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Hello everyone! How was your Easter weekend? It's really crazy here with a lot of new projects wrapping up, we couldn't find the time to put together a full blown Easter event this year, but we'll make it up to everyone with the upcoming arcade area, battle system, new storyline, and other fun stuff.
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 Hi Lanzer. Easter here was great thanks. How was yours? A few people have noticed that some spam topics in forums tend to be a bit slow to be moved to where ever it needs to go. Would it be possible to get a few people to work specifically on cleaning up the spam, to make the mods' jobs a bit easier? (LOL first post again) |
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Hi Lanzer. First of all, thank you for addressing the erroneous bannings last March 10, and for unbanning some accounts that were caught up in it.
However, there is still a number of accounts that were banned last March 10 and are still banned. The explanation we received is that these accounts were correctly banned for botting. I own one of these accounts. The name of the account is cardi. She is a grombie beta-tester and has been banned for botting in games. I have never botted in games, and I have met several March 10 bannees who are still banned and said that they have never botted, do not know how to bot, and have never considered botting. Notably, a number of these accounts are trophy fishers. Those of us who have been banned last March 10 and are still banned are very frightened and hurt. Our accounts mean a great deal to us. We have spent a great deal of time, money, and effort into improving our accounts, and we have been anxiously looking out for any developments with respect to the March 10 bannings. We were initially relieved when we heard that innocent accounts that were caught up in the March 10 bannings will be unbanned, so we are devastated when we found that our accounts are still banned. Here are the questions that we still have about this situation: 1. Are the investigations into the March 10 banned (and still banned) accounts complete? 2. Does this mean that the still-banned accounts will not be unbanned? 3. Many of us are aware that we have never done what we were accused to have done last March 10. Are the people responsible for the investigations 100% certain that your data is flawless and that they did not make any mistakes in interpreting them? I implore you to revisit this situation. There are far too many of us who have been banned last March 10 and profess that we have never botted. Please. We are very heartbroken at this turn of events. As with the previous AtA post, here are the meeting places of the March 10 bannees. We are continuing to discuss this situation and are hoping that it will improve. List of users who are still banned: http://www.gaiaonline.com/guilds/viewtopic.php?page=1&t=12216031#147463893 Chatterbox thread: http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/chatterbox/mysterious-march-10th-blockings-meeting-place/t.38794729_4261/ Guild: http://www.gaiaonline.com/guilds/viewforum.php?f=479 |
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My main was banned on March 10 and I was wondering if there are any safeguards for the future to protect people that have done nothing wrong except fish a lot and purchase items on Gaia using real money?
Myself and many others did not bot for gold...and yet were banned. Comments? |
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There are obviously still issues going on with the March 10th bannings. It was claimed that it was resolved and all those wrongly banned were unbanned. But there are many many people claiming to still be banned wrongly. I find it difficult to believe that all those people are botters.
In short... 1. Are the March 10th bannings still being looked into? 2. If those still banned are thought to be botters then have you considered that perhapes some part of the criteria you use to identify bots may be flawed? 3. And on that thought is it possible that there are many other innocent users out there even before Marth 10th who were banned for botting by this flawed criteria? 4. If the incident on March 10th had happened on a much smaller scale and spread over time rather than all at once would anybody have noticed it? |
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Hey Lanzer :3
Anyhoo, some of my questions will probably be repeats/repeated a lot, but I’ll post them anyway. D; 1. The Easter event. It’s pretty much over isn’t it? 3: (I know Fleep said so, but it’s hard to believe it. ;-; ) 2. Are you planning a small mini event for April Fool’s Day? I know you said small event weren’t going to be celebrated, but Gaia has always celebrated it before. I would say April Fool’s was probably my favorite mini-event. 3. Can you give us an estimate, not official of course, of when Gaia Battle is coming out? At the con, it was said that the Easter event was abandoned because they didn’t want to push Battle back a few months, so is this coming soon? 3 months? 6 months? A year? 4. Are the admin going to try to communicate better with us Gaians? I know a lot of us sat around abusing the F5 button, because we were not told that the Easter event was going to be scraped. (My poor F5 button. ;-; ) 5. Should we expect any new NPC’s this year? I loved the new ones that were introduced. =D Looouuiiieee. <3 6. I heard somewhere that pinball was coming, is this true? o;? 7. Where are our softball team pics? I wanna see so bad. xD If you could answer one or a couple of these questions, that would be awesome! Fanx for making Gaia pretty sweet. :3 |
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As can be seen through the "epic fail" of this Easter event as well as past instances of failure (the grunny spamming event, for example), it is naive to deny that the gaia staff/admin/marketing teams (and related others) have, at best, a serious lack of foresight, and at a most likely worst a grievous disconnect from the community.
That is, you don't know your userbase, you don't know what they want, you don't know how to best implement what they want, the people you have hired to do this fail at it, and time and time again through actions big and small you have demonstrated this as truth. Have you ever considered the creation of a panel of users to act as a focus group for any major event on gaia whereby you actually listen to their suggestions? A further (snarky) request: Require your marketting team to read site feedback for an hour after the initial release of any of their "great" ideas. This will quickly orient them with what gaians like and dislike. In relation to those bannings - will you openly admit what a number of us have already speculated: Gaia runs a script to catch "botters" and the threshold on it is low enough to catch legitimate behavior. Will you consider implementing a policy that no ban may occur without human intervention? i herd u leik mudkips? is it true? |
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"The method for detecting bots is very very obvious, and the bots don't do much to hide their identity. Their goal is to farm the gold, and try to sell the gold before we are fast enough to catch them."
Your own words Lanzer. So......someone who... -Has a real name for their accounts, not a bunch of letters and numbers -Has an account that's been there for quite some time - are not most bots newly made accounts made for the specific reason of botting? -Has no history of trouble making - connected to those accounts nor any accounts connected to that IP address has ever caused problems -All their suspected accounts are well dressed - most botters would not take the time or gold to do so, and those trying to be tricky would have them dressed all at once, their botting avatars would not gain items slowly over the course of time, especially over the many months that it takes normal users to save up and buy the items -Several of them contain MC items - why waste an expensive MC on a bot? -Those accounts not only contain MC items but have bought them with money - doesn't grant the user greater privledges but why would a botter spend money on MCs when they could use easily gained botted gold? -They have a high post count - why post on a bot account? -Some of those accounts are very obviously roleplaying accounts and several have commented in other's profiles - why chat with other roleplayers and take the time to dress the avatar as the character as well as name them after the characters if you're going to bot -The suspected activity did not occur over a long period of time but in one moment in time - a user may at one single moment in time mistakenly do something that may look like a bot (move a little too fast for example or sign on too many accounts at once), but if it is not prolonged suspicious activity how can you be sure? This would obviously not be a bot yes? And perhapes would warrent further investigation besides "the computer detected you of apparent botting activity and there's no way possible it could be wrong"? Am I right or am I wrong? |
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D< Lanzer! You said there would be AN EVENT ON EASTER! Gaia has failled... What do you think about your self >>;;; UGH When is the new story line coming??? >>>;;; At least give us that nao! D< YOU FUCKING RUINED MY EASTER GAIA! I waited home for the easter event D< i didnt go to easter with my family D< |
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USEFUL LINKS
The home of past Ask The Admin topics: Ask the Staff subforum AskED the admin: Answer Compilation (built and maintained by yours truly) |
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Hi Lanzer. smile
Could you please tell us what is going on with the event? We've been going insane for the past few days... event, or no event? That is the question. Also, thank you and the staff for what we did get, even if we have no event heading our way. |
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'lo theres
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Hello Lanzer.
So we can expect a new storyline and thus expect Gaia's world to once more be involved? It seems as though the very world of Gaia has been forgotten these days. sweatdrop |
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Lanzer, How do you feel when the masses are upset at you? What are you planning on doing to reassure people that Gaia is going to remain a free website. Alot of people feel like you cant get anywhere on this site without spending money. It startd with the letters, and I was fine with donating 10 dollars a month, but to get all the items in CS and the letters would be ridiculous. I have a family to feed. Also, can you offer any proof of Gaia costing 25 mill a year to run. I find that hard to believe. Last, Do you anticipate a drop in usage after clearly stating there would be an event in last weeks ata? And not coming through on that? Oh wait one more, Why are users afraid of banning when posting in ATA? |
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"Harmonious Chaos" Hi Lanzer. smile Could you please tell us what is going on with the event? We've been going insane for the past few days... event, or no event? That is the question. Also, thank you and the staff for what we did get, even if we have no event heading our way. Read the first post .... We dont fucking get one cause they are to busy with other crap ; 3; |
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