The humor is appreciated, but don't you think he could be doing something more useful if he was actually on the server? Perhaps managing your ability to see and also your ability to loose 7-0 flawless and blame it on something no one thinks I did.

Psh, bureaucracy has always been a part of Graal. It's inescapable.

Say you wanna script a quest. Well, if you want it online, you gotta join the LAT. But as a LAT member, all you can do is MAKE the quest, to UPLOAD or APPROVE or PLACE it, you gotta be the LAT Admin. So you work your way up to LAT Admin. But LAT Admins gotta handle Hiring, and Firing, and Corruption, and Coordinate with the other Admins, and fight for Stefan's attention, and take player submissions...and really, it's the Server Manager who decides what should go where, so you gotta work your way up further...

Here's the problem; the most talented, tenacious and dedicated workers are rewarded by being pulled into a desk job where they can't use their skills. They get bogged down with secretarial responsibilities. And the alternative is let someone Else be in charge of Them who Doesn't know how, say, the movement system works.

No escaping bureaucracy.

('course, if it was up to me there'd be an executive wing that handles hirings, firings, etc., and Accepts That It Doesn't Have Any Business Meddling With Levels - and a Dev wing that did all the actual worldbuilding...)

Perhaps if there were someone managing all of this hiring and firing. Who could manage a job like that though? I can't imanage a position that would be fit doing that.

Exactly. It'd mean giving All the power to someone who doesn't code or GP or FAQ, and Trusting them not to arbitrarily fire the head of the LAT and reverse all his decisions.
In a sense, having an admin who wants the world to do well, but has no strong opinions on how to do that and doesn't care if the admins seem to be going the opposite direction for an indefinite time.
So the Dev Head says "I need more guys who can code", and the Admin hires them; the players say "Guy A's corrupt", and the Admin investigates, (consults with that Guy A's superiors) and fires Guy A...
It's the kind of thing one generally has to pay someone for. I don't wanna do it, I'd wanna tell the LAT to do things my way, and I'd wanna spend my time developing, not gerrymandering...

I don't know what your talking about Dusty, the quests in classic gave me weeks of entertainment. The desert dungeon was awesome, and I've yet to see something as impressive as it on graal.

I finished many quests on Classic in a few hours. Of course, this is all subjective.

Oh my god I do not see why people are putting such an emphasis on quests.
Quests are a small piece to such a big puzzle that is a successful server, and compared to the other pieces, quests are quite small.

The biggest importance quests play is that of trying to hook newbies into playing long enough to build their character and get into the game, make some friends, play some events or whatever else your server has to offer.

Most people who continue playing this game grow tired of quests eventually, specially single player ones where theres no player interaction. Multiplayer quests might be a different story and peak some old interests but the fact remains the same.

Quests are there to build up your character and provide a few hours of fun, mostly to newbies trying to get into the game or people new to that server. They won't, however, give you days/weeks/months of entertainment unless you're some weirdo that would make new accounts for the sake of replaying the same quests over and over. Even with the amount of quests in GTA, it would take maybe two days tops on average to get those done. What do you have after that? Well, that's whats going to make or break the server.

With that said, the old GTA levels arent a large part of what made the old days fun. They contributed to the fun but they did not make that server what it was, why it was fun. If you think that, you're blind or just really had some creepy love affair for some levels and are probably the same people who raise **** fits when the path in level14 gets some sort of minute tile change.

If you released a fully functional GTA from 2004/2002/2000 or WHATEVER year. It would initally get a ton of players because of the hype, and once that hype died down in a week, maybe a month tops, the server would implode on itself and become a ghosttown. It's happened with Graal 2001 when they tried to bring that back a few years ago, it happened with "Graal 2000" when they tried to bring back pre GTA classic. It would either stagnate with the old levels and eventually bore everyone away with nothing new ever happening, or you'd have to appoint a LAT Admin to progress GTA further, which would end up being a huge mess since that LAT Admin would end up doing something awful in the players eyes, either by reshaping the old into something new or making something that doesnt fit in GTA. Unless you find some LAT Admin that mindlessly follows in the footsteps of the last LAT Admin and doesnt even think for a second to mold or remold something in their vision of how things should be done. Good luck with that, because that LAT Admin doesnt exist.

What makes a server successful? Community, and something constantly fun that hooks people to stay around, to log back in instead of somewhere else, if even at all.

The community is what made the old days fun, that and the fact that there was something being released all the time, always something new. That old community isnt coming back. Not for a GTA rerelease, nothing, those old days aren't coming back, they're dead in the past. As for something new, noone debates that Classic needs a torrent of new content on a constant basis, but its gotta be more of a hook than a new quest or even a bunch of new quests, Classic doesnt have the luxury of having a big playercount anymore,that playercount was a big part of what brought people in and kept them playing.
It's going to be hard for Classic to come back, it is hard to make a new community without there already being one. Some new quests aren't going to cut it on creating a community, you need a lot bigger hooks than that, something ADDICTING that makes people log back on, makes people bring their friends to play because its so damn fun/addicting.

I won't go into specifics on what to hook players with because the options are only limited by the willpower to work, the imagination, and knowledge of what would work vs what won't of Classic's dev team. Or you could be like Zodiac and just rehash whats proved to work.

I honestly loved the quests on Graal the Adeventure. It was the only reason i even played that server, honestly. Ever since that server went down quests in general sucked balls, other than Bravo's. I kinda wish someone would make quests similar to Zeldas. it may take a LOT of work (scripting, GFX, LAT, etc), but it'd be worth it.


...or mayeb a sports server. Graal Baseball, football and bowling ftw.