First off, I started in mid-2000(mid 1.3's) and was a part of the newbie rush on the Main Server so I remember alot about graal.

This guest mode thing IMO is gonna drive so many trials away that would probably p2p down the road.

For the short term guest mode will be a slight success; more people will buy a p2p account. But looking at the big picture Graal is going to lose alot of players that could have paid off later if they weren't forced away after a short time.

I like to think of Graal as that small mom and pop store; a small business with a tight, knit community. Guest mode would be a big step in the other direction; it's most likely to be slightly profitable in the short run, but going the other direction and trying to compete with the bigger mmorpg's isnt the best step to take...and its apparent to me that Graal is trying to take that step.


-People who play graal need real incentives to pay.
-People need to think that there is a sale going on.
-Offer less Gold time for less money(Have a bronze and maybe even a silver package as a limited time offer.), but have that big bulk deal that looks a million times better but isnt much more... And then have your "VIP"'s.
-On those Bronze and Silver Packages maybe not offer lifetime Classic membership, only do it for Gold and VIP.

All those may be good ideas but probably not, im just trying to help out by throwing out ideas and stating my belief which is that guest mode is a bad idea.

(man its late, sorry if that was incoherent)

Yes exactly, the suggested system by the MODs that never works, you sir are correct.


Correct again, this is how graal was published in game magazines, it was known as one of the few good games you could play without paying any money.

No argument here, once again you are right.

One of the big problems of graal was expanding to creating your own playerworld when it wasn't ready to do so. There simply isn't enough players to make a quality server (with few exceptions). Even the respected "quality" servers that for some reason people got all hyped about (Zenkou, Oasis, GRAAL2001,TOT and Faheria) all fell because of lack of staff and eventually everyone gave up (Yes that may not be the reason for all servers).

With one server ages ago with 300 players and increasing, it allowed players to actually play the game and limit the amount of staff jobs. When a player became staff it had actual meaning to it. Now anyone can buy their own server and TRY to make a low quality server, but eventually just quit graal because they get tired of DEVELOPING and not playing. So once players started buying their own playerworlds they concentrated on that, which cut down on the amount of players big time.

Yes, there is a simple explination for this and we all know why the community has been destroyed :rolleyes:

Yes once again I agree and your explination is along the lines of mine. If graal was cheaper I would upgrade to gold, but the amount of money for a package now is getting ridiculous. I would love to post on these forums more than once a day but no way am I going to pay $40+ to do so, I'd rather use that money for food for a full week.

I read about this in the "Future Improvements" sections and I was amazed by the amount of GOLD players who wanted a limited trial system. A GUEST SYSTEM is the same thing as a limiting trial accounts. Some of my old friends on graal still use a trial and simply don't have the money to upgrade and don't have a reason to do so (goes along with nothing attracts them).

I'm sorry to the people who think it's a very important issue and getting out of hand that all trial users are incompetent asses who are just annoying, but I could say the same about all the new GOLD players. They are part of the game too and just because they don't want to upgrade doesn't mean they shouldn't be allowed to play, GRAAL is known as a game you can play for free and ages ago put up a good reason to upgrade and some of those reasons were...

1. Growing Community
2. Constant Updates
3. More Freedom (ex: look at the amount of closed threads for no reason around here, half the time I can't post on a thread because it's closed for no reason).
4. Logical Staff (staff now just beat around the bush and send you to one staff to another. It takes over a week to sort out a problem which could take literally 4 seconds, and don't tell me it has always been like this because when Contego and I were account admins it was required to fix the problem first rather than say "Let me look at it tomorrow" or "send me a forum PM")
5. LESS money for a game that should be for less.

Fully agree again.

It would be nice to have classic servers go free again, but we have to remember the financial costs of the servers. Personally I don't mind the one time fee to play CLASSIC servers, but even that has increased in price (was $15 originally). Personally I think Gold should be $15 a year, I would upgrade instantly because it's only worth $15 a year.

Seemed graal was doing better when the system was like this too.

Well it used to be advertised as a FREE online game which got a lot of attention, that quickly changed though.

Yup agree with this, explains what I was talking about earlier.

I also keep returning as well, but each time it's disapointing but I put forth some kind of effort each time.

I also thought about this a little more and I remember when a certain game came out (YES I WISH I COULD SAY THE NAME BUT APPERENTLY IT'S ILLEGAL) and it had a free trial account thing like this, but the game had a HUGE community before it started using guest accounts. The game had more than 3,000 players on at once, that was a minimum playercount sometimes it would be at 6,000. Right now it's 1:40am and according to the playercount on graalonline.com there is approximately 121 players on, now according to the RC server list 24 playerworlds have 1 or more players on. Lets do some simple math here...

121 players divide by 24 playerworlds averages to be 5 players on each.

12 of those playerworlds are PRIVATE/HOSTED with a total of 41 players out of the current 121 players logged on. 80%+ are idling RCs...

So for trial users who consider this time to be morning/afternoon they have a good 4 people to interact with on each playerworld, is that seriously going to convince them to upgrade?

During the day graal only gets at tops 600-700 total players and peak time. Divide that up with the amount of private servers graal has. Usually UN and Era have 100+ and sometimes GK has a high playercount (nothing extraordinary still).

It really is time to re-think some of the things going on with graal...

Might not be that way too long congress has their grubby little hands and is sending proposals all over to be the world internet police or what not o_o. But trials are annoying but UN will lose 25-50% of its player count. ^^

I have 30 or so friends on other communities who are dying to play graal, simply put - they cant afford it. They played the trial, they LOVED it, but they just cant become p2p.

Free games are good games. (Sorry for the nubish attempt, but here it goes)

Runescape is a prime example. I remember playing it when 100 on one server was an all time high. Nowadays it's an average of 1.1k per server, and there's 89 servers X_X

Why? A huge portion of the game is free. Then there's a huge member section, double the size of the free. Its 6 bucks a month, and 1/3 of players are subscribers. Bingo. Do the math. 32633 subscribers, at six bucks a month. 195800 a month. Woah. In a year, 2349600. Lots of profit.

Easily pays for rental/server costs, with plenty to spare after wages and such. Why doesnt graal start advertising and doing this? It's a great game, it's just too damn expensive for what you get.

First thing, Stefan said he presumes that the actions of a normal trial user are as he said. He did not say "According to my databases".
Even if he statistically does have how often trial accounts are used, do these "logs" account for trials made by people with P2Ps, trials made and never logged on, ect?
Personally I know tons of people who have used trials for over 2 months, forget 2 weeks.

Well, I'm certainly happy to know your financial situation reflects upon that of the entire world.

However, now back to reality, as Raeiphon just stated, there are TONS of potential players out there who would play, but can not due to unavailable money.

Believe it or not, there are people out there without 40$ to lay out on an online game, be it no access to a payment method, bills that must be payed, pesky things like food and rent, ect.


Which also brings me to a new point.

Let's take the average trial user. Probably a 12-16 year old, with no bank account, nor credit card of their own.

Which, as a parent, would make you more likely to lay down the 40 bucks for this game?

"Mom/Dad, I've been playing this cool game for a week, and I need 40$ to upgrade my account before I can't play anymore!!"

or

"Mom/Dad, I've been playing this cool game for a few months, and there are tons of features that a VIP account would unlock for me!"

Personally, I believe the first situation just seems like the kid has found a new toy that he wants, that he will most likely soon grow tired of. Why pay for a year of something for your child that you believe they will grow tired of before the month is out?

As a parent, seeing your kid sticking with something for a long time would probably compel you to invest your money into it over something that they just found.



Well, so far I have a lot of people completely agreeing with everything that I have wrote.


Willing to listen to me and talk about this yet without excuses, or are you really willing to ignore what the players have wanted for so long?

Someone just stated that it takes tons of money to run this game.. How? I mean.. What the hell, the only thing they pay for is the hosting since all the people that work on it do that for free?

...or breathe loudly

I was lucky to get my account upgraded, but you are right.. At my age when P2P came, most people quit because they can't pay, we dont have an credit card and we cant get one.. Parents usually deny the youngster who wants his account uppgraded, because they dont know what they are paying for.

I had to plead for almost a year (pausing for toilet breaks and sleep). My mum was just too scared to use the internet to buy things. She simply couldn't trust this "New fangled payment system.". Less likely for most parents these days, but I doubt their parents would allow their kids to pay for something, and if they see Graal, I'm really certain that they'd snort and say "Rip off."

No offence, but I've seen this happen to so many people.

Graal should be free, graal is not worst paying, graal have no content, graal downfall is coming, graal managers are dumb, I will leave the game if nothing change.

Your should really change your disc.

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? ^^