Graal dieing
 

Anyone noticed, other then me, that Graal's dieing? I've been noticing this for about 2-3 months now. Slowly I see my friends quitting. Here I find myself doing the same. I log on and log off in like 5 minutes. Graal need's something new. New Globals, Classic Servers, Something to get more players. I really think the cost for such a non-attracting game is what get's at people and makes them not download it..
I talk to my friends they all say they'd play if they didn't have to pay $28.00. Unholy Nation is atleast trying something new to attract people. I remember it had over 230 players at times. Now there down to 100-150. Era.. Oh, don't even get me started on Era. Era's going through hell right now. No one likes Era anymore. The reset(s) the staff. The poorly qualified managers. It's all going to hell. But, I won't harp on Era's downfall, but theres a majority of players gone down the drain! Alright so we have so many servers to play on *Yay*, yet only 3-4 seem fun. The rest have like 10 players and no one can log on. Sure, we can buy a playerworld! But all of the plan's/ideas get shot down like a duck trying to fly away in duck season. Nothings new. No one responds on the Support Tickets. The only active global staff are extremely ****y and/or never log on. Stefan's busy with whatever, You can never get ahold of him. Maybe I'm just rambling on trying to buy some time in my Computer Applications class. But if any of you feel the same, please tell me so I dont feel like the only one who thinks Graal's dead.

Ever since everything got p2p'ized, it's been a downward spiral of population. You just haven't been around long enough to see that.

They do, they just take a long time..
Partially true.
False.
Perhaps you've never had a worthwhile reason for his attention? x_X;


Anyhow, possible solutions (which I'm sure have been suggested before, but here goes):

Lower account cost. $19.00 for 3 months of running around on a 2D futuristic game and a collapsing RP server? Not worth it.
Increase playerworld cost. Higher cost to start a server = less people running off to their own corners of Graal = more centralisation = (in this case) good.

What's dieing?

Anyway, Graal has been on a decline since p2p hit. I remember there being at least 1200 or so players on Graal at any given time. Now we're lucky if we get 600-700.

You personally tried to attack Era and Unholy Nation, can you try again please?

What? UN had over 190 online yesterday.

Our average is still around 180-200 at peak times.

We can get to 220 on national US holidays and such... when nobody has school.

That's UN though. Not alot of the classic playerworlds can stay at 40-50 anymore. There's only about 4-5 playerworlds that can maintain that playercount.

Classic can't hold a playercount above 30 - 40 nowadays. I blame the Administration, the developers there are inactive, the Manager doesn't really do anything, most of the time when I was on RC with him, he was fiddling around with his website. The only reason most of us stay is because we never played outside classic, or we hope there will be change sometime soon.

I find myself as well logging on a server and logging right off after a few minutes, because I get bored. Though I find myself doing that a lot now a days for all games I have. I don't know, maybe I am just as your could say "growing up." I do wish graal had something exciting happen. I would like to see Stefan make another playerworld using the original tileset. other than 3d or Kingdoms. That is just my opinion though.

I remember when Classic was just called the main server and there'd be around 500 on at one time. It got so laggy just before the serverlist Graal and peoples account were RANDOMLY being wiped. The server was just randomly wiping peoples accounts and I remember everyone getting all worried. Ah, the good days =P

Graal wasnt so bad in 2003 either, you had UN, Era, GK, Val, Bab, and Delt dominating the playerlist with playercounts of over 50 each or so. I remember bab and val hit 100 numerous times, sometimes even competing with UN and Era. Delteria would jump a lot and GK always had around 60+

Oh man, I loved Babylon. In my opinion the real downfall of graal started after Babylon went down the drain. (WHY'D YOU HAVE TO CHANGE IT, ALEXANDER?! T.T)

I agree with you; everything has really gone completely downhill.

I do still come on to Graal, but I usually just idle and do other things while I'm connected.
It's a shame. It's ridiculous. Unless some big changes are to be made, then Graal Online will never been like it once was.

I blame Stefan creating Zelda Online! If it wasn't for the birth of Graal, it would have never declines! *shakes head in dismay*... Why not we just twiddle our thumbs and complain about how messed up some game that never was created due to these threads could have been!

You know that one game? Yea... The one the George almost made but didn't... They would have had corrupt administrators that dominated the players... Oh -- It would have been so bad...

Seesh! Leave Graal alone, will you? It's fine enough how they are trying the best they can with the little budget they have. I do believe that if they invested a little more, they would get more quality, but it's obvious they can't do any better. People have put a lot of effort into making this game and their servers possible, and so what if they aren't top notch quality... I play the server (script on them, actually), because of e community, and how they try rentlessly to make something on it... To expose the little development skills they can possess to create something that maybe 10, maybe 15 would enjoy for 5-10 hours of their lifetime.

Be a little more constructive... I don't care about complaining -- As long as it's constructive.

I wouldn't say so, I don't think playercount is directly related to graals fall, but the lack of big updates recently more so contirbute to this over playercount which P2P caused.

I think you do not know what you are talking about.

Agreed.

why play i mean to a person who has just seen graal on the site and such why play? i mean there are many free games and buy in the store games like guild wars that you know are good and you can always return im not trying to say refunds but like well maybe a better sample thing maybe a trail only server. i know it has been said before but it must suck for a trail to get pked and after a while they think it will just happin over and over. then ontop of that the staff refuse to add new playerworlds then they need to do somehting about all the inactive playerworlds i mean without any activity in a while like maybe a email to the person or something but seriously graal is just well its not changing with the times.

Pac would give stefan 100$ to shutdown ALL servers and go back to just Graal Online, and N-PULSE :D

thats nice but still something REALISTIC should be done.

ive ranted about this before, but I think increasing the playerworld renting fees would bring in nothing but good things. its a long term solution.

Pac's, while very harsh, is a super short term and probably the best solution right now.

there needs to be some choices i mean those are nice for classic stuff but what about modern or hmm maybe role playing and im not a big fan of classic to many egomaniac olbies but still something needs to be done about the playercount decreasing and all the worthless playerworlds.

I do believe with the prices of servers going up, the public would take conscious of the fact that players are paying for something they created (and paid for). The only problem here I see is... The players aren't paying the true creators of the playerworld. Basically.. They are paying for people who pay to play their server, and there is NO profit done whatsoever. Of course, advertisement on servers seem like a more-likely idea to be made, however, the income from advertisements aren't quite great. And already the servers are cluttered with crap, I doubt that adding onto that a bunch of ads will make them happy.

To conclude... I do believe that the GO organization should reward playerworlds that actually do update, and keep a high playercount alive and active: Those who want to get something for their work would be compensated, and those who actually create something that would interest players would be benefitted. By cause, GO would benefit due to increase in clientelle, (for plublicity between people would be a lot more effective).

Simple solution... Put a bait for developers to try to reach, and they'll higher the standards of the game tenfold. Otherwise, you're only paying to do volenteer work.

Don't blame alexander. Blame the ****ty influences that he's had over the years. Alexander was the best thing to happen to Babylon, all these people swarming around him give him bad ideas and get him mixed up with what needs to be done, i'm sure if the staff left Alexander to do what he pleased, Babylon would be a competitor again.
All those New Overworlds? Blame Outlaw
All those laggy NPCs? Blame the scripters
All the new Events Houses? Blame me for all I care, I acted out Outlaws (and others) orders.
Alexander isn't the one to be blamed here

I hate to pick on any one playerworld, but I wonder why Shaded Legend is even on the classic list. It has decent content, but at peak times it just doesn't attract more than a 10-15 player range. It also lags a lot for me, but I guess that is my own computers issues.

I thought Graal's fall meant there was a trend of a decreasing population.

Remember, the content is, for the most part, made by the players. How much of GraalOnline's content was made by Linux Cyberjoueurs employees? Graal depends on the volunteering players to develope the content. A decrease in the amount of players should result in a decrease in the amount of updates and content.

Again, I don't know what you mean by "Graal's fall." For me, it could only mean the population dropping Graal going bankrupt (which would be news to me).

I find this comment somewhat poignant. Personally, I have always rated Shaded Legends, and have always been somewhat surprised that it hasn't gained the playercount it deserves.

I think its a matter of which playerworlds should be on the hosted/classic tab, there is several servers that get more players that are hosted then the classic tab, and these servers should take there place.

Classic Rant
Classic barely deserves a spot on the Classic list. Its hardly what it used to be, and do to poor Management, nothing is changing. I complained all the time when I worked there, that I wasn't being assigned anything, and then they told me to redesign a piece of the overworld to keep me quiet. Exodus and I made a layout to a quest, and all we needed was a Baddy NPC scripted and a Boss, but no, it was too much for the Scripters to make, and our levels stayed in that temp folder for over two months now. All the LATs on that server either quit or became inactive because of the lack of help or assignments, and its because of Storm, and his choice in Admins (he chose to keep an inactive LAT Admin on, and luckily they are logging on a little more now).
Ventrue, the guild thats slowly taking over every staff position on Classic has their guildhouse updated and uploaded daily. I wish someone cared enough for the work we did to do this for us, but no, we were only LATs, and the mighty Ventrue's guildhouse needs constant updating. Its sad actually, a couple GPs and an FAQ have NC and Level rights, and the LAT team (other then GrowlZ of course) had nothing. Storm was handing out rights, left and right, except where he needed it most, with the staff who were actually trying to make things right on Classic.

I agree wholeheartedly. Graal is supposed to be all about letting people create their own content and have it on a world where everyone could enjoy it. But with the playeworld renting, they are making developers PAY to make stuff to attract people to Graal, so that Graal can get even MORE money.

It's bad enough to not reward these developers for dedicating so much of their free time to Graal and helping keep the playercount... but then to charge them even more to do so, it's just ridiculous. It seems like a case of wanting too much money and not really caring about what people think. There is definitely a way that can benefit both Cyberjoueurs and the players/developers, and this is not it.

Top playerworld staff should maybe get free p2p. It's not as if Graal would be losing tons of money doing this. In fact, it would encourage people to work harder so that they can get rewarded, which would make for better content, which would bring more players. REWARD people for all their hard work. It's not a tough concept.

Yea, of course.. It's always Graal people who debate on anything you say. But this is the point of the forums, I suppose. But, notice how everyone that is pretty stubborn about this (Malinko, Skyld) seem to have something going for them on Graal? Malink is GK Staff.. Pretty good thing to be. Skyld's a Developer on Era. That's also another good position. My point is, if you have something like good weapons, alot of hours, staff somewhere important, you seem to like Graal alot more. First timers log on, get killed, harrased with "newb" "noob" etc.. etc.. then log off. It's just my oponion on everything, sure be jack ass's and deny it to hell.

These people worked their way up to what they are now...we were all new to the game once :)

Exactly. Everyone wants to get RC and npcs NOW. What the hell? Wait and earn it like the rest. No patience.

Didn't use this forum for months, so you should be glad I'm wasting my time for "noob"s like you!
Blame Skyld and Malinko for doing a good job, why not? If you were a good developer, I'm sure you could work on some "important" server, your fault.
You have no clue what you're talking about, so just stop it.

Also, Era isn't screwed. Every server had or will have problems, it's hard to keep a good playerworld up. Rick knows how to do his job, the current Staff Era has is awesome, just wait a little longer.

Both I and Malinko have experience. It would also appear that experience allows us to see Graal in a different (ultimately more reasonable) way to you.
From your original post...
... You seriously appear to not know what you are talking about.
I would say that you are the one denying important factors.

era is kinda sucking now and if you dont belive me rember the old playercount then look at what it is now.it is hard to start on some servers becuse the players are compleat jerks but what can you do they pay there fees just like everyone else and its not aginst the rules to be a jerk.then with the playerworlds people lose motivation they see that almost no new playerworlds get on the classic list so why try? and to the person without a playerworld it seems as if i pay them they host my server that i will never get on the classic list so :-/

Graal has been dieing for years.

well it seems to be taking its toll now.

Skip the jibber jabber, the playerworld arguments, the fight to be right, and everything else.

I used to love Graal, I couldn't stop playing. I was addicted. But now I can't stand to be on it for 5 minutes, let alone any game. Maybe my "gaming years" are up.

The point of this. Graal's dieing. And that's something you can't argue. I guess that's how the cookie crumbles.

Why would we need to? You haven't given anything but anecdotal evidence.

:eek: If I knew what the **** that meant, I could maybe reply.