Welcome to Gaia! :: View User's Journal | Gaia Journals

I don't usually talk about specific items, but I am kind of geeking out right now about having a frickin' TARDIS available in my inventory. In honor of this monumental event, I will give my tribute to the Doctor with my section titles.

Achievementdvoratrelundar
So, the achievements team pushed out a new update, enabling a bunch of new achievements, some of which are going to be a pain to get, but that's good, in a way -- the achievements mean more if some of them are incredibly difficult to get.

Our current plans right now are to continue adding to the depth of achievements in the site, including some that are incredibly obscure or difficult to find. Wouldn't it be cool if you were using the site and then stumbled across some hilarious achievements that you didn't even know existed?

A Ball Of Timey-Wimey Wibbly-Wobbly Stellarite
Based on the messages I've been reading, there's still a lot of confusion about animated items, so I wanted to clear it up a bit.

Basically, when the animated items first came out, we told people that they would only be active for a month. There are a number of reasons for this, but chief among them is that we wanted to make sure that they didn't cause performance problems for the users.

However, the user feedback to the animated items was favorable, and it didn't seem like there were any huge performance problems that needed to be solved, especially given the fact that we had an account setting that would allow users to turn off animations.

So, given that we wanted to do more animated items in the future, we decided to go with "stellarite," a potion that would animate your items for a month. Currently, the potion is being given out in DC -- we'll be adding it to the stores soon for both GC and gold purchase. Stellarite is pretty expensive on the marketplace right now, because the chances of getting it via DC are pretty low -- but rest assured that it will soon become much cheaper.

Note that stellarite applies to the user and not the items. Once you quaff that magical elixer, every single animated item you have will be animated for a month -- you don't have to buy 3 potions just because you have 3 animated items.

The Well-Mannered War On Bugs
On June 28th we're doing something called "Spring Cleaning" -- basically, we're going to take a step back from the hustle and bustle of trying to implement features, and instead going to spend some time and fix the things that have been bugging the users (and us) for a while.

A lot of the work we're considering is behind the scenes -- we're dealing with the moth-eaten code in the attic that the users don't usually see. However, there are some long-standing user requests that we've decided to put up to a vote, to see how much the users care about one thing vs. another.

We created some forums to funnel the feedback, and they are already active. We'll make an announcement about it this weekend, but if you at all care about what we fix or what we prioritize (and you must, if you're reading an obscure developer journal!), please feel free to go to the Spring Cleaning forum and vote away. If we've missed a proposal that you think is really important, please put it in the Spring Cleaning Proposals. Even better, post a reply -- we're using both the number of poll votes and the number of posts as indications of user interest.

Also, as part of a larger picture, this is part of our ongoing experiment in trying new ways of communicating to the user base about the site and allowing the community to have more input. Putting technical issues up to the community wouldn't work with most sites, but Gaia is special; if the reaction to this is strongly favorable, then it helps us plan for similar feedback loops in future development.

So: vote early, post often, recruit friends!