This site has been dying for quite some time now, in fact I am surprised it is even still around. I suppose we can thank the whales for that, though there isn't much to be thankful for these days when it comes to Gaiaonline. As other reviewers have pointed out the site is now a mere shadow of what it once was, a toxic cesspool of grown men and women who never actually grew up and think of themselves as a sort of Peter Pan. They start drama over the smallest of things, are predatory and prey on any and all younger or newer users (or even returning users who don't know what's up yet), and then turn around and cry like a tiny baby the moment someone tells them to "leave them alone" or retaliates over being harassed. If users were allowed one account then the economy might not be quite so broken and the harassment wouldn't be so bad, but the admin in all their genius glory decided long ago that people should be able to have hundreds of mules; which of course has led to levels of harassment that I haven't seen on any other site. On any other site I would simply block someone and be done with it, but not Gaiaonline! Here you block someone and they'll use their mules that they created through no-lifing to continue to harass you, sometimes in ways that you can't 100% prove it was them, and the admins don't give a crap about looking into it. And even if you report them and an admin DOES respond it will take them 1-4 YEARS to do so. At which point a ban will be ineffective since your harasser will have already chased you off the site, or gotten YOU banned for saying something as simple as "leave me the $#*! alone" (because that's such a super aggressive, flaming thing to say to someone who won't stop harassing you, coming into your threads to ruin them by bumping them so much people can't see your posts, sending you inflammatory or bigoted comments, etc, etc). People also use these mules to farm the currency (platinum) to such a degree that any attempts to curb inflation at this point will fail, because one person using dozens or even a hundred accounts to log in daily and collect platinum will simply pump more plat into the economy and wreck those efforts. Supposedly this is a bannable offense, but again it takes admin several YEARS to respond to anything, and even if you report someone doing this with proof and it would be insanely easy for an admin to look into it, see you are right, and ban the person doing it, they will not take any action. Oh but don't worry, they'll take action against your account if you so much as roleplay something an admin doesn't like, even if it's within TOS limits.

Be warned: at this point if you join the site you will be interacting with a handful of whales, and the rest of the users on the site are pretty much another handful of deranged individuals using dozens to hundreds of accounts to try to scam you and trick you into thinking you are interacting with several other users (maybe even hundreds of other users) when in reality it is a handful of the aforementioned "Peter Pan" individuals trying to scam you or trying to manipulate you through pretending to be multiple people because they are so desperate and pathetic they can't go make real friends and want attention like little babies. They literally want to live in their own roleplay world and never go live in reality or touch grass, and they will ruin your life to do so by bombarding you with hundreds of fake accounts made to look like different people and gaslighting and screwing with you until you think you are going crazy. And having found you on Gaia, they will then go out of their way to try and find you on other sites as well. And this is all okay to the admins because of bs reasoning, like "people want to have multiple accounts so they can roleplay" as if you can't have multiple roleplay threads on one account. Or because "people want to be able to play the marketplace without getting harassed"; AKA: people want to scam and rip off other users anonymously and not have to face being blocked on their main account for being a POS.

If you REALLY still want to use this site for some reason currently, the only advice I can give is this:

- Do not use the roleplay forums. Many of the users there are the "Peter Pan" ones, there is extreme prejudice and childish "in-group" like behavior from a lot of them. And most of them are actually one or two people IRL using dozens of fake accounts anyways.

- Do not use the art forum. I've had people straight up try to sell me and my friends stolen art or get into crap with us over the dumbest $#*! when it comes to our art.

- Do not EVER have contact with anyone outside of quick trades, the staff DO NOT go out of their way to make the site safe, and in fact often let these predators continue doing what they are doing (I guess these people are really good at sucking the admins off or something).

- Do not participate in any forum dealing with the (mostly dead) marketplace, the only users who remain there are people using their mules (as mentioned before) to greedily scam people out of their stuff for less than it is worth. And then these same users turn around and spend all their time in that same forum complaining about how the market is dead and how they can't make insane profits of billions or trillions off of limited items they hoarded that can never be released again.

- Just don't be social or have contact with anyone. On a forum website. Because here especially, more than most other areas of the internet or websites, is not a safe place. The admin make zero effort to make it a safe place.

All in all, I would say not to use Gaia at all if you value yourself or your safety. And especially don't let your kids (teenagers or not) use this site, unless you want to watch them get groomed by pedophiles that the admins let roam free, or want to see them sending pics of themselves/their feet to weirdos so those weirdos can have a pic of a 16-y/o holding a piece of paper with their username on it. Rest assured that if you use this site, or even spend money on it, it'll all be going towards the admins sitting around with their thumbs up their butts watching these disgusting people run amuck on their site, because they quite literally do not give a $#*!.

Pathetic Service
Still I have not received my order

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I have been a member since I was a freshman in high school, which was sometime back in 2009; it was the go-to site in my friend group at the time. Over the years, I would use this site on and off, but around 2013 was when I started noticing a downfall like the gold generators, which caused massive inflation. From 2013 up until 2020, my experience with that site has been nothing but a complete dumpster fire, and I have been screwed over so many times that I lost count, and it was mainly by the hands of other users, which were mostly scam artists, and weird pedophiles. Around the start of 2018 a real-life friend of mine introduced me to this one user they were friends with and that user was "Cassandra Evermore" well, we later found out this person was a gaslighting catfish who used upwards of 20 mule accounts or some $#*! to convince and trick us that they were multiple people and this individual also claimed to be transgender but used one of their mules called "Lauren" to say nasty transphobic things just to make themselves seem like a victim. They also used some of these accounts to pretend they were new users here and there and get gold, items, and art off of my friend and I. Once we figured out that we were played for fools, we were understandably upset, and I'll admit we didn't take a mature approach in the following events, which resulted in us calling them out on their roleplay threads with some rather choice words. This was all on our mule accounts because they blocked us on our mains. We understandably got in trouble with staff for this, which resulted in my friend getting all their accounts banned, and all of my mules banned but for some reason, my main account was only given a warning. Despite the fact that we had tried to report this other user to mods with details and evidence of what had happened and that much of it had happened on their website, they did nothing about this other user who still uses Gaia on both their main account and however many mules, free to prey upon whoever they like. This user was equally as abusive towards us during the fighting and while many of their posts were taken down (as well as all of mine and my friends) some of their volatile and abusive posts remain up on the website. A Gaia admin went in and decided to leave up flaming and abusive content, but they claim to have no bias whatsoever. We left Gaia for about eight months, give or take, and then decided to start fresh with my friend making a new account along with us sharing a couple mules. We asked an admin if my friend was allowed to return to the site after the incident with the other user, and they said she could so long as she did not break the TOS again and did not contact Cassandra Evermore.

Now let's skip about a year or so in July 2020, my friend and I had moved on from this individual we call "Cassfish." We made new mules to sell more items in the marketplace and to store our gold/platinum. I am an artist and my friend is my colorist/assistant in some of our projects, we decided to run an art shop, some art bids, and even submitted to a contest, we quickly became well known in the art community and we made a ton of money in-game currency which we planned to use for buying some art of our characters, but that quickly came to an end when suddenly my friend's new account and all our mules got banned out of $#*!ing nowhere! We urgently contacted admins about the issue and all we got were different stories as to why this happened, one admin was very condescending and wasn't being clear while the other admin kept coming up with excuses. The admin who kept coming up with excuses then told me I was bullying another user back in 2019 with my mule, when in fact it was just my friend and I roleplaying as a dysfunctional couple from our favorite Key and Peele skit (Meegan and Andre). I even told the admin it was just my friend and I roleplaying and to check the IP address but he dismissed it entirely, but then told my friend that they got banned by quoting the time they were expressing their frustration from our art thread getting spammed by two different bumpers we hired (neither of the bumpers were spoken to directly or referenced in the comment, it was a comment of general annoyance with people in general and her shutting down a search thread by saying "nevermind"). For the past month, my friend and I have been struggling to get our accounts back, and only now we were told that we're never getting them back despite the fact we've had to jump through hoops by going to the help center and filing tickets like we were told.

At no point in this timeframe were we posting inflammatory content, harassing other users, or breaking Gaia TOS. Our roleplay happened inside of a casual roleplay thread, and their comment about the spamming wasn't directed at anybody nor did it involve any abusive language. Oh, and did I forget to mention that while my friend was banned they were still charging their credit card for their Angel subscription? And now my friend has to wait 7 business days to get that back while we are in a pandemic. $#*!ing classy...

The game won't even let me $#*!ing sign up.
10/10

Like many of the more recent reviews for Gaia, this one isn't a positive one either. Much like many members of the community [and trust me, Gaia used to be a *wonderful COMMUNITY -- with a very loving and loyal userbase to boot.], I've been a member for years. Over the past 2 years, I've been on and off the site, usually to check in and scope the site a bit - lately I've been stuck in Site Feedback, checking the forums there. I first left 2 years ago out of sheer disappointment from Gaia. Their MMO, "zOMG!", was one of my favorite parts of the site and the developers who created it were great people who actively stayed on top of the game and had big plans for it in the future. Out of a turn of events, some of the developers were either laid off or assigned other projects, thus leaving zOMG! To no longer be updated [other than cycling the servers out on certain days of the week - but all staff members are taught to do that]. There was no one left to work on it, so it was put on hold indefinitely --- but here's the kicker: zOMG! Was indefinitely "put on hold" because it was free - they weren't generating enough revenue from powerup sales in the Cash Shop. Thousands of users, not to mention the developers/creators of zOMG! Were let down and ultimately disappointed - I was so that I actually left the site not to log back in to a new account until late October/early November of 2013. I'd decided to come back and see what was new with the site, I'd missed it. Nothing had visually changed, unless you count the hundreds, if not thousands, of complaint and disappointment threads flooding different sections of the forums and the ridiculous amount of ads [some containing malware and trojans] and cash shop advertisements/popups. In other words, nothing had been enhanced on the site, nothing new, interesting, or updated. I quickly learned of the [long] list of problems with Gaia and why the majority of the userbase is so upset and leaving and abandoning their accounts in droves: Gaia has recently fallen under new executive management. Under this new management, lots of changes have occurred to the Gaia staff. The predominant amount of original staff members/artists/developers/admins were gone and lots of new ideas were coming into play - ideas of literally destroying the economy that Gaia has in an effort to make nothing on the site monetarily free - "freemium", if you will. Gold generators that give out bizarrely large amounts of Gaia Gold are sold for true cash dollars in the Cash Shop as well as Random Item Generators, which causes quite the addiction to gambling. Photos have surfaced of the COO of the company giving a seminar on this calling it "gamification" - he was giving a seminar on the financial benefits of getting teenagers addicted to online gambling in the form of Random Item Generators and Gold Generators. I believe a slogan he also used was "Dopamine, baby!" Photo evidence of this can be found through any search engine, as well as a vague track record of the new CEO/COO.
In lieu of the site's economy being irreparable, having a staff who blatantly ignores and disregards the community [though Gaia has made it known that they consider themselves a business first rather than the community it once was], making it impossible to enjoy the site without spending legitimate cash money [unless the only activity you want to partake in is strictly the forums - those remain free], constant [and blatantly obviously desperate] announcements, notifications and banner ads [that can't be blocked with AdBlock] demanding people purchase Gaia Cash, the intimidation to new users [everyone feels like Gaia Cash is mandatory in order to have the things they'd like for their avatars], the attitude of the disgruntled general userbase, completely ignoring any and all suggestions on how to fix or repair problems that are now irreparable, blatant extreme censorship of the userbase, no new updates to parts of the site unless they are Gaia Cash related, promises being broken and disregarded, hundreds [if not thousands by now] of members leaving the site [many of which were active members of the community either since the site began or in early years shortly thereafter] and either quitting or finding a new site, poor customer service in anything not related to Gaia Cash, the staff wording announcements sarcastically and being catty toward unhappy members, the CEO/COO fiasco and his terrible attitude and lack of morals regarding children and teenagers, Gaia's new [and unreleased] sister-site is in the works and will be 18+ [gambling and porn, perhaps?] and awkward vibes between members and staff, not to mention said staff being ban-happy and either driving members away or banning them for unclear reasons, many people no longer use this site or have many positive things to say about it. Many people, myself included, stick around and check in every now and then in hopes that positive change will be coming soon. As the site and staff currently stand, Gaia Online is no longer enjoyable. The best thing about the site are the people who are on it - which those people are now upset, hurt, disgruntled, and generally unhappy. If they stay. Most are leaving. If you've never used this site before and you're starting off as a new user, don't waste your time OR your money. If you're unwilling to pay cash money for pixelated avatar items, there's not a way to get ahead on this site any longer. You'll meet some wonderful people and it's still worth it to be around for that, but if you're looking for something other than forums, Gaia isn't the place you want to be.
I speak for everyone when I say we miss the old Gaia. This new version of the site and staff are absolutely unacceptable.

Been using Gaia for a few years
Used to be waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more fun back then
But so much has changed in these last few months
Games on here aren't that great (you don't even make much gold anymore), forums are okay (parents beware), Manga is eh, Cybering is out of control on here (admins need to crack down on this), need to file a complaint? Well get in line, takes forever to get your complaint noticed (when it does, boy is it hard to contact them again).

If you want any cool items (even some looks more or less items) you better be ready to have the cash to get it. Sure there is a monthly collectable that is 250 Gaia cash (equal to $2.50 usd) but those quickly go down in the market after a week or 2. (The $5 items aren't so bad in price either) I am talking about items that are seriously that are $10 (which still isn't so bad), $20, $25, $30, $35, and $40.

Still doesn't sound too pricey to you?

Well after spending a certain amount of money in the public cash shop (available to all Gaiaonline users) you sent an invite to an exclusive cash shop (club verge is private unless you drop good amounts of cash in its public cash shop) with exclusive/better-looking items worth usually worth $20, $25, $30, $35, $40, $45, $50, $60, $75, $100, $125, and (the most I have seen, but I am told is definitely not the most others have seen, that they have seen higher) $150. Awfully pricey.

Sound like you can afford this at least x2+ in 1 week? Then welcome to Gaia!