Gaia is often fun and games, but it's also serious business!
You Say It's Your Birthday
We just wrapped up the Gaia 4th anniversary event, which saw:
- The release of a new quizzing system (which we will probably be using for quests in the future)
The release of "The Newsroom" which will be used to display past storyline and new storyline going forward
A limited-edition Gaia 4th Anniversary T-shirt in the stores
3 new event items
It was still not considered a major event, like Halloween or Christmas, so some users were disappointed with the size and scope of it -- but we were all very happy with the way it turned out and all-in-all, it was considered a success.
Plotheads
I don't want to spoil the plot for users who haven't read the update. But also, I don't want to dance around GO READ IT!
So 02 is dead. Mother is tall and elegant now. The Zurg are gone. Some users are upset, lots of users are relieved, and frankly, so are many of us.
Here are some things I've mentioned to a few different people about what's going on:
- We lost control of the Zurg plot. Half the time most of the people at Gaia HQ didn't know what was going on. Various people were flying ships without any idea about what the motivations of the Zurg were or what was supposed to be Zurg Canon, as it were.
We plan to have a lot more control of the plot going forward, but to do that, we had to tie some loose ends with the Zurg plot. What happened with the Zurg story wasn't ideal, and we know that. We're not so ignorant as to think we did a fantastic job with it -- but by the end of 2007 you might have a better understanding of why we had to wrap it up when we did smile
Finally, most importantly, there's a REALLY cool plot in the works. I can't say much more than that, but new and old users alike will get a kick out of it wink
BTW - I wanted to point out this fantastic guild thread which covers Gaia's history up to this point in a way that's significantly more in-depth than the newsroom. Stop making us look bad, users!
Event Evolution
So like I said, I put in about 3 weeks of crazy hard work, weekend hours, and overtime getting 2 events that launched within 10 days of each other ready. Lots of UI designers, artists, and content writers were involved (as well as many others), so we were swamped like mad.
I should mention again that we love what we do and we like creating stuff for our users. It's hard, stressful work a lot of the time but it usually ends up being worth it.
So as we wrap up these events, I have the pleasure of working on a list of ways to make future events better, how to appeal to casual users (which we did a great job of catering to) and hardcore users (who didn't get as much fun during these two minor events), learning from past mistakes, etc. etc.
Prior to these two most recent events, priority one was to fix two major problems with past events:
1. They crashed all the time and the site lagged
2. Non-hardcore users didn't have very much fun
So with these two past events, we solved those problems, sort of:
1. The site didn't lag or crash
2. Casual and semi-hardcore users had a lot of fun
But both the past events had one big problem: There wasn't much variety for hardcore users participating in the event all three days. Part of our goal was to extend the events so that users who didn't get to do it the first day could do it the second, or those who could only do it on weekends had a chance to do it also.
Really, they were both one-day events that were extended over three days so that everyone had a chance to play. What this ended up meaning to a lot of users, though, was that after the first day of them playing the event, it got boring.
So if we have enough lead time with future events, a big priority will be finding out how we can make events continue to be fun for people who participate over their entire course while not requiring us to tie up all our development team to do it.
While we work on events we also have MC's to create, newsletters to write, shop items to design, GStore items to design, bugs to fix, features to rewrite, new features to write, conventions to prepare for, and a multitude of other things. So we always have to decide how many of our resources can can we put into an event, and a lot of the time, it takes some creative re-designing of what we can do in the event.
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