I've scripted roughly 95% of the server from scratch, which also consists almost entirely of custom scripted systems, have been working on it non-stop for 5 and a half years (as has Racil), with over 13,000 hours online time. If that's not enough for you, I'm sorry.
I have never refused anybody the opportunity to develop who had provided significant good & useful examples of what they're capable of (providing a link to someone else's code threads saying that you understand how it works doesn't cut it for me), and didn't have a recent ban/corruption history. I'd like nothing more than to get back to working on Quests in order to further the storyline and to expand the world, but unfortunately there are fundamental problems (some ofwhich beyond our control) which render efforts futile.
I hope you understand that the quests are not necessarily aimed at those who have already established themself on Graal, nor are they in any way intended to keep players constantly occupied. Their primary function is to provide a sense of purpose and direction to legitimately new players.
You can usually tell roughly how new/old a trial is by their account name, guests use their PCID, whereas Graal###### accounts are incremented each time an account is created. I observe this happening with both older and fresh trial accounts.
I don't blame you for not playing, I wouldn't expect anybody to be playing with no hope of future updates and there already being hardly any players. But then why should we, the developers, continue voluntarily putting in so much effort, as we have done for a very long time as it is, when on top of having restrictions that conflict our aims (something we've already tried hard to get by with), we've been lied to and deceived for the last 14 months?
Do you think you'd still be motivated under the same circumstances?
I have never seen any documentation explaining that trials aren't allowed to play events on PlayerWorlds, only Gold servers (where observer mode is removed). Nor was it brought to staff's attention that they shouldn't be allowed in July 2007 when observer mode was implemented (I happened to be staff at the time).
As far as I know the exclusion of trials from events has always been an indirect consequence of observer mode, rather than a deliberate restriction.
This is the closest acknowledgement of the problem I'm aware of:
http://forums.graalonline.com/forums...87#post1338487
That would be an even more watered-down experience than at present.
It's been 5 and a half years since the ability to purchase lifetime accounts was removed, Classic had already reached a very low point in playercount by 2009, having previously seen its average playercount be cut in half every 2 years since P2P was implemented.
Thus it was decided (and not just by myself) to try something new, to make the server more coherent, to give it a higher proportion of quality, so that it could eventually at least be capable of hooking new players. I have sympathy for those few who have paid money to play Classic, but given the choice, I'm sure most would feel the money was better spent if they were able to regularly play events and card games with trials.
Also keep in mind that PlayerWorld developers do not get a cut of such paid money, it's never been an intention of mine, but if it were the case I'm sure things would be much different across all of Graal.
This is actually how it happened, not a change of story. Initially I thought it was a suggestion, and so I made a counter-suggestion, then later I was told this is the format it will be. Bell can verify that.