You know, looking back I have but one question...
 

Why didn't rocks ever get owner tags?

Seriously.

It was a good idea. It wasn't difficult to script. Pretty much the only people against it were rock stealers, Karakaze (i.e. criminals) and their friends. There were no really legitimate arguments against it (mostly it was "OMG ROCK STEELING IS R RITE!")

Why didn't it happen?

Why didn't they have Graal 3D from the beginning? I mean seriously!

I'm going out on a limb here, but I'd have to say money and technology. But I hope you're being sarcastic.

'Cause Kaimetsu would've ripped Lance's limbs off like an angry wookie had it happened.

Hell yeah I am. The only G2k2 I liked is the one attached :)

It wasn't like everyone was out to make you miserable. There are reasons behind it... The main reason being... there was only one bomb site for each type of mineral. How exactly would you give rocks owner tags?

The person blows up the wall and like a dozen rocks comes out... So that person owns all of those. So what if they just sign off right then and don't mine the rocks? Nobody can use that bombsite. Do you see why it's not so easy? You could say "well make the rocks lose the owner if the owner leaves", but what if you got disconnected on accident? Then you'd be mad to come back and lose your rocks.

Then there is the idea to give the rocks ownership but time them so they run out and anyone can take them... But then the owner is scrambling nonstop to quickly mine all their rocks before the time runs out. Making the job even worse than it already is.

There's always the solution of making more bombing sites... But you'd need like 10 of each kind to work for a really active 2k1 server. Plus it seperates people more, and one of the biggest parts of Graal is community, and I rather enjoy seeing other people while I'm mining or whatever.

So there you have it. It's not as simple as "give the rocks owner tags".

edit: but I actually came up with a simple solution to it that doesn't involve owner tags at all. Except we'll never get to see that because Stefan will never respond to my PM and it's been nearly 3 weeks already. :\ I actually had a mining system designed to where each pick axe actually has different stats that mattered, and hitting rocks required timing and you could get combos and stuff.... it's pretty fun.

Lance alluded to Kaimetsu disliking rock owner tags, but I didn't know whether or not he was being serious. Kaimetsu never said anything bad about them back in 2001/2002 when I was trying to get them added.

You make it so that the person keeps ownership of all the rocks so long as they hit one of them every few seconds. The problem of getting disconnected applies to all owner tags. It is a problem but it's still better to have owner tags then to not have them.

I really don't think it would be better that way... People love to abuse things and use any sort of annoyance as much as they can. Once people find out how many seconds it takes before ownership is lost, they could hit the rocks as slowly as possible and take wayyyy too long to mine their rocks. Causing other people to just sit around and wait instead of also being able to mine rocks.

But I came up with a really easy solution that doesn't involve owner tags at all. I still need to look at it from more angles to see if it could be abused... of course, that is, if I ever have any reason to implement it.

People used to be able to block up the crafting room (the blue one) by occupying all the tables and running around and hitting each one once in a cycle, but it hardly ever happened. Are you seriously suggesting that rock owner tags would have created a bigger problem than they would have solved (rock stealing)?

Yes I am.

Someone could hog a rock site forever. Such as just leaving the rocks sit there and then as soon as someone gets close to the rocks they hit a rock one time. The only way anyone could get the rocks would be to just constantly hit the rocks and hope the owner doesn't hit one once before the time runs out.

There was how many rocks... like 8-12? It took a lot of hits to hit those rocks, right... so if you hit on a rock each time the timer is about to run out it would total up to many hours.

edit: So you don't think THAT would be annoying? At least with the old system you could mine rocks right away. With this system you'd be sitting around... and most people don't have time to just sit around and wait for someone else to finish. Time = money. I can't begin to imagine how many people would complain about not being able to mine because some idiot is taking his sweet time.

What are you gonna do then, jail them for not breaking any rules?

You're saying that just because the potential for abuse exists that it will become widespread. Like I said the same kind of abuse could be done with the crafting tables, but it rarely happened.

The crafting tables required a lot of effort to pull something like that off... not to mention if they messed up they'd lose minerals and look retarded. Unlike standing there talking to your buddies and having a good laugh and tapping one button before the time runs out to prevent dozens of people from being able to mine a certain mineral requires very little effort.

Anyway... I might as well explain my idea since it seems it won't be used anyway since 2k1 is down the drain.

Basically my plan was to make it so that people could recieve one FREE tnt at a time, with a time limit inbetween. So you could get one free tnt like... every 2 hours... (or whatever seemed fair) This would make it so that people wouldn't be as bothered by rock stealers, since you technically didn't have to pay for anything. It wouldn't SOLVE rock stealing, but it would make it bearable in a sense.

Also you could still buy extra TNT if you really needed it. The thing is, you could get as much free TNT you want... (like getting one every 2 hours) and just save them. You could even save up a bunch and sell them in bulk to people and make profit. Like to people who don't have the time to visit the TNT store and pick up free ones all day or something.

Anyway... I was either going to have that as the default... or have it as a special "members only" bonus for people who bought enough TNT from the store... or something.

So again, you'd still have rock stealing (which could be dealt with by RP law enforcement maybe), but it wouldn't be as bothersome... It's like if you bought 5 sandwiches and someone kept stealing 1-2 of them every time... it would be really annoying. But if you could get 5 free sandwiches every so often, it wouldn't really bug you if they took a couple because they were free.

Paying for TNT was kinda dumb anyway since you already have to invest so much money (from buying pickaxes) and time just to get the minerals.

That Graal2002 was Er1c's 2002.. and I think it was much better x_x

It was easy to block up the blue crafting tables. If for some reason did become a problem though it would be easy to just put a max time limit on the tags (but a large one so that it wouldn't effect legitimate miners).

Or you could just a set time ammount for the whole thing, if it takes 7 minutes working at a site as fast as possible then give them all the rocks for 10 minutes.

Ahh.. beta gk? Wasn't that suppost to have air planes and stuff that they were releasing on graalonline.com? XD