This has been a major problem with Graal for a long time now... The Graal Management Team needs to work out some serious comunication issues. I still think a private staff/owner forum would help alot; one where only staff/owners have posting rights, so Stefan and everyone else could make it a point to read one forum, that wouldn't be full of spam to filter, and serious issues could get addressed.
Playerworlds are also in rough shape right now. We have _alot_ of Servers out there that are being run very poorly, along with some that might need a bit of help with back-end stuff. The major problem here is we have alot of people creating playerworlds, but in most cases (not all!) the PW owners don't really know enough information about how Graal works to run a server properly. It's basicaily, "Ok. Your levels are good, we'll upload them and give you the admin tools. Have fun!
" and here we're left with a situation where the server owners don't really have anyone to turn to when they have problems, lets face it; Stefan is busy with the actual programing and managing the official servers, anyone who's tried to contact him knows the odds of getting a responce from him are slim.
Another situation we're seeing is that people will get playerworlds approved, and then after they get the server, decide to delete everything and create a new world. (Or they are stupid and do not backup their playerworlds and someone else deletes them!) So then we have alot of servers that literaly have NOTHING to do, and are constantly under construction. These servers really shouldn't be online if they have nothing to offer yet. If they have work to do, they should, at the very least, have a small, temporairy world up, maybe about 25-50 levels or so, that people can play in and have things to do.
So with all this, we definately see the need for the PW Administration team to have more control. Right now it looks as though once the server is up, the PW Administration Team has no more control over the PW's. The problem, is finding someone to do this job, and handle this responsibility. If this person would go bad, then he/she could potentialy take out every playerworld on Graal.
Finding someone trust-worthy enough for this will be very hard. The best way I can think of to go about it, would be to actualy Hire someone as an employee of GraalOnline for a small amount, like maybe $10 /mo. and make them sign a leagly binding contract and such, so they would have the risk of leagle action against them if they ever were corrupt. The person they would get should probably not be a teenager, I'd think someone in there 20's who alredy has had work experiece and is a bit more responsible (no offence to all us youngin's!
) I know that Stefan and Unixmad most likely won't go for this, but I don't really see any other way, with the past experiences we've had with power-hungry players becoming staff and then going psyco!
It's very hard to find good people, especialy when they can hide behind a computer screen (It tends to change people).
The point:
Graal needs to setup a method where the inner-circle of staff can comunicate well and address issues.
Graal needs to work to get proactive staff who think ahead, and can see problems before they become nightmares. People who can actualy think outside the box and work towards constantly improving Graal, and making it more fun of a place.
Playerworlds need to be managed beter. More information needs to be avaible to new server owners.
Stefan is a busy guy. We need to stop expecting him to take care of everything, and likewise he needs to stop telling himself he CAN do everything. After all, we're all human.
I would start posting stuff about how to manager your playerworld beter, and how to work with g-server etc... but everyone would say "What do you know? You've never owned a playeworld!" So I'll just let you guys do that stuff
Urizen
05-10-2002, 09:07 AM
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