What someone talented would do with UN.
 

Ditch Newbie Island project - this seems to be a massive waste and I can think of a much better system for introducing new players to UN. My idea?

Player Coach/Mentor System:
When a new/newish player logs in, a GUI prompt appears asking if they'd like the assistance of a veteran player in getting started to play Graal. If they choose yes, their request will be forwarded to players who have opted-in to mentor. The mentor will then be warped to the new player, and will be able to introduce them and begin to show them the ropes for Graal. When the mentor concludes their work with the player, the player will be able to rate how helpful and friendly they thought their mentor was.

These ratings can be turned into rewards such as some sort of points to buy hats/rare items with from a specific salesman.


I'm sure this could be expanded upon quite quickly and its implementation at its lowest level would take a matter of minutes. Much more effective at teaching new players how to play, gives content to both new and old players, and requires considerably less development effort. Or spend another 6 months to get a "large-scale" (rofl) Newbie Tutorial to completion.



Back-end Revamp:
I know Luca has claimed to be doing this but based on every script I've seen on UN (nearly all of them) I struggle to believe it. This is something that really needs to be done, there is too much effort being spent redoing the same things over and over again. I began creating a new back end for events to handle commonly used scripts but I am only aware of their usage in a few events, which were rescripted by myself.

With v6's release, I can't even begin to imagine how many things will be broken on UN, considering how many errors I saw logging onto UN one time with v6. The scripting team really needs to shift focus to doing what they have put off for the last several years and fixing bugs, rather than working on personal tools/toys constantly. No one should be working on any major project besides this at the moment unless UN drastically increases the number of scripters it has.

Development Tool Creation:

This is something I dabbled in a bit on testbed and elsewhere, the idea is basically to use your newly improved back-end to allow for some new development tools for staff members like LATs to use. Instead of having to copy/paste scripts and end up with something different from their vision, have tools such as a light creator, particle creator, NPC creator, setshape2 and other sorts of commonly used scripts in a tool that LATs can place in a level in an editor mode online. Then, they can copy and paste scripts that will place the effects in their proper positions or place them in the level themselves. I haven't seen any recent revisions of new online level editors but as things are even now, this wouldn't be horribly hard to create and will allow NATs to spend less time working on graphical flourishes and making other basic scripts for LATs.

By extension, even more specific tools could be created that would be helped by an improved back-end such as an improved room to rent editor, events editor (which would allow LATs to place things such as team mode, spawn points, conditions (water eliminates, lava eliminates, etc), Carry x to y, how many players can play at once, tag team systems, etc.

The easier development is, the faster high quality content can be created.

300% approved. 150% for each post

I really want something like this. Not necessarily an "events editor" but an actual events system so it isn't all over the place.

I feel that none of these 3 ideas is so huge in scope that they're unrealistic - in fact, I believe a team headed up by the right people would be quite capable of finishing them or at the very least having them in a very usable state before the year ended.

I also feel that these 3 things combined would allow for much accelerated development on Unholy Nation, and allow scripters to focus on less mundane tasks which would help UN even more.

expansion on the developer's tools, can even have a great world event tool created to allow for easy decorations. While decoration mode is on, you can see where decorations are currently placed and they would only be visible/active to regular players while a server flag were set to that particular holiday. Prevent a lot of effort from being repeated every year, and allow for easy work

The mentor system idea is actually pretty cool and UN's management would have to borderline retarded to not be stealing the idea right now.

The Coach/Mentor system seems awesome.
If I had the time/opportunity, I'd help with it.
That idea is probably the best in that.
And what the heck is the Newbie Island project thingy about?
Seems very stupid because all newbies are usually better off without a tutorial on UN for pretty obvious reasons. I have never seen a newbie that didn't know what to do after the quests.

all useless except for making the scripts competent again, because you won't be doing **** if the server breaks down

wat

Honestly, a lot of ideas would be much better than the newbie island given how much time has been effectively put into it.

All awesome ideas though!

Luca and Cron's ideas are good too though! Cron has idea's like uh... hm.

Luca's got the Newbie Island!

I want to be a Coach/Mentor!

You do know UN right..? They're great at making unexpected stupid calls.

What's a mentor really going to teach a player on UN though..?

Mentor: Oh hey this is the spar, and this is the pk zone, there's also some quests but you're definitely going need to use a website to figure those ones out. Here's some other <random feature of UN>.
Typical iPhone Player: can i be admin?
Mentor: Uh no.. you have to try out and yadada..
Typical iPhone Player: oh..
Mentor: Anyway that's pretty much it, rate me 5 stars please. (Thinking to self.. **** yeah just a few more noobs and I can get that hat)
Typical iPhone Player: ok.

I'd personally opt for more of a checklist-tutorial system with way points and a map that has the player walking around on UN on there own, and allows them to discover each feature without requiring a mentor. While also pushing non-Dev staff to do more and be helpful to the newbies.

I think you mean:

I figure a good mentor would be able to teach players the sorts of things they usually learn through other players anyway, such as using emoticons, mass messaging, toalls, private messages, etc.

I also think it'd be more likely that players who would typically be helpful would be more likely to use this system and it would just make it easier for helpful players to find new players who may need help.

Would also possibly help players get involved in the social aspects of Graal faster since it seems every server has a dozen or so cliques

I can only agree with the back end improvements, especially new development tools. Everything else seems like it could be abused.

as can virtually any system for player interaction on Graal since creating a trial account is easy. Doesn't mean it shouldn't be tried, though.

The thing though is, a tutorial like this would be very easy to get together and would continue to work regardless if there were any mentors on, and it wouldn't depend on the mentor's ability to be helpful.

I wouldn't see a decent tutorial taking any longer than an afternoon or two of work to get put together and working solidly.

This really just comes down to UN being so behind that they're neglecting the people who play the server, the newbie experience, and spending all the time arguing about what they should do and just end up spinning their tires and getting **** all done while trying to keep their close friends on the server happy.

A system that depends on the players to work correctly is going to fail. There are more people who would use the system to their advantage than players who would actually use it as intended.

Moving on from development to PR related...

Un-ban everyone:

I seriously doubt there is a compelling reason for why anyone currently banned > 7 days was banned for so long. There maybe a few exceptions for a few hackers but I imagine nearly everyone else should be given another chance at redemption, especially with a change in GP Chiefs. It's not as if the current GPs/management (lol) are so laden with overwork that this would be a disaster if all of these players decided to act up.

i agree. i still don't know why i'm banned and its been like six weeks.

EDIT.

my jailing history consists of

October 19 2008 8:18 PM EST
Cursing in masses. 1 hour -booj


January 25, 2009 9PM EST
Massed a picture of Jay-Z with it saying "u crazy, nigga" at the bottom.
Jailed 3 hours for racism.
-Sting2Dope

January 27, 2009 12:30AM EST
Being racist with the stealth NPC as seen in this video;
Going up to a player and trying to make him say "******"

February 3rd, 2009
Jailed for 5 hours, racism in masses.
~Streety
(all i said was black power)

and then got banned one time for giving out a photo of someone.

then shimmy put this in my comments
http://i.imgur.com/Kofi3.png

even though...
http://i.imgur.com/n9mn2.png

shimmy decides to ban me for 1,000 minutes from massing which took him like three days to take off. plus the last thing he made up since i was still mass banned when that happened -_-/i never stalked him. then i massed "i wonder if shimmy has ever..." (corrected mistake) and got 30 day banned which got changed to perma.

also

absolut_crono (Mon Sep 06 01:15:54 2010):
I cant really say your ban was directly related to that PM though.
(so why am i banned again?)

2010-09-19 15:52:10 on Unholy Nation by Tigairius:
local ban modify
Banned for: Multiple Jailings
Reason: Spoke with staff & vicious. We agreed 30 days is more reasonable based on harassment history. We cannot ban him for the Smoke thing because he never logged into Smoke's Graal account.
(it got changed back)

tl;dr - i got permabanned because shimmy don't like me.

ya kevin ya

hm

nice, stock photo

Zomg what happened. Who got murdered?

The village elder is sick with pneumonia. Likely due the the snow.

reported to iStockPhoto copyright violation department

What?

plz stop kevin from using copyrighted material

this is my mock up of what should be done with the Isle of Bane.

why not **** OFF

I don't think it's because there's no talented scripters. I think it's because they don't care what happens to the server, unfortunately.

When I saw this I actually thought you took a screenshot of the server. It looks like some of the stupid **** they'd pull.

It's a good idea but all in all I think it would be best to just leave it to the FAQ.

I've been waiting for someone to press the delete key on UN for around ten years now.

Someone needs to take control of UN that won't accept the standard bull**** that staff force players to deal with on a daily basis.

There's literally so much bias, corruption, bad staff hirings (or re-hirings), it's just getting pretty sad.

example please