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Originally Posted by unixmad
What's about million of people making web pages on blobs, do they work for free for the company hosting the blobs? No, they do what they like to do.
When some people are reading web pages some others are using creativity to write text and make everyone enjoy what they do.
They don't make money with what they do but they make experience, if one day they have opportunity to create there own business they will have skills and experience.
Graal is the same for games, we give opportunity to player to create games and manage most of the administration of games. Some player world manager will only do for fun but some others will work in the game industry (we have lot of example of Graal players that work in the game industry) .
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I understand everything you said here and I agree, you make a valid point. This also shows that you do care about the game and are open for ideas... let's continue (thanks for re-opening the thread!)
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Originally Posted by unixmad
You say that we have not improved the restaurant since P2P, do you really play Graal ? If I count number of professional people that have worked on Graal we have probably spent more than 50 man year of work to make graal.
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Essentially we arent saying
GRAAL itself is getting worse, we are simply bringing up the issue of the dying community ahd the stand still, you can't deny the fact that the forums have died and the playercount has gone down. We arent anti-graal, we are for graal and we don't want to see the game drown when it brings a great amount of entertainment.
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Originally Posted by unixmad
Making an Online game is not only programmers but graphic designers, Web Designer, Web scripters, Computer technicians, Network Technicians, Administrative Staff to manage office, payment of Staff, State taxes …
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Well aware of this, that's why I agreed to the classic one time fee because of financial reasons. Graals server is up 99% of the time now compared to it's horrid past of going down constantly.
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Originally Posted by unixmad
To manage a Online game you need lot of hidden charges including the renting of a office (We have a dedicated house for Graal staff), Computers and Network (We are renting a dedicated space in a Paris datacenter with 3 complete racks, We have more than 30 rackable computers, we have a dedicated Gigabit network with Cisco routers ( 2 X 6509 cisco switch/routers ) , we have dedicated tape robots to be able to archive backups for 2 months. We have NFS servers to store data in a safe way. That’s a lot of money.
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Yes more finiancial reasons, completely understandable and I don't think anyone would argue with you on this.
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Originally Posted by unixmad
Graal have more diversity than any other game and give opportunities to everyone loving 2D games to play what they like. Our goal is not to make a clone of Ultima Online but to create lot of diversity to make everyone find a style of 2D world to enjoy playing. Also our Goal with Graal is to give advanced communication tools to be able to have fun playing but also make Online friends. How many other online game give advanced communication tools and tools to create Online world?
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This is where I might get a little harsh but I'm not against you.
When you say graal is more diverse than any other game I would have to disagree with you. That's all based on opinion/perspective, sure graal is diverse but every online game is diverse because it reaches out to players all over the world.
I see where you are going with graal, there are prominent overall improvements but I think you are taking what we are saying the wrong way. In my opinion graals advertisement methods and community/player assistance is really really poor, but I will continue this a bit later...
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Originally Posted by unixmad
I agree that we are not the best company for advertising or even pricing/marketing strategy but we are still there after 7 years, how many Online games are still there after 7 years? Most Online games are closing after a few years and players have no other choice than to switch from game to game, that’s not the best way to make a community neither long time friends.
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This is VERY true and I'm glad you said this.
Graal has survived for 7 years and yes that's a long time. But in 2001 graal was averaging 300 players online on one playerworld (classic/mainserver), this made room so everyone in the game could interact and actually play the game rather than develop. Now the game is still getting a top 600 players on about 100 playerworlds spread out. Therefor cuts the amount of every server more and more and more which goes away from interaction.
I remember back in the day when I would get on and every single spar room on classic was full, always a guild war going on, people in angel clan being idiots and the lovely pkers roaming around level13. Go to the playerworld now and you might get lucky to see pking.
I remember back in the day when these forums were always active and there was about 60+ users always on posting, now only the main graal forums and non-related forums(more active than any others) are the semi-active areas.
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Originally Posted by unixmad
Most players play an average of 60 hours a month, Graal is less than 5$ a month for Gold and 2$ a month for VIP, and you say it's to expensive? Where can you spend that much time for this amount?
In France for $2 you can get only a coffee or a Bus ticket.
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$5 a month seems so little when it's used that way. If $5 was nothing then I would spend my money on so many things that I would never need. You can't compare graal to necessities of life because in reality we need food, water and shelter, but graal we don't need to survive. Graal is entertainment to all of us but an extra $5 on our bills can be overwhelming. Your job is to bring us into the game and convince us to upgrade by bringing more updates,events,news and so on (no i'm not telling you how to do your job here, i'm just stating the obvious).
Above I mentioned something about player assistance so here is one of my suggestions that really can help. When I go and buy an online account somewhere (hosting, domain registration, software and games of course) one thing that is the main attraction to me is the professional customer service. I'm not saying pay for 24/7 customer service but there needs to be something done about account maintanence/
PWA. Lyndzey and Ibonic are exceptions in this because they have been around for a long time, they are mature and respond generally really quick (going off past issues). Now when I returned to graal May 2004 I browsed around the forums and I could see the
STAFF around here calling other players idiots,*****s and so on and just with that is enough to turn my back. I will admit I haven't been as active on graal for a while due to college reasons, but I stick around because you happened to get my addicted to the game for nearly 6 years. I stick around because of the old community that still exists, but lately it's just been... dull.
Essentially your restaurant is expanding, but the amount of customers are declining. Graal really should look into advertising more and continue its classic ways of entertaining players because it has the great client but the community needs more attention (more community = more cash moneys for YOU!).
I'll put more thought later, i'm quite sleepy.
It's 5:30am so some of this might be questionable.
*Suggestion idea... I'd love to post on these forums more than once a day, there should be an option to have forum access seperatly at an affordable low cost, I'd definately pay that because I don't have the time to play graal much anymore but I'd love to contribute to the boards more often but I don't want to pay $30-40 to do so.