fast forward a little, shall we? 2012 is when I first started feeling the sting of cynicism within Gaia. The economy had gone from “Hey, buy this really awesome item for 4.99 in the cash shop or 500k in the market!” to “Hey, buy this decently made item for 4.99 in the cash shop or 4 million gold in the market!” I really didn’t like that at all….and after some digging I realized that I wasn’t the only one.

How could I have not known about this wonderful thing called the Site Feedback forum!? I’d never ventured there before but when I finally did then quite a few of the topics were angry about the inflation. Just like a real economy, Gaia’s can only work with balance and that was tipping.

It wasn’t nearly as bad as it is now but even then people were upset. We were reassured over and over again by Uncle Kenny and other members of the Gaia staff that things were going to be okay. A “New Goldsink” was just on the horizon, yada yada yada.

White Noise.

Oh, we got a gold sink….We got D-C, We got events that centered around getting rid of trash, we got ALCHEMY. None of them were affective.

For one, D-C was far too expensive for the “Average” user to afford and no “Gaian Elite” was going to spend 5 million gold on a one pose item. After the luster of being able to say “I’m richer than you on a socially nonrelevant website” was gone, those items were worthless and people stopped buying them. Remember how the stock of D-C was supposed to “rotate” every once in a while and the shop was supposed to “mysteriously vanish and reappear with all new items” ? Yeah that happened what…twice? When they realized what a flop it was the devs stopped doing all that. The same items have been in the shop now as we’ve had for two years, except for Loyal’s stuff but we’ll get to that later.

Next, we were treated with club verge. I was going to put a picture here but that doesn’t even deserve the effort it takes to google it. Club verge was a special “exclusive” club to gaians who were “loyal” to the site. By LOYAL what was actually meant was that you were only allowed to access the Club Verge shop if you had spent one hundred dollars or more on Gaia in the last calendar year. The guild and shop weren’t about loyalty, they were about greed and the prices reflected that. 25$ for a single item? 50?

And of course, who could for get…your very own SDPlus doll for 500 dollars or if you really wanted to give a big middle finger to people in need: An angelic halo for no less than ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS. That’s rent for me. That’s MORE than rent for me.

Remember when Alchemy was supposed to save the site? “Hundreds of new items” it promised. “A way to get rid of stuff cluttering up your inventory!” it swore. Then we all saw the price tag of creating any items and the anger began anew. You basically had to drop fifty bucks just to get started OR already have millions in your account. I don’t know about you but even being one of the “wealthier” gaians I didn’t have MILLIONS just sitting there. Maybe one or two but not 30. At the time 30 million would have been like “OMG I can buy EVERYTHING I WANT.” To me.

Even so, people still pursued it, even people who had little to no money still went for it…most of them failed but hey, you gotta try, right? Coveted backwings were the ultimate goal of Alchemy. Since 2003 Gaia had been teasing us with them, it was somewhat of a running joke, even to the point that Gaia released an event item called “Cardboard Backwings” that had a description of “Finally! Back wings! ...Wait a minute. Were these made from an empty refrigerator box?”

Somewhat of a side note here, those wings used to sell for 10gold a pair. Now they’re going for 4 million.

The risen, fallen, and angelic quests were the ultimate of many Gaian dreams. I know lots of people who went for them….and some who got them….it was a ridiculously difficult undertaking and I have a lot of respect for the people who worked their butts off to do it with gold…Finally, one set of each wings was created by three different users. It was maybe a week, maybe less before something happened that made a lot of us scream foul. Gaia released bundles in the cash shop containing all of the ingredients that so many people had worked for to start the wings quest. These bundles cost no less than 99 dollars apiece. Gaia had become pay to win and that pissed me off.

I’d go over all of the other horrible things that they’ve done since then but what’s the point? If you’re reading this, you already know all of that. For now, I leave you with a little bright spot in all of the gloom that is currently Gaia:

Mor_ Fish in Phin Ph[ng!

We wish for more fish to be sold in the shop, Phin Phang.

Help our tanks flourish again!

Turn off th_ “Sp_]i[l Popup Off_rs!”

Petition Gaia to turn off the pop-up ads that often appear on the My Gaia page!

More Fish in Phin Phang!

Turn off the "Special Popup Offers!"

K__p Sit_ C_nt_ring Option[l!

STOP r_l_[sing Flynn's Booty [n^ oth_r gol^ g_n_r[tors!

A petition to get Gaia to bring back the option to choose between the left-aligned and Center Site layout.

Keep Site Centering Optional!

Petition Gaia to never release any massive gold generators ever again!

STOP Releasing Flynn’s Booty…..

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Were ‐ Animals Were ‐ Item Guide

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We are a group of Gaians wanting to be heard. We are not looking to be violent or rude, but to simply and effectively get our point across. Revolution: Gaia

We are here to push back against the negative things happening to our beloved site. And if we work together, we can change things.

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 † Energetic †

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