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This is kind of a work in progress... but I keep seeing some of the same statements in the forums, so I thought I'd make a general FAQ about development at Gaia:

Q. Why did you work on <feature X> when you should be working on <feature Y>!?
A. (Usually, <feature Y> is battle!) Well, first off, there are a number of developers here, and they are all working on different things. There are two difficulties:
- first, priorities are different: your most-important-feature is probably different from somebody else's most important feature
- second, for a given project there is an optimum number of people that you should put on it. The classic statement here is that "it takes nine months to have a baby," but more specifically... if we decided tomorrow that everyone should move onto Battle to finish it as quickly as possible, it would actually not speed it up and would probably slow down the project. I know it seems contradictory, but it's true -- "The Mythical Man-Month" by Brooks is the canonical work on the subject.

Q. Why do you guys never listen to us on the forums?
A. Actually, we do -- a lot of the developers spend a lot of time reading the forums and paying attention to the feedback. Unfortunately, many developers are hesitant to post on the forums due to the negative e-mail they'll get, but the developers are definitely reading it. We read it, pay attention to it, fix issues as they come up, feel happy when the users are happy and feel depressed if the users hate something that we worked on.

Q. How could <feature X> have gone out with <some bug>!?
A. Our stuff goes through a lot of testing. We have extensive internal testing, we run features past the mods, we sometimes run tests against subsets of the user population, so on and so forth. Unfortunately, sometimes errors slip through. We either a) knew about it and decided that the new functionality outweighed the bug (so we deploy the new stuff and fix the bug), or b) we didn't know about the bug and are scrambling to find a fix.

Q. I have a burning issue! How do I get heard?
A. Post about it. Honestly, we read the threads all the time. We tend to pay more attention to the users that have had good feedback in the past. Swearing and cursing at the admins is generally not the best way to get someone to pay attention to the issue, as we're only human. Detailed problem reports with steps to reproduce and relevant information help a lot.

Q. You must get all the collectibles and gold you want, huh?
A. Actually, no. There's an initial gold grant of about 30K when you start at the company so that you can equip your avatar, but after that there is no free ride -- I have to buy my monthly collectibles and earn gold like everyone else. I don't know what the MCs are before they're released, either.

Q. What technology stack do you use?
A. Open source, baby! Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP.