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Halloween week! Zurg! Red Bino! Record numbers! WAAAAAHHH!!!
It's been a crazy, crazy week that set records and has been a load of fun for Gaians everywhere. Here's what happened...
Invasion!
The Halloween event started slightly after noon (Pacific Time) on Tuesday, October 31st.
Two energy drink competitors opened up shop across from each other: Johnny Gambino, the sales of whose "Red Bino Energy Drink" afforded him the ability to rebuild him demolished mansion.
The other, Mother of the Zurg people - who have been visiting and scanning Gaia for the past several weeks. She was selling "Zurg Energy Drink", which when consumed, turned Gaians (like myself) into green skinned, giant-headed aliens!
Trick or Treating was happening in the shops AND in Towns, with the MASSIVE Jack tromping around town centers, and roaming randomly around the world map. In exchange for collecting candy, users got special Jack-gear.
In the event forum, Zurg were able to probe Gaians and cows, and Gaians were able to zap Zurg and tip cows. Doing enough of either would also win you some special event items.
Stuff went wrong, as with any event. More than any prior year, our developer team worked hard to open up any bottlenecks that might break the site during the event. While the event was going on (and all throughout the night) they were on hand to tackle problems, speed things up, and disable some features (like Towns) temporarily so that users could use the rest of the site.
I raise a glass to those devs who gave up hours of their personally time to make this one of the most successful Halloween events yet!
Yeah, I knew all that. Tell me something I don't know!
Okay. Here are a few things you didn't know or may not have noticed.
1. All abducted admins have been returned to the Gaia World with no memory of what transpired on the UFOs.
2. There has been no word on the much beloved UFO 09. Maybe we'll hear from him again?
3. I flew one of the UFOs. But which one, I'm not telling!
4. Apparently, the cows appearing in the forums are mooing in some kind of code
5. This has been the biggest Towns event ever. Bandwidth used up by the 2500+ users using Towns accounted for a large percentage of the bandwidth usage that led to event problems eek
6. Overall user participation is up roughly over 125% of last year's Halloween event! (That's not last year's + 25%, it's really 125% more than last year eek )
7. The User's Online record was broken by a whole 19% in the last 2 days alone (from roughly 57,000 to today's roughly 68,000!)
NEW FEATURE ALERT
OKAY! So my feature was being tested all week. It's pretty stable now, but we're still doing some minor testing. NO PROMISES, BUT: I hope to release it next week.
Now, I know I've built up a lot of hype, but now a word of warning and a hint. It's something users have waited a while for, so you'll be excited to hear that it was made.
However - because of the scope of the project, we are releasing Phase One of the project now, and then as time passes, releasing increasingly robust versions of it.
Long story short: It's going to be cool - but it will get cooler with time blaugh
We've already had a ton of in-house Quality Assurance done on the project. Because it affects so many aspects of the site, I had to alter and fix bugs in other parts of the site in order to pass the QA process. The feature itself has graced the hands of numerous programmers, at least one in-house writer, our UI designer (Brunosmad), and has undergone several code audits to ensure that it is done well.
I'm very happy with it, but we're going to continue to test and refine it until its release.
Gaia: Y&T
The way Gaia operates has changed a LOT in the last 6 months alone. Here's a brief glimpse into a lot of the improvements going on in this crazy entertainment-factory:
Yesterday: Before, whenever a feature on Gaia was made, each developer was kind of responsible for figuring out how it looked, worked, and what everything said.
Today: Now, Gaia has a User Interface team that deals with graphics, layout, and text. So developers can focus on writing great code without having to spend time creating a look and feel for the project. And with a single team focusing on keeping the site having a unified feel and appearance, all new features (and old revamped features) will follow the same theme and be much more polished.
Yesterday: Testing a new feature was limited to the devs and mods. The actual process was sketchy at best, and while the features were fun and mostly functional, we're still getting burnt by really old bugs to this day.
Today: Every feature undergoes a rigorous Quality Assurance process which ensures not only that new features are bug-free, but that they're intuitive, not confusing to new users, and actually enhance the site.
All code undergoes a peer-reviewed code audit, wherein the code is checked for best-practices, security, and stability. Bugs are much less likely to sneak in when the application is well designed. We also check to make sure that it won't slow down the site, and that the processes and data processing are speedy and smart.
Finally, each feature has to meet a set of guidelines which ensures that it gives users options (like turning off Daily Chance or Gold Notification) and that it can be quickly disabled if it runs into some major problems (like how we could just switch off Daily Chance when it broke the economy!), along with numerous other criteria to ensure that it is ready to be in the Gaia World.
Yesterday: The site would go down frequently, major instabilities were prominent (can anyone say "Sushi Error"?), and the site couldn't handle a large user load (e.g., event crashes).
Today: Today Gaia has a very smart team dedicated to site stability and scalability - ensuring not only that the site can handle a large user load, but that it can handle rapid growth (which we've been noticing!). If you've been on the site for more than a few months, you'll notice that site crashes and MAJOR site glitches are down significantly.
Yesterday: The Battle System would have been promised but lack of resources would mean it wasn't getting built.
Today: I saw a working demo of the Battle System.
Yesterday: Devs would run around like chickens with their heads cut off developing whatever they felt was cool or fun, even if it wasn't necessarily what users wanted most or if there were old broken features.
Today: Goals are set as a group and teams are set to tasks that we all decided will help improve the company. We're spending a couple of months almost exclusively fixing bugs and upgrading features on the site. Hopefully, by the end of that project cycle, the site will be significantly more bug free and enjoyable!
SUMMARY: Basically, Gaia's better in every way. We're growing faster, we're improving the user experience, and most importantly we're listening! We have a team here large enough now that we can fix bugs, finish new features, and then do things you guys have been asking for forever!
Close Encounters of the Fleep Kind
I drank me some Zurg and turned into an alien! Don't worry though, my avi's long, luxurious hair will return when the event is over rofl
(Though I will always keep a can of Zurg Energy Drink close to my heart...)
View User's Journal
Gaia Life
A catalog of my experiences as an employee and citizen of Gaia.
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