Stefan and I just had a fantastic idea:

Let's open a new restaurant where you can eat for free, you will eat as much as you want for free.

The main idea is to make money in another restaurant near the free restaurant; this other restaurant will sell Caviar to the customer coming in the free restaurant !

I've got to agree with Unixmad here.

"Graal has no content content." What are those nine classic playerworlds, two Gold playerworlds and four hosted playerworlds? Why is the game being constantly improved, and new concepts like Graal3D being worked on? To fuel more content.

"Graal should be free." In an ideal world, yes, it probably should. But, GraalOnline would not be anywhere near what it is now were it not for the funding that account upgrades and the like provide.

"Graal managers are dumb." That's an entirely different matter. People are selected as managers for playerworlds, or they buy a playerworld. Global staff members are selected due to their competence. If you have a problem with a playerworld manager or global staff member, well, problems can't be solved if nobody knows about them.

"Nothing changes." Things do change. Era alone has made great progress recently. Plus, Graal3D is being worked on. Zone and Graal Kingdoms are often worked on. Not enough for you? Graal is very complex compared to a lot of similar ideas. It provides you the oppurtunity to help change things yourself, too!

You will become millionaires!

Loans and overdrafts have to be payed back, y'know. :frown:

Will it have the famous Graal Beer? ^^

This is ridiculous. Inspiration offers you genuine suggestions without bias and/or prejudice and you fire back in sarcastic tones. Maybe you should take into account what your customers tell you. James and Inspiration are right. Read their posts, they are telling you that your "caviar" doesn't even taste right. I really miss the community this game did have and your comparison to a free restaurant is a little... off. How about this:

Stefan and you decide to open a soup kitchen for the homeless, and the soup kitchen is popular and for some reason people want to work there for free. So you hire them for free. Well it turns out that some of these waiters like to spit in the food and generally cause disorder. So you decide to make the restaurant pay to eat (P2E) and don't advertise or improve the restaurant in any noticeable way. The staff still spits and messes with the food, but you ignore it. The regulars become stagnant and move on, while you shun new people that want to see what this restaurant is because it looks like something that Nintendo made (which they did). But you limit them from ever joining and participating in the restaurant by means of trial accounts. Pretty soon everyone can open a chain of the restaurant if they pay you and mess around and spit in the food all they want. The community becomes divided and no one really wants to work for a bunch of sellouts anymore. All you have left after this is a bunch of bad food and disgruntled customers.

Or how about this!

You open a resturant that only has 5 things on the menu, and all of them cost $10 more than your competition nearby.

Also, your main draw is that this resturant is a "social environment with entertainment", however, only 5 customers a night come, and the entertainment is the jukebox.

Unix, you seem to believe I'm idioctically complaining like people have in the past. I'm not. Read what I wrote.

I'm offering you suggestions, methods, and tactics to IMPROVE YOUR INCOME. I'm not telling you this game should be 100% free in every aspect. I'm telling you that at the current rate, you will not make any money.

Which would you rather do:
Sell 30 accounts a month for 15$ each. Make 450$ Players online that month now improves by about 20, assuming 10 people quit that month, making the community overall larger and more attractive.

Sell 10 accounts in a month for 40$. Make 400$, gain 10 new players. Community loses an estimated 10 players due to quitting. Net growth for the month is now 0. Community does not grow, nor does it become more attractive.

This is what I mean. I'm sick of this admins on this game treating us like we're idiots with no valuable input. This is why this game can not improve, WILL NOT improve, and has a falling playercount. This is why players are losing faith.

I know what will make the players happy. I know what will make them buy accounts. How's this? I am a player. All my friends are players. We're not global staff. Our accounts were not free. We just want an enjoyable game


Skyld:

You're completely missing the point of what I wrote. I know Stefan is working on improvements. In fact, I specifically pointed that out!

But, as I stated before, what the hell good is this great new client, and this brand new scripting language, if there is barely anyone left to use them?

Also, I know for a fact you, and others who you are friends with, have spoken out aganist Global Staff members because you've complained about how they've been hired despite their incompitence, so do not change your tune now.




It seems like all the players are the ones supporting me now, and the admins and globals are attempting to mock my ideas, as expected.

For once why can't you just LISTEN, think for a second that, despite how improbable it might be, you're not 100% correct on every issue, and that maybe us peons MIGHT HAVE SOME VALUABLE INPUT TO HELP THIS GAME AND THE COMPANY THAT RUNS IT.

Im sorry , no one has ever said that. Of course graal has content but its not intresting. People just have opinions of different things, you really should look at the posts before. No one was complaining for graal to be free, they think your prices are high which they are, heck you raised the vip 6 dollars. That last one is probably correct because people are bored because nothing is being done to correct current situations.If you actually considered what inspiration told you, You guys would be making much more money even with the revenue you have.

"Inspiration" please let us do the commerical stuff, you should play the game, work on a playerworld or post your ideas or complains here. Your posts didn't really contain anything related to that.

What's about million of people making web pages on blobs, do they work for free for the company hosting the blobs? No, they do what they like to do.

When some people are reading web pages some others are using creativity to write text and make everyone enjoy what they do.

They don't make money with what they do but they make experience, if one day they have opportunity to create there own business they will have skills and experience.

Graal is the same for games, we give opportunity to player to create games and manage most of the administration of games. Some player world manager will only do for fun but some others will work in the game industry (we have lot of example of Graal players that work in the game industry) .

You say that we have not improved the restaurant since P2P, do you really play Graal ? If I count number of professional people that have worked on Graal we have probably spent more than 50 man year of work to make graal.

Making an Online game is not only programmers but graphic designers, Web Designer, Web scripters, Computer technicians, Network Technicians, Administrative Staff to manage office, payment of Staff, State taxes …

To manage a Online game you need lot of hidden charges including the renting of a office (We have a dedicated house for Graal staff), Computers and Network (We are renting a dedicated space in a Paris datacenter with 3 complete racks, We have more than 30 rackable computers, we have a dedicated Gigabit network with Cisco routers ( 2 X 6509 cisco switch/routers ) , we have dedicated tape robots to be able to archive backups for 2 months. We have NFS servers to store data in a safe way. That’s a lot of money.

Graal have more diversity than any other game and give opportunities to everyone loving 2D games to play what they like. Our goal is not to make a clone of Ultima Online but to create lot of diversity to make everyone find a style of 2D world to enjoy playing. Also our Goal with Graal is to give advanced communication tools to be able to have fun playing but also make Online friends. How many other online game give advanced communication tools and tools to create Online world?

I agree that we are not the best company for advertising or even pricing/marketing strategy but we are still there after 7 years, how many Online games are still there after 7 years? Most Online games are closing after a few years and players have no other choice than to switch from game to game, that’s not the best way to make a community neither long time friends.

Most players play an average of 60 hours a month, Graal is less than 5$ a month for Gold and 2$ a month for VIP, and you say it's to expensive? Where can you spend that much time for this amount?

In France for $2 you can get only a coffee or a Bus ticket.

I have to say he makes 3 very good points and more. I just like these and actually know about them. I'm sure the other points are good as well but I know little about them so...

I understand everything you said here and I agree, you make a valid point. This also shows that you do care about the game and are open for ideas... let's continue (thanks for re-opening the thread!)

Essentially we arent saying GRAAL itself is getting worse, we are simply bringing up the issue of the dying community ahd the stand still, you can't deny the fact that the forums have died and the playercount has gone down. We arent anti-graal, we are for graal and we don't want to see the game drown when it brings a great amount of entertainment.

Well aware of this, that's why I agreed to the classic one time fee because of financial reasons. Graals server is up 99% of the time now compared to it's horrid past of going down constantly.

Yes more finiancial reasons, completely understandable and I don't think anyone would argue with you on this.

This is where I might get a little harsh but I'm not against you.

When you say graal is more diverse than any other game I would have to disagree with you. That's all based on opinion/perspective, sure graal is diverse but every online game is diverse because it reaches out to players all over the world.

I see where you are going with graal, there are prominent overall improvements but I think you are taking what we are saying the wrong way. In my opinion graals advertisement methods and community/player assistance is really really poor, but I will continue this a bit later...

This is VERY true and I'm glad you said this.

Graal has survived for 7 years and yes that's a long time. But in 2001 graal was averaging 300 players online on one playerworld (classic/mainserver), this made room so everyone in the game could interact and actually play the game rather than develop. Now the game is still getting a top 600 players on about 100 playerworlds spread out. Therefor cuts the amount of every server more and more and more which goes away from interaction.

I remember back in the day when I would get on and every single spar room on classic was full, always a guild war going on, people in angel clan being idiots and the lovely pkers roaming around level13. Go to the playerworld now and you might get lucky to see pking.

I remember back in the day when these forums were always active and there was about 60+ users always on posting, now only the main graal forums and non-related forums(more active than any others) are the semi-active areas.

$5 a month seems so little when it's used that way. If $5 was nothing then I would spend my money on so many things that I would never need. You can't compare graal to necessities of life because in reality we need food, water and shelter, but graal we don't need to survive. Graal is entertainment to all of us but an extra $5 on our bills can be overwhelming. Your job is to bring us into the game and convince us to upgrade by bringing more updates,events,news and so on (no i'm not telling you how to do your job here, i'm just stating the obvious).

Above I mentioned something about player assistance so here is one of my suggestions that really can help. When I go and buy an online account somewhere (hosting, domain registration, software and games of course) one thing that is the main attraction to me is the professional customer service. I'm not saying pay for 24/7 customer service but there needs to be something done about account maintanence/PWA. Lyndzey and Ibonic are exceptions in this because they have been around for a long time, they are mature and respond generally really quick (going off past issues). Now when I returned to graal May 2004 I browsed around the forums and I could see the STAFF around here calling other players idiots,*****s and so on and just with that is enough to turn my back. I will admit I haven't been as active on graal for a while due to college reasons, but I stick around because you happened to get my addicted to the game for nearly 6 years. I stick around because of the old community that still exists, but lately it's just been... dull.

Essentially your restaurant is expanding, but the amount of customers are declining. Graal really should look into advertising more and continue its classic ways of entertaining players because it has the great client but the community needs more attention (more community = more cash moneys for YOU!).

I'll put more thought later, i'm quite sleepy.

It's 5:30am so some of this might be questionable.

*Suggestion idea... I'd love to post on these forums more than once a day, there should be an option to have forum access seperatly at an affordable low cost, I'd definately pay that because I don't have the time to play graal much anymore but I'd love to contribute to the boards more often but I don't want to pay $30-40 to do so.

And you've just stated the EXACT reason I made this post.

An online blog company depends on one main element to be successful. The amount of people who are posting their blogs on it.

What this game offers is indeed unqiue. However due to the nature of what it offers, your most important aspect is your players.


Your player count brings you the community.

Your player count brings you the worlds that they develop. The player count is directly tied into how well this game will do.


I'm not attacking you. I'm not "Anti-Graal". I'm just telling you at this rate, the game will die. SOMETHING needs to be done to improve the falling player count.

Sometimes you must take losses at a certain point to profit in the future.


Unix, have you ever tried playing Graal between 2am and 10am Eastern time? No one is on. The community is dead.

Have you recently tried to find staff to develop your player world?
There is barely anyone.

Have you tried your damn hardest to get people to listen to you because you don't want to see something you've enjoyed for years fail?

As I said before, I'm not telling you to make this game totally free. I understand that you can not, and should not be expected to.

What I'm telling you is there are ways to make money that you have not even tried yet.

What I'm telling you is there are ways to improve the player count drastically, thus bringing you even more money than ever.

I'm telling you that I have a lot of advice and help I can give this game as a player, not a staff member.

All that I'm saying is that I want a good chance for my opinions, and everyone elses, to be heard on this issue, and really taken into consideration, so we can all save the game we have enjoyed, or still do.

I no longer wish to be ignored as I have all these years passed. This is my final attempt to help this game on a large scale.

I don't want to argue, I don't want to debate, I just want to come together to improve the community, and help restore it.

I didn't read your entire post because, quite frankly, it's full of the same useless garbage you keep spewing from your fingers every time you post.

I did, however, notice a few points you made that were seemingly without background information, or common sense.


Good job noticing that the players are only human, and need sleep. How about you consider it this way: If there's no one on, then no one cares if anyone else is on.


Speak for yourself. Just because experienced people don't want to work for a new playerworld, for many reasons (one being most new playerworlds are managed by incompetant people who only want the playeworld for power) doesn't mean there are none out there. If you want staff for a new server, there are plenty of people who are just getting started with scripting, graphics design, level making, etc, that would love the chance to work on an actual server. If you're too incompetant to help novice staff members out a little bit, then my former point is valid.


Exactly why you don't have the credentials or experience to be giving such suggestions. You think you know a lot about how graal works, but in reality you have just been hiding being the player-facade, only taking in what you want to.

Well, firstly I'd like to thank you for being mature enough to be the one to attempt to start the flame war.

However, instead of wasting my time like you saying "LOL UR STUPID U IDIOT MAN UR DUMBANDWRONG", I'm just going to address your points, as to keep my thread on the topic of HELPING THIS GAME, not being internet warriors.



Yeah, sorry, I forgot that the world is not round. Here I was thinking that day and night occur at different times all around the world, and that it's possible that people outside my country would also enjoy playing this game. Sorry, my bad.

Who said I was speaking purely of new playerworlds? Yes, there are staff out there. Yes, most of them already have projects.

There is a large difference between helping a novice staff member out a bit, and teaching them the entire area of the field you need.

Yeah, me being dumb again, sorry. I forgot that the customer is always wrong, and that we're just peons who should mind our own business. After all, with me hiding behind my "player-facade" the whole time, I totally let it slip my mind that this game is totally about the success and enjoyment of the staff members, not unimportant people such as players, like myself.

Strange that 90% of the other players seem to agree with me, though. Guess we're just all too stupid to have opinions, huh?

But each customer would only get a single free dish, right? Until they come to your restaurant with another car?

I suppose it would be even more profitable if you served the free food in a room with a lot of loud and annoying people that is also never cleaned, then stop serving any new food and instead offer paid access to the gold-plated second restaurant that will soon serve a lot of new and exciting dishes, providing the volunteers stick around. There is some other restaurant which provides free access to all its recipes, I suppose you can just mix them with your regular recipes and save a lot of work.

After that, you can stop working on the food and invest some years into developing a more technologically advanced version of serving the same old food, perhaps using knowledge from some other big restaurant chain. Your volunteers are going to take care of the food-making until you are done with that.

If that does not work out, you can always rent out the back rooms to kids who want to run their own restaurants.

Just make sure to have some more volunteers run around and tell everybody not to steal ingredients, and what they are allowed to cook and what not. And have some bouncers to get rid of people who complain about the food. You can have them mark the customer's cars so you know who to not let in anymore.


Man, I am having way too much fun with analogies.

This brings up another question, where does our money go to once it's sent over there? We pay, and I'm assuming it goes to paying for the server upholding. But there's gotta be more distribution of our paid account outcome than that.

But thousands of people read their blogs like daily.

In hopes of gaining popularity with millions of people.

The ones that actually pay for their space are ones who are practicing for later, when they can charge people and make websites for them.

Except every non-graal run playerworld is crappy. Prove me wrong please?

Graal hasn't been improved overall since full p2p was introduced back in june (may?) 2002. The .exe itself may look fancier and gscript 2 may be more advanced, but the community of graal has been dying since.

We know that :(

But the thing is, we're not saying "make graal free". We're saying "make graal better and worth paying for".

What makes Graal itself successful is one thing, the community. That's it. How many people pay for a graal account just to do quests on servers? Seriously, who does? People play graal because it's so social and so easy to interact with other people. That's whats made it successful since the beginning and the community itself has been dying since p2p was introduced. Sure you may have some good "boosts" like Era, New val 2003, and such but they've died.

Ragnarok itself has been around for quite some times, and the private servers are usually around for like 3-4 years. But you got to remember that those private servers are free for the player.

Buy paper/pen and study with that money. (?)

In Sweden, $2 dollars won't get you anything but -maybe- a can of coke. But that's not the point.

The point is that graal has gone p2p for a while now and it's not offering every-so-much professional service. Not only that but the playerworlds aren't great anymore. It's a matter of having money and waiting for a classic playerworld to be kicked out. Seriously, look at the playercounts.

Obviously they are not showing any signs of consideration so why attempt again?

As Graal's financial advisor, let me start by taking off my $2,000 Gucci hat.
Look people.. Graal's money is paying off my 3 cars, 2 mansions, and my GraalOnline subscription. LEAVE US ALONE.

Unixmad; Stefan: How about we have lunch today out on my yacht? Unixmad's house is starting to stink from his dog and wife so I thought a change of scenery would be best.

for 2 dollars in sweden u can get, a cop off cofee with an hamburger or ciggaretes or snuff or candy or the newspaper or milk or 2 small pizzas that you can get done in 2 minutes

so yeah, u can get alot for 2 dollars, thats y im upset = /
:whatever:

I am by no means attempting to start a flame war. I am simply stating facts that are (as I thought) common sense.


Well, according to our good friend 'Inspiration':
(You really should consider reading the sources I'm citing before responding.)


Perhaps you didn't read my entire point. I was not referring to the people who are looking for a mentor to teach them everything. I remember specifically saying that there are a lot of people who don't need to be told exactly how to do everything, that are looking for a job. You obviously just don't know where to look, and that is the fault of no one but yourself.


No where did I say players were unimportant. I was just stating that you are just that, a player, not a general manager, not a business consultant, just a player and quite frankly, it is none of your business how Graal is managed. Stick to playing, my friend.


90% of the people agree with you? Perhaps. But 0% of the people who actually matter, agree with you. (Stefan and Unixmad)

Then please depense with the attitude, as it is not at all needed.




Nor do the clusters of other managers and admins who are always short on development staff, I guess.

I've managed a top player world. I know how hard it is to find good, reliable staff in all fields. Can you say the same?


Read this over a few times.
I am a paying player. Yet it is none of my business how the product I payed for is ran? What?

You're right, I'm not a general manager, not a business consultant, but I think I am a lot closer to having a grasp on how to be one than you seem to.

What you're saying is that the opinion of the masses should not be heard or taken into consideration, simply because we are not part of the staff?

Nothing is more important than our opinions. It is 100% our business how this game is managed and ran. We're paying for it. We're the reason the game can still exist as it does.




I'm glad to know that as a paying customer I do not matter at all, nor do all the other paying customers who agree with me.
But hey, since you're not Stefan or Unixmad, I guess I can just totally ignore what you say, because you're just another peon who is not allowed to voice their opinion on anything just like me, right? Right!

Due to server costs, etc. it probably wouldn't be good idea to go back to the old account system, but advertising Graal in some way would probably be a good idea.

I agree that the current account system should stay realitively the same... I think it's the playerworld system that needs some major revamping.

I like the idea of the new trial system with two weeks free like other MMORPGs do, then you're expected to upgrade to at least classic (one time fee, all this "they'll quit" is way off base) to keep playing. I think an important part would be not to have any level of play after the trial so people can't satisfy that one burning question they have about a quest or a person and have to upgrade to get satisfaction. Then they might as well play.

As for the whole "I pay you so you have to listen to me" argument, that's really quite flawed. When you buy a burger at McDonald's do you get to go in and tell them where they should mop the floor? No way. You're paying for the product, not management rights.

If you are upgrading, upgrade for Graal's product: the game play. If you are upgrading because you think it entitles you to run the game then by all means stop upgrading. Graal isn't a public company, so you're a customer, not a shareholder.

I think it should be taken into note that everyone replying in tihs thread are already subscribers of Graal and their oppinions are genuine and sincere. By bringing up these topics they're hoping to better the community, since they personally don't benefit from it.

They aren't trying to gain a profit and shouldn't be treated like so...everyone posting here has already paid and legitimately wants to help Graal.

Idea:
Era 3D. Perfect.
Popularity will explode.

For guests:

Account key. Simple.

... Just my little 2 cents

Oh please, that pw name has infested the playerworlds section. Please don't bring it here. :(


I disagree homes. Maloria, outside of the lag, is an extremely good playerworld, maybe even better than GK and Zone, but that of course is my opinion. Others will not share the same opinion as me.

How does someone prove one playerworld to be better than another?



To Unixmad

Can you please consider what has been discussed in Mykel's thread about the referral system, and other ideas on better payment plans? Some you may not like, but maybe some you will.

http://forums.graalonline.com/forums...ad.php?t=62086

Why the hell would anyone want a snuff movie? x_x

Ignore the idiots. Graal's subscription is fine.
Get a job, beg your mother. Hell, it's 2$ a month. I'm sure your parents earn more then 10$ an hour.

Snakeandy, go away - noone likes you.

And to haunter, I tried getting Spark to listen to me once but he's obviously convinced that I'm mentally retarded or something weird. Or maybe he's just that better then me. :rolleyes::

Sure, when you say two dollars a month, it sounds ohso cheap and affordable. In reality, its quite expensive. I believe it was sixty dollars when I last upgraded. For a kid, that is a lot of money to come up with. When I was fourteen and upgraded for the first time, I didn't/couldn't get the money so easily. It was only due to saving every penny I had (I didn't recieve allowance, I didn't have the rich family) for a month. With the new guest accounts, you're done in two weeks, and I doubt anyone would save their money for a month afterwards. They'd sooner forget about the game and spend the money elsewhere.

(As mentioned earlier) Most parents are unwilling to purchase anything online, as they are unfamiliar with the technology. Not to mention that you hear of credit card fraud almost weekly on the news relating to internet scams. Parents are already wary (and for good reason), and aren't willing to shell out all that money.

We may not pay for management rights, but ideally, the management should take what the customer says into consideration. Afterall, they make or break the company.

[edit]Apparently Snake thinks every family is able to afford giving out an allowance. We don't all come from the middle/upper class families like you.[/edit]

Question: who the **** are you? I don't really give a **** who you are.

What? you can't afford it? Hell, your parents can't be that mean. Hell, 2$ a month, that's £1 a month in England. Hell, I get £4 a day from my parents. That's just for getting an education.
Retards.