Intro + Progress Update

[ffcmike]

Originally Posted by Oni

Thor! It’s great you guys are making progress on the server, and the intro looks really nice. Your really dedicated to this server.
However I have a few concerns, please hear me out.
You say after the Castle Quest is completed you will, “consolidate both content and other aspects of the server and push for a server release“. This scares me because it makes me feel you think quests are priority and everything else is secondary. How you worded it especially, you seemed to not really give to much importance to the other stuff you kind of just jumbled them all together and called it “content and other aspects.”

Well actually, by "consolidate" I mean revisiting the things that have not been a priority when building the systems, working on the Spar + Event systems, working on Quest related content & resources etc, this is mainly level insides, not to say it isn't important, I want them to contain much more detail in terms of NPC interaction than what people are used to, but things have needed to be done in a certain order and this is really one of the last things necessary to make the server presentable as "complete".

Originally Posted by Oni

1. Polish, polish, polish. EVERYTHING on this server needs to be perfected, every single tile, every single npc. It needs to look, feel, and sound BEAUTIFUL. I don’t care if the past had a certain look, because this isn’t the past. Mmorpgs are meant to develop, or else people will move onto the next one (like most of the Graal community has done already).

There never has been a feeling that certain things should be kept as they were "for the sake of being old", my message has always been that it's important everything fits towards the theme, some times old content will do this, other times not.

Originally Posted by Oni

2. The content has to be overwhelming. Ever inch of the server needs to have thought put into it. There has to be a currency, items, and other gadgets to be collected and farmed. This is the main idea that fuels most modern games. No one likes grinding, but they’re willing to do it if they’ll earn something cool. People like to be better than others. That’s the idea behind online games. Your competing with others to be the coolest (sounds dorky but its true, think about it).

Nothing is going to be implemented for the hell of it, there is a planned approach regarding to the main Questing content which is much more sophisticated than on the server previously, regarding an Economy there are alot of ideas which have been discussed though nothing concrete until a later point of time, meanwhile nothing wreckless shall be done that can possibly impede our ability to utilize an economy in future,

Originally Posted by Oni

3. The entire event and spar system has to be revolutionary, seriously. You can’t have people complaining about HD, that shouldn’t even be a thought. It needs to just be solid. If you have to redo all the systems or whatever, do what it takes. The time you put in is worth it. Also the events need to be reworked and added too. This falls into both the polish and currency category. Make sure CLASSIC has the best event system. This will drive the server (like it has in the past).

Both the Spar and Events (atleast the Team side of things atm) setup have imo been revolutionised.
The spar system is GUI based, has more options, details on screen, greater statistics viewable in profiles etc.
The Team Event system is similar to what you may be used to when playing CTF pre-wipe, but was specifically made to control + be applied to all Team Events, it takes no time at all to add a new CTF mode, not much time to add an entirely new Team Event, and adding new features/fixing bugs instantly applies to every Team Event, inwhich there are plenty of already.
The joining/summoning for Events is also automated now.

Originally Posted by Oni

4. If your going to focus on quests because you think that’ll bring that adventure feel back to the server, well, make MOST of the quests MULTIPLAYER. Who want’s to do stuff by themselves. I’ll answer this for you, VERY FEW. People don’t come online to play by themselves, this is just a given.

This has been discussed before, and I agree that there should be some specifically multiplayer Quests, but this is something i'd like to switch the focus to at a later point of time, implementing them separate from the main storyline inwhich the core server is designed towards, though not necessarily as something you have to complete after the single player content, possibly any time.

Something you have to consider is that in aiming to create an Adventure/Questing style server (which Graal lacks), one of the main goals is to create something which is both attractive and friendly towards entirely new players, this is much easier achieved with single player Quests.