A 'clean' interesting rant.
 

This isn't a flame, it doesn't attack anyone. It's just an old grievance. It's just getting it out of my system, and hopefully providing something interesting to read for the older players.

About two years ago, no one had a mental level much over 10. Why? Because leveling mental didn't involving killing things, so the flamers, pk'ers, and lazy people two years ago didn't want to be bothered with it. Those that did, ran into the trouble of not knowing how to do much, or it being initially expensive to get started in leveling up mental.

I chose, alchemy. I got my cauldron, started alchemizing 7 waters at a time to make some spare plat, buying better ingredients from the Hirathia store, making better stuff. As my mental levels rose over time, the process became marginally profitable, and then profitable enough to be self-maintaining. Around mental level 12, it became as profitable as harvesting body parts from a HH.

I had spend thousands buying up all the books and recipes that I had seen cycling through during the several weeks I had spent, sometimes non-stop, sometimes intermittantely (gotta repair that house). Then, I began experimenting, yes, experimenting, that thing that serious people do to learn new things.

I am the person who discovered the recipe you all love that uses rubies. Yes, I AM THE ONE WHO FIGURED IT OUT. My weeks of work and hard effort. Someone accused me of scamming when my mental broke records and took first place on an old high-score chart (haven't bothered to see if its still around). One of the more corrupt admins at the time looked into it, found out that it WAS legitimate, but instead of doing the honorable thing and telling them to figure it out themselves, he broadcast it to everyone who he was buddy-buddy with and soon the recipe gets out, people buy out rubies by the ton, and start doing that age old trick of 'pushing' me out of the way to fight for ingredients.

Now, I don't have any grudges over having a now relatively low mental level, i can swallow being scoffed at by newer members when I say I found out the ruby recipe was so good at leveling, but what REALLY stings (and I THINK i can understand Stefan's reasoning behind it) but what still REALLY stings, is now, the game rudely informs me to "go learn the recipe" when I try to alchemize 7 waters. It just stings, after so much I know longer officially know a single recipe. Now, i'm going to have to spend who knows how many more thousands of plat to do all that what second nature to me.

Can someone please at least let me know if this major cutback inflicted on me and most likely others has really had ANY improvement on the playability of Graal?

EDIT: This may not count as constructive, and it certainly may have been much spammed and much flamed over in the past, I missed it. So please, for those polite ones out there, humor me. I don't want to open a can of words, I'm just looking for a little closure, for better, or for worse, over this gaping wound. (and please, no salt)

It's only made the game more frustrating. As an ex-crossfire player, I knew every recipe for every item, and I know recipes for items GK players have never seen or heard of but can be called for on debug, which I also used to have.

My only grudge against GK however is that they used the open-source crossfire and nuked all the most important parts to make the game less fun. For instance, if you're going to copy all the skills from another game, where is my hiding skill? Why is it disabled? I don't spend hours and hour stealing from monsters to have such a high agility skill for nothing. Hiding is and should be a highly useful skill and a great reward for those who took the time to level their agility, why no hiding?

I could even accept the fact that despite my high agility skill, there is no skill-based benefit to agility skills like mining. Why does it take me as long to mine as someone with level 1 agility, when my agility is so high? Seriously, beyond level 40-50 agility, why should it take you more than 4-5 hits to break a rock? At least give us some benefit for our hard work on otherwise useless skills.

Also, another thing that peeves me is that GK doesn't carry the random drops, like crossfire.

If I kill monsters in crossfire, they drop randomly generated items, like a crossbow of Zormola +2, or a gloves +1, why do we have to settle for body parts, and nothing directly useful?

Not a big deal, I accept that graal is it's own game, but if you're going to be unoriginal and steal someone elses game design, why disable most of the features that made it fun to begin with?

Raelyn, it sounds like you have some good greivances, but this thread is kinda my rant here, could you uh... either help me out, or make your own thread, please?

This isn't a hey everyone let's rant about what we don't like, this is my last final hurrah about this issue before I bury the axe and start buying recipes again.

Should make Sam view this thread and comment. PMing him always works.

I sympathize with you, I truly do. I also had and still have to buy recipes that I already know and have used many many times before.

That's what I said in my previous post, and it led to other equally pesky greivances of mine.

By the way, while you were gone we kind of moved beyond harvesting body parts and getting plat isn't too hard now.

Heh, I make 8k-10k a day harvesting hearts and livers in level 2-3 maps. Not to mention that I find diamonds and more maps while I am doing them...

I have a bag of maps like 200 deep, and it seems like for every map I do, one of the monsters drops 1-2 more maps...

Seriously, at this rate, I will never run out of maps. :o Or plat for that matter.

So no one else is gonna tell me whether or not making these recipes learnable has any effect in the game other then more heartache all around?

In the two months I spent heavily alcheming, I only saw about 1/2 of all the recipes. It will take forever to get back to my regular abilities.

Yep, and I have been making Dust of Piercing Vision since 2003, over 3 years now, and suddenly I can't, because I don't haver the recipe, and people want to charge 100 diamonds for it.

I seen DoPV being sold today for like 50 dias.

Which is absurd, because I know the recipe and I've done it thousands of times.. *sigh* But I still have to learn it.

Hmm, my mental level after far above 5 k online hours is still at 26. I know that people selling leveling scrolls lvl 107. I know there are some recipes giving a lot others only very low lvl points.
But serious, isn't it with all skills more or less the same?
There are always ways to lvl. faster, but what if you reached a high lvl in almost every skill? I will tell you: you will be so much bored that you maybe some weeks PK everybody near you, loosing friends or lacks because of that behavior to get new friends and at last you leave the game.

I would like to see people are going more back to the roots. Sometimes, I think it would be better to reset all this levels back so people find a way back to play together.

Recipe books and stuff should be spawn in a shorter intervals, maybe it is possible to do that.
Perhabs we can add some new interesting recipes and enforce so the leveling of mental by doing some nice and helpful recipes.

Sam, I think you are right on with this as far as a few things.

Shops for one, should spawn faster. If I remember, they used to spawn alot faster. Perhaps we should make it so the shop resets everytime a player exits the shops, this way people can't scalp things like scrolls, and spells, and items that are harder to find.

EAs and things only cost about 1k in shops, but people buy them and then charge other people like 2,500 plat. This scalping is outrageous, and the game would greatly benefit from an increased shop respawn time. That way everyone can buy the things they need at a reasonable price, and not have to pay someone else more for being a jerk.

Another thing you are right on about is that people need to learn to play together. And one thing I think ruined this is the level restriction on parties. That was a very dumb move and we need to make it so all players can party together, regardless of level. This would make people more inclined to go hunting together to level up.

Alot of people will say that this feature caused "cheating" where people would get more exp for partying with newbies, but I when that was the issue, people didn't just alch rubies to get to level 110, so I think that is all out the window now. Besides, while a higher level may get more exp for partying with a lower level, he is indirectly helping the lower level by partying and hunting with him anyways.

It is in this scenario that everyone wins, we need to go back to those days.

Also, we need to go back to the days of losing experience points when you die. This feature may seem harsh, but it exists for a reason which I think many can appreciate. It is to throttle the PKs and make them take warfare more seriously. People would be alot more cautious and hesitant in bmode if their levels were on the line.

This would help out bigtime to bring all the power players into check, and it would bring a real seriousness level to Kingdom-based warfare. If two kingdoms were in battlemode and at war with each other, you would gain a raised sense of value for fighting for the kingdom if you had something to lose.

Something alot of people forget is the most important thing in keeping a game interesting is keeping it challenging, and after all these changes that have been made in the past, high level players no longer have anything to challenge them, and I blame our dwindling playerbase on that exactly.

Bring back exp loss, open parties, and increase shop respawns.

I garuntee you the game will become more challenging, and that challenge will keep people on their toes and keep them intrigued. Otherwise, they will just end up quiting once they've hit level 110 and realized that there is nothing more to do.

Yeah , when i came back after quitting graal and renewed , all my items and my stats were completly gone so i had to start again . Luckily good friends from the past helped me out though like Johnathan :D