We have added a short delay before jumping off a cliff.

We will be hosting a guild spar tournament on Saturday, 24th of September At 6pm (EST).

You can register your team by going to Graal City's Battle Arena and tapping the GST Information NPC.

Team Registration on the iPhone server will close at 6 PM (EST) on Friday.

Team Registration on the Facebook server will close at 5 PM (EST) on Saturday.

Rules

• To keep spars fair only iPhone, iPad, and iPod users will be able to participate in the tournament on the iPhone world! A Tournament will be held on the Facebook Classic World for Facebook players instead.
• Only 64 (32 on Facebook) fully confirmed teams will be allowed in the tournament. If there are more than 64 teams fully confirmed teams for the tournament we will pick the first 64 teams with the highest guild spar ranking.
• Each team will have 5 core members and are allowed to have 2 (optional) substitute members.
• Guild leaders need to submit their guild as a team, but are not required to actually join the team.
• As a player you can only enter with 1 guild of choice.
• At least 5 members of your team are required to be online before the tournament starts or else your team will be disqualified.
• If a guild does not have enough of their submitted players online during the tournament they will be required to play with who they have online at that time or forfeit the match.
• In order to progress to the next round, a guild must defeat an opponent in 2/3 spars each match.
• Any excessive lag or cheating will result in a disqualification of the entire guild.

Prizes
The hat prizes will be displayed on the registration sometime this week, and your team will need to win your first spar in order to get into the GST Waiting Room (Shop).

Hey, Stefan.
Is there an update on the progress of Graal Android and Era Facebook?
Also, can we now use custom controls on Classic Facebook?

With custom controls you mean changing the keys for movement and activating items?

Yeah.

we need shortkeys like how theres M for map but theres no pressing M again to close the map? same with Q for profile

iPhone:

Congratulations to Prodigious for winning the September GST.
Congratulations to Ch4rM for placing 2nd!

Facebook:

Congratulations to US Juniors for winning the September GST.
Congratulations to Epic Kolosals for placing 2nd!

Still the same problems at the mod, players block and its unbearably stupid. It would literally take ten minutes for someone to widen the entrance as I've suggested in this topic. Today I was "warned" for using bombs to walk through the side of the mod entrance as it was literally the only way to get up with 4 players blocking and freezing there iphone clients by opening the map so you couldn't get by. Or at least I assume so since whoever did it didn't even bother to pm me. I come back to facebook graal every once in a while in the hopes that some of these issues will be addressed, and then play for a few days and get annoyed and quit. I can't imagine the server ever sustaining a decent pc player count the way it is now, I'm hoping there are plans for some major improvements.

Edit: Did eventually track down guy who did warn me by reporting a random person and he seemed nice enough, not trying to get anybody in trouble. Would be good it a reason was given in warning level though.

There's a bug where you can't change your items anymore (at least for me) on your non-VIP iPhone account, even if you re-install the application. Renders my application pretty useless without VIP. In addition to that you get hurt when you shoot fire from your own horse and that should probably be fixed too.

Whenever I log onto the iPhone server with the PC, and my iPod is offline, it still says that I am using another device. Also, this happens to me, I start off with 3 minutes if I don't log in.

I've fixed the first part of the issue. Not rightly sure how to fix the second issue. Not sure it's fixable with GS2

The horse problem has already been fixed some weeks ago, the horse is freezing a little bit now when breathing fire.

Client based functions should be implemented alongside with the iphone functions for Facebook.

Custom Controls?
Era Facebook?

If Era Facebook was implemented right I'm sure it'd be one of the best available FB games.

If forums had a like button, I'd totally like that man.

Why?

Are we ever going to get PC access to these servers or what, I can't really understand why this isn't being allowed by now.

Again, still waiting for my Android app :(

Yeah, I'm curious, how is the progression of this port of Graal Classic to android?

Some bugs in the custom work.

While you have a bomb equipped on Facebook you can hold down your D key when walking upwards and this results in:



When you throw a bomb it resets how close to explosion it is. If you throw bombs on an iDevice there is a delay between a bomb being thrown and it appearing. If you throw bombs on Facebook this is the effect:



There is no "blink" on horses anymore, so you can pretty much kill someone instantly if you spam your sword at them:

That is the pricehe should pay for riding a yellow horse

Can't wait for Android version as I have a Kindle Fire and think that Graal would be gorgeous through it :)

So how about that?
Is this something which is also being delayed, inwhich case I understand that plans and dates change, or is it just a load of bollocks?

I'm actually quite interested to see what those requirements were supposed to be, seeing as I've spent all this time and effort writing up micro-transaction & incentive plans and preparing them, for what is arguably one of if not the highest quality production-ready servers. Yet the response I've received almost completely failed to acknowledge the plans I have presented. Following myself responding to the supposed issue of credentials in a manner which should have put that to bed, has been nothing but silence, having already waited 4 months for the first reply to begin with.

I could talk all day about why I feel Classic should, at the very least, have its plans for an agreement in principle to eventually remove observer mode, be given an honest consideration, but I feel it would hit the right chords if I instead let some quotes from last year be known:

It's funny how there was such an interest in our work when the idea was for the benefit of a different platform, yet our plans for this work in its natural designed state for PC Graal are essentially ignored. I would like to re-iterate that I am not demanding they be accepted, if there is a problem with them or they are unsatisfactory I'll be back to the drawing board and putting in the extra work to make it more credible. I am simply asking for a proper response.

As for the actual problem at hand, I would like to bring attention to something listed within the subscription policy at http://www.graalonline.com/zone/stores/subterms:

To put it simply, Observer mode is a restriction that ****s players, why?
Because it causes disruption to competitive gameplay, the form which gameplay on Graal mostly consists of. Look at Unholy Nation, it's a server which revolves strongly around events and sparring. Because of the disruption observer mode causes to spars and events, as well as the fact it renders players stuck on the screens of other players with no way to manipulate the observer through script, UN prevent trials from participating.

This is a problem which contributed to other traditional style servers such as Classic and Npulse dying out, which you could say has made the game less worth paying for. Now with the new version of Classic, it has also become more apparent to me that observer mode can cause bugs which can prevent Quest progress, or even render the game unplayable without staff intervention if a trial is in an unfortunate place at an unfortunate time, and I haven't become aware of it in order to implement a solution.

What's even more annoying is that it is virtually impossible for a developer to take the necessary measures to debug potential problems caused by observer mode.
To test this requires logging on a trial account, waiting a couple minutes for observer mode to end, getting into the relevant position within a level, waiting 10-15 minutes or so for observer mode to occur again, waiting another couple minutes for it to end, actually experiencing the bug, and then repeating the process once more and wasting even more time to ensure you've managed to fix it.

Considering trials are given 5 measly hours of "free time" a month, that this applies on every server they log on, most of which take several hours to explore and actually become familiar with, and this time is even deducted when playing a non observer mode server, how the hell are trials supposed to enjoy the game before deciding to buy a subscription?

Even on those servers fortunate enough to not be plagued by observer mode things aren't all that rosey. Trials have heavy restrictions placed on them, to such an extent that they are at a big disadvantage to paying players, with this idea it will provide an incentive for them to upgrade. Similarly to observer mode this means players are having to pay before they can enjoy the game.

Once again Graal is a game which relies heavily on player vs player competition, half of what makes the game what it is can be attributed to the playercount itself. While there are several different reasons for iPhone's success, the main thing which stands out which PC players/developers would hope Stefan and Unixmad have learned from and can apply to PC Graal, is the fact that it actually lets players play the game.

Amazingly we're still stuck with this myopic attitude that it is wrong for any player to be playing this game the way it is meant to be played, without paying. It is not rocket science that if the game can be played at a reasonable level for free, playercount would be much higher, and if playercount is much higher, the game is more fun, and if the game is more fun, it makes it more worth paying for whatever incentives are provided.
Is it better to have 250 paying players and 100 non paying players, or 500 paying players and 1000 non paying players?

To finish this off, I truly hate to make such a **** post, I know there are lots of other developers and players alike with their own concerns for their respective servers, and so I apologise if this post comes across as selfish.
To Stefan and Unixmad, if you have taken the time to read this far, credit where it's due.

You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to ffcmike again.

You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to ffcmike again.

couldn't have said it any better Thor

Classic pc is still better cause it has meaning.

Nicely stated Thor. You speak the truth about this topic. :)

0_0 he went there.

Quoting what you've said, I agree trials are placed upon heavy restrictions, however you've also left out that due to these restrictions most players quit. Due to most people quitting and Graal not having many players, servers don't feel an introduction or tutorial to the game is needed, therefor trails usually don't learn to play, and also, quit.

I had a friend who didn't know how to use F7 or Tab for 2 months trying Graal off and on... Some people will walk up to you and start slashing until you say "Press Tab to talk". Most servers don't even explain how to make money on them, after years of being off the servers I don't even know how to make money on UN or Era... I assume Zodiac you kill things.

Maybe once Observermode is gone, servers that are up as well as players will think more of the newer players and possibly teach them, or even go a step further and make a tutorial for them. (Preferably one that is re-playable)

Also,
This is good to know that it is no longer a reason to not rid of the intolerable OB mode.

You fish an cut tree's i can't wait to see how popular classic pc becomes.

I'm not sure that there's such a deliberation behind the lack of tutorials/introductions on Graal. But there would certainly be a higher drive to create a more newbie friendly game if it wasn't for the fact that newbies are punished with observer mode, punished by players who have payed to be at an advantage over them, and then thrust with such a high cost for a subscription. If you know that you're powerless to prevent the vast majority of first time players from quitting, that does raise the question of 'why bother?'.

If observer mode was removed, trials would not have the problem of having "free time" deducted regardless of what server they're logged on. This would allow them to try out all of the main servers, increasing the chance they'd find at least one in which they can become accustomed to.

Lets say you have a first time player who likes role playing, they might spend 2 hours trying Zodiac, and then 2 hours trying Era, and one hour trying UN. By the time they visit Valikorlia (role playing server), they're punished with observer mode, and therefore quit.

This does raise the question, why is PC Graal still being neglected?

Things like this aren't much of an incentive to pay either.
Well, incentive, yes, until they realize it is false advertising.

You must pay / have gold to get a guild, yet guilds don't go up.
I tried to create a guild a while ago, and it was deleted without
even going on the pending list.

Noob Inc. R.I.P. before started.
:noob:

Reminds me that I've heard a lot of new players complain that the guild they've tried to create doesn't work. Then again, with the fact that lifetime Classic subscription is no longer purchasable, you could create a guild, and then no longer be able to wear the tag once your gold expires anyway, which is laughably bad.

I think by removing guilds were ruining history lets remember the good old days why delete history why even make a guild if all your progress will be gone when you stop paying for gold.

Why can't we just keep observer mode but make it 5 minutes instead of 15 minutes an make a count down start before it begins so you know not to join a event an it happens every hour or 30 minutes an we get rid of the player head restriction an just make gold were you can have a server for a year an use rc an make it were you have to be gold to upload things such as graphics that way servers won't suffer as much as we are now.

It has been requested many times before that there be a way to determine how long a player has left before entering observer mode via script, that way it can be distinguished as safe to permit a trial to compete. It would be far from ideal but at least an improvement.

yeah it be nice maybe then some people would comeback maybe even iclassic would play here. wait we don't want that.

This isn't about getting former players to come back, though a higher playercount would ofcourse help this. The main issue with observer mode is that it drastically hinders the ability to attract legitimately new players to the game, largely due to the fact it alienates trials from common forms of community based content.