[konidias]

Okay! *cracks knuckles* Time for me to repeat myself!

I'm really glad that you're making this thread Unixmad... it's definitely a step forward.

Okay first off... the forums and classic's current content are not worth anyone reupgrading. So that should be free forever. (after the initial gold upgrade) This let's non-gold players communicate with staff and gold players, which in turn, might convince them to upgrade for whatever reason.

Next, the website issue has been addressed, but I will restate that I think you should have weekly contests for poems/comics/art/stories so that you'll get people contributing to Graal as a community, plus if you give them discounts off graal store merchandise or discounts on another upgrade, it will encourage people to submit stuff. This could be a weekly update to the site which would keep the website even more active looking. Plus when strangers come in from the outside and see the site has a lot of fan art and stuff, it's going to show that this game has fans and people dedicated enough to write stories or draw art for it.

Another big thing is staff... You've simply got to dig up some more people to handle this stuff. Support center, website, possibly a newsletter... more moderators for the forums and possibly ease up on the rules... Otherwise the forums feel very unfriendly where you can't have an opinion that a mod/admin doesn't like without being banned.

Okay... now on to the actual point of this thread... How to make money with Graal. You need more gold content. More servers. You need to get teams put together of talented people and you need to watch over them like they are your children. You get together these teams and you assign them new gold servers to make... and make sure they are active. You could possibly reward these people with free gold days for each day of work they put into the server. This is only fair seeing as how they are losing play time by working for you. Then while the servers are being made, you pull in some people from the outside to give their opinions about it... Maybe you could start by creating a website or forum poll that is multiple choice which lets people choose what sort of servers they'd like to see. (medieval fantasy, modern, futuristic, something totally different, etc)

You need someone at Stefan's level or Stefan himself to actually keep these teams in check and possibly motivate them and keep them working. You'd have quality gold servers coming out all the time. You also need to encourage professionalism with the team. Not just acting professional but making professional quality work. Not just slapping random levels and graphics together from all directions. All graphics and levels and scripts and everything about the server should stay consistent.

So anyway, the main problem is that you have 2 gold servers that aren't very active, up against a dozen + classic servers with varying levels of activity. You need to try and match the number of classic servers with Gold ones. That doesn't mean taking the badly made classic servers and forcing them to go Gold. It means starting new gold server projects.

I mean, it's silly to even ask why nobody is upgrading when all you have are two gold servers that are in specific genres. I don't like the hardcore stats based MMORPGs and I don't like the futuristic laser shooting stuff. So where does that leave me as far as gold servers? I've got no options.

I would stop worrying about Graal3D and put more focus into making more high quality and active Gold servers. Your current playerbase didn't start playing Graal because it was fancy 3D. I don't want fancy 3D Graal and I'm sure many people agree with me.

Which reminds me... stop losing focus on what Graal is about. Graal is not a 3D game and it shouldn't be. Graal is not a hub for flash games. If you want to make flash games, then make them graal related. Make chess but make it using little graal characters instead of chess pieces. Screw having a flash game lobby. Why not make a gold server that acts as a lobby for tons of Graal minigames like those? I think that would be far more interesting. You could still link the games in the lobby, just have them direct the player into that gold server. When those games came out I didn't even know they EXISTED. My account is expired and there is no listing of the games at all in my Graal game.

Also, don't base Graal's image around one server. I hate it. I don't like GK that much and yet you've changed Graal to "Graal Kingdoms". All of your merchandise minus one item is GK related. The website images, the forum... it's all GK related. I miss the fun family-oriented slash'em that Graal once was.

You could definitely get more people upgrading if there were more gold servers that people actually wanted to play. I mean you've got this great game engine and scripting language and all the tools needed to make great online games... yet you have two measily gold servers as your selling point. =/ I gave up on GK a long time ago... Because it lost it's professionalism the moment Stefan stopped focusing 100% on it. The economy was never balanced properly, staff were hired with powers and not watched over. People would abuse glitches and nothing was done about their accounts being overpowered. The one of a kind battleaxe I won in the first spar event ended up being three of a kind within a couple of months... Just things like that which ruin the experience.

I'd love to go into more detail about how Graal could do a lot better but I know you don't exactly like me or what I have to say anymore.