The average user on this website has a woke cult-like mentality which is perpetuated by moderator bias. T.O.S is selectively enforced. If you present a woke ideology that moderators deem "reasonable", then you can get away with harassing people, making "name drop" threads (which are against T.O.S), and more. If you do not have a woke ideology you're open about, then you will be banned for various reasons, be it twisted things from the T.O.S or just random reasons. They frequently ban people for "disrupting general flow of the community", which can be something as simple as making a thread about your support for a republican candidate, if that thread generates hate from other users, even if it is innocent in nature, YOU are punished. Please understand I am not a user who is complaining because I go in screaming slurs like the "n" word and advocating for Nazi's or something...no. It's really as simple as, if you present a right-leaning opinion, and the woke community shuns it, you are to blame. If you go against ANY woke ideology you are harassed, abused, and ultimately banned by moderators. You cannot engage in ANY political talk unless it is following a far-left ideology. The website boasts it's for children 13+, and yet they continue to pump out items which are extremely sexual in nature (large breasts and items that remove clothing from those breasts, stripper poles, masturbating poses, and more). At the same time, they are extremely strict when it comes to "joking" about being a user under the age of 13 (such as "I'm 12 someone explain this meme to me", which is a satire comment popularly made when something complex is presented, and does not literally indicate being underage. Even if you say "disclaimer: i am not 12" the mods will STILL ban you for even joking about it). It's very contradicting. They are strict on anyone advertising OnlyFans content, or sexually-driven threads, which makes sense for a site aimed at 13 year olds, yet at the same time contradict themselves by having incredibly sexual items. The average userbase is actually well over the age of 18, but the overall vibe is confusing. My very first ban on that site was a screen shot I shared from the game "Yandere Simulator" - a really gory (cartoon gore) off the wall and almost comical anime-influenced game. Meanwhile, if you search "yandere" or "blood" or "gore" in the Gaia marketplace, you see endless gory items ranging from decapitated limbs to mutilated and burning bodies. I was a paying user when my ban was enforced. I had never received any warnings, or anything. They will just throw down permanent bans on a whim, based on their feelings at the time, and you are especially at risk for this if you do not present left-leaning/woke ideologies. Lanzer (owner of the site) made a thread where he joked "here are some spicy nudes", where he dropped a nude photo of his newborn baby. This is, I admit, absolutely innocent in nature, however had ANY user have done the similar, they would have been banned on the spot for even kidding about it. It's also strange to post a naked picture of your newborn to a site KNOWN to be ramped with pedophiles. It's just not tasteful. I still post there but admittedly I now just troll. The account I lost I had since I was 11 (now 30), and it was lost unfairly at that. I lost all respect for the site, but that aside it IS concerning how they love to say they want kids to come, and still actively to this day promote high-sexualized content. Politics aside, the woke movement is also rather terrifying. In the last week I've seen many threads aimed at promoting sex changes in CHILDREN. I don't care what you do as an adult, but children?

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

Jhakgvsohbaohbakjvakjvakkvakjvakjvskkhvsjsjghsj

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...

Although I very quickly got to a point in which i had billions of gaia gold to spend i hit the point where I couldn't go any further in getting good things without paying irl money for gaia cash. Now as of this review for an empty bottle you can pay over 100 million for it as 2 weeks ago it was around 90 grand. With the constant inflation because the admins do not regulate the shops it seems to be making the game nearly impossible for new players who want to get some good stuff. People are less often donating items in the dumpster diving area and wealth is nearly impossible to get now. The social aspect is segregated, one main section are the pay-to-play players and their good gear which none of em even put any effort into getting, the other is the majority who are discriminated against or in other words the free-to-play players. My first 4 weeks on gaia have been very irritating, the first 2 being before i had millions of gaia gold, I was called names and no one spoke to me. On the other hand when I went over and got millions, and now billions of gold i could buy and get better items, using only the default shops, and dumpster dive I got some amazing gear. This was the point people would begin approaching me and actually having good chats with me, and yet I watched as the newer and poor players flocked around trying to talk to people and being ignored. I eventually got into the bidding aspect, with 32 million gold at the time it was nearly Impossible to win any bidding wars with players topping my 2 million bid with 245 billion gold bids (not even kidding this happened twice to me) getting great items became impossible. After getting over 4.9 billion from a sold item I suddenly was greeted with another aspect of the market... Pay-To-Play gods, they had billions at a time even topping your bet by 1 every time you placed a bet, making it irritating to even try. The 2nd worst thing in this game is how when you place a bid it suddenly displays it to the whole marketplace meaning your stealthy bid is now gonna be topped for hours on end until someone runs out of money (99% its you) and the other person gets the item. With me and my sister both helping each other we both managed to beat 1 player in a bidding battle, Railath is an example of a Pay-to-Play god, he will top your bids for hours on end. After a 2 1/2 hour bidding war we managed to beat him (I am not kidding). The worst part is, the items generally look like crap bur because they are worth a ton players are willing to take part in a mosh pit of horrible practices. The game is constantly giving you 20%-50% off coupons which encourage you to buy $50 or $100 packs of gaia cash by saying "HERE ARE SOME COOL ITEMS WHICH YOU WILL NEVER SEE AGAIN" The vast majority require you to pay over $20 for a single item, which they don't tell you this but the item you just bought for IRL money will only give you 1 piece of the outfit you saw unless you buy more of them. Over all the site is greedy, predejuced, and takes part is some dirty practices.

GaiaOnline has become possibly THE biggest scam on the internet. I'll have been a member (although I wouldn't exactly call myself a member NOW, since I rarely even log on anymore) for three years come January, so in comparison to a lot of the oldies and veterans, I'm still within a "newbie" stage.

However, from the time that I signed up, up until this point, I have given witness to the downfall of a once warm community. After Gary Schofield stepped into the CEO shoes, the site quickly began it's deterioration and it immediately became clear to us what the higher-ups' main focus was:

Money.

From releasing gold generators in exchange for real money (which ultimately ruined the website's virtual economy, making it nearly IMPOSSIBLE to afford anything worth while) to spamming it's users with 30+ cash related announcements a day, GaiaOnline was turned into nothing more than a farm for cash cows.

Key features that everyone enjoyed have been left to rot or were simply taken down altogether (zOMG! Would be a prime example) only because they didn't bring in nearly as much money as Gary Schofield and his greedy henchmen had hoped for.

Now, there is nothing left to do aside from browsing the forums (and even the FORUMS could use an update) and dressing up avatars with overly expensive, low quality pixels.

Users are ignored the majority of the time, and whenever the staff DOES interact with the community, they always feed them the same rehearsed and generic lies over and over again.

In short, don't waste your time on this dying website. There is nothing there of true value anymore. The only thing that awaits new users is harassing announcements begging for your money every five seconds and a community that is as dead and dry as a desert.

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

As a member who has stuck with the site since 2004, I can say Gaia has gone from a great place to hang out and have fun to a wasteland of broken promises and greed.

They fired so many good staff members, people who actually cared about the user base and treated them as human beings.
Staff used to interact with their userbase/customers, even having a weekly time in the forums for Q&A. Now, for the most part, they remain silent.
There are still a few games left on the site, but the majority of fun games were taken down because they were either glitchy or didn't produce as much revenue as the staff had hoped. The remaining games are capped, meaning one can only earn so much gold (site currency) from them.
The quality of most of cash shop items (items you pay real money for) has degraded. The prices for these items has inflated from what it used to be, although for now, monthly collectables are still only $2.50 per item.
The inventory arranger is in dire need of repair and upgrades. It's nearly impossible for someone who has lots of items to find what they are looking for.

The absolutely worst thing about Gaia, however, is the user run marketplace. Due to people paying real money for gold/random item generators, the prices of older and "premium" items has skyrocketed. What used to cost 20k gold now costs over a million. Greed not just on the company's side, but also the remaining users who set the prices.
Every day there are roughly 10 announcements site wide for cash shop items and sales. It's quite annoying to try and find relevant news in the midst of ads.

Newbies start off with a few clothing items, and a couple game items, but there is no real easy way for them to earn gold for the "premium" items unless they pay real money for either gold or items. They can buy gold shop items, which I admit, some are very nicely made.

Zomg, Gaia's MMO, was a great way to meet new people, earn gold, and just have fun. They used to hold events there for holidays (mainly Christmas and Halloween), but now the game is glitchy and has been put in maintence mode, which means no new content or fixes.

So honestly, I wouldn't waste time or effort on this website.

I have been a member for 7 years or so. Gaia has been going downhill for years. It was bad when the prices of items went up and up and up while the quality remained the same or degenerated. It was bad when it would take months to get any response from them in terms of your account being compromised. It was bad when games and features would be completely ignored or shut down due to them not being money generating machines. None of this compares to the worst thing that Gaia has done.

Gaia has willfully, and fully intentionally, screwed over the user run market in order to make more money to open a porn site. No, that is not a joke. The user run market is finished and there is nothing that can happen now that can save it. The inflation is so bad that items that used to cost no more than 30k in gold now cost well over 20million. Anything that used to cost 10~30k or so now costs millions.

Why, you might ask? Gaia allows you to directly buy gold for cash now in the form of a random number generator. For the low low price of $1~$2 you can win millions, even billions, of gold. These are not limited time items as Gaia claims they are. They have been continually released for like a year now, in many different forms. To make things even worse the amount of gold you can win has been going up as each new gold generator is released. Surely this will not completely annihilate the market, right?

To further contribute to Gaia's greediness they have used this market price manipulation to re-release old items and recolored old items at exorbitant prices. Items that were originally release for lower $3~$10 are now being sold for over twice that. Gaia's reason for the huge markups on these items are because the market prices of these items are so high. No $#*! market prices of these items are so high, you deliberately manipulated the market so that you CAN re-release these for so high.

The Announcements may as well be renamed Advertisements as that is all they are now. It is common to receive upwards of 10 cash shop announcements a day. There was a feature where you could subscribe to dev alerts to where you can get updates on site features and maintenance, but these have also been perverted into advertisement whores.

Gaia does not care about its userbase. Gaia cares about their customers money, not the customer themselves. Gaia does so many things to piss off its customers and does nothing to please them. There was an event that happened on Mondays called Ask the Admin where users could ask admins about anything. Gaia as since stopped doing this in an effort to avoid complaints that users have about the direction that the site is heading. Besides the closing of AtA Gaia also has a history of not communicating with its userbase. Well, unless its cash pushes of course.

The prices of items are horrible, and very laughable. $9.95 used to be the highest priced item, this is pocket change compared to prices now. I remember that Gaia defenders used to defend Gaia's prices by saying "at least they don't cost $50 like some other websites." You're right! Now items can cost upwards of $1000. $50 is a very common price now, and seeing things for upwards of $100+ is not uncommon. Remember, these are pixels. Little 100x100. Jpgs being sold for a laughable amount of real world money.

It may say that the most users ever online is 532,396, but this is a lie. The real number is much less than 60k. That absurd number had to have come from a glitch as at the time it would say that 500k people are just guests(as in not online). I wouldn't put it past Gaia to have been the ones behind that gross overinflated number in order to look good to advertisers. That would be the exact level of sleezyness you would expect from the business that is Gaiaonline.

There is nothing good about Gaia. Whatever they may have had in the past is long gone now. The sites only purpose is to make as much money as it can now until it is eventually shut down. The marketplace is dead and they only way you will be able to buy anything is if you sell off your items or open your wallet to Gaia. The absurd number of cash pushes(daily) and advertisements all over the website alone are reason enough to not bother with Gaiaonline. Avoid like the plague.

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.