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I would like to say that these are only my opinions. I realize the developers of the site take a lot of time to make what the make, but please listen to this like it is from a member that has seen too much mediocrity to really stomach any more.
If you want to throw bricks at me, wait until the summer when I post one of these on youtube and you can see who you have to hit. Plus, it will give you a better chance to hit me, since I'll have a lot to do until then that will keep me indoors for most of the spring.

And to the developers, I do mean what I say about zOMG. If you don't like it, fix the game.

I'm up to 25 of them, but they're the cheaper ones, or ones I bought with Gaia Cash, so it's more like I have enough little crappy EIs that equal the price of the good ones.

The problem is exactly that. I would have to sell off the majority of them to buy one of the good ones. It's like the entirety of Gaia is against me finishing me great quest. Add to that the fact that they keep making re-releases of the older items with different colors, and you end up with one pissed-off, unemployed Gaian and a lot of little kids who just joined and have mommy and daddy's expendable income to spend on Cash Cards for the items and then sell them to make the same amount of gold it took me a month to make chatting and playing games. It's simply rubbish.

This isn't complaining about those who occasionally buy a cash card with money they earned doing errands for your mom or mowing lawns or something, and this isn't aimed towards those who have jobs and make sure to have a little expendable income at the end of the month to put into some sort of meager entertainment fund. I actually think that you are making Gaia a better place by spending your hard earned money on a digital item that you will never physically have, and I support what you do.
The is towards the aforementioned little wankers who think that playing the Gaia marketplace means buying things with money they didn't earn and selling them for rediculous amounts of gold that most of us only dream of having, and some of us have spent months or years collecting.

It's at the point that my old plan of sell an item from a past event would have worked had I kept the items from the 2004 events, which should be worth at least 100k because of the scarcity and how much cooler event items once were. And when Gaia released the idea for "soulbound" items, they basically kick all of us who use the tactic in the genitals and laughed at us as we writhed on the ground crying. I can't sell the items that I own that are worth the most because I have equipped them once! That is crap stacked on crap with crap on the side. I would understand something like this in a normal MMO, but in zOMG you can do nothing but improve an item by using and leveling it. The idea of locking you from selling something that you made better is the worst plan that Gaia had. It's like Lanzer and the other Mods looked at the site and decided that most of us weren't pissed off enough and proceeded to proceeded to try anything to to give the sensation that we are having large barbed objects stuck in regions where things should not go with no lubrication whatsoever.

It seems that Gaia may be set on destroying itself, since it is set in the idea that one good idea should be accompanied with at least 2 bad ideas, if not 7. When the marketplace came out, there was the then steep price of 1000 gold to buy a vending pass and you couldn't use it if you didn't first have a trading pass, which meant spending another 500 gold. Now your 1500 gold out trying to sell items to other people who are 1500 gold out, but it added something new at least. When towns and homes came out, There was such limited room for houses that half of us had no actual house, just a thing decorated waiting to be a house. And you had to spend another 200 gold on items that you only had a few real uses for and only one of the things you get is still expanded upon. It's like Gaia completely forgot that they added in trash and flowers as collectible items and stuck with the idea that bugs=ink=tattoos=cool. But tribal designs and whiskers and crap are not cool tattoos. they aren't even worth collecting the ink for. The only real use for the ink is turning your skin a funny color.

To continue on this horribly long rant, we reach the creation of rally and the Bebo app, which both seemed like Gaia selling out in the biggest way possible and were a sign of bad things to come. The Bebo thing was changed too much after only 2 months, and the interesting items that made people go into it were axed for earning more gold. Rally just cost you money. If Gaia was trying to jump on the Tuner Car bandwagon then they succeeded and should get the hell off of it or do it properly. There are Myspace racing apps that are basically just glorified spreadsheets that offer the same customization depth and more consequence to lose than Rally. Plus, you can have more than one freaking car in those. Then Gaia teamed up with MTV, Which is a match made in my worst nightmares. It's like telling me that I will be give all the money that I could ever want and then telling me I have to cut off all of my appendages and have a full lobotomy to get to keep it. There really isn't any winning. I guess now it makes a good meeting place since hackers have claimed Towns as there own little Hell, but what is the point in that even. We could meet in Rally and still have the same effect.

Now, instead of going right into the next set of bad things, I'll say what Gaia did right. They regularly put out a new shipment of halfway interesting items into the store, and by regularly I mean every few months. The Monthly Collectibles still stay halfway interesting as well, although some of the ideas are kind of hit or miss and others seem to be redone a billion times over. I get that the first halo was popular, but do we really need 7 more. The Fishing and Casino games were very well done, and give you proper prizes that are updated at least often enough to keep it interesting. But Gaia found a way to screw Fishing up by adding a security system to get rid of botters, which is a little glitchy on how it works and often screws you out of the fish you just caught.

Now back to the bad. When Gaia was created, they said that they were developing a combat system for the site. Last year, they gave us it in zOMG, and probably laughed as we played what can only be called half an MMO. They got rid of the normal idea of experience in favor of having your level be dictated by the level of your weapons. They also got rid of the idea of real equipment, as all of the weapons and armor are in the form of rings, as we all know now. My only real question for this is why. I have been a member of Gaia since 2003 and I think I could have waited another year or two so that we could have some actually RPG elements. Plus, you add on a story that is so far up its own a** even it doesn't know where it's going. There are so many theories on why the Animated are around that if you can keep them straight then you have far too much time on your hands. Add in the items that you can make from recipes that the enemies seem to carry around more often than useful items, take 17 of an item with a drop rate of 0.000000001, and needing 3 billion of another item that you can only find from certain quests that are few and far between, and you have a load of crap. Add to that the fact that some of the quests require you to team up with other people, but increase the difficulty to the point that it is like the normal gaming conventions are turned on their ear and you are suddenly the AIDS-infested leper so weak that a cough could make you fall apart, and the enemies are at the strength of Juggernaut from X-Men.

With zOMG came the Cash Shop and the yet again the aforementioned Evolving Items, which were a good idea in theory but are being pulled off about as well as any sports game EA releases now. Yeah, you have new players to deal with the trades and s**t, but nothing else has changed, and your just milking the cow of that idea until it turns inside out. Releasing a new Evolving item about every 3 weeks would be great. It would give us who post for gold a chance to get them from the market place. But there have been times where Gaia has released 6 evolving items in a month. That's a bit of over kill. Then you release sub-par items that are cash shop only, and the zOMG powerups, and the fish.... WHY THE HELL DO WE NEED ALL OF THESE ITEMS RELEASED THAT WE HAVE TO PAY MONEY FOR. ESPECIALLY ITEMS THAT GO AWAY BY THEMSELVES.
I understand the powerups, but not the fish. And I haven't even given a damn about Celebrity Snare once I got over the cool Hulk items.

Gaia needs to cut the crap, take down the security for fishing, remake zOMG so that it actually feels like an RPG and find a way to blow up the computer of every hacker in Towns. Then I will be truly happy again with the site. Until then, I will be posting a seasonal rant here and send each of the mods a link so that they can see that we aren't all 12-year-old wankers with parents who have raised us poorly and some of us actually think. Only next time it's gonna be a video on YouTube. That way, the world can actually see who is saying this and stop throwing bricks at the wrong person.