I'm back from a... 5 year(?) hiatus. The last I played was in the early zOMG days, and I stopped playing for natural reasons; growing old, university got in the way, etc. I didn't stop because the site was bad or stale. Basically, I got a sudden nostalgia trip and I was wondering how dear old Gaia has turned out in those 5 years. I was crossing my fingers that they managed to survive these past few years, that's how much I loved the site back then. So I log in with my old username, and lo and behold it worked! Excitement turned into dismay, however, when I saw that absolutely nothing of note has changed, at least with the interface. It looks old. Nothing new to pull in users. The interface is still as clunky as it was. And then I saw what had happened to its economy. 1 GC= 50 BILLION Gaia gold. When I stopped playing 50 billion was a god send. Now it seems like its worth absolute trash! What happened? What is the site doing to save itself? I can't fathom people spending ten dollars IRL for one new monthly item. It's pixels. All I'm seeing now is a site that could care less about what users it has left, and doing nothing to bring in new ones.