Update from Narumi Misuhara

[Ariel Yardena Davidson]

Please, please, please, for the love of everything, guys -

be civil. i'm not liking this either, but i for one am glad that Narumi is showing his hand. How do you suggest we address these points?

The Journal

quoting-

Quote:

Then and Now
Whoa! been a while ride the past few months. XD Thought I'd give a project update to the projects I announced at the beginning of the year. You can see that entry here. This biggest change between then and now is that all projects going forward must earn their production cost. This is nothing new in the world of business but is new to Gaia. This does not mean you won't be able to do anything without gcash, it does mean that you should expect most projects to have some gcash element to them.

Games
The update, as I intended it, is still on hold, especially since Alchemy still needs to be figured out. In it's stead we have an update coming using the game you can find in labs and some new ones we have created to release a new game system on Gaia. I don't want to steal thunder away from the dev who's idea this was so I'll leave it to them to say more on it if they wish.

Guilds
At the beginning of the year I had hoped to start production on it in Q3, which is around now, unfortunately because of the amount of time production would take (about 3 months) and because it needs to make back it's cost. I can't justify the project. Here is where I could use the communities help. If you have ideas on cool features that guilds could have that you would be willing to pay some gcash to use please post about them in SF, or send me a PM or reply to this journal. Remember these would need to be sustainable ideas so something like a kick-starter would not be an option. Otherwise, feel free to pass your ideas along!

Alchemy
My original intention with this was to re-design the system to require more site interaction and game play to actually craft an item. My original hope and intent was to have this out in Q1 of the year, unfortunately we weren't able to get to it. Due to the amount of time required for it we will see if there is anything more short term we can do so people can progress with the existing system.

Towns 2 & Pets
Little updates to this are ongoing, but it may be a while before more Town maps can be drawn out due to shortage in resources.

The devs working on pets are also working on the Halloween event so we needed to stop production on this to start on Halloween. We'll get back to it afterwards. Pets has come along nicely and we're currently looking at launching around February. We've had a lot of ideas and changes that we wanted to get into the system and we want to make sure that when we launch it the system is solid and as cool as we can get it!

Events
As always these are still going strong. Halloween I hear should be quite a amazing!

Inventory Arranger
This is currently in QA, we want to do rigorous testing on it to make sure the new system is solid before launch.

Alright that's it for then and now, I'll post another entry with more details on the future. smile

Until next time...
Narumi Misuhara
Producer

 

[Ariel Yardena Davidson]

This is just MY viewpoint, but i'm not liking it either. i know some of my friends don't, either, but i stand by their idea that this can work if Gaia plays is rather smart. Non-intrusive Cash options for games isn't too bad an idea. Hell, they could have an ability to buy a random Alchemy ingredient for a small, small amount of GC (no more than 49). More often, it'd be cheap items, but, sometimes, you might end up with caches where you can PICK your prize.  

[GC Revolt]

It seems like they're spreading themselves too thin. I think if they focused on one project at a time, we would see results faster and think, "Hey, at least one thing got done!" At this point I don't care what's finished first, I just want to see something finished.  

[Ariel Yardena Davidson]

GC Revolt

It seems like they're spreading themselves too thin. I think if they focused on one project at a time, we would see results faster and think, "Hey, at least one thing got done!" At this point I don't care what's finished first, I just want to see something finished.

i couldn't agree more!  

[Little Stormbat]

and this is what happens when you let people like JK and Pannagrammic go.

Too many projects, not enough resources to finish said projects, projects go by the wayside and we are left wondering wtf is wrong with them.

I am currently working alchemy and if they tack on another bunch of s**t you HAVE to do to get caches open I am going to be mad. I am having a hell of a time with what little time I do have to myself trying to gather enough trash, zomg loot, word game stuff, tickets, and fish to finish a cache every four days as it is. And I am making backwings. ><  

[Andromeda Phoenix]

Whatever staff does, they're gonna have to be really careful with what aspects of a feature they make cost GC and how much GC that aspect costs. The way they've gone about things these past years has given GC such a negative view. There's a lot of facebook gaming apps that are playable without the use of real money even with the real money aspects there. I personally, don't trust Gaia to do this right, even if they use the ideas we throw at staff.

On another note, my goodness Gaia needs a group of devs who work on events, and a group of devs who work on main site features. Having to stop production on a feature because an event is in the way is slowly them down to ridiculous levels. It's not helping them at all. @_@  

[Pilotslover]

This was the last straw for me.

The only thing I ever cared about here was the guilds, now I know that Gaia doesn't care about them I think I'm done supporting the site.

Effective as of the end of October, my Auto cash will be turned off.  

[xx I met my fate xx]

I would love it if they would improve things that AREN'T making them money but making our lives easier.

I wish they'd put less work into RIGS and CS stuff and more work into guilds, inventory arrangement, bugfixes...  

[Apollos Liar]

The site isn't pay to play by any means, but by integrating cash into almost every feature of the site, isn't it something in that same ballpark? I'm happy that the devs are talking us through things, but I still can't blame people in the slightest for their doom theories regarding all of this.

I agree with Cecilia that if they're going to have to implement it, then I'm OK with small amounts of cash. I just don't wanna see us pushed into dropping large amounts of cash on things that we should never had to have used cash for in the first place.

Zol has a great point as well: Our cash is obviously going toward maintenance--among other things--but how are they unable to update guilds with the massive amount of cash that has been going into the site lately? I don't wanna sound like a snotty little s**t, but with the thousands they made from the halo sale, how do they not have enough to update guilds? They updated Towns 2 (which seems like a much larger undertaking) and that has no cash push! Is it true that the cash isn't helping fund this new site? It's hard to say for sure at this point.  

[Elen_Gilthoniel]

Pilotslover

This was the last straw for me.

The only thing I ever cared about here was the guilds, now I know that Gaia doesn't care about them I think I'm done supporting the site.

Effective as of the end of October, my Auto cash will be turned off.

This echoes how I feel, really.

I understand projects needing to make back their production costs, but this new directive should not have been applied retroactively to planned updates, to the point that some of them are effectively being cancelled until when (or, let's face it, IF) they can come up with a way to monetize in my opinion.

I'm not opposed to small ways to monetize guilds--layouts you can pay cash for,or whatever. But the idea that we're basically not going to get even a bare bones update because an update would take too long, and therefore cost too much, to justify it....unless it can make all that money back.

I am just not okay with that. emotion_donotwant This decision is not one I can agree with. Not when they've been assuring us for such a long time, that a guild update was on the to-do list and that they were totally going to get to at some point. To have that assurance of an update revoked because, well, guilds don't make them any money and it's hard to come up with ways it can....yeah.

I know a lot of people are reading Narumi's post super sympathetically and as him saying "OMG WE HAVE NO MONEY FOR NEW PROJECTS"--I've seen several people indicating that he is absolutely saying that. But...he's not. <.< I mean, that could be it, but he never really gives the exact reason for this directive (that is visible to my eyes, anyway). For all we know, it's simply another way to maximize profits. He never really specifies (And, logically, if they were that strapped for funds, it doesn't matter if a project can make back the funds after the fact. If there's no money there to do the project in the first place, it seems like it wouldn't get done...) Developers and admin have said time and time again, that the company is doing well, or going along like normal. Either they're lying, and the situation is truly dire....or this has nothing to do with a need for money, and everything to do with a desire for more profits. Which, in the end, there's really nothing wrong with wanting profit.

But there comes a point to where the desire for profit is at the expense of the customers and this is an example--and that is what I dislike, really.

What really, really bothers me is that there is no acknowledgement that guilds (and other features) indirectly generate revenue because they keep people here, spending money. There are plenty of users who probably would not be as active on Gaia--or active at all--if not for features like guilds that keep them here. Each person that stays here solely because of guild communities is a potential customer. But that's no longer good enough. It's not good enough to have a free feature that holds potential cash spenders here. Now, the feature itself has to generate cash or it falls by the wayside.

Indirectly making cash by encouraging people to just, well, be here...just doesn't cut it anymore. Part of me does get this. Really.

But there's a larger part of me that questions if this is really the right direction for this particular community. I can say that I, for one, have called into question a lot of plans I had for Gaia. I have quite a lot of money sitting in my paypal account right now--money I was considering spending here on Gaia (enough to launch me into CV, and then some) because I do want to support Gaia; I love this community. But I definitely nixed those plans instantly. I haven't even been motivated to earn free cash at this point because I'm just really....blah....about this news. I've been planning to set up a very expansive breedable shop and RP and now I'm kind of questioning if I even want to do that on Gaia, or just take it somewhere else.

I'm sure that...I will cope and life will go on and all that. But this really did make me sad because I question if it's really even possible to make guilds recover their production costs without doing something horrible like giving them a cash subscription, or creating "premium guilds" with all the updates we want...except you have to pay cash to upgrade to a premium guild, or create a new one. Otherwise, I just don't know if they can monetize it enough that they'll be able to "justify the project" to begin with. emotion_8c  

[Pilotslover]

StrawberryZ0mbie

/snip

I agree with you entirely.

It's painfully sad to see the bones of the site stripped bare like this ...

The guilds, arenas and such matter too.  

[Apollos Liar]

StrawberryZ0mbie

This echoes how I feel, really.

[...]

Speaking of guild updates, if there was a tip feature, I would be using it for this post.

It's just so frustrating because now it seems like nothing on the site will get a good update without a cash push. Kenny said that codemonkey is working on the flash spaces, but will that Jigsaw update never come now? Will Journals and Guilds still remain messy and a relic of the past? There are certain things on the site that are really hard to monetize and what gets me the most is exactly what you were talking about: how in the hell are we getting so many cash pushes and being told that everything is fine, but that unless we spend even more cash then the site will never update? It seems like everyone is giving different answers and it's impossible to really piece together what's going on.  

[Kain-Senpai]

I'm not happy with a lot of the topics discussed in the journal entry, but we have to do what we have to do.