It's not hard.
 

On UN's in-game forums, I see suggestions that blow everything out of proportion and treat UN as if it is a hopeless smear of what it once was. In respect, that really describes the current state of Graal. The internet changes, and it's no one's fault in particular.

What I don't understand is the apparent lack of direction. This isn't aimed at the current Manager or higher administration of UN in particular. I actually appreciate the general structure of the server right now: higher-ups are Manta, Rage, and Vicious (I think). These guys don't act like traditional Graal staff and probably aren't treated like them, but they have experience. These guys have contributed and been with UN forever. The server is better with these people (moreso the first two).

We need more people like that. Cujo seems interested in developing levels for UN lately. Why isn't he staff yet? Hoyt seems pretty passionate about Graal again. That guy is one of the best coders I've ever seen, why not try to bring him on?

The fact of the matter is that UN does not need huge sets of vibrant, complex levels and scripted systems for it to be successful. UN needs some cleaning up and polishing around the edges, and then UN needs to be brought into 2011.

What I mean by that is, 95% of action on Graal's only "traditional" server left occurs in a small portion of levels: the Events House and TC Spar. TCPK should and could easily be included in that mix. Events, sparring, and PKing. That's the trinity of classic Graal gameplay. It still works. People don't play UN to mine. People don't play UN to do the little RPG system or whatever. People don't play UN for the marriage system or whatever time-consuming other side projects you guys have put efforts towards. How about UN steps up and does what Graal as a whole has neglected for a long time and take a step back?

• Ease the workload on staff. We don't need new quests, an RPG system, or all of this extra junk that is or may be in the works. We never needed the dojos with all of those skills or the Zelda-esque caves, I mean whatever. Come on. This is Unholy Nation. We play this server because it is fun to chat with friends, play events, spar, and PK. Maybe we like to trade hats too, that's fine.
• Why is there not a more concentrated link between TC Spar, TCPK, and the Events House? Like I said before, welcome to 2011. We're lazy players. The internet has changed. I know the Events House has a door straight to TC Spar in some hidden level through the middle door in the main room of the building, but can we put it out somewhere more visible. We don't need that second level in TC Spar, how about replacing that door with doors to immediately enter TCPK and the Events House? It seems like such a stupid problem, but I think part of the problem is that we don't want to walk between so many levels and so far between events and sparring. We want to be there and come back in seconds.
• Why have you guys allowed PKing to die? It doesn't take Bill Nye to revive PKing. You incentivize it. You have someone create a script that randomly drops a little bit of EP in the level every 2-6 hours. You make a script that rewards the top PKer of the day with 10 EP at the end of every day. You create a leaderboard. You link it directly to TC Spar and the Events House. Hello? This is basically a no-brainer.
• Once again, in regards to bringing everything all together: Can we see the spar line while in TCPK, if we have these 3 (Events House, TCPK, TC Spar) linked together? People don't really like to sit around idle in TC Spar. They do it because, well, what else do we do? You know, if TCPK was linked directly to the spar, I bet people would PK. You can have it summon them right back to TC Spar and into the spar when it is their turn to spar. It's really simple, guys. Maybe create some sort of miniaturized "spar viewer" that shows the main TC spar from the Events House, so people have something to watch and look at instead of just idling, waiting for an event?

I feel like UN has a lot of content and a lot of truly time-tested material that can be successful, it's just not being leveraged correctly. You guys seem to be thinking big instead of thinking small.

inb4 the following:
UN is a sandbox social server.
but we like the RPG and marriage projects.

If it was that easy I'm sure PC Graal would have at least one server thriving on nothing but traditional spar + pk and events.

how to fix un - stop taking it seriously

Guess what, UN was fun because friends used to play. Friends grew up and left, some of us still played. No new players come along because back when we played it was newish, Graal wasn't cutting edge but it wasn't outdated like it is now. So all the new generation kids like to play the better updated games, they like graphics, updates every day, and pointless achievements. Graal only has one of those three (pointless achievements). UN will never be what is was in the past, or what you in-vision for a future of change. It will slowly lose players due to growing up and eventually the game will be shut-down or move solely to the iDevices. Yet, it doesn't matter at that point you should be worrying about whats going on in your life and not about a game.

Spar, PK, chat. iPhone has all of those with more people and better accessibility.

UN's ****ed until they get Observer Mode removed off of it.

Hard to get any new playercount when they get randomly booted off every 15 minutes or whatever amount of time it is.

pretty well said. i think UN only needs to focus on events, spars and pking. the only complicated part is they need to figure out a reward. it'll be fun for a while but eventually people will expect to get something or they'll get bored again. they also need to focus on a few other things, but mostly because they're broken. job system, economy, qmenu. they're all so terrible.

the main problem UN has is the management. every single admin excepct the et dev and eta are inactive. they either don't have time for graal or don't care to play anymore. just last night there was like 50 people on for one event, so i think if globals finally did something and replaced them with someone who will actually do something instead of just say it, that this server could at least get somewhat active.

Here's a tip: Disable GS1, that'll get UN staff and even players working.

no, it is hard

Pretty much this, Though I feel that MattKan's phrasing needs changing to the following:

Events would still work! ;-)

What staff?

Huh? Hello 1998-2001? You're managing Classic right now, I'm sure you remember what Classic was like years ago. It was nothing but quests, PKing, and events, less enthusiasm on the sparring. We don't currently have a server thriving off of that because that server doesn't exist. Even if everything is implemented perfectly, UN still isn't going to surpass Zodiac or anything. It'll just do more to make the community a little more active and responsive. Right now, the only thing keeping UN moving are events really. The new achievements system is really cool, though.

You're stating the obvious. This isn't what I'm implying. Read my reply to Thor, UN isn't going to be "what it once was" but it can still be something. It's common sense that Graal is well past its prime and UN isn't going to touch 120 players anymore.

I'm not trying to belittle staff and say that there is no work at all required to put into this. But I see things in development and things released on UN that just make me scratch my head, because everyone knows that they're going to remain untouched and unused. Like I said before, the RPG system, mining, fishing, all that is old news. Stop exhausting yourself by working on changing UN and just work with what you have and weave it together a little nicer.

It doesn't exist because with all of the several servers that has been attempted with deliberation or not it has never succeeded or remained successful.
Classic's community survived on little except for events + spars + pking + guilds in the post-npcserver years, despite the awful hit-detection, simple fact was it wasn't enough by itself.

Really?! Well kudos to you :D!

I'm also pretty shocked that ther isn't a single server so far that has developed an automated events system. The only drawback would be if players began to cheat more frequently (although hacking on Graal is probably at an all-time low), and there are several solutions to that problem:

• Make it a new responsibility of GPs to monitor events when they can and to take care of player complaints in automated events
• Create a player-managed reporting system (which could obviously also be abused, but abuse would be easy to pinpoint and punish for)

Either could work.

I know that there are a lot of events that it'd be difficult to automate. Race events would not be hard though. Most PK events, like PPK, wouldn't be hard either. A system like this seems far overdue on Graal. I remember in either 2005 or 2006 when I was the Head Admin on Babylon, we began discussing the development of this but it was never followed through on for whatever reason.

Have the system automate events if the playercount is above 15 or so, have the event automatically cancel or 4 players aren't in the event warper, etc. It'd probably be a ton of work and I'm not undermining it, but after having run through the temple quest for the HatTap NPC last night, I can see that UN staff apparently don't mind doing a lot of work because that thing was extensive.

Don't know what you're talking about, Era has an automated event system ("EventBot", developed by Sales) that does a lot of the things you mentioned.

Oh, that's neat. How long has it been around? Haven't played Era in a little while and I mentioned it a few times on UN and never heard that Era had something like that. As we speak right now, there are nearly 30 players on UN, several massing asking for someone to host events.

About three years, not sure on the exact date though. It was on hiatus for a few months at a time at one point, but I think it's been running consistently for a while now.

Classic's Team Event system (think of it as the games console, and something like CTF as the game disk, means we can rapidly develop team events and not completely re-write the system each time) could very easily be made to host completely automatically, but I think players going AFK or modem tapping etc has been such a problem in the past it probably would be better for events to be overseen by a person. However it could be possible to make it publicly hostable by a volunteer player.

kb (ET Admin) and Ph8 (ET Development Admin) apparently stepped down yesterday. I don't know either of them personally and neither of them seem to like me very much but the two seemed to do their jobs pretty well and at least contributed to the progression of the server.
I was told they left because of some sort of issue with management. Just speculating that it probably had a lot to do with Crono only being online at obscure hours, times like 4 AM EST, 9 AM EST, etc.

Despite his weird hours, I feel as if he's been a fair manager and pretty respectable so far. From there and trickling down, there are plenty of problems.

It's 2011 and people have realized that cooperate internet has practically killed in-game creativity on Graal. No one wants to contribute because, well, why? They aren't getting paid for it and it's sort of nonsensical. Graal kind of has a slave operation going on here, where they release an engine and the players handle the development and social growth of the game. It's weird how that works.

More and more players are beginning to realize that and staff are beginning to use their time in power more and more to their advantage because they really have no reason not to.


I haven't seen a developer (other than Lloyd and Ph8) on in forever. Does UN have specific LATs and NATs, or just developers? I don't even know anymore.

The Events Team is generally pretty quality.

The GP spot is pretty much riddled with ridiculousness and seems to be a poison to the server. They recently hired 4 GP Cadets, that's on top of the existing 3 or 4, which now puts the GP-to-player ratio at about 1:5 at any given time. It's pretty unnecessary.
Okilian has played forever and contributed to UN in many ways. You'd expect him to carry the team as he should as the GP Chief. He does a pretty awful job. Red is a decent GP. Infamous is a quality GP. Kea (a Cadet) is a quality GP. The rest seem to pretty much go out of their way to do everything they can to favor themselves and their friends.

When this server's playercount continues to dwindle, just know it's because you guys are neglecting the basics and you're letting the wrong crowd run your server and ban off anyone they seem to dislike.

This system usually ends up being rather hazardous, just commenting from my own experience.

this is nessary because not all gp cadets go on to full status. lets think about it this way:
it is 3pm EST and there is 18-20 players online. 2 of them are GP's, 1 is a Dev, and 1 is a ET. There is a problem at town center and the two gps (out of 6-8) handle the situation and leave the others to their work. what if those gps weren't on because of your views on unnessarity? the 1 ET and Dev would get pmed about the situation, and they wouldn't have any power to stop the problem.
point is that the GPA said he needed more people and he hired more people. No point in complaining

Who cares how many GP's there are? Does it hurt the game play to have more GP's? No. Does it hurt the game play to have little to no GP's? Yes.

Agreed.
Better having 100 Polices in a Village than 0. =)

Ph8 and KB quit?

That's not a good sign at all

No! :(