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Originally Posted by iismike
It bothers me to hear so many people say graal was better in 2001, 5 years of development shouldn’t yield a negative product. The truth is, graal has developed a lot of useful and cool features and I do accept them as such. However I do have an opinion on the matter as many do but I’m going to do my best to make a really solid post that might get a good discussion going about graal and I will hope and hope that Stefan will read this and maybe keep it in mind.
Here’s the thing, to summarize what my perspective on what’s happening it is this: Graal keeps developing on potential and has not realized nearly enough. As soon as the competent graal team dropped out from classic and started working on 2001 and all these new projects I saw a big problem coming. Graal tried to reach for a dream of being a popular mmorpg (one I understand but trust me if your going to go into that market and be a generic pay per month role-playing game, get ready to go to the back of the line because huge development teams have already put out way to much competition for you guys to do very well)
Graal is not an MMORPG, it never will be and to develop it as such is just silly. Kingdoms has 13 people on right now, graal's greatest feature is the community and the freedom. If you look at what brought in the most people it was the simplicity, and the guilds and incredibly basic sparring system. People don’t want large scale things here.. That’s what made graal nice, it was small and modest and the level editing and scripting was fun and easy. I’ve seen a terrible thing happen to classic, the npcs are gone, the quests are gone and nothing works right. I could go and play Java graal and at least then I wouldn’t have to worry about killing myself in an attempt to shoot an arrow!! To much effort has been put into the engine but now that graal is P2P you cant possibly rely on nice people to maintain these servers for you, classic is currently run into the ground. And with all this effort being put into a 3d game and a mmorpg you could have saved and stuck to maintaining what you had and making it better. Make the clients different, all the staff at classic tell me that the reason everything is broken is because they are trying to (with no staff but a couple part time lats) rebuild classic with gscript2 and a gmap. Why does classic need this? it doesn’t. If the team were to restore classic to what it was level and quest wise, put it up with some of the new features but keep the gmap and gscript away then it would probably grow again and with less ridiculous stuff to deal with you’d also get more staff and it would flourish again. Stefan I understand your a coder and you want to make things secure and smart and modern, but for all those people who want that can play on kingdoms. Nobody appreciates it on classic simply because they want a Zelda ripoff like graal used to be, 15 hearts, no pk tags and a freaking lizard sword.
Also if say Classic was made free, no string attached, you’d bring in a lot more people and eventually they would get hooked just like I am and they would want to start a guild or try kingdoms or WHATEVER. But ever since graal went pay you’ve been milking the same group of people for money because there’s so few new players who are willing to pay for a game like this when they can get one of the million already made korean 2d mmorpgs or world of warcraft. You have an audience though, I’m part of it. However you’ve let graals content die because so much time has been spent making the engine so dynamic and full of potential that servers like classic aren’t even keeping up and are degrading at a really bad rate!! I love graal, but i don’t care about gscript2, its to much for any of the servers I play and I have no intention of playing anything that doesn’t feel like grail. I dont love the concept of graal3d, Its too complicated and you don’t have the resources to compete with any of the billion other 3d mmorpgs. I want my zelda online.. I want basic community driven gaming and you can’t do that with all the complications that have been made. I don’t think classic needs an npc server, and i don’t like that graal castle was removed for a billion things nobody cares about. We don’t want complicated minigames and that garbage, everybody just wants a big empty castle to try and steal the throne from.. There’s some who care about graal being pulled into the new generation, but please help classic.. rebuild your fanbase and i promise if you have a free classic again with the way it was right before it went pay you’ll have a server running with 300+ people who will eventually buy VIP for a guild or get gold to try Era or Kingdoms, and I guarantee you that if you put more emphasis in simplicity and fun you’ll have a bigger audience again. Please Stefan save classic, i know you’ve moved on from it but its your baby and it was so beautiful once. As a developer you must feel bad about what’s happened to it, its a simple and fun place to chat and have guild wars ect but you shouldn’t have to pay for it.. I know you’ve heard it a lot and you need the money but hey I promise if you don’t force people to pay to play (because the principle of paying for such a basic game has scared away so many people) they will get into it enough to pay, and a lot more than what your currently receiving. So I hope you believe what im telling you to an extent, to know that classics been better and was so good at one point and is gone now is just making me crazy. You have the power to bring it back to what it was right before it went pay, and it is a good buisness decision.
I know you probably wont read this or believe me, but graal has a way smaller playerbase, if you could capture the essence that brough over 400 people to classic alone at one point then you will have that pool of people and they will pay for guilds and whatever you can get them on. Not only that, but if graal has a bigger playerbase it will attract more people because the game is fun only when theres lots of people around! so it will expand again and be optomistic.
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You say you want your Guild Wars and stuff back. You also say that it doesn't need an NPC server. Then how the hell do you expect to have guild wars?
I can see your marketing view on Graal with Classic being free. You're right, new players could think "HMM, This is cool I guess Kingdoms would be better!" *goes and pays for sub*. But then people might not, and GO.com might lose money because existing paying members may find Classic more exciting than what they're already paying for. Like I've read from many other people and what you've also stated also, you joined because of the simplicity. In some ways yeah, I did join because of that point. I mainly joined though because the game seemed pretty interesting an fun, and I wanted to join into that fun.
I can vaguely agree on what you generally acclaimed on how pointless it was to have the creation of Graal3D. It was a step taken too soon considering the playerbase was still limited upon the release of the new server/game. Although like a majority of the other currently released servers, it was a project. The whole game IS a project from what I can sustain. Consider the fact that development tools are released publicly so then people can edit the game and create game servers themself! I consider that to have been quite a smart move from GO.com, lets the players do all the dirty work for them.
Though if you want to make comparisons to such well known games as WoW, that game is already at its final stage. The only thing updated on the game is patches, quests and etc. I'd know because I play the european version of it.
I'm 15 now and i've been playing since I was 12/3 and I guess I can say im a dedicated player, and I think thats all Graal is going to get at this stage. Dedicated players! Not the odd general player which comes on time to time for the excuse of amusement.
I don't understand however how Thallen considers your post to be "resourceful", it's more of a question on a larger scale. Though it reminds me of the attempted revolution of Unholy Nation. Which failed; see the link?
Fact is, I do believe that Stefan doesn't care what people think, as long as people are paying GO.com for the game service and he has a roof on his head for his ideas and work. That's all that he will care about.
And nice staff on servers? You're in a fantasy, all you're going to get is distressed hormonal teenagers as your favourite server's staff. Which I must admit is slightly hipocritical for me to say but i'm not staff on any server
But anyway, that is my view I would write more but im at school and extremely lazy.
Luc.
05-15-2006, 10:03 AM
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