Maloria - What happened.
 

I have to ask a serious question,

Why is Maloria not just released as it was? It had 80 players a day! I can understand updates, and a good development team working on it, but I really cant understand, why its not just released as if it was- after fixing the market duping glitch; or whatever ruined mal.

Another question;

What made Maloria die?

What made Graal die?

Maloria is just being developed with a complete new vision of gameplay. There are not just updates, but mainly a whole bunch of new features and such.

The things that are left from "old" Maloria are probably weapons now, since there are new spells, a whole new map and a new tileset aswell.

Maloria isn't even maloria anymore ;[.

Maloria's sole purpose was to fill the void Valikorlia had left. Someone correct me if I'm wrong but according to my memory + old screens it didn't always have high playercount and towards it's end it was pretty low.

Still unsolved... :\

It was up there with era for quite a bit. The only thing I really liked about maloria is how there wasn't an auto target for pvp so you can't just bash s as you run around in circles and how you can set your stats.

Mostly the new payment thing, who wants to pay for this? and monthly? I dont think so.

The state it was in survived entirely on nation wars, and hardly even that at the end. There'd be no point releasing it as it was, as a lot of things were severely broken and would be even more so now.

As always, ignorant players make it sound so extremely easy. I experienced the downfall of Maloria at first seat, and there's only a handful of other people who know exactly what happened. To be honest, Maloria's gameplay was extremely ****ty overall and wouldn't last long at all today.

Honestly? Me, ShadowBlaze and Gambet did. Me and ShadowBlaze despised Gambet, so when Mania promoted him to Dev Admin because he couldn't stand his constant *****ing, he started turning the server into his ****ty vision of it (same thing he later on did to Zodiac after failing on Maloria). Me and ShadowBlaze didn't want to fall behind, so we too started releasing lot's of advanced updates in form of systems and items. It became an evil circle that drove the players away (we had ruined the one part that was fun - PvP - and had nothing left to attract players) and Gambet then quit. Me and ShadowBlaze tried a lot of things to revert the harm caused, but ultimately Maniaman made the call to remove the main server in order to finish v3 and come back with a bang... which ended up with a handful of different new managements and even more development restarts. To this date since then, the current team has kept going strongest and with most dedication than any of the previous ones.

Yeah, so was Val, Babylon, and even Delteria. And Era? Lol please, Era was second place for a long time between 2003 and 2007.

I never wondered whay that happened to maloria O.o

I cannot remember Maloria every getting to 150+ playercount which is why I didn't compare it to UN.

That leaves me with one question, why are you charge of maloria development?

I know for a fact, if we pulled up the final backups, to before the high-speed-katanas that owned everyone, the duping, the ****ty overpowered gear, all of that, fixed nations a bit, added a few quests, we'd have a solid 50 players a day.

From there, you can do weekly updates to make it BETTER, as i stated earlier.

We dont want a new gmap, or any of the terrible updates youve done, we just want Maloria back. Updates would be incredible, but for now, your just wasting time.

I've talked to several people about this, what MAL used to be, is not what mal is now, so please- if your going to continue making terrible decisions on updates, you can atleast do us the favor of not stealing our attention, and putting up our hopes, and rename the server.

^ this
They copied Zodiac. And Zodiac copied Maloria before that.
I sense a time-space continuum rift in our future.

In any case, Ziro is right, trying to put the old content back up is not a viable or smart decision, except I'd say it is the fault of many more people than that that Maloria went under.

Fair enough. :]

What?

Are you normally this dumb, or is it just an act?

Ziro should have major props for what he has done to improve Maloria, some people may not agree but Maloria is alot better than what it was, I'm pretty sure the server wasn't structured for a long term gameplay, that's why it went down.

I don't see Maloria ever becoming classic again. Although it was once my favorite server, i personally think that the developers on there should should beating a dead horse and possibly come up with a new server and work on that. Like how 127127127127 or whatever his name is made that Doom replica, I personally would love to see someone make a FPS on graal.

When do you ever see a server becoming Classic? The newest Classic addition was Zodiac, and that was years ago.

How long has it been since Maloria was taken off the list? I can't remember.

LMAO @ Kale

that brings back memories

The best shield, Mirror shield was hosted off in a event i won. Guess how many players? 100-200 players were there. I won
Then alot of peeps spam killed me when i were going to trade

I say Zodiac copies Maloria.

No we didn't? Not in any way. If anything we're trying to make it unlike anything on Graal to this date.

Yes, because back then copying Maloria made Zodiac so successful?

I think it more so Yen borrowing concepts from FF11 and WoW, not some server he despised.

Everyone says that.

"Borrowing" concepts lol. Yen basically made a completely unoriginal server, not to mention all the stolen content/scripts. Luckily most of that has changed, you and others have done a good job of getting rid of stolen content, but Yen...lol. He was just upset because he got fired from Maloria for adding every item to himself and giving out items for camshows.

When the glitches where found and people like ecplise running around with npcs to level you up spawning baddies the economy died.

All the players where really strong and there really was no more room for new players to take the place of people who get "bored" or stop playing graal. The server was really really hard to get started on with trying to mine... when people duped and had all they wanted basically.

From there, new updates came out new setes and such but then classes got unbalanced. Players who would work so hard on their char ended up sucking beacause of lack of money and armor.

SO when the player count was getting really low like 20-30 and such, the maloria team decided to comeout with a NEW maloria to get players interested again.

BUT the project was mostly all talk and no action, it was down to basically one guy TBH .. or someone like that i don exactly remember his name. He was doing all the lat work till he finally gave up and maloria died.

the project was HUGE and no one wanted to do any work (common graal server thats UC).

So yeah, instead of trying to keep detailing a massive over world and reviving everything that people already did in the past. We decided to just make new maps new town.

Basically once we have enough places to grind up to 50 or w/e its finished.

Al lthe major scripts are done.

You guys forgot about me? :[

I'll never forget about you :pluffy:

of course not ^^

duel wierd was awesome :D.

Cool.

Zodiac copied Mal, Zodiac was same yet new, shinier and bigger. Maloria had almost no serious content updates, inflation was retarded and items were unevenly spread. Seriously, the only way to get super special awesome items was events, and no one won those but the best players. So when Zodiac was released it destroyed Mal, then there was like 10 players, then they did a reset of items, levels and all that then the pop was 0.

Ziro was developing new baddy systems, I know because I spent several hours helping him test it. Then Mania took the server off, and that was the end of it. Since that point many changes of ownership, lack of development and changing the concept of what Maloria should be completely, several times infact, has set it back much longer then it should have.

nn

I miss old maloria, I played it so much and now its dead

Honestly Zodiac isn't really like Maloria.
-The way you level is totally different and faster.
-You level up class levels instead of main levels and adjust your stats like Maloria.
-PVP it totally different, especially with the auto turn target system which is one of zodiacs less admirable properties.
-Events on Zodiac aren't really all that fun.
-No epic nation battles and no Kevin laming kills on Daednu to help Inuia win nation wars.
-ect,ect,ect...

In all honesty I think Maloria players, even myself at one point accused Zodiac of copying Maloria although it's not quite true. It has aspects of many, many mmo's.

Zodiac seems to be like it was Graal's attempt at jumping on the bandwagon set off by WoW. Every commercial MMORPG seems follow the concepts laid down by WoW in some way these days. I just hope, which I'm sure they have, that Maloria's team has really thought outside the box and is doing something really cool :D

WoW has roots in many other MMO's you can hardly say Zodiac copied it.

What I'm saying is that since WoW was released and gained the popularity it did, there have been many, even successful, attempts at following it's success with similar concepts. I never said it was a direct copy of WoW. Even Jerret has said that Yen borrowed concepts from WoW.

Honestly in the end i dont think it even matters.

i really couldn't care less if they took some ideas from wow or not.

But there are other games out there that are like wow too but use item shops instead. there is TONS of mmo's.... Plus im pretty sure everyone already knew to some extent that zodiac is like wow.

Still, it doesn't matter.

I wasn't saying it did matter. I should have put more focus on my hopes for Maloria.

Time for a little history lesson!

We started out with Old Maloria under the leadership of CyberX and BinaryCrash. I don't remember the exact date it was launched or the date I came on board as a measley little events team member.

Anywho, CyberX and BinaryCrash eventually left as they no longer had enough time to handle it. I believe the server then went to MrWorry, Pokilty, and Twusk. It's been a long time ago, so I don't remember who was technically highest on the foodchain at the time. MrWorry and company kept Old Maloria around long enough until the playercount began dwindling to nothing.

Once the playercount dropped everyone was introduced to the wonderful "wait.nw" level. A new development project was started. A new overworld was created with new tilesets. It was what an "upgrade" should be. It saved the general idea of Old Maloria, while ading many new features and polishing old ones. This era of Maloria is now known by most as the "v1" era.

v1 did good for a while. By this point I had worked my way up to Developer or something like that. Midway through the lifespan of v1 the powers that be decided to plan for the future, and began discussing plans for v2. Development on v2 began on the main server alongside v1. Some older players may remember seeing a few admins running around with "v2" text floating above their head while we worked on the new systems. v2 added classes, exp, and leveling.

Unfortunately, you can't exactly finish developing and polishing a completely new server on a single gserver while still keeping the 'old' server running. I believe Maloria was removed from the classic list at this time so we could finish getting v2 ready.

v2 development finally wound down and we had to re-apply to get classic. Passed all the "tests" and then we got failed on scripting for a couple scripts that could easily be abused. Fixed those and a few weeks later Maloria was back on classic and boasting record playercounts that rivaled Unholy Nation and Era for a while.

I was now the manager after MrWory had left because of his lack of time. Things were still going good for the server, we had an active development team, kept pushing out updates, and kept players interested.

I'd say v2 lasted a good year atleast before things really started to go downhill. Most of the development team were beginning to grow up. I was in highschool at this point and had other obligations than graal. The same can be said for most of the development team at that time. Most of the dedicated ones that had helped design and build the server were reaching highschool or college. They were getting licenses, and jobs. The upper management/developers of the server (me included!) didn't have as much time as we once did to run the server.

v2 was now a few years old at the point. Many of the systems were beginning to show their age. Developers and NATs went through adding new items for players, but never followed through with actually putting most items out for sale. Corruption ran rampant with staff members giving large sums of money or items to their friends. Duping bugs were discovered and abused full-force.

Everyone knew something had to be done. TB3 had joined the ranks and was responsible for many new features later in the life of v2. However, with the server crumbling beneath us we decided to start on v3. There wasn't a whole lot of planning, little documentation. Things were going great though, until TB3 dissapeared. We were left with only a general idea of how to move forward, a number of half finished undocumented scripts. Throughout the time I was manager, we tried a few different ideas/plans for v3. Each time we tried, we would have an energetic staff team that worked great and pushed out the content...for a few months. Then key memebers owuld just dissapear and the process would repeat itself.

With v2 still online, being horribly neglected, and averaging less than 10 players, I finally decided to pull the plug on it and concentrate on v3. Its just too bad I didn't have enough time to actively manage v3 development.

Most people thought I should quit because i wasn't active enough. They were right, I should have, but I was stubborn and believed that we could still get v3 finished. I think I also wanted to prove a point to all those people telling me that v3 would never get finished.

I should have listened to them and handed it off to someone else sooner.

I finally decided to get out of Maloria for good and in 2007 or 2008 I handed it off to Vash-Aniki. beyond this point I don't know enough about what went down to be able to tell you. Ziro could explain it better as he was more actively involved at that point. All I know now is Ziro is in charge, and they are working on v3 again.

Ziro also touched on a number of other things in his post that led to the collapse of v2.

Now to answer the two big questions:
1. Will v3 ever get done? Only time will tell.
2. Am I responsible for Maloria's downfall? Yes.

What can everyone learn from this?
-When developing a server, PLAN EVERYTHING OUT IN ADVANCE. You want a solid plan before you start development. Then if someone leaves or dissapears, they don't take all of their plans with them.
-If you don't have time to manage a server, let someone else. One hour a day is not enough time to spend managing a server if you want to be successful.
-Managing a server is not as easy as most people think.

(wow that was a lot of typing)