Here's what should have happend
 

If the dev staff were smart they would have released "graal2001" with its Original Bodies from back in the day. They would have also given each player a sword not this dumb lets get 5 gold and craft a sword bogus. Hats should have been stocked in the hat stores. The dev blew it from the start. People spent all their time making money rather than having fun on the server. I've played graal since 2002 and I played graal2001 all the way until it went under. Graal2001 can be revived if we get the right manager who is committed to getting the server back on its feet. I believe also that the events on this server make it very unique and special.

Capture the Flag and Counterstrike are unique?

As opposed to unique roleplaying aspects, the infamous and iconic traintracks, a race of alien creatures and a crashed lunar planetoid?

It's wonderful to sit back from your pillar and say what should have happened. It's another thing to be able to realize things. Our original plans had most of what you asked for, but the release date was forced on us in advance.

Not to mention that the original bodies are really, well, ugly. I realize full well that in the beginning, Graal 2001 had the original bodies, and also had the normal heart system, but that way, it's just like any other playerworld out there, especially now that hats have become commonplace. If anything, the differing bodies and heart system helped set it apart.

All that aside though. If anything does happen with the server in the future, Ms. Wyndell is ready and waiting to lead the Bellaseran people once again.

I could make everyone a black pixel on my PW and that would set it apart also. But would it be good? No.

The players voted that they wanted the old bodies back, they should have come back.

The reason Bomy Lands failed was because of inactive staff. Inactive staff before the release, and inactive staff after the release. The entire reason the release date was forced on Lance was because he was taking entirely too long to produce any results. I'm not trying to play armchair quarterback here, but he could at least have admitted to people that nothing was getting done, instead of keeping private and not telling anyone anything.

I already knew nothing was getting done when he'd make posts about how "things are coming along" but wouldn't reveal ANY information... I know from past experience that when you're a manager and you're only updates are "things are getting done"... nothing is getting done.

He failed as a manager because he was not involved enough in the server, and he was not keeping the staff active or removing them for inactivity.

Anyway... the server release shouldn't have even happened. What did the staff expect? That players would just sit around and do the same boring jobs for gralat that they once had before being reset? All that seems to have been done was to make everything harder to do. Harder to get a weapon, harder to earn gralat... Plus the fact that there was little to nothing to spend your hard earned gralat on.

Lance wasn't thinking about the people. He was thinking about himself and his staff. I can't believe Cheetos couldn't see that either. I had a chance to look at their ideas and plans for 2k1, and what they wanted to do was to totally change 2k1 into GK, basically. I'm infuriated at Lance for telling me that my 2k1 revision was changing 2k1 too much.

Lance's 2k1 is basically:

- pre-2k2 bodies with stupid karate crap and ugly HP display
- new and confusing kingdoms instead of focusing on the ones that were already there
- giving bomies special abilities or some new attacks or something which would have been hell to balance out
- magic spells for humans and all sorts of items and crap needed to perform them

These are mostly Gryffon's ideas by the way so he's sure not going to like me saying they are bad for 2k1. But they are. 2k1 is not GK and if you want to get into that sort of intense RPing, you should just play GK or work there to make it what you want.

2k1 was very loosely about roleplaying. Roleplaying on 2k1 was never so technical and not about making up complicated and cool sounding names for kingdoms and things and making up crappy and confusing histories about everything and totally ruining what 2k1 once was.

I like roleplaying but I don't feel that all roleplaying has to be dark and medieval and D&D style to be good. Graal was born from Zelda, and Zelda was never about that kind of crap. Zelda was lighthearted and made you feel like you were whisked away into a storybook. It didn't complicate things and that's why it reaches so many people of all ages.

Coming up with a bunch of random names like Bellasera and Vanguard and Oraster and all of that might be fun to think up, but it's not fun to have to learn and involve yourself in. What was wrong with the old kingdoms? They were simple... you had Dustari which was about being a knight and a classic medieval style, you had Pirates, you had Zormites the fish kingdom, and you had Samurai. Simple. None of this other crap is needed. At least, not on 2k1.

Gryffon totaly didnt understand my post. Graal2001 was fine back in 2002 when I joined and you ***** staff went and screwed it all up. CHANGE IT BACK!
Maybe then the server would accually populate up and everyone could enjoy what it was like 4 years ago. Lance and the staff tried a new approach and it totally failed. You guys didnt even have to work on the server. All you had to do was move it from its original gold status to classic status.
None of these new Kingdoms like Konidias points out. I mean hell you *****s destroyed Dustaris original Kingdom do you have any class or respect at all for the history of that place.
You guys had it all wrong from the start when you tried to change a server that was completly fine.

First and foremost, let me preface this by saying that I spent FOUR YEARS as a Dustarian. If it would have made sense to keep Dustari, I would have. But Dustari died, by no fault of its own, and to keep reviving it would have been more harmful to its reputation.

Sounds kind of like 2k1.

And to Koni, considering you never saw any of the planned abilities, I think you commenting on how the simple, 2k1-style spellsystem and simple bomy abilities would "be hell to balance" is exactly armchair quarterbacking.

Sounds like Jeff's revival... and what happend with that? Yeah it died.

2k1's players were all about getting gralat... you can't deny that. 2k1 is dead, the community that drove it is gone, just let it go.

As for Koni's comments, I don't think it's right for you to bash Lance when you yourself had failed at several attempts to revive 2k1 with your own twist.

It has nothing to do with how simple the spell system would be. It's the fact that there would be a spell system at all. As far as I remember... the original 2k1 had pretty fun sparring and fighting because it was kept to swords (the bamboo was never really used much). Also judging by the fact that nothing else on 2k1 is balanced, I'm gonna go ahead and assume that this stuff wouldn't be either.

I have failed several times? How can I fail at a server that's never been public. That's not a failure. Failure is releasing a server twice, having it die both times, blaming it on everything but your own management skills and then leaving it to die.

Thats not even failure, thats like super failure or "Mission Failed" failure.

The main reason on the failure of 2001 was this:
"PHs and Bomies will be released Friday"
Friday Comes.. then Saturday.. then Sunday... all but CheeToS are on and the playercount falls by 20 each day.

You guys should have had PHs, Bomies, and ALL JOBS rescripted before releasing, and I know that could not have tooken long to rescript it all in GS2 ( i believe you guys are using that )

Even if those things were released when the world opened back up, it would still have lost all it's players. Like I've said before... making it harder to earn money after you've reset everyone is not going to make people flock to your server.

It's like getting fired from your job, and then having them rehire you years later for less pay.

I think Lance might be one of the worst managers 2k1 has ever had. He managed to not only release the server with half of the old things not working, but he also changed several working things and made them worse.

I figured out what killed 2k1 last night. I shall not say it though, because I want it to stay dead.

If only they had made me manager.

I actually would of loved to see this one. Though like you said it probably would of been hell to balance out. Though I also like the new bodies and would of liked to of seen the types of special abilities/spells they would of came up with.

You didn't reach your end goal... so yes, I consider that a failure. Never said anything had to be released to be a failure.

It was a forced release.

Your opinion.


There's no need to bash Lance... 2k1 is gone, it was gone very soon after Kingdoms came out. Let it go. I highly highly doubt anyone could have revived it to 1/2 of what it was.

Yes it does have to be released to fail. You cannot be 100% sure I won't reach my end goal. But you can be 100% sure that Lance's 2k1 release failed. Because... well look at the player count.

Did you ever stop to think why that is? Stefan was growing impatient with the project taking so long. Lance had over a year and a half and there were months without any activity whatsoever, when Lance said things were moving along and progress was being made. He essentially lied right to our faces.

No he didn't. He never posted/said anything during the downswing. Whenever he posted that it was progressing, work was actually being done. While I may not have agreed with Lance's high standards forcing this stringent downtime, I didn't think we were in any rush to put out crap.

Apparently, I was wrong.

Are you sure about that? Because he was posting that progress was being made and I have various resources that tell me there was nothing getting done at the very time he was saying that there was.

He complained several times about staff not being active enough or not having enough staff to get things done. This is why weeks would go by with absolutely no progress. This is why Stefan set a release date. He wanted Lance to get his team working and get the server finished...

I wouldn't even be posting any of this if Lance and his team were actually working daily on development of the server... and it was just taking a lot of time. But like I said... weeks would go by with nobody doing anything and Lance did nothing to change it either. That, in my opinion, is bad management.

You were given an opportunity and you didn't fulfill it. To claim that you are a more accomplished manager than Lance is false.

I was in Dustari as long as you gryffon I've been playing this game almost as long as you by a 2 month difference. Don't try and tell me about what I dont know about this server bro. I was a ET on this server and I accually do care about this server unlike yourself. I want this server to get its population up and I want to see it totally finished. But I also want to see the old bodies and everyone to have a sword at the start. I believe that what you guys have done has confused the newer players and so they arent getting the full aspects of the server.

Gryffon just look for some more things to quote off me thanks ; )

dude theres less than 10 ppl around from the original 2k1 players

lance didnt even start playing 2k1 for a probably a year after it was released

same with almost the entire new staff who worked on it. Im tired of coming on here seeing people claim they've been around forever when buddy...you haven't. 2k1 was so simple when it was first released but it had Stefan working on it and he always had something new to release. Zormite and Dustari were the original kingdoms and people still had fun. Then addition after addition was added and it always added more fun to the game. Personally I think the reason it failed is that when 2k1 was shut down initially it was "complete". Stefan was no longer managing it, the new staff working on it slacked and didn't release things which appealed to players.

Well, I had a reasonable amount of hours on 2k1 back in the day. (I dunno, 200 maybe?) But I wasn't a hardcore player because I only had p2p for one stint and it wasn't until maybe 6 months - 1 year after 2k1 was released. (I was an avid opponent to the release of p2p in general, free servers 4 lyfe!) So this is coming from a player who was interested in seeing the server opened but wasn't super hardcore.

The new 2k1 was too Hard! I spent about 3 hours collecting gralat and ended up with a net of like....12. First of all, the people who knew everything about the server had sprinted from the opening and got swords and would pk incessantly. So in my wandering attempts to remember where things were, I would inevitably be sucked dry of whatever precious gralat I had collected. A server I was looking forward to opening and had been jockying and contemplating kingdoms and RP for for months lost my interest within about 5 hours of gameplay.

That was the fault of this rerelease. In my opinion at least.

This was a whole crap load easier to get gralats then the original 2k1.

Seriously. In the beginning, there weren't even jobs for gralats, the few on the server were placed there by Events Team members for "Gralat Tag" type events, similar to the very beginning of the 2K2 Alpha. And when jobs finally arrived there weren't nearly as many simple jobs as there are now. Before Pie baking, Gralats were REALLY hard to get.

Well, I was more speaking to the constant threat of PKing, etc as the cause of the challenge. Without any sort of way to defend yourself from login, you are doomed to loose gralats again and again to the kids who logged on 1 hour before you and got a sword. Either give some sort of weapon from the beginning or implement some sort of P-Mode.

Pausing is an effective way of not getting killed.
Problems existed in the very beginning of the rerelease, because NoPK zones were not working correctly at the time.

I never claimed I was a more accomplished manager. I was simply stating that Lance is a poor one. Then it was brought up that I "failed" so I was also a bad manager. But I wasn't claiming I was great in the first place.

Oh and Brad, I agree with everything you said. The original 2k1 was fun because new stuff was added all the time. Even if it was just new hats or a new instrument or two. It was still completely new content. Plus there were lots of active levelers... even though I think 2k1 started going downhill when birdbird arrived. Since he wanted to birdbirdize every level by filling them full of lights and npcs and making the tiling all messy and weird.

Hey, Birdbird was the ****. He just needed to relax a bit.

He was a great guy, and yes you're right, he was a little wired/weird.

He only wanted to help 2k1 I know that, but his slum areas were just making 2k1 uglier and laggier. Underground Lake is nice I think, because his level style works there... but he started the revolution of people putting lights on stuff that wouldn't illuminate EVER, and I cringe every time I see those levels. Putting a green light on every bush/tree in your level does not add ambience. It makes it look retarded and it lags people who don't have supercomputers. Please, stop the torture.

I remember loving his levels back in the day. I think if he removed the laggy light npc's they would have been great. They were considered the best in graal at the time.

I worked with him on Era for sometime, he was obsessed with the light effects. His levels worked with them though.