Graal Currency
 

I personaly like games that have a system in where you can play for free but can buy in game currency to pay for items, extra's ect.

A system like this could work for graal, yes it would give the "rich" an advantage but life is tough, deal with it.

There could be a global currency of some sort which players can obtain with:
*Buying a Gold Account (you get a small ammount as a presen)
*Buying a Vip Account (" ")
*Buying the currency for Euro's
*Global Event Awards

With this currency people can buy items from Classic & Gold servers from special shops. Purchasing such an item can be done by either using the Global Currency or Global Currency in combination with local currencies*.

The global currency should not be trade-able, if people want to give it to someone else just transfer money to someone else trough paypal and let them purchase it on their own.

* = To prevent people getting powerfull by just using the global currency, they could be obligated to pay X ammount of global coins and an X ammount of local currency. Items that can be bought can be exclusive things that alot of people want to have but can be exclusivly bought with global coins or the item has a major discount on the local currency and you need to pay some global currency.

----
Give some constructive critisism and don't just go "I don't like it" or "Cool"...

a similar idea I had when the Global Gralats came out - a Currency Exchange. You can buy Global Gralats with Real Money: One per penny, so for a quarter you've got 25 gralats (negotiable), and naturally it doesn't work Both Ways, but you get the idea; then you can trade in Gralats for Kingdoms Platinum - say there's ten thousand Gralats in circulation but only the equivalent to a thousand platinum in circulation, 10 gralats only buys you 1 platinum piece. You buy a beefy sword, whatever, it's way faster than mining.
Conversely, say a server where money's poorly controlled - old Classic - has a million gelats, and there's only a thousand gralats in circulation. One Global Gralat is then worth a Thousand Classic Gelats - instant fortune there. So you can slash bushes forever on Classic hoping in vain to get rich, or you can mine for a little while on Kingdoms hoping the same, or you can send Graal a little money and jump ahead.

My only concern - Gold Upgrades better get a fair ammount of Gralats, otherwise you're paying to get in, paying yearly for access to the Good Servers, then paying for items on same - three tollbooths just to get an IWD scroll.

Who is going to decide how much items cost and who's going to manage the "store" over all the servers? You couldn't just do it through script, otherwise you'd be putting players in charge of other player's real money.

Hmm, fair point.

If we had a Global Scripter providing us with a default Shop Script - one that read in the "Gralats In Circulation On This Server" variable (which ought to be hardcoded, or at least difficult to manipulate), and said each weapon would cost (gralats on the server/players who have accounts on the server), then we'd know the sword will always cost a little more than the average wealth on the server. Granted, that average can be thrown off by a lot of newbies who never got any money, so it's not perfect - the Players On The Server variable would have to take that into account - but the important thing is that the cost is a factor of the local currency's value.

Though now that I think of it, maybe it should be a factor of the local currency's value in Global Gralats. That's much more stable. "Crazy Red Weapon - 1000 gralats ($10 US) (1,000,000 Classic Gralats) (100 Kingdoms Plat.)"

I've never really liked online games where you can pay for huge advantages. If you could only buy cosmetic stuff with global graalats then that would be cool but i don't think you should be able to get server money with global graalats.

Kind of, but not really. I mean, this would be a benifit that they didn't have before. So, even if they charged ridiculous amounts, you'd still have more than you used to.

wtf screw you dude >.>

No
No no no no no no no...NO!
Part of graal is the economy developed in the different servers.
The only thing I may agree with is developing exchange rates between the servers.
Plus, without jobs, selling, trading, etc, Graal could become boring.
Sure, there's a chance of making an actual profit, but it could also destroy the fun of Graal. Do you really think the players of Graal would pay more money?

A shop tab could be made on the "login" server. People purchase items on there. A Global (PWA, GST ect) could be given edit rights for the Shop. The shop could have a list of servers (simmilair to the Update tab) where you can select the items, see a description/picture and the currency it uses.

You can select an option to buy that item and than the "Login" Gserver will connect with the other Gserver to check if the player has that currency and make the required changes (When loging into the server a player could be prompted with a text that he/she got that specific weapon)

If servers want weapons added, prices changed they can request it with the Global in charge. They have the final say as it goes for accepted weapons, prices.

Part of it is that you release speficic features that can be bought with global currency and do not effect game play (alot). If they do effect gameplay in a significant way an additional local currency can be added to make sure the player has spend a significant ammount of time/work into the server. (You didn't even read half of what I said excaliber or you just didn't get it)


----
Server examples:

Unholy Nation:
You can release a variaty of things:
Toys: small things that don't cost much, nice special effects maby..
Furniture: people could buy specialized "themed" seasonal furniture sets..
Weapons: weapons that are fun to pk with but aren't more powerfull than the maximum sword damage. (You get people to spend their money on something that does the same damage as a sword but just looks cooler... good way to make a profit)
Hats: Special hats that are made or used specificly for the global shop...


Era:
Specialized guns or excisting guns that come on a discount if you buy them in combination with a little bit of "Global Currency". You can make additional cars available for the same "Era currency" as other cars but with a small ammount of "Global Currency" added ontop for these limited edition cars

Zodiac:
You could release special swords... (not to sure on how and what since I don't really play it)
You could add some simmilair skills to those that already excist but make them a real eye candy.

Graal Kingdoms:
Pets: You could add new pets that can be bought only trough the Global Shop (not sure on pricings and such... )
Furniture: Special furniture sets...


If done correctly this could make graal more profitable withouth ruining gameplay.

Since Graal uses Euro's for payments right now something such as 1 Euro equals too 100 Graal Dollars.


---
As for obtaining them, when you purchase a vip account you get 400 Graal Dollars for free (allows you to buy some basic fun items on servers or some nice furniture) Same could be done for the 1 Year- Gold accounts.

Graalympics, Forum contest ect. "Graal Events" could have Graal Dollars as rewards...

(Possibly you can also donate Graal Dollars to servers to extend hosted/UC times)

Also the up and coming house & apartment system. Possibly reduced rent or the ability to purchase one of the units.

Okay, this system reminds me of another game, which shall not be named, but is produced by Nexon. (If this post gets deleted then thats bull, because i didn't say what game) Well, anyways, you can buy some extra money using USD, and that is converted to a SET amount, 5 USD = 5k points, 10=10k 30=30k, and that can be used to buy different items that cost anywhere from 800-11k points. But the thing is that their items disappear after a while. Thats what sucks. They also have a "lottery ticket", where you use the ticket at a machine and recieve anywhere from an orange juice to a high level sword.
How's that for an idea? Copy their system, cause there isn't a copyright/patent. :fro:

I concur!

If you were able to have both the global currency, and your own on your server (like many have gralats and event coins) that'd be fine.
But do you really think hackers won't take advantage of this?
One thing that would be cool would be being able to exchange the gralats for money then. There'd have to be an exchange rate, and it would have to favor Graalonline,but it would allow for 'businesses' to be set up and actually make money.
Personally, I like the current system, however, this isn't so bad of an idea.

If you fear hacking, than just burn your modem... most thing's can be hacked but you can atleast make it secured enough so that no one would even want to attempt such a thing.

The idea isn't exactly like that, exhchange rates would just end up in the favour of the people that are addicted to graal and spend their every dime on it. Not to mention that it could ruine other gameplay aspects on servers.

You can use the coins to buy non interputive weapons/items/skills, some of these will be nerfed so that you also have to use a local currency. (See Kingdom example)

Most important remains that you only offer items that cannot drasticly effect gameplay or ruine economies.



Graal Kingdoms example,

Cute Pet
You could buy a cute fury companion for 1 Euro, these pets have a randomized lifespan (up to a year?) and increase the owners mining abilaties.

Sword of Bhaal
A rare sword with some nice stat boosts and a cool light effect
Price 1 Euro and 20,000 Plat (no idea how much that is)
(You sell the "interuptive" weapon for a reasonably medium high price combined with a the global currency)

Potion Pack
A pack of healing potions for 0.5 Euro's

Guild Castle Voucher
Same concept as player house.. but much bigger (10 Euro's?)
On Graal kingdoms you turn in the voucher and an npc will "build" the castle for you if you bring him certain matterials and pay him some local currency

Christmas Furniture Set
For the price of 2 Euro's and some local currency you will get:
1x Christmas themed table
6x Christmas themed ornaments
1x Christmas themed carpet

Concern - Paypal's fees on Small Transactions are (I hear) prohibitive enough to make it not worth bothering: Charge someone $0.25, Paypal takes $0.20; charge someone $5, Paypal takes $0.50. Is that even true? *shrugs* I don't generally pay that much attention to Paypal, so.

I still like the idea of it just trading in for local currency. So your options for gaining currency are - work in the real world, pay Graal some of your real money, get Graal money as though you'd been mining that whole time -or- Mine on Graal for hours and hours, get Graal money as though you'd just donated $1. Yes, the entire currency system would have to be completely overhauled on all participating servers to ensure nobody can Just Hack that they found $50 worth of Gralats under a bush, but other than that, not gonna throw off the economy...people won't be considerably richer just because there's a new "job" on Graal, not any more than they were when bread started selling well on Kingdoms. It's like buying a VIP Pass and getting Free Stuff on Kingdoms, only more direct.

An important detail I'd like to see: People who have upgraded to VIP in the past get some free Gralats to jumpstart the economy.

I don't see this being implemented.
It would make it more of a hassle.
And, once more, who would be willing to pay for graal money?

I think it'd be an effective replacement to VIP.
But yeah, I wouldn't bother buying anything for Gold. I already paid twice if I've got Gold, I've no interest in paying a third time.

I don't really see the point of this, nor do I think it's a good idea.

I concurred with exchange rates between servers. I think that is a wonderful idea.

Its a pretty cool idea, actually. This system works great on Gunbound. A great way to make some extra cash for graal to hire more paid staff or better servers or whatever. Just generally improve the gameplay.

This system would only work if servers don't get reset... or if the items you buy don't get removed in a reset. Otherwise it would be one big ripoff. It's hard enough getting people to buy digital items for real money... but then to have them not know whether the digital item will disappear one day makes this idea fizzle out pretty fast.

Also it really wouldn't matter what prices playerworlds set their items to. If the item costs too much, people won't buy it. Simple as that. I think it's really up to each playerworld what they would be able to sell and for how much. I'd also expect the playerworlds to be paid some of the profit on this stuff...

But this whole idea is unlikely to happen. Seems they've already put their focus on several projects and that's all they've got room for. If this project happens don't expect to see it for one... two... maybe three years from now.

Their system actually works surprisingly well.

It does. If I were to make an online game, that's the path I would go. (in order to make money from it)

The problem with Gunbound is that it gets really boring since they never do any decent updates and their events are kind of crappy. The game has bugs and issues that have existed in it for years.

Graal would need to be a lot more cleaner looking before they could offer anything like this...

But an awesome way to go would be removing the pay to play all together and funding the remaining gold/vip people the "graal currency" depending on how many days they have left... Either that, or cut off resubscribing and wait until everyone runs out of gold time? lol

Gunbound rocks. ;[

I can't imagine this being a replacement to p2p. Most likely it would be in addition to p2p. We can all have our pipe dreams I suppose.

**** the rich, I don't wanna see some spoiled kid running around owning me on every server because his parents can buy him a new mercedes every year.

I don't think you can prevent that really. People that have a lot of money can buy accounts for friends, buy items illegally from other people etc. A server should be made so that you can buy advantages (that's what gold/classic upgrades are about), but it should of course limit it a little bit so that you can still have fun with some basic subscription/item purchages. Many games go more into the direction to charge for changing the look (free players=only head 1-10?) or buying special colored or designed items or pets.

The only servers that can benefit from rich kids is Graal Kingdoms and maybe Era. But if Graal implements like "ADVANCED PHOTON CANNAN + 500 ARMOR FOR 50DOLLARS" then its obviously going to give them an unfair advantage.

Like if anyone has ever played Gunbound, the people from UAE (all rich) have the best items in the game simply because they have the $$$. The GM's dont even ban these players because they spend so much money on Gunbound. That's what really pisses me off.

Of course people can for example illegally buy items on GK, but that doesn't really have such a huge effect. However games that implement a whole real-life money system for items usually become unfair to those who don't pay.

The only server I can really see this being a serious problem on is Zone. Since, like gunbound, its a competitive server through and through. Perhaps limiting the purchaseable items there to things that just look cool, but aren't necessarily more powerful than regularly bought weapons?

As it stands the GK Platinum coin is worth $0.0002 USD. Essentially what that means is every ten diamonds is worth a single United States Dollar.

It's a lucrative trade if you've got the items to sell.

Wow.. Do you like not play Graal?

2k1 currency is 1 gralat = 10 cents US. I think this works out nicely since you really won't be paying less than 10 cents US for any item in the game... I mean I can't even think of a Graal item that would have the value of 10 cents... I'd love to have this sort of system for Bomy Island when it's finally released. There would be plenty of items to sell too... none of which would be powerful weapons or stat boosting items. Just off the top of my head I could sell:

- special clothing sets
- mutation potions to mutate into different animal-human hybrids
- bomy pets/special bomy pet looks
- special house furniture
- cool looking shields/swords/bows not available in the game otherwise
- new emotions/playable ganis

so on and so forth... =) The only thing you'd have to watch out for is that people would start making servers with barely any content and then try to get people to buy everything... I mean, my server will have a ton of clothing varieties available without paying... but if this system was in effect, I'd make some awesome looking outfits in addition to what I planned to have in the game anyway.

Another idea is to pay for a "premium ticket" which lasts a set amount of time (like a week or month) that while in use, allows for more item drops from monsters, or more gralat earned from jobs... or whatever. They also have that on Gunbound as well. You basically earn more money than normal and you get your name in gold and your chat text is a special color and stuff. It does give some advantages that way but it's not really effecting the non-paying players directly.

Maybe if normal gralats could be purchased.
People would pay graalonline, who would give them the gralats on a certain server.
Of course, money hacking scripts may have to change a bit.

Ooh, the drop multiplier's a good idea. You buy a week of "X2!" for a buck, and (Kingdoms Example) every mineral you crack open drops twice - so twice the chance of it coming out as a diamond...having played WAY too much Disgaea, I'm well aware of how nice a multiplier is. ^_^

What if we don't have Euros? Are we **** out of luck? [/SARCASM]

I dunno about this idea, I think before it could be implemented the overall game-play on playerworlds would have to be improved. As it stands I can't see too many people wanting to spend money for items on most of the playerworlds that we have, because most of them are fairly idle.

I'm sure they'll offer a changeover.

For a small fee, of course.

If it were to be introduced in the long run it'd be like Graal Kingdoms; I see people under level 30 with some of the best items in the game... I'm intimidated so I just idle there now and talk to friends :(

Thym.. saw you said something about what Paypal charges for money transfers, PayPal only charges you for taking money "out" of your PayPal account.

So you can put it on there for free by using a credit card, wire tranfer ect... you can keep it on there forever. But if you send it to someone and they wish to "withdraw" it or send it to their bank account, than they pay 5% or something like that.

Something like that wouldn't effect the profits very much..

... Ok lets make it Russian Roubles than, who cares paypal automaticly converts it for the person that recieves it.

Well it's pretty obvious that servers have to be remodeld in certain aspects and that it might not be made available to all servers (right away). Above all of that, graal always changes.. new servers emerege that could be compatible with shopping, more so than the current servers.

And you would be mistaken if you see to what lenghts UN players go for Furniture for their "rented" room.

No it wouldn't if done correctly, overpowered weapons/skills/items still require large ammounts of local currency. (Read my previous post :P) This way you prevent access to these weapons/items/skills to those who do not activly play on a server. Above that it's more than just weapons & power objects.

That aspect would give economic unstabilaty in the long run. Even if you would make the exchange rates very expensive, Private Ragnarok servers have people that donate 100 dollars just for a "God item" and some "cards"...
Than there would also be notting to stop them from obtaining "powerfull" items/weapons withouth even bothering to participate in the server...

Nice idea, wouldn't mind paying for some of these... aslong as the server is nice to play ect..
But i'll just wait a month after the release >.> before I'd be anything
Having a house full of bomy's.. with specialized KONIA (Ikea?) furniture... and two other players online doesn't sound worth it

Again.. worth to pay for (if it wouldnt be to expensive)..

Servers could basicly have their own system.. like with the "Events" tab. But have a special RC right *Shop Access... and leave whats to be sold up to the Manager.. but by oversight of an appointed global. The server shops would also show up under a general Shop tab, simmilair to events.

It wouldn't make the concept for a shop menu much more complicated to create.

Possibly linking it to a special DB that edits the account information once the player logs on or is online already.

(Just to give an idea of how it could be done with just a "little" efford)

Key to all this (or at least to Buying Currency) would still be some Global releasing the full script for all playerworlds of a New Currency System, nice and serversided, with the little editing marks for "if you have a baddy dropping Gralats, have it Join GGralats and then call ggralats_drop(value), where value is an integer from 0 to 5...

Could this be enabled per server?
Maybe allowing servers owners to make some money?
Of course, some/most would have to go towards graalonline.