Most cash-shop games offer no real 'benefits' other than cosmetics.

if you're going to give them any free playing time, it may as well be 10 to 15 hours so new players can actually look through the variety of servers and see if they think upgrading would be worth it or not

Almost all MMORPG's that are available for free have cash shops, but this only works if there are enough players and the items in there doesn't give much of an advantage at all, if any.

When I Said free Gold Period
I meant free subscription period for new players to let them have a taste of what they'll receive.

It could help boost sells, the period doesn't even need to be long, like maybe
1-2 days for each computer.

For Stefan:
Just think about what the players think, because they are the current players and they should have a say in what happens with the game, and their ideas should be taken into account when you think about updating the game. I can clearly see that us players have alot of ideas which are just remaining ideas because you Stefan and Unimax just don't really take us seriously by the looks of things, which is irritating since we can all clearly see the game slowly degrading.

Current players should not have any say.
Suggestions should be wanted, but that doesn't mean that you should be able to say "Make my playerworld Gold because it's cool" and have Stefan do such.
It doesn't work that way. He develops the game how he wants, and that's what happens. Sometimes if there's a player (or a few players) that are respected by him/greatly respected by the community, he might do something small.
That's how the gaming/design business works. Deal with it.

Well we all know Graal has never been the epitome of great business decisions. Oh well. I really wish Graal would do well.

Actually Graal was doing fine for its first few years up till around the beginning of 08 or late 07 it started to fall, for some reason.

I think it was at its peak in '01, but business-wise I never think they made very good decisions. I think Graal could have turned out way better with better business practice and decisions. For some reason they always try to be different with their trial modes. Ghost mode nor Observer were ever very... appealing.

I think this is most effective when it's a massive amount of players. I'm not even sure how much 1 player costs CJ on average.

For alot of people, it'd take atleast a full week to get into a game to decide whether it's worth their time or not. 5 hours is like a tease, and will just anger most people especially if they didn't experience much of anything interesting within the 5 hour period of game play. There's my opinion.

We could go back to the old way where trials didn't have the ability to save.

You're not entitled to your opinion. I copyrighted all of the stupidest opinions in the universe so they can never again be uttered.

Create a small "trial server" that any trial can play for free for as long as it takes to get them to buy an account. Give it like, 2 events a week, few NPCs, and little to actually do, like limited spars (each person gets 5 rounds a day), restricted pk'ing (very few pk levels), and lots of ways to separate players (5 islands, like GK, with no way to get between them; you log on, and are confined to your island; and having unchangeable nicknames and guildtags). Constantly have the PRs, the main staff team, telling people how awesome upgrading is, and have high quality ingame billboards depicting servers they could be playing. It could be an alternate for of advertising playerworlds too!

The normal PR's barely help regular players :X

PR on the trial server would be more so Public Relations (making sure players are on good terms with graal in general and entice them to upgrade) than the Player Relations whose only purpose is to have a staff tag sans developer skill.