Alright. Well I suggest placing the book in the level right before you enter the boss chamber to have the clue get better attention, I read it while I was questing but I didn't care much for it and thought it was just a random detail like the other books/items coming out of the pipes.

Ok I've shuffled these pipe items around a bit.
In place of Galen's note within the last level before the boss is that Rat book.
Galen's note has been moved one level left to where the book supposedly flushed from within Supernick's was, and this has been moved to the previous position of the Rat book.

The original positioning of these items was intended to be consistent with the locations theoretically above them within Graal City.

I read:

Just sayin'

Maybe you should get your head out of the gutter. Dohohoho

Although I know your answer is no and your reasons for it gave been repeated endlessly on these forums, it would be neat if you brought your talents to iPhone so players can actually see them.

Dream on :p

Enjoyed The Quest, Expected more of it seeing how long its been since you guys have released a new quest.

<3 miss ya buddy!

Usually when there is a content release Classic can hold onto a playercount of 10 - 20 (such as 20 players minus 2 or 3 RCs yesterday) for a day or a few, it may not be much on the scale of things but pretty exceptional for what is an Under Construction server that is in no way intended to currently maintain a playercount.

Oh and:

*Graal the Adventure: Facebook.

* Name subject to change.

I dunno, it is all about audience. In developed communities of learners(IE: Classes that have been together for years--Like the "classic community") the students will distrust the teacher. However in "new communities"- like when a class is broken up amongst many schools in a system the teacher holds way more power and sets the tone of the class. So a response to critiscm like this only hurts the old community. Which, from what I've seen, isn't the focus of the development- so it isn't as big of a problem as you're making it out to be.

Also, if you let the students dictate what you're doing and when, you aren't going to get anywhere. Sometimes you have to tell them "Relax I've ****ing got this" and just teach(develop) what you think is necessary.



I think you're putting too much emphasis on the community and not enough on actually getting things done development wise. To get things done you have to make decisions and work forward. Sure, this lesson(or quest) didn't work. When you realize that it is best to let it go and do better next time and not take 3 steps backwards to fix mistakes.

u 2 :)

So I'm thinking that Classic will never be finished at this rate. You could make a million quests, but it will never be exciting because they are all released so far apart, and there's never a playercount; nor will there be if all the quests are finishable before you release- and I don't know what you mean by release anyways.

But yeah, good udpate....maybe release some more updates that aren't quests and save all the quests for release?

That's stupid. It's a lot easier to find bugs/problems the way they're releasing content now than it is when your dealing with a bursting player-count.

yea we are like beta testers xD

:/ good point

Btw it took me five minutes to do the quest.....:/

ya was pretty easy, just annoying and weak dialogue

You need to remember that there are also new players trickling in, who have not completed any quests. Each time we release a new quest, those new players will be online longer and longer.

We haven't hit it yet, but eventually we will hit some sort of 'overlap' where a lot of new players come online before the old players leave, letting the player count grow, and hopefully become self-sustaining (via events, chatting, etc.).

This is just a general outline of course, but I think when that happens it'll give us a good indication that we'll be stable enough to move somewhere with bigger player flow (like the live tab, or elsewhere).


Re: quest length, it was a short one. We only released it since we haven't released much quest-related stuff lately. It is just a part of a bigger quest which we are currently working on.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, Questing is in no way intended to constantly keep players occupied, it is more of a way to hook new visitors with the hope of them then interacting with players via other means.

As you gradually add more of them there's an increased potential in the time new visitors stay online, and this definitely seems to be the case so far. We're not that far away from what has been our target for shifting the focus off of Quests and onto Community Based content.

Well, progress is progress, which is to say it is almost non-existent, so progress is progress, therefore it is "good".

What? Leave the Chinese proverbs to the Chinese.

我不明白！我是中国！

iphone gets alot of it's game content (hats excluded) from pc classic anyways :P it's all sharing and caring when it comes to graal.

that's interesting, self-sustaining. players stay longer when there's other players. keep bringing in new ones before the old ones leave. you have a reason for new players to come and old players to stay. thor explained this to me before but it never "clicked" untill just now :P

I liked the quest, but it was short.

Something you could do is, when you have all your quest materials done, give a tutorial on commonly used quest items. It would give the player some sense of what to do on quests, and you could have the tutorial skip-able so anxious players could move on.
This way when they complain you could honestly say that they could have had a heads up about questing if they took the tutorial.

-EDIT-

Also, the "short-cut" is only one way. Yeah, it cuts running to a quest in half, but then I have to walk all the back around the trees again? Why not place horses around the world, or make it a two way short-cut, or (this may be down the road a bit but) even do a weapon that would summon a horse? This way traveling wouldn't seem like a chore. It isn't like the scenery changes... Just some ideas.

I'm not sure what suggestion you were referring to by "this may be down the road a bit" but I had already intended to scatter horses around various places, there is already some different coloured horse within another secret location :p, a portable horse however would likely cause horses to lose much of their novelty.

I can't imagine anyone would say that they wouldn't prefer to be able to get from place to place quicker, but is it really that much of a chore as it is now?
In terms of our map its going from the center to the top right, but in comparative terms our map is quite small.

Yes and it will be because a player is forced to make that trip over and over again. Especially since it would be a one way trip because of the one way short cut. And not a "portable horse" just like a whistle or something that could summon a horse. <- which is what I was referring to as later down the road, as a quest or purchaseable item...

I know you want to keep players on the server, but it should be done with content not walking from the quest then back to Master Li's then back and forth.. It's already old and there isn't a ton of content/quests.

Something which would enable the immediate use of a horse anywhere at any time is essentially a portable horse, having a means of calling the horse may make more realistic sense than firing a weapon and and suddenly being mounted, but there's still the problem that they may become over-used and thus lose importance.
We do however have an idea of an end-game weapon to enable quicker travelling to destinations but this is a long way down the line.

I'm not trying to advocate travelling around as a means of keeping players online, but this is always going to be expected to a certain extent in what is a world, if something is taking a long period of time to reach then yes it is potentially a problem, otherwise a line has to be drawn somewhere.
I've counted the time it takes to go from level 14 (the main hangout outside the bank) to Master Li's house at roughly 30 seconds, obviously people will have varying ideas of what is reasonable but 30 seconds is significantly less time than what the actual content can be expected to take.

These are just easily implementable ideas that you don't have to use. Obviously the server is perfect and no player should give you input about it. Even if they do you should defend everything to the death. x_x Door was right.....

I believe it's better to explain our viewpoint rather than silently ignore people's suggestions.

Never mind the fact that Crono's suggestion about re-positioning TNT when thrown directly onto the door, or Luda's suggestion that a book be moved to a different location within Zol's Toilet, among many other suggested changes after the release of Zol's from the other thread have been implemented then.

I'm not saying that you have to accept my ideas, but it would be nice to see that the two way "short-cut" idea would be acceptable. It wouldn't even have to be implemented just an "well that's a good idea" would suffice, but so far on this thread most ideas have been shot down. Also I do agree that the quests should have the mice and inconvenient things with a small degree of logic required to figure things out. Also the tutorial idea would only help new people.

It just seems like a battle with you to try and make things better.

Every idea has an upside and a downside. Being a developer means you need to weigh those ups and downs and decide on what is best for the game.

If you pitch an idea, we definitely do consider it, but often people only explain why the idea is good, rather than the downsides that are packaged along with it.

So, we usually respond something along the lines of "okay, but if we use your idea, X will be a downside of it, so we probably won't". If the ups still beat the downs, then we do it.

I think that's perfectly reasonable. Perhaps designing a game is a battle -- but a peaceful battle to a constructive end, rather than an endless war of words only to be won through attrition.



To be slightly more concrete, it is true that providing a shortcut would make travel less annoying. But to what extent do we reduce travel? Two-way shortcut? Horse summoning? Teleportation?

I think travel has the upside of making the quest more dynamic, as long as it isn't too long. You can travel with friends, chat with people, and gain a moment of familiarity in a potentially confusing quest.

The reason we added that one-way shortcut was so you wouldn't have to run the same path twice within like 3 minutes. Instead, you would have a little run through the forest to Master Li's as a moment of relief from the questing, not a 10-minute grudge through a gargantuan overworld.


When our overworld gets larger, this will become more relevant and we will hopefully come up with a neat solution to keep travel time at a healthy minimum.

The quest was short so I traveled back and forth through the forest in like 8 minutes because I didn't know a shortcut existed. And the playercount doesn't exist for said friends, chatting, etc.

Also to be slightly more concrete, you haven't said anything about the "good ideas" such as a the tutorial idea. You only pick the seemingly "bad ideas" to pick apart and don't say much otherwise. That's why it seems like a battle to me.

I don't doubt you need to weigh the ideas, but you should weigh them all with feedback to the player. Not just the ones that are easy to turn down.

One must acquire oats to convince a summoned horse to be mounted. Horses don't work for free.



jk idk classick i just like busting your balls

As you know, we are under construction. We aren't designing the server to be the ultimate experience for those who are playing right now, we're doing it for everyone who is going to be playing when we go live.

We tend to just comment on a couple ideas rather than all of them. Usually we pick to comment on the ideas that are 'important' and global to the server than local to one quest. Our release threads are already populated with a decent amount of discussion about development, responding to every single idea would become a little crazy.




Since you requested specifically, I can give you feedback on the quest item tutorial idea as well.
We don't necessarily want to appeal to the 'hold my hand' crowd too much.

If you've played Zelda LTTP, one of the most interesting parts about the game is acquiring a new weapon and figuring out how it interacts with the environment and baddies. Usually LTTP gives you some hints on how to use the weapon. (Sometimes the hint is just that no other weapon kills the baddie right outside the room you got the weapon.)

I feel like a tutorial walking the player through every most aspects of the questing experience would kind of kill most of the 'adventure' out of an adventure server.

I think it's better to instead use creative tricks to explain to the player how to accomplish certain tasks in the quest itself, which is usually what we try to do.




Overall, we really do appreciate commentary on our development. We can't implement all ideas and respond to every single critique, but we do read everything people post, and everyone's points sway us one way or another, just perhaps not fully. You can bet that we'll be discussing travel extensively on RC now that you brought it up again. ;)

When I originally brought this up, I don't think the issue was travel time so much as why is an important quest hub so far away from where things are actually happening?

It seems you're are making Master Li an influential character in the story (or at least to what's happening in Graal City), so if he carries such influence, why wouldn't he be able to create an outpost somewhere a bit closer to the city, or arrange for easier transportation from his place to the city?

... seriously? you guys are so ridiculous, its not far away.

Weighing everything up Master Li's was the ideal location for a central quest hub.

The ninja encampment is as close as you can get to Graal City before you hit that line where in placing several buildings you'd be infringing original locations, which I'd imagine would probably generate even more complaints (justified or not, again we're trying to find a balance).

Ofcourse there wasn't anything stopping us from packing all of these places into a single building, or hiding Master Li's/a different hub within some warp. On the other hand it's always been a public intention of ours to try and limit the amount of waste space on the overworld and provide different areas with something of interest or purpose. With the combination of the starter content and Master Li's we've accomplished this in 2 areas that throughout long periods of the past have been virtual wasteland.

I would say that the only other location which could possibly be any more central, but without that potential downside of older players opposing the change of an old location, is the level directly above level14.
As it happens this is where we intend to place the eventual GC Studios. This is something I think would be more appropriate as this will have purpose regardless of a players questing progress. Master Li's or a different hub is only going to be as purposeful as it currently is for what is only a portion of the overall planned quest line.

When it comes to constructing the storyline itself, there wasn't really much alternative for a character further within Graal City to build the player up in the same way Master Li has. Again there was the option of coming up with something entirely new, just this time rather than it being a matter of old vs new we felt Master Li's was ideal largely due to the fact that he's a master of combat, and that Sister Gertrude > Master Wong > Master Li would be a good connection.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying what we have is perfect, but I think it's pretty effective for what we intended to achieve on both a players perspective and a developers perspective.

Since i jumped down the mat in Chritian's shop, i have getting this green block on my body. How do i remove it?

Solution: Use the V6 Beta. V5 has problems with body transparencies particularly when zoom or alpha effects are used on the player.

Short-Term: Resize the window should fix it until it happens again.

I've been having the green block problem, too. I hope they release V6 soon!