Most Frequently Asked Questions
These questions are currently 20% of my mail / profile comments:
Q. What is that blue box behind you? It looks just like a TARDIS!
A. It's an evolution of the "Imaginary Friend" EI
Q. There's a chain letter going around that says unless I respond that my account will get deleted.
A. Fake.
Q. Are you sure? I keep seeing it.
A. Totally fake. a) It's not from an administrator account. b) We know who logged in, why would we need to use PMs for it? c) We never delete accounts anyway.
Wow, glad we could get that taken care of.
Life At Gaia
Our development server. I thought all the contrasting colors were interesting. Our operations team keeps it running flawlessly (but don't ask me how!)
Our supply room has all the critical necessities -- paper, pens, paper clips, staples, and, of course, nerf gun ammunition
Gaia has either a very egalitarian feel or a very chaotic feel, depending on your viewpoint. Any piece of paper becomes an analog wiki, and you should be prepared to see edits and revisions.
By the watercooler is a pad of paper. Every week someone turns to a new sheet, and everyone doodles on it as they wait for the geological epochs required for the hot water to dispense.
Animated Items
There's been some misunderstanding about the way that animated items work, so I wanted to clarify it a bit.
The animated item flag is a per-user flag. Basically, when you use Stellarite on your character, it sets a flag on your user data that says, "go ahead and animate." It doesn't set any flags on the objects themselves. So:
- Gifted an animated item? It will be animated (or not) based on whether you've had Stellarite in the past 30 days
- Buy one off the marketplace? Ditto
- Buy one from cash shop? Ditto, but you'll also be granted Stellarite so you can animate immediately if you like
Why did we do this way instead of a per-item (Updated: fixed typo) flag? Basically, it was the way that added the least amount of load to the servers. Accessing user information is for the most part quick, whereas accessing inventory information is slow. Since the canonical forum thread will have 15 different users on it, we wanted to choose a method that was very quick. Also, if we added a per-item flag (i.e., the item itself is animated for 30 days), we'd have to change marketplace to make item properties visible, and there are all sorts of interesting questions that raises: do you have 30 different typs of Baron the Owl, for 0 - 30 days left on animation? How do you figure out what the average marketplace value should be?
Spring Cleaning / User Communication
So, Spring Cleaning finished up, although there are still lots of projects ongoing that need to be finished up:
- Towns 2.0 needs to be resolved
- Need to figure out what we're doing with fishing
- Jigsaw is still pending
- the trade window needs to be updated
- there is are new preview options for marketplace/stores that still need to get out
- new guild look and feel is in testing
Although, all in all, it was kind of fun to just spend a concentrated amount of effort on fixing stuff in the site. Internally, we cleaned up a lot of code -- made it easier to work with, and also sped it up quite a bit. It should make adding features and fixing bugs easier in the future.
For communication during the event proper, we used PMs to anyone that had voted or posted in the main Spring Cleaning forum. This worked okay, but it would have been nice to get the word out to more people. Unfortunately, there is not a good mechanism right now for system level messages. As forms of communication we currently have:
- announcements -- which spams everyone, and are tightly restricted, since they are used for sponsorships
- system alert -- very transient and easy to miss if you're not online when the message is shown
- Gaia News / Dev Notices -- which almost no one knows about and weren't read, even when they were being updated regularly
It seems like we need something that is perhaps below the intrusiveness level of announcements but about that of a system alert. We have been talking about a number of possibiliteis, including taking over one of the three modules along the bottom of the home page and repurposing it for system alert messages, which might work -- although I wonder if a below-the-fold item on the home page is going to be obvious enough that people will feel like they are being informed.
I made sure to post them in a couple of my large guilds where I thought other users would be interested in getting a glimpse of Gaia behind the scenes.
<- Help this cat on his quest for World Domination!
Community Member
i think i'd like to be a programmer when i grow up :3
thank you for all your hard work!