A 'clean' interesting rant.

[Raelyn]

Originally Posted by Drakeero

This isn't a flame, it doesn't attack anyone. It's just an old grievance. It's just getting it out of my system, and hopefully providing something interesting to read for the older players.

About two years ago, no one had a mental level much over 10. Why? Because leveling mental didn't involving killing things, so the flamers, pk'ers, and lazy people two years ago didn't want to be bothered with it. Those that did, ran into the trouble of not knowing how to do much, or it being initially expensive to get started in leveling up mental.

I chose, alchemy. I got my cauldron, started alchemizing 7 waters at a time to make some spare plat, buying better ingredients from the Hirathia store, making better stuff. As my mental levels rose over time, the process became marginally profitable, and then profitable enough to be self-maintaining. Around mental level 12, it became as profitable as harvesting body parts from a HH.

I had spend thousands buying up all the books and recipes that I had seen cycling through during the several weeks I had spent, sometimes non-stop, sometimes intermittantely (gotta repair that house). Then, I began experimenting, yes, experimenting, that thing that serious people do to learn new things.

I am the person who discovered the recipe you all love that uses rubies. Yes, I AM THE ONE WHO FIGURED IT OUT. My weeks of work and hard effort. Someone accused me of scamming when my mental broke records and took first place on an old high-score chart (haven't bothered to see if its still around). One of the more corrupt admins at the time looked into it, found out that it WAS legitimate, but instead of doing the honorable thing and telling them to figure it out themselves, he broadcast it to everyone who he was buddy-buddy with and soon the recipe gets out, people buy out rubies by the ton, and start doing that age old trick of 'pushing' me out of the way to fight for ingredients.

Now, I don't have any grudges over having a now relatively low mental level, i can swallow being scoffed at by newer members when I say I found out the ruby recipe was so good at leveling, but what REALLY stings (and I THINK i can understand Stefan's reasoning behind it) but what still REALLY stings, is now, the game rudely informs me to "go learn the recipe" when I try to alchemize 7 waters. It just stings, after so much I know longer officially know a single recipe. Now, i'm going to have to spend who knows how many more thousands of plat to do all that what second nature to me.

Can someone please at least let me know if this major cutback inflicted on me and most likely others has really had ANY improvement on the playability of Graal?

It's only made the game more frustrating. As an ex-crossfire player, I knew every recipe for every item, and I know recipes for items GK players have never seen or heard of but can be called for on debug, which I also used to have.

My only grudge against GK however is that they used the open-source crossfire and nuked all the most important parts to make the game less fun. For instance, if you're going to copy all the skills from another game, where is my hiding skill? Why is it disabled? I don't spend hours and hour stealing from monsters to have such a high agility skill for nothing. Hiding is and should be a highly useful skill and a great reward for those who took the time to level their agility, why no hiding?

I could even accept the fact that despite my high agility skill, there is no skill-based benefit to agility skills like mining. Why does it take me as long to mine as someone with level 1 agility, when my agility is so high? Seriously, beyond level 40-50 agility, why should it take you more than 4-5 hits to break a rock? At least give us some benefit for our hard work on otherwise useless skills.

Also, another thing that peeves me is that GK doesn't carry the random drops, like crossfire.

If I kill monsters in crossfire, they drop randomly generated items, like a crossbow of Zormola +2, or a gloves +1, why do we have to settle for body parts, and nothing directly useful?

Not a big deal, I accept that graal is it's own game, but if you're going to be unoriginal and steal someone elses game design, why disable most of the features that made it fun to begin with?