Inactivity, Continued
 

Hey :)

I am inactive for quite some time now - yet I've wanted to take this chance to say goodbye, possibly while still some people are reading these forums - possibly some collegues are still reading this forums.

Reasons? Easy to state. The game (atleast the PC version) seemed dead last time I was logging on and I don't want to be the last person to leave. Obviously, the graal management does not see a future for the PC version, atleast I am unable to see any efforts to get things running again. Even if they freed it, I doubt that graal could be able to compete with the huge market of free mmog's.

I am not planning to force a final quit by getting the account banned or something like this, yet - I have better things to do with my time then idling on empty, devastated playerworlds.

As I don't plan to be a regular visitor in future - goodbye graal :)


By the way, have a nice year 2011 ;)

- Lux

l8z

later

cya man, good luck in rl

I'll miss you! :3

and drag you back someday in msn.

Now we need 25 people to post this and maybe it will open up Stefan/Unixmad's eyes.

25 people have posted it. 100 people have, probably. They don't care. I used to think they might, that's why I posted a thread like this, thought they might notice something. They don't, and they won't. Once you step away and let yourself be detatched from the good memories you had of this game (which are never coming back, no matter what you people tell yourselves) and actually look back at this "game" through more mature eyes you realize that it doesn't really matter.

Nothing about Graal really matters. I don't care if you're a PWA, Forums Admin, Server Manager or whatever your "job title" is, you could not possibly be more miniscule than you are to Stefan and Unix. (That's mostly why I've stopped caring when Forums police delete my posts, I realize just kinda how sad they really are for caring that much)

This platform was a vessel for them to get what they wanted out of it and ditch. And they got what they wanted. They got some global recognition and a foothold in the iPhone app world with a couple of extra bucks along the way. Anyone deluding themselves that there's some saving grace coming to Graal is -- well -- deluded.

I'd be surprised if they took notice of this thread, or any of the other hundred. I wouldn't be surprised if they posted in this thread saying that changes were coming and this and that just to feed the addiction, when really any change or patch they make isn't going to make any significant impact.

Graal died a long time ago, and while I know I sound very cynical about the whole thing, everyone needs to take a step back and re-evaluate what they're doing here. The graal forums is a community, entirely separate from the game it spawned from. Unfortunately, it's like Crono's signature says, in a quote from Loriel:

"Maybe if we keep promising that Graal will be a development platform for a few more years,
people will keep paying for their gold accounts to post on the forums about how Graal is dead~"


Couldn't have put it better myself.

I read about 6 words per paragraph and must say I agree with you whole-heartedly!

I wrote a response to this post as a blog entry.

http://forums.graalonline.com/forums/blog.php?b=240

However, I will also post it below since it is appropriate:

---------

Is Graal actually dying? The simple answer is: no.

But it's a little more complicated than that.

Every day we all seem to lose a little more hope for our childhood memories that we made on this small 2D Zelda-esque multiplayer RPG. I won't deny this at all.

What seemed to once be a flourishing little community has now turned into a fallow field, sparsely scattered with dying plants and a few dried up seeds. The dying plants are the players who have grown up on this game because they were once nourished with dreams, potential, and entertainment... and the withered seeds are the developers and artists in the community who have the potential to make a large impact on Graal but don't have the motivation to do so anymore because they have been begging for updates for so long that they've grown bitter and exhausted with hopelessness and frustration.

Many people are so caught up in their vexation of Graal's current state that they neglect to look at the other side of the situation.

The truth of the matter is that Graal seems to be more popular now than it has ever been in the past.

The word iPhone seems to be a dreaded word today in our community on Graal, most likely due to jealousy of the care and nurturing it is receiving by Graal's cultivators - and the delinquency that the PC version is undoubtedly experiencing.

However, the iPhone versions of Graal are receiving thousands of visitors on a daily basis - much higher than the traffic that the PC version is pulling. So... the truth is that Graal is not dying, but evolving. The strategy used to popularize Graal is completely different than what we have been used to experiencing for the past 10 years.

The iPhone is generating much larger amounts of revenue and... for what? Almost no extra cost or work at the hands of the game developers.

Graal is not dead, nor is it dying. It is changing, quite drastically. It is "moving" to a new home - so to speak.

Will Graal be able to sustain an iPhone community forever? Probably not. However, now we have tested mobile devices to see how players handle the game, and it has been, in my opinion, a much larger success than anyone had anticipated.

I am confident that if Graal is not on the iPhone forever, then it will always be on a mobile device from now on - and what's wrong with that? Not a thing. :)

---------

Sadly, this means that we will probably not receive the amount of updates that we once received for the PC version of Graal, but nothing is forever and things will always change.

real graal is dying in favor of iphone graal, in the big picture anyway. if we focus on the past few years, there's been a small rise in playercount. noticeable for sure.

too bad the clowns running classic over the past few years have missed the biggest opportunity in graal's history to capitalize. i think that with even storm's classic up it could have been big.

While what you've said is largely true, it's given me this underlying impression that PC Graal being put on the shelf would be entirely justified, I would say that with iPhone being so popular and successful at generating income it should be a prime example that PC Graal could also flourish with some attention, care and more reasonable pricing, especially considering the standards of the iPhone servers are by no means better.

Graal iPhone does however have the major advantages of its advertisement being pretty much handled by Apple, and the fact there is as of yet little decent competition on the platform, and as a result you wouldn't expect Graal to be capable of emulating the same level of success, yet there clearly is a desire among iPhone users to make the switch towards playing Graal on their PC, this effect would be alot more obvious if not for Observer Mode and the terribly high prices for what is now a temporary subscription, I'm also pretty sure that a considerable amount of money has been made through iPhone players by server rental.


Given hindsight from Stefan we'd have probably redeveloped Classic with built-in systems for both PC and iPhone, Stefan was actually asked through Bell for his opinion on what option we should take but failed to mention anything about an iPhone server until the very last minute, by then our custom systems had already been implemented.
Although I'm yet to see a drastic rise in Era's playercount since the implementation of iEra, which pre-wipe Classic was unable to compete with.

Bye :( x

Hello,

I've thought about, whether I should answer to this post or not. I've decided to answer.

At first, you are obviously right with some of your statements. Graal is moving to a new home - the iPhone, maybe other mobile devices lateron.

I certainly agree that the iPhone versions are a great success. But I certainly don't think that dropping the pc version in favor of the iPhone version, is a very good idea. And was there any need to do it? No, as it still might be an appealing platform with the right management decisiouns.

Commercial development (other than game client updates) has stopped on graal years ago, yet payment plans for subscriptions remained on equal prices. Best examples are the downfall of Kingdoms and Zone.
Both gold worlds, or rather playworlds have been under player management for quite some time now, leading to a continous downfall.

On another hand, graal on iphone might have the same problem like graal on pc soon. The hardware of smartphones is quickly evolving (Tegra 2) and Rage (ID Games) is already showing what the platform can do, possibly cheaply licenseable mmog's might pop up in future, too - seems like a rough market to me. Will 2D be sufficient for success on these platforms in future? Is it on PC? Only time will show.

Anyways, best of luck, I am not trying to badmouth anything, except maybe the current developments of the pc version.

Happy new year 2011!

- Lux

You wrote an entire blog entry based off a miscommunication.

It's definitely my fault, I didn't really word myself properly, but I was never saying Graal as a concept was dying, when I speak of Graal I speak of PC Graal, and if I ever reference iPhone Graal I usually tag iPhone in front of it.

My post is purely referencing that PC Graal is dying or diminishing, (whether you want to call it Moving/Evolving/Dying all three words are synonymous at this point) and that Stefan and Unix don't care about PC Graal anymore. While iPhone Graal is HUGE, posting on this forum that you're leaving Graal forever because PC Graal has inactivity isn't going to accomplish anything, purely because they don't care.

That was my point.