Free Gold Period
 

Alot of games have a free trial period e.g. WoW (It would be a free gold period in graal's case). Which gives people a taste of what they'll receive before paying for it, which i believe would be a good idea.

This could be made effective for new players just starting off, if they enjoy the gold period then they can upgrade themselves into a gold member, if they prefer not upgrading then its up to them. If put together along with advertising then this could increase the number of subs graal gets by a convenient number.

I suggest a 7 Day trial period for each Computer and a few banners on sites which you can advertise your game for free, as well as youtube and veoh.

We arent open to good ideas here

I think we got a trial node for this

First I want say, I like the idea.

WITH OBSERVER!
If I am noob and wanna try out game, a observer mode each x minutes doesnt make fun.
7days gold sounds good, so you can see the diffrence between gold(or classic) and trial

My bad I didnt realize, I was thinking about Zone :P

We have a trial mode for zone
not a gold trial mode for zone where you have access to hotkeys, classes and 100 hp instead of 80.

i think it's a good idea, anything to try and raise the playercount

I'd rather see Graal pull away completely from trial's and subscriptions and focus on cash-shop type income, solely. It's a reason nearly every free game is cash-shop now.

People would rather feel like they are freely paying for advantages(no matter how cosmetic they are) rather than being pressured to pay for subscriptions.

We'd all rather see that but the fact is nothing will change while Stefan and Unimax are thinking the way they do, so rather then convincing them to change the system, it be a better idea to try get more subs through other ways, free trial periods, better advertisement, more benefits for long time subscribers and whatever else i've forgotten to mention

If that's the attitude for this sort of thing, then your suggestion is no better. They consider the observer mode a 'trial' mode with free time.

Well I agree on the fact that this will probably never happen due to the fact they are stubborn and don't like changing much but its worth a try.

You have 5 hours of real free playing time, the observer mode is starting after that.

Is 5 hours really enough, most other companies give players more time so that they make a significant investment (with their time) in the game and therefore will pay instead of losing that investment

yeah, 5 hours isn't enough. let the players experience the game as a normal player for x amount of days this way they know what they're upgrading for. they're not going to want to pay for the game if they don't know what to expect :x

I'd rather shell at money once a year from my own pocket than having kids running around being better than me because they have mommy's credit card

Most cash-shop games offer no real 'benefits' other than cosmetics.

if you're going to give them any free playing time, it may as well be 10 to 15 hours so new players can actually look through the variety of servers and see if they think upgrading would be worth it or not

Almost all MMORPG's that are available for free have cash shops, but this only works if there are enough players and the items in there doesn't give much of an advantage at all, if any.

When I Said free Gold Period
I meant free subscription period for new players to let them have a taste of what they'll receive.

It could help boost sells, the period doesn't even need to be long, like maybe
1-2 days for each computer.

For Stefan:
Just think about what the players think, because they are the current players and they should have a say in what happens with the game, and their ideas should be taken into account when you think about updating the game. I can clearly see that us players have alot of ideas which are just remaining ideas because you Stefan and Unimax just don't really take us seriously by the looks of things, which is irritating since we can all clearly see the game slowly degrading.

Current players should not have any say.
Suggestions should be wanted, but that doesn't mean that you should be able to say "Make my playerworld Gold because it's cool" and have Stefan do such.
It doesn't work that way. He develops the game how he wants, and that's what happens. Sometimes if there's a player (or a few players) that are respected by him/greatly respected by the community, he might do something small.
That's how the gaming/design business works. Deal with it.

Well we all know Graal has never been the epitome of great business decisions. Oh well. I really wish Graal would do well.

Actually Graal was doing fine for its first few years up till around the beginning of 08 or late 07 it started to fall, for some reason.

I think it was at its peak in '01, but business-wise I never think they made very good decisions. I think Graal could have turned out way better with better business practice and decisions. For some reason they always try to be different with their trial modes. Ghost mode nor Observer were ever very... appealing.

I think this is most effective when it's a massive amount of players. I'm not even sure how much 1 player costs CJ on average.

For alot of people, it'd take atleast a full week to get into a game to decide whether it's worth their time or not. 5 hours is like a tease, and will just anger most people especially if they didn't experience much of anything interesting within the 5 hour period of game play. There's my opinion.

We could go back to the old way where trials didn't have the ability to save.

You're not entitled to your opinion. I copyrighted all of the stupidest opinions in the universe so they can never again be uttered.

Create a small "trial server" that any trial can play for free for as long as it takes to get them to buy an account. Give it like, 2 events a week, few NPCs, and little to actually do, like limited spars (each person gets 5 rounds a day), restricted pk'ing (very few pk levels), and lots of ways to separate players (5 islands, like GK, with no way to get between them; you log on, and are confined to your island; and having unchangeable nicknames and guildtags). Constantly have the PRs, the main staff team, telling people how awesome upgrading is, and have high quality ingame billboards depicting servers they could be playing. It could be an alternate for of advertising playerworlds too!

The normal PR's barely help regular players :X

PR on the trial server would be more so Public Relations (making sure players are on good terms with graal in general and entice them to upgrade) than the Player Relations whose only purpose is to have a staff tag sans developer skill.

Why would anyone want to waste their time like that? Volunteer, get gelats?

It's not like it would be a novelty server for idiots to pretend their big shot developers, it would be one of Graal's "flagship" servers, preparing Trials to upgrade. Being the PR there would be an honor, you'd be one of the faces of Graal that everyone who's just starting to play would meet. If anything, being a PR there is more rewarding than being staff on any other server, at least you would matter.

Why do people waste time developing or being non dev staff on regular, worthless servers?

I just can't see myself wasting time like that.

It's the exact same as people being staff on every other server, are you really that dense?

People like to waste their time like that because some enjoy it?
It depends on the person.... and being staff on basically any server is volunteer work so ask them why their 'wasting' their time being staff on the server

Should be atleast 24 Hours... People have to get the game known and find out which server they like.

that would be nice, but imagine on Zone... players are gold 24 hours... after it,
they are on observer mode...if they dont buy gold sub.

i think, most of players will not buy it; so Zone community will be more D.E.A.D. than what it is Right now.

Trials don't work, look at WoW, I can just easily get a friend to invite me, get a 30 day trial and repeat over and over again.

look at Zone: People would CONSTANTLY create new accounts just to get the different classes, heads, and bodies
Also if this were to happen, do not let them go into hosted servers :/

Zone doesn't have a observer mode. They just made trials extremely crap :) with all the slow classes and ulgy looks.
And since you can make it so that each computer can only have 1 free gold trial period each.

I was put into Observer mode on Zone about 4 days ago. x.x