The two most recent GP hirings, I belive.

Lordofpi13 and Newyorkernick.

As far as I know they where both previously iPhone players and had only recntly joined the PC community, and had little, if not no experience as staff on servers.

I don't know all the facts but I do know that the two in question where iPhone players, quite popular on there as a matter of fact, and had only recently started playing on the PC.

My point is that surely if the staff of the iPhone server belive that the iPhone players will become the new generation of Graal Players, then surely they should have more experienced people dealing with them. I'm not saying it's wrong or anything, but it just makes more sense using experienced people.

Most "experienced" GPs on the PC Graal servers aren't that great.

Also I think you're kinda ignoring the fact that maybe they were hired as staff before they joined the PC community.

Not that I care for this discussion, but FYI they weren't.

Yep, most of them are hired, and they're required to get on PC to work.

and they're still iphone players, so am I!

Yes, it can be argued that experienced people aren't the best in some situations.

But honestly, hired before they joined the PC community?
Sorry but that's the most ridiculous thing I ever...

Also I actually know as a fact that at least one of them was not hired before entering the PC community. I saw them post on a forum about the iPhone game that they had just been hired AFTER I had seen them online on a PC server. Unholy Nation in fact.

Also I belive Xor recently had some trouble with a GP on there, whom I belive may have been quite inexperienced. It's a rare thing to happen, but having had it happen surely they'd want to be more careful.

If you know more on the matter then please put me right, I am simply going with the information that I have.

In that case how are they selected? Isn't it a bit of a risk picking someone out of the iPhone community and asking them to get on a computer and come on graal?

After all, they may have a lot of issues, computer trouble etc. And in addition to that you have no idea how they are going to react.

I've seen a few different forums where people are discussing GraalOnline for the iPhone. One in particular has a thread with around 500 pages that Stefan actively posts in (I can't remember the name of it, and I don't feel like searching for a link). I've also seen NewYorkerNicole posting and participating in that community frequently...sharing videos and whatnot.

My point is, stop crying because I'm sure they were hired for a reason.

I think the forum you are talking about is the Toucharcade forum?
I used to read every single comment on that thread when I started playing the iPhone server. I never made an account and posted myself tho... x_x

I'm not "crying" as it where.
I'm making a point. The only reason I was making the point was because I wanted to make my presence known and had no other way of doing so without embarassing myself. Ummm...Ok? ^^

Glad I cleared that up....

No it's not x-x. It is true that iphone players can be quite unfamiliar with how the PC Graal works, but i'm sure if they just logged in any server, play for like 1 hour I'm sure they can get used to it. Besides it's not a hard thing to teach.

So what really?:/ Everyone has the same chance of joining the team. There are quite a load of players that download graal and start playing PC Graal, but not just because they started playing PC means they'll become GPs.



That happens on every server, doesn't matter if it's iphone or not.

read me other message.

As I said, the only reason I rasied this point was to make my presence known. I don't really care who gets hired onto the iPhone server, as long as they do their job.

That's cool, but I do know there are some Classic iPhoner's who are staff on the actual server just figured they might be what he was talking about.

I believe that Xor knows who to choose for his staff team, no matter what coincidences occur.

I don't think having GP experience has anything at all to do with being a good GP. Just sayin.

Stefan has been satisfied with Xor's hiring practices so far. There will always be a person now and then that doesn't quite work out as you hoped and needs to be cut but that holds true for any server. It helps if the GP's you hire understand the server and its particular issues. It even helps more if they have some knowledge of the players habits of gameplay. I personally don't see where someone who came from iphone would be required to have experience as staff on a pc server before hiring them. Anyone can learn to use an rc with a few minutes of instruction.

Actually, as someone who regularly talks to new players on the game this is something that has been bothering me for a while now. People aren't visiting PC Graal with the intentions of playing it, they're visiting under the assumption that it will increase their chances of becoming an "admin" on the iPhone server. On top of that, looking through threads about the game such as TouchArcade and even on sites such as Yahoo! Answers, people are a lot more focused on becoming staff than they are in simply playing the iPhone version. Sure this staff buzz has existed for a long time, but when the server has a huge (by Graal's standards) playerbase and the only 'marketing strategy' employed is, "Play PC Graal and you might be able to join the admin clique!" it is in terribly poor form.

Most MMO's give players the opportunity to try out for GM when they need one, and it does work out well a lot of the time, but this is just stupid.

A lot of players from iPhone/iPod/iPad are also downloading the PC version to get additional sword and shield codes (filenames) :D

I think it's funny that they call it codes like if it was cheating or a hidden easteregg. :P

Downloaded it and it's pretty fun for iPod Touch.
Question: PKing is illegal? I was on a killing spree earlier and someone threatened to report me.

Also should probably move the map icon somewhere else on the screen - sometimes when I'm running around/in the heat of battle my finger will scroll to far and pop the map open

Legal of course if the buttons show :)

Changed it just now, check if its better now.

Yes thank you :)

They call it codes? Omg XD

UN noobs have been calling it "codes" for a couple of years too.

Yay, we ended that discussion!
That was a waste of a page and a half on this.... Oh wait, I started the discussion....Sorry... :noob:

And your point is... ?


I like how I got an e-mail from Azrael (GP?) to add him on Facebook, then saw the Twitter site.
Should have links to those on the app.

Well, I did play Graal The Adventure years ago, maybe like 2000-2002? I don't remember much but I do remember making levels and all that jazz. I downloaded PC every now and then to check it out but wasn't able to afford paying for a subscription since I was busy with college and work. Well I'm done with college and underemployed so I downloaded IPhone Graal, and LOVED it. It brought me back. I finally got around to purchasing a subscription.

In the end, Graal is Graal. One of them just fits in your pocket. (and has less stuff to do but considering the userbase, this will change)

Please be nice to me :cry:

...I cry myself to sleep.

I welcome our new immigrants!

Especially because chances are very slim that I'll see them on GK.

Why would you not want more people on GK?

I'm surprised "become a GP" hasn't been made a pay-for-perk yet, it would be effortless and probably rake in the dough, and that's the important thing right?
Plus you could hardly do worse than hiring a handful of people who are either at the age of 12 or under (not just being derogatory here) or have been jailed for cheating/hacking numerous times previously.

Yeah, do you really want hackers or people who (verbally) abuse to represent your game? Oh, I totally would...

If Graal for PC could change its pricing plan, there could be a lot more new people retained from the iPhone server.

Yes.

We have players interested in becoming GP's fill out an Application. Then we sift through to find good Applicants, just like every other server does. We like to hire from the server itself because those players know the community, the server, the players, etc. more-so than PC players who haven't been on the game.

The people we have hired so far have been great GP's. You don't need to have PC Experience to be able to hold a GP position.

NewYorkerNick is a GP for iPhone. He doesn't seem like your stereotype. You pick and poke a lot, Thor. Stop trying to start crap.

I'm not saying all of the GPs iPhone has are bad, i'm not even arguing over the whole Iphone Player > PC Player > Iphone GP issue, but from what i've heard there a couple GPs who have previously cheated on the server, and there being an instance of corruption or 2 in a fairly short amount of time, and I still see iPhone as a server intended to wheel in some quick cash rather than as a project intended to be well worth playing.

I am however glad that Xor chooses to hire from the servers own community, just a shame really that a similar approach wasn't taken towards designing the server, it having ended up as largely a mixture of just about every server rather than either as per the original or new.

Well said Zeltino. If I may add my two cents without sounding like I know more than anyone on these forums do:

With a 900 player average there are bound to be more hackers/cheaters if you will. And since the IPhone server has generally a lot less stuff to do there's more of a need for imagination vs PC servers who have events, npcs and (small) quests. People get bored. I believe this reimagination of Classic was initially meant to be a chat mmo, and Less of a game. Due to the overwhelming growth that happened after Christmas I've noticed a slow transition into a more familiar Graal. I guess it was inevitable.

Due to the low price and the parents who buy their kids iPods and iPhones for Christmas/Birthdays (whatever happened to racecars?), yeah, young people have easier access to it. Does it bother me? Well sometimes... I'm an 80's born and naturally it was difficult to find people I could relate with but you'd be suprised how much of a diversity there really is on there.

I guess we all may have our underlying biases and envys since it's only natural to proclaim what server "is da best server". But if we could all look at this with the glass half full for a minute... We just brought in a new generation of people and a new generation of creativity coming forward.

I can't say too much about the GP process since I'm sort of a new hire but it's not like they hired scripters from iPhone server. That might have been a different situation. The GPs who were already on since December were available to us and left a good impression for us to reflect off of. Just as anyone on pc has seen a GP do what they do (warping, jailing, answering feedback, helping others in general), an iPhone player can catch on pretty fast.

I'd say more but... I'm typing this from my iPod :p

Good luck hacking an iPhone game. You don't exactly have the same tools available to you. lol

Yeah, you have different ones. You'd be surprised on what can be done.

As far as I know, current iPhone's can't multitask... how can anyone hack the game when they can't even run a different application without Graal closing? Most they can do is mess with the app file. This may be a different story with iPhone firmware 4.0.

I guess it depends on your definition of "hack". In the IPhone context a small hack would be editing music/graphics customized to your iPod and bigger hacks would include walking through walls, invincibility, scripting restricted abilities that only admins can access (sword spin is not enabled for iPod players but a few have hacked into the game and figured it out).

Small fish. But still enough to bother other players in forts, spars, an posing as an admin to trick people about releases. Seems harmless but keep in mind 1000 players online at a time.

The iPhone can multitask.

And you're also forgetting that you can modify packets as they come in through a proxy. (i.e, drop all "sword" gani packets, player is now invincible.)

EDIT:
To elaborate on the iPhone's multitasking, it's only officially supported by the "Music" and "Safari" apps that are bundled with the phone, one being the interface to play MP3's with and the other being the browser, but if you jailbreak your phone, there's a plugin available for download called "Backgrounder" that lets you run any program in the background. I've used it to listen to the Pandora radio app while browsing.

Same here, I use it too when I need to do something else like changing the artist I'm listening to while using Colloquy (IRC) or to perform any other action.