What I think Stefan could do to reel in new players is include one server that is free. Lets say that he revives Graal The Adventure at its prime. New players would be able to truely obtain the Graal experience without compromising profit. The free server would hopefully hook players on the original experiences many of us had. With that said, I still believe that trial accounts should have limits. I think that the trial accounts would have to wait in ghost mode if the number of players exceeds a certain number.

I dunno. I miss the old community.

From my personal experiences, Graal Kingdoms needs much more than just fun sparring events between kingdoms. That server needs a total reform. Leveling up is tedious and too difficult. The only factor that kept me playing was the playerhousing.

My idea for the next killer server is a hotel server. The server would consist of endless floor hotels (similar to my apartment system thread in the Era forum). Events would be the main focus of the server. The events wouldn't be biased towards dedicated players (ex. of bias: If two people were sparring, one player,whom has 400 hours, has 10 max hearts and the other, whom has 10, has 4). The events would be based on skill and benefit the casual player whist not discouraging the hardcore sector. Events could range from finding an Easter Egg to a massive 30v30 spar. Now, aside from participating in events, players could use the experience points earned from events to purchase weapons, furniture, clothing, insturments!, arcade games, and more luxurious rooms. The weapons purchased would be used to complete quests. The quests, which could be located in the basement floors of some hotels, would require specific items and weapons and number of players to complete. A possible reward to completing a quest would be an expansion for your room.

I would work on this idea myself. But I don't have the time or money to do so.

ki'mdone

Only thing that made graal fun was the community. I think the playerworlds need to be removed and only have the popular ones left. Have a different variety of gameplay.

Classic, G2k1, GK is all we need.

Well considering those three servers are all but dead, no thanks.

Hackers are way overestimated, and erroneously the target of a lot of hate.

I don't know about you guys, but when there was a hacker loose on a server, it was never to the point where the hacker was actually destroying the server or anything. It was more along the lines of it disrupting the gameplay, which sometimes was pretty fun. Speedhacking and that kind of thing was kind of lame, but whenever someone dropped like, 20 bombs on the screen, it was kind of fun.

It made Graal interesting, gave people something to think about, gave the GPs something to do, and gave the community of non-hackers something to unite against. I think that, while we may stereotypically consider hackers to be bad, they do add a certain black aspect to the game. An underground, if you will. I think we're so used to thinking of them in terms of the typical MMORPG hacker: duping items for profit and so forth. The thing is, Classic doesn't have an economy, so they can't really do anything that is so destructive to the constant gameplay. This makes the whole "hackers" argument for keeping the NPC server void.

Just my $0.02.

Jellyfish?

Jellyfish did his business on Maloria, where there is an economy. I believe his arguement is toward "classic" servers, while Maloria falls under something like "level up/roleplay."

that is not entirely accurate.

sanstrata + one particular hacker = all files on server deleted 5 times in 2 days. (we re-uploaded and as we were uploading he was deleting. back in the days of ftp). I am glad for the many more layers of security that have been implemented over the years.

hacking = not fun and i for one have absolutely no tolerance for anyone who even mentions that they are going to hack, even if they are trying to be funny. you so much as joke about hacking on my server and you will be inviting an insta-ban on your account.

Harsh.
Who needs hacking, I have perfectly good boots now ;)

I find myself agreeing with konindas. He seems to be speaking the most sense here. I was one of the original GK developers and even I had no interest in the server - for me it was all way too complicated and lacked community. I'm in no way saying it's a bad server; on the contrary. It simply wasn't for me - an impatient gamer.

It's kind of funny reading that back seeing as in my career I am a Games Engineer.

It is not hacking if the guy has your ftp password. What new layers are you talking about?

Hacking is, in contrary, very fun, and I am rather convinced that the PWA will not let you get away with randomly banning people like that if your server ever reaches a certain point of popularity.

If you think your post is important enough to be read by anyone, especially Stefan, you should put the minimum of effort into it that is required to come up with proper grammar and spelling.

fun for the one doing the hack, perhaps it is fun.
for those observing the hacking, perhaps its fun to watch - after all, it's not their hard work being mutilated and destroyed.

for the one being hacked, whose hundreds of hours (yes i spent that much time on sanstrata all those years ago) seeing your work gets deleted, it's hell on earth.

of course when my server does get to the hoted/classic tab, i will comply with the same standards that graal online has for various offenses.

Instead of thinking what classic needs why don't you ask the current generation of players who actually play classic longer than 10 minuites wants? We need quests, We need constant events, and a playerbase to play the events. But in the end of it all, even in the 'old' graal days people spent their time PKing and taking over graal castle... There wasn't much to do. Its just your childhood nostalgia getting the best of you, like a grown up who played nintendo, playing it again and realising things have evolved since then and it isn't so great anymore. But you CANNOT expect people to rebuild classic in a month, expecially when they are doing it on their own free time. GScript 2 will only help Classic evolve into where it needs to be at in terms of a playerworld.

Don't worry about Classic though, its being taken care of.

Read his post and the rules please.

Pretending it is not just abuse of staff privileges or stupid trainers, it probably is.

That is a very retarded kind of fun and not at all what I was refering to.

This is, for me, outside the scope of "hacking". The destruction of data is not what hacking is about and clearly a bad thing, and not "fun" for anyone.

By your command.

Ah to the guy who said i should have used good grammar you obviously didnt read all the posts because in fact i was not the person being trolled about grammar. I do not think it is constructive to this post however so please stop being english teachers. I simply want Classic to be free so that more players play graal and it flourishes again. I firmly believe having one free server will bring in more people who will eventually pay and make graal more profitable. If you disagree have a good reason.

In that case, make UN free. It already has the biggest newb population.

And then once the new players are hooked on the classic server, they can pay to be dissapointed by the lack of game content on any of the other servers!

Is anyone realizing that these threads are occuring all the time and nothing is being done about it? Obviously Stefan and others do not care. They obviously think they are right and everyone in these threads are wrong. They obviously have different priorities than the players and if they were going to change anything, they would have done so long ago, since people have been complaining about this kind of stuff forever. What is the point?

The servers will not be free. Making everything free is not really the solution. This is a business, money needs to be made. The solution is to make something worth paying for instead of charging people to run around what has become a Massively Multiplayer Chat Room.

Making the game so the community can create content is great, but leaving all the work in the community's hands is lazy, stupid and is making people bored out of their mind. Very few people will spend that much free time to make an actual good server without pay. Graal The Adventure was the closest thing to a game on Graal, and it's been slaughtered.

Why do you insist on brekaing the forum rules?

So what? Grammar is still an awesome thing.

I have no obligation to be constructive to your post. However, pretending that English is some kind of free-form communication thing instead of language is not very constructive either, so calling out people who obfuscate communication by lack of grammar is entirely justified.

Apparently firmly believing something is good enough for you, so why not for people who disagree?

Graal was fun back in 2001, because of the communities larger population. There was more people around with similar interests. More interactivity, more guild/spar/pk/event competition. More players willing to help development on each playerworld.

It was fun being able to meet new people that shared your same interests. As time moved on, people matured and left the game for better structured/maintained MMPOGs or to deal with real life issues. There was no purpose to stay around a game that peaked out its fun for us. Once in a while the older players pop in to see whats new and fun, but those returns are usually shortlived.

Instead of trying to compare one generation to another, maybe the new kids can try to make their own fun. How? Don't ask me. My brain is fried and this is about as sensible as I'm going to get.

Graal's main problem - Advertising. There is none of it, and I came to Graal by a FAQ off GameFAQs which had Graal as one of it's cool links. Start advertising, and you'll bring in more players.

nobody will pay money for this game off of its immediate apeal, theres not much. You need to be able to play the game for free to get into it. Thats why the populations are so low.

I agree, there is no advertising. I stumbled across Graal year's ago whilst looking for an online Bomberman game :\