Remember your roots... please...
 

Fellow Graalians, I just want to say...

There is a very heavy focus on community in Graal. I used to venture over to the new servers in development, and the very first thing you would see online is all the standard staff houses, rules, sparring arenas, blah blah blah...
New RPG system! Hat shop! Car shop! Buy yet another cool NPC shop! Go mining! Fishing! Get money and go spend it!

These are all standards of every MMORPG you find online. Go get a "job" and click on things forever. Or click on things to level up. So many servers are trying to design their own system of play...

but everyone is overlooking the all powerful, core engine that Graal is! How fun it would be to take on a quest with your friends by your side! Collecting all the items around the graal world, growing stronger, and teaming with other players in doing so! But no, the most you get to do with a weapon nowadays is fight with another player.

There are no other online games like Graal. It's like... dare I say, playing ZELDA online with your friends! Yet no servers take advantage of it. They focus on events teams and such!

That's all... I'd just like to see some servers go back to the roots of Graal, because that was a lot more fun. I feel pretty ripped off with my classic account. Graal classic was the coolest and had the most GAME aspects in it, and even it is gone now.

All the good servers already have all of this stuff o.o

Name one that doesn't suck ass at this present time that fulfills the Graal name in it's full glory.

Classics!! Oh wait they broke that too.

They tried to bring "old" Classic ( as in, pre-hera nonsense) back in the guise of "Graal 2000". Barely anyone played it. :-/

I agree with the thread starter but it's not possible to introduce that kinda stuff anymore. The -main- playerbase of graal are idio-oh wait i'd get banned for saying that for some reason.

Its staff messed it up.

I've got **** loads planned for my project.

actually, my server has quests that you must go on with friends, i realize that people forget about friendship, and pk a lot, so i made it mandatory to take some friends with you sometimes. I hope that in doing so, people will be more friendly towards eachother, saving the fighting for the spar arenas. i also included many realistic effects, like food rationing before long journeys. i tried to make my server feel like a medieval adventure, because in real life, no one would walk up to a stranger and hit them with a sword. so, look foward to the release of dark rival, you won't be sorry :D

Zenkou.
Although Zen won't be your standard PK server (with the turn based system and all), we will most likely be doing this.

Reasons servers fail:

1) Nothing to keep players there. I remember back when being staff on a server was like, an "OMG IM STAFF" kind of thing. Now it's easy to be staff on a server since you can go pretty much anywhere, so you don't have players hanging around to see if they can be staff (which kept alot of people there for a week, which got them participating in the server, etc)

2) Systems are either too restrictive or are too basic.

3) Quests turn into puzzles instead of hack-and-slash, which is exactly what the old Zelda on the SNES was.

4) Too many custom tilesets.

5) The current tileset is mediocre and moves away from the cartoony feel of Zelda, which is what people want to play on an MMORPG scale.

There's just a few.

era always wins no matter iof its in dev or not :)

Rudora is hopefully going for this, however we need a large ideas team.

Ah, the 3 Experiments. Graal2000, the great "Bring back 1.37 but don't change anything ever!" There were 2 major lines of complaint regarding it - one, that I used the wrong Perfect Server Era, and two, that it wasn't the only server so it wasn't the same - I should shut down GtA and force everyone onto Graal2000.
The second incarnation. Graal2000b, the great "Bring back 1.365 but let us change it so it doesn't get stale and I can finally have my house on the oldbie server!" Same complaints.
Graal the Adventure. Well, we saw how that turned out.

This is Graal, not World of Warcraft
seriously, I cry inside whenever I see a post imploring server managers to waste their time on things that ultimately hinder community development.

In what sense? In the sense people want quests, and quests are bad for fostering a sense of community? Whereas a more powerful sword dropped randomly in the center of the server would be better? In the sense that World of Warcraft is 3D? You leave a lot of lattitude open by saying such a thing; may as well say World of Warcraft is not Super Mario Paint

Super Mario Paint was elite. I think I'll go play it...

Well, I got a few promises that there is upcoming servers of this kind...
All I can say is, I will believe it when I see it. There have been promises of new, bigger, better servers ever since there was more than just one Graal server. Not a whole lot seems to come.

Either way, my p2p account is expired, and I don't want to take a gamble and try to trust that these other servers really are all that awesome and go renew it.

On another semi-related note, a server I have fond memories of playing on is Dino Valley...

They don't want quests. That is an assumption made by the developers.

Quests are fun. I'm not going to disagree. I had a problem with GTA (Graal the Adventure) getting all the hearts and swords, it took so freaking long just to get through the puzzles, making the casual player get frustrated and quit. Possibly quests should be optional and for items that don't effect pking?

If the developers assume players want quest, then why are there so few of them?

If you don't want quests, what do you want to do?

1: Ruddy brilliant idea there. Which is not to say people weren't saying it at me for years, but in hindsight, yeah - make the sword and heart (and I guess shield) quests easy, make the knife and trident and magic quests hard. It's a good plan, though of course there's nothing I can do about it anymore.

2: Way to take a quote out of context tortoise. (Tortoise? Weird...) I was asking, not telling. Thus the series of questions regarding what they meant by "THIS ISN'T WORLD OF WARCRAFT". If you're going to abbreviate a statement kindly include such qualifiers as question marks and negatives - Otherwise "I'm not about to say that Kelly Clarkson's all for abortion" shrinks to "Kelly Clarkson's all for abortion" and "I should be crying about the financial oversight committee?" shrinks to "I should be crying". For that matter, it becomes "This is World of Warcraft", and then where are we? We don't even know what game we're talking about, hardly condusive to conversation.
I'm not intending to make accusations, I'm pointing out where we got off track. My point is not that gamers want quests or that they don't want quests - while admittedly that combination of words were in a post, it wasn't my statement. It is my humble opinion that gamers hate quests but need them anyway, as a world where you start out with the best stats you'll ever have is a mote unfulfilling - if you start with 9 hearts and sword 3, why not start with 3 hearts and sword 1?

I dunno, as regards the skewed topic, perhaps the new Classic management should put up a randomly generated quiz for everyone who pops on, and those who pass start out with the appropriate flags set to bypass the quests. I like to think Classic was more than a convenient hub for tapping the S key at someone who was loading the level, but then, I was in the LAT, it was my job to think that.

IMO graal died when p2p came out. nuff said.

Graal2000 Had many many many people at the end of its lifetime. I was one of the people that played it when it was up from Maximus Asinus being manager to Muddy being manager. I think Graal2000 was one of the best servers I've ever played. It was so fun and noone was called "omg n00beh lol u sukz" because it was a nice small community but then we started to get bigger and started going into the top 5 and it was a larger and better community. My point is that G2K in my opinion was one of the best servers.

You mean when full p2p came out? In 2001 and such Graal was just fine. It was after full p2p came out in mid-2002 that graal began it's downfall.

I hate it how Graal:The Adventure or the Graal JUST before the heras is butchered. That was so much fun.

An inevitable downfall I'm afraid. Graal needed money, money requires P2P, P2P necessitates a smaller market than free games, a smaller market makes for a smaller community.