Gaia Online

@gaiaonline.com

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Official Bluesky for Gaia Online! Please @ us with your art & avatars! https://linktr.ee/officialgaiaonline

As you've probably noticed, we've got a new look! We've also done some menu re-organization. To give you a quick summary: there's now a dedicated marketplace tab, a newly added explore tab that combines what were previously Games and Worlds, and a tab that let's you change the nav bar color theme. Our goal was to make things more friendly to new and casual users. If it's not your cup of tea, you can switch back to the old look at any time by going to account settings. We've been reading through the feedback we've received so far, and based on what you've said, we put together a list of things we plan to adjust or add in the short term. For the nav bar itself, we'll be reducing its height a bit and increasing the font weight of the text. We'll also be adjusting the existing color themes to add more contrast, as well as adding a set of dark-mode-friendly color themes. Plus, a new customizable tab that will allow you to add any gaiaonline.com link! In terms of notifications, since many of you mentioned missing the bubble, as well as having requests and notices separate, we're working on a solution that will hopefully provide a nice middle ground between the old and new! Overall, the new nav bar and the the planned adjustments to it are just a first step, we're working toward a redesign of all pages and features on the site. But it's a gargantuan task, so we'll be tackling it piece by piece over time. Tired of hearing about our makeover? There are a few other fun things on the horizon that we want to mention before we sign off. The first is a new dress-up contest that is currently in SCAS testing. It combines elements of Runway and Arenas and we hope everyone will enjoy it! We're also working on a new Event that we camp wait to share with you! (: And next month you can look forward to our annual extravaganza of new avatar styles, bundles, special sightings, Prismas, and more! So, stick around to see what we have in store! Until next time... <3
Greetings, Gaians! With summer on its way, the weather's been super sunny. And our outlook has been too! Because after months of seemingly endless struggles, things have been much more stable lately. *looks around and waits for a piano to fall on our heads* Phew. The migration is now officially complete! And Lanzer is also allowed to sleep again! So, we hope you'll join us in celebrating those victories. We are, of course, aware that there are still some remaining issues and interruptions, but Lanzer is working through them, constantly monitoring and adjusting the web server configurations to reduce their frequency. Thank you again for you patience as we put the finishing touches on what has been an excruciatingly long and difficult process for everyone! As we continue to look toward the future, our first major change has been one that was actually years in the making. And that's the official transition from gold to platinum. For those of you who had already switched to platinum, this won't have made much of a difference in your use of the site. But if you previously had your account set to gold, we understand and appreciate that for you there will be an adjustment period. We also wanted to use this opportunity to remind everyone that no currency was lost in the changeover. 1 platinum is equal to 10,000,000 (ten million) gold. It is simply an exchange rate; nothing was taken away and both currencies have the same buying power. And now that we're all using the same currency again, Lanzer should be able to get a clearer picture of what payouts look like from all features and better balance them across the site. Meanwhile, work continues on both the site re-design and, what we hope will be, some exciting new features! Thanks again for sticking with us through everything. We can't wait to move forward together!
Platinum switchover and platinum earning changes We needed a bit more rebalancing changes so the switch over will be happening at 6PM, PST today instead. Along with the switch over, the recent earning bonus will also come to an end. The new earning potential will be at a 1.3x earning from April 2026, instead of the 2.2x bonus for last month. There will be more balancing changes coming this week, after we monitor platinum payout for the next two days. In particular, flash games, tournaments, and older features like Aquarium will be seeing a boost.
Gaia Transitioning from Gold to Platinum Next Week The long awaited Platinum transition is finally upon us. With the new designs under way, we will be focusing on a one currency system moving forward. What this means is that everyone's currency setting will be permanently set as "Platinum" moving forward. The transition will take place a week from now, on Monday, June 8th. Better payout for Gaia flash games will also happen at that time, and we will continue to re-balance payout for all Gaia activities moving forward.
Addressing Concerns There had been some questions and concerns recently about Gaia's stance on the use of generative AI and cryptocurrency, as well as how Gaia funds are being used. I hope the following will clear things up and offer some reassurance! Gaia's stance on AI The majority of Gaia's team members are artists and it'll continue this way. Gaia have not used any generative AI for creating items, artwork, or any creative writing around the site and have no plans for this to change. Gaia is also not utilizing another generative AI in the form of AI chatbots. We understood that Gaians do not want to interface with AI, and we will not be building any features with AI chatbots or AI NPC. While we don't use generative AI, Gaia do find what we can leverage from AI as a tool to enable the engineering team to amplify our work and allow us to fix more bugs while building more features at the same time. Without AI's help, the Gaia infrastructure upgrade project could not be completed without us hiring a senior IT manager which we couldn't afford. Site outages and Downtime This led us to the entire Gaia infrastructure upgrade project. We bit the bullet and not only upgraded the servers but also set up proper infrastructure to report potential issues, and make sure that new code will not break the system. We leveraged AI which helped prevent many issues that we introduced when trying to do things by hand last year, but trying to built too much in so little time ultimately caused too much instability. I literally said that "the dust had settled" but I still had one major database job to do, and of course, life loves irony, and that last task triggered a major issue which caused the recent rollback. The new system will ultimately make Gaia more stable, and with the new backend our art team can proceed with the site redesign project. But I must apologize for the constant issues we caused you over the past few months. What is Pixlet? Marvin had been the project lead…
Inventory rollback for May 2nd Due to an error in the platinum economy system, we had a terrible bug that ruined any transactions made between 2:30AM and 7AM, PST. We had to disable all purchases and trading as we deal with the issue. Unfortunately we had to perform a roll back due to this error. The following systems had their data rolled back to May 2nd, at 3AM: - User inventory - Marketplace - Trading If you do not see the correct gold or platinum values on the site header, please logout and re-login for the numbers to update. For those who had purchased items during this time period. Those items will need to be re-purchased. There are a number of issues that the roll back will have caused, including the loss of data for users who registered today between 3AM to 12PM. We are working to restore those accounts as we speak. I'm very sorry for the trouble this had caused. We're working on a number of additional testing protocols to prevent these types of issues from happening in the future.
Bonus payout this week and update on future gold payout We know that all the recent infrastructure upgrades have caused much frustration due to the long downtime you’ve experienced. We want to once again apologize and acknowledge that this hasn’t been the seamless experience you deserve. We can only promise that with the new system in place and changes locked down, Gaia will become more stable and secure moving forward. As a gesture of our gratitude for sticking with us through these improvements, we had made some changes to Gaia's gold payouts. For this week, we had significantly increased gold payouts across the board. This bonus will continue till next Tuesday, May 7th. We hope this gives you a chance to earn a little extra as we finalize our new infrastructure. Once the bonus period ends, gold payouts will return to our standard baseline, but with a permanent 30% (1.3x) increase compared to the rates we had last week. This is our way of ensuring that the baseline experience is better than it was before the upgrades began. As part of the infrastructure changes, our new Gold Payout Adjustment System is now online. This automated system will allow us to dynamically manage and adjust payout rates more consistently in the future. We will also be revisiting the payout of all our activities including Flash games to ensure more up to date and meaningful payouts. Thank you for your patience throughout the mess. We are committed to making these technical improvements worth it, and we can’t wait to show you what’s coming next.
Spring cleaning is done. Sorry for the downtime! The various web and database server upgrades were a long-standing project for Gaia that took months to complete. At the end we had overhauled every system on our backend: -Upgraded all web servers to latest operating system and PHP 8 -Committed thousands of changes to make Gaia compliant to new PHP 8 -GSI servers, job systems, and scheduler servers all were upgraded -Upgraded database server to latest operating system with MYSQL 8 -Better daily database backup system -Re-organized database across servers to distribute load -Setup site wide firewall to deal with intrusion attacks and DDOS attacks -Setup automatic OS security updates -Upgraded Opensearch engine for forum and user search -Memory caching servers upgraded -New monitoring system for all services -New staging server with unit tests to validate new code before going live -New code deployment pipeline for faster code updates -New bug tracker Many of these changes were overdue and postponed because the "upgrade database server" task alone required 120 hours of work. But the updates will pave the way of new site redesign and frameworks for a more responsive Gaia experience down the road. Unfortunately, some changes still had serious bugs to sort out, as the "automatic OS security updates" caused a major outage yesterday, and once again I'm very sorry for all the frustrations due to the downtimes. We placed a lot more emphasis on reporting and alerts for our new system, but with so many changes happening at once, it inevitably caused many unforeseen issues. All major work are now complete, and we'll continue to work diligently to ensure servers stay up moving forward. Thank you for your patience and understanding through all this mess, and please look forward to the new redesign and features to come!
Greetings, Gaians! We hope you had a lovely Valentine's Day! This year, by special request, we brought back the classic Valentine Generator! This love-filled event will be running until the end of the month and lets you send letters to your fellow Gaians as well as many of our NPCs. If you haven't had a chance to check it out, just click on the heart in the header to get started! The long and arduous task of upgrading the web server is finally (thankfully!) coming to an end. This project involved making changes to over 19,000 files and implementing thousands of bug fixes. And we're heading into the home stretch! As far as what you can expect with the upgrade? The new code compiler is much more strict, so it should ensure that there is less bad code floating around Gaia causing trouble!! You should also get a small boost to loading speed thanks to the newest caching servers. Overall, you can expect better performance and higher security. And on our end, we're looking forward to making use of newer tools for the site re-design! As you probably know, it's our birthday! We'd party like it, but we're pretty busy at the moment. Maybe one day! In the meantime, here's a special Gaiaversary message from Lanzer: It's hard to believe that Gaia will be 23 years old in a few days! For many Gaians that's more than half a lifetime. It's amazing that we've been through so many holiday events, so many feature releases, site outages, and hanging out together all this time. You know, the one moment I realized that I wanted to build Gaia was when I spent more time chatting with other players on an MMORPG game than actually playing the game itself. Though nothing would had prepared me for the amount of years that I would get to chat, have fun, and make countless great friends along the way. I am the luckiest person ever and it's all thanks you every one of you being a part of Gaia! Happy Gaiaversary to all! Until next time!
Dear Gaians, Today marks 23 amazing years since Gaia Online first went online on February 18, 2003. From a small anime link list plus hangout site that started in a garage by us few anime nerds, we've grown into a world filled with your creativity, stories, friendships, and endless adventures (or drama :). Whether you've been here since Reina and Leon greeted you at Barton Town during registration, joined during the era of the alien invation and zOMG rallies, discovered us in Towns or Rally hangouts, or hopped in recently to see what Gaia is all about, we thank you for being a part of our community! 2026 is an exciting year as we get ready for some redesign work to bring Gaia to a new level. We would like to take this opportunity to ask for your opinions on where we should place our focus. Additionally, we would like to ask all Gaians to share their most memorable moments you have at Gaia with the rest of the community. Most liked memories will be featured on the leaderboard for bragging rights! We can't wait to hear what you have to share!
There had been a bug where completed quests or zOMG badges do not appear in the quest list. As it turns out there was a compatibility issue with the new database where the completion date was not entered correctly during quest completion. That in turn caused the completed quests to not appear because of the missing data. All the missing completed quests will now appear in your quest list. Unfortunately there isn't a way for us to find out exactly when those quests were originally completed. As a result, all quests and badges completed between July 2025 to Jan 2026 will all be marked as completed on Jan 22, 2026. I'm very sorry for the issue this had caused.
Greetings, Gaians! First of all, Happy New Year!!! We hope you had the happiest of holidays and that your 2026 is off to a fantastic start! If you're not quite ready to let go of December's festivities, though, don't forget that you can still celebrate the season by posting in the event forum, decorating trees, and playing Snow Way until the end of this month! Don't miss out on the fun and prizes! Speaking of celebrations, we'll definitely throw a party* when the web server upgrades are officially complete! They've been in the works for a while, but now they're being tested for stability, we can finally see some light at the end of that long tunnel. *actually get some sleep, maybe? Have you made a New Year's Resolution yet? If not, a good one might be to meet more cool people! And a great place to do that is in Avatar Chat! Especially since the feature has recently received an update for better controls on mobile! As for our resolutions? We have a lot of them! One of the most important is the UI update we've been hinting at. With significant projects like server migration and upgrades out of the way, we'll be able to dedicate more time to the redesign. Our goal here will be not only to give the site a much-needed modern makeover but also to get everything organized, easy to navigate, and mobile friendly! As a bonus, once we have enough pages converted to the new frameworks, it will be much simpler to port everything to the app. Our other major goal this year is to make as much progress as we can on Project Custom. And toward that end, we're lucky to have several former Gaia artists back on the team! And they're ready and raring to go on user-designed items! Overall, we're really looking forward to some big changes for the better this year! Then we can all party for real!!!
Christmas Event Caroling Bug Fixed We've applied another fix for the Caroling issue which caused sometimes would cause your progress to reset. Sorry for the long wait as we figure out this tricky bug. To compensate for your lost time, we have removed any cool down timer for your first 10 caroling prizes. (Festive 2025 Giftbox) As long as you haven't received your first set of caroling items, you should be able to quickly earn your prizes. Merry Christmas everyone and hope you have a wonderful new year! PS - the timer will take in effect at on Dec 22, 7:15PM, PST
Dec 12 zOMG Invitation – A Special Remembrance for Mavdoc zOMG has been a Gaia staple since 2008. Throughout its long history, we were incredibly fortunate to have some of the most dedicated staff members anyone could ask for – especially JK and Mavdoc – who held weekly user meetups starting in 2010. Mavdoc was the heart and soul of the zOMG community for over a decade. After taking over from JK in 2013, he faithfully hosted the Friday DevMeat every single week, bringing joy, laughter, and a true sense of family to everyone who attended. For 12 years, he made every player feel welcomed and at home. It is with profound sadness that I share the news that Mavdoc passed away on November 3, 2025, in a tragic car accident. He was on the final leg of a cross-country road trip, heading back to his hometown in Wisconsin, when the accident occurred. As with every DevMeat, we’ll have a theme – and this one will be Mav’s absolute favorite: pumpkin pie. Please join us at Friday, December 12th 5:00 PM PST zOMG – Alarm Skeeter server Location: Zen Gardens (E-7) (3 maps south of the Barton Town west exit) Come dressed in your best orange, bring your favorite pumpkin pie items, and let’s fill Zen Garden with the warmth and love Mavdoc always shared with us.
that stupid gremlin's on the shelf again pink fuzzy body... it's probably soft just to spite us!!! infuriatingly proud smile someone should just smack him off of there
Zomg Bug Fixes For those who wish to play zOMG on your Chrome or other modern browser, we've made some changes to the UI so the game is now at a playable state. The zOMG Halloween event is available now, be sure to join in on the fun! Halloween monsters roam the maps and you can find Charon at Barton Town who can bring you to the Graveyard Pier and fight Jack. There are still some lingering bugs to fix, especially the one where the chat input field disappears when the chat history is full. We'll be focused on fixing that ASAP.
Futurama Cosplays!
Greetings, Gaians! We're days away from the start of fall...and it is still hot as heck out here. D: C'mon, weather, get it together! Anyway...while we're waiting for crunchy leaves and an autumn breeze, at least we can while away the hours with a beloved Gaia game. Just kidding, we're not allowed to have fun. But you can! And all because Lanzer's efforts to bring Jigsaw back to life have finally paid off! So, if you've got a penchant for puzzles, now's your chance to once again piece together pictures from the past! In other news, our overhaul of the web servers is almost done! This upgrade has required a lot of work on the backend. It's been pretty intense in terms of time spent, but also delightfully boring, in the sense that we've managed to make it most of the way through without any major setbacks. (Did I just tempt fate?) Which is a huge win in our book...and sometimes all we can hope for! Just wanted to let you know about this essential but mercifully uneventful update. And with that, we'll leave you until spooky season!