Yeah what the hell???? 2 billion gold is just ridiculous. I remember struggling trying to get to just 20k back then, despite things already going into inflation hell thanks to all the mystery boxes.

Oh my gosh, yeah, 20k is pocket change now. 😝

*shudder* I'm so glad that Mene's economy has remained pretty stable throughout the years.

Well there was no sudden influx of gold so I think that’s why hyperinflation has never occurred. Gold earning mechanisms are pretty limited here while on Gaia you can literally earn gold by doing nothing (just refreshing the page) which is why it attracted so many bots and kids using scripts. Their flash games were also stupidly insecure so users could cause errors for other users if they utilized scripts in the Towns and other areas. I don’t think Gaia’s staff thought through how stuff might affect the user base or how things might be exploited. But I suspect they made boatloads of cash for the owners.

Yeah I guess the owners just wanted to make as much money out of things as possible and didn't really think about how those things would affect the economy...or they did and just didn't care.

Iii'm gonna go with the didn't care route DX. Especially after the Economy-Killers took over after Lanzer...who is now back in charge, and trying to fix all of the disasters the moneymongers caused.

On the upside, he brought zOMG back~

I wonder what originally had him handing over control to the Economy-Killers? And what happened that had him back in charge?

I have no idea of the deets anymore, but the result has been--hopefully--a currency modification and change to inflation. So far, the currency mod seems to be helping. At least, when determining prices in the MP X'D

Something that also helps is the fact that gold generators are no longer being made. They were literally ways to buy the regular currency (gold) for actual money...millions and billions and trillions at a time. With zero effort...which inevitably led to said gold generator buyers buying up all the items in the MP for cheap, and hiking up the prices.

These were also the demographic of entitled little kids/adults who had a bunch of disposable income, and promptly used it to rub in the faces of the rest of us who don't have that...gods it was annoying. Amusingly enough, they were also the ones who bitched about always getting attacked and killed in zOMG, when they were wandering around to show off their avatars. In the MMO.

There's already a thing for that. It's called Towns. Towns is for chatting and avatar-parading. MMO is for killing things. Don't want to get murdered by fluffs and sandcastles, don't go into zOMG. Bing-bang-boom.

Oh, yeah, I forgot about the gold generators! I knew I was forgetting to mention something...
Also! I don't know how true this is but I read somewhere that Lanzer and the other original owners/staff/whatever were forced out by whatever corporation took over, and had to save up money to buy the site back from them (probably after they tanked the price of it by ruining it 😐). Something about a clause in their contract that said they'd have to give it up to the corporation or something. So that's why the site changed hands...unless Lanzer and Co were just trying to cover their butts.

Wow that sucks. I'm glad I got away from all that mess. The environment can be pretty toxic.

Yeah...and when things started getting nasty, a lot of the old members kinda...left. I'm not saying there aren't newer members who're decent people, but...

I swear, most of the people who're around now to see the revival of zOMG, don't have the slightest clue that it's not just another version of Towns with cute critters running around. It makes finding people for quests--example, ME--really, really difficult. It's kinda maddening when all I get is "oh we're just hanging out, why d'you want to go fight stuff?"

BECAUSE THAT'S HOW MMOS WORK YOU DINGUS!!!

lol Yeah I can see how annoying that can be, being in an MMO and not knowing it's an MMO. >_<;;

I'm pretty sure the people who play zOMG now missed the memo on how MMOs work. You kill things. Not show off your cool outfits.

Yeah, I also get the vibe on Gaia that everyone's trying to show off how expensive or rare-covered their avatars are rather than just enjoying the items for what they are. It's something that I really like about Mene, how even the inexpensive items gets utilized in avatars and all the items are enjoyed for how they look, rather than what they're worth.

Yee, same. Most of my inventory is commons and EI's X'D

Don't get me wrong, I do have some expensive stuff on Gaia...but that's because those happen to be items I like X'D. Most of the time, I'll see an item and go "oh that's a nice item"...then see how outrageously priced it is on the MP. Guess how nice I think it is then X'D

I just make avatars I think look nice. More often than not, there's more than a few commons items mixed in there lol

Yeah I just stick to whatever items I think makes my avatar look good. I remember one of my favorite items on Gaia was that toad-like evolving item whose name I forgot...I was questing for three of them to fill my avatar but before I could do that my account was banned. It wasn't a very popular item since I rarely ever see anyone use it beyond during its initial release, but the price is still beyond my reach most days.

e_e Did you get the mystery-ban that a lot of people got landed with, or did you actually get a reason for the ban?

Well according to the email I got, I was banned for 'botting', which was utter bullshit. I'm still rather bitter about it because I worked so hard and spent so much time on the site. But eh, I've moved on to much greener pastures in the form of Mene so who cares about Gaia anymore.

Yeah, Mene seems to have far fewer trolls than Gaia ^^~

Yeah. It helps that our community is smaller so the staff are able to handle the trolls and enforce the rules to make sure chaos doesn't reign supreme.

Yep ^^. It also makes it better than Facebook for the same reason X'D

lol Yeah, same with all the other large and popular social media sites.

yeah, it's so weird, i can't actually even remember a time i ever saw a troll on mene, even when we were big. i think i remember a bot, like, once. idk the mods were always so fast back when it was busy, and like y'all said, the community's always been on the small side.

I remember coming across a few spammers but they're always taken care of really fast so they're usually gone within the hour if not minutes after I see their posts.

Unlike Facebutt where they have to kill thousands of fake accounts every day. At least...