Gaia Online is a blend of social and gaming MMO experience with its origins related to an anime based forum that has since grown to be deeper offering. In the current website iteration of Gaia Online players can connect with others, chat on the forums, play games and create their own avatar while collecting fashionable items.
Launching in 2003 Gaia Online has had a long evolution to reach this point and while it has grown from a simple community forum this has not seen Gaia Online lack in popularity with millions of registered accounts and unique visitors each month to the website. Following this success the game was brought to iOS and Android devices via the Go Gaia apps. With a wealth of content on offer players are generally free to explore the website and linked activities as they see fit with no correct way to play or engage with the community.
For most players though Gaia Online will centre around the creation of their own Gaian that serves as their avatar and can be customised with countless options. Gaia Online lets you choose your skin, eyes, hair, gender, clothing and even lets you choose your own fantasy inspired race. Starting with basic fashion options you’ll eventually be able to access additional clothing pieces through the NPC stores with Gaia Cash which are earned from activity or paid for with real money.
Accordingly to accumulate game currency players will spend much of their time on the various forums which have plenty of categories that cover most modern pop culture topics. Be it gaming, general entertainment, art, anime or the latest music release you’ll find a location to discuss it in the Gaia forum component. While similar to most online community forums the size of the audience and having your personalised avatar appear alongside your posts provides a little extra touch of personalisation.
When you aren’t posting on the forums you can play games from the large collection of casual games available through the website which will also give you amounts of Gaia Cash and serve as mini games while waiting for a forum response from another user. Those that aren’t game orientated aren’t without options though with other options to past the time including an aquarium, house, rally racing and Hollywood inspired clubs which all have comparable customisation elements to avatars.
Events are also a staple feature of Gaia Online with its well known site wide events that also often pair with the guild function and are based on real world events such as Halloween, Valentine’s Day and Christmas. Often focused on once off items these events gives players a second pathway to building out their closet of avatar clothing options.
Summary:
- Mixes social and gaming genres together with a community that started primarily as an online forum
- Large list of things to customise from your avatar to house, car and aquarium with each having a vast range of items.
- Easily meet new people and make friends with interest based guilds and forum sections for all lifestyle categories.
- Suitable for a wide variety of age groups with players able to design their own adventure and focus on what they want.
- Play a number of games and mini-games on the side to earn currency to invest in your avatar and other customisable elements.
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Review Platform: Browser
Ashley O'Toole
Stay as far away from gaia as possible. The new CEO and COO are running the website into the ground. Gaiaonline is constantly releasing Gold Generators that are ruining the economy. Items are now costing in the billions. Simple bugs and flowers found in the towns game are costing millions of gold. There is simply too much gold in the economy to handle, and more keeps flowing in from the Gold Generators.
Add to that, Gaia Online is constantly having Cash Sales, and sales on cash items, and sales on gold generators (that are not really sales cause the sale price is the same as the regular price on older generators). Users are constantly being bombarded with announcements for the latest sale, and the site is full of advertisements for Gaia Cash.
Add to that, Gaia Online is not listening to its users. They are not releasing promised features, they are reneging on item details (such as re-releasing limited quantity items months ahead of time), they are not fixing issues (such as fishing’s captcha, which is almost unreadable and yet they are still using the same captcha system months after users pointed out how much more difficult it was).
Add to that, the quality of items Gaia Online has been releasing has drastically decreased. They are mostly releasing re-colors of the same items. The re-colors typically look terrible and have must less variation of color to them than the original.
All in all, Gaia Online is a horrible, terrible website. You should never go on Gaia Online. Stay as far away as possible.
Erika S.
CONS:
-No worthwhile games to play (at least atm) since they closed down zOMG!, the site’s 10 year-old MMORPG
-Plans to discontinue the ongoing comic and story of the site’s many NPCs
-Users being spammed by ads of the site’s purchaseable currency and items
-Ridiculous prices for items purchaseable with real money (the most expensive item right now being roughly 20,000 usd)
-The site’s economy being hyperinflated because game currency is being sold for real money (the current ‘gold generator’, as we call them, releases up to 2 trillion game currency, or ‘gold’)
-Items being sold/traded for hundreds of millions to tens of billions of gold (100,000,000 gold ~ 10,000,000,000 gold)
-Most site features that help users earn gold were from the old economic state and still give at most a hundred gold (100 gold); this is slowly being changed though
-Management not listening to the users and neglecting features of the site that won’t raise revenue
-New management as of late 2013 who came up with all of the above ideas
-Everyone complaining about the new management
-Not much to do but dress an avi up and talk to people on the forums.
PROS:
-There’s a niche for almost anyone; there are trolls, but most users are nice and are passionate about the site (at least what the site used to be)
-Cute avis and nice items
-Interesting NPCs and storyline
-The prices may be daunting at first, but it’s easy to earn some millions by your first week
-The site’s 11 years old. Heritage, if you’re into that
Check it out or stay away, it’s your choice.
Sonno Eterna
The previous reviews were right – Gaia Online was a mess in 2014. Fortunately, it has gotten much better since. With the tons of gold inflation gone, the currency reworked and not using any more gold generators, the economy is seriously better. With Platinum, I’m able to buy items I never thought I could back then. The site is no longer run by the terrible CEO, now being overseen by the original founders. Items are much more creative and beautiful, with wonderful artists making them. You’re able to get a lot of money just by being active, along with daily gifts. The only downside I would say is how there are much fewer users than there used to be in 2014, and it shows – but either way, I still find it great.