What I want to see for a server

skillmaster19 · #1 07-22-2011, 04:31 AM

Note: this is not a request to see an exact server like this. This is a guideline to what servers should have to avoid the commonly made mistakes with other servers.

I have been quite sick of graal recently, because the current servers only offer repetitive gameplay. I want to see a server that relies mostly on action and skill and not on having the best gear. Here are some of the categories and how I think they should be done:
General:
Do not buy a server until you know you have a good staff team, have it all planned out,and have a lot of time on your hands. This does not mean having 20 Graal Police or having 200 developers that are brand new. non development staff are not needed when a server is under construction, they just get in the way and serve no purpose. And some people think the more staff the better, but in reality if you have more staff that means more to manage, and there are people out there who try to destroy servers. Also, having many unexperienced staff can cause problems. Some examples of this would be a LAT making many tile errors to existing levels, a scripter trying to fix a broken script and breaking it even further or making it lag the server. By this I mean experienced developers that are willing to give up sufficient time to creating content for your server.
Be original. don't copy off of another server's ideas, it will get you nowhere. Also, don't try to do something completely out of your ability.

Combat:
The combat should be original and complex but somewhat easy to learn. There should be many types of weapons that are all different. For example, A large sword should slow your movement down and take a while to swing but do massive damage in a large area. A dagger should allow rapid movement and quick attacks. Monsters should be scripted to fight in a non simple way while remaining efficient.(they shouldn't just be monsters that keep charging right at you, they should find their way around/do special attacks)

Jobs:
jobs should not be extremely repetitive and they should all make about the same amount of money. D button mashing jobs are extremely dull and and are often macroed. As an example, mining is often achieved by repeatedly pressing a key. A way to improve this be to have a moving bar that you need to time well to hit a rock with maximum power. Cooking could be made to have you have to time certain things perfectly, or else food will burn.

Economy:
it shouldn't take days to weeks just to get an item,but you shouldn't be able to achieve everything rather quickly, because once everyone has everything, there will be not much to work for. Trading should be included to allow common item trade for convenience but not allow everything to be traded so players have to actually play for the best items rather than pay to win or just do jobs. In addition, there should not be common recurring payments such as
having to pay 500 gold a week for a storage spot. These push players away from the game because they either don't have much time to play or they want to pay for something than have it forever
PKing:

PKing and sparring should be promoted with some rewards to keep players actively doing it instead of wanting to just do jobs all the time they play to get as much money as they can(I see this on era a lot). PK should be toggle-able so that new players don't constantly get killed when they are trying to learn.

Microtransactions:
Since Graal *should* be moving to free to play, servers should take advantage of gelat shops so their servers can be free to play. The items sold should not obstruct the gameplay, such as offering temporary stat increases or sell the best items in the game. Instead they should simply sell whatever currency the server offers, because it is often sold by players anyways. Stefan does it on the iPhone and Facebook servers so I imagine he would be fine with that.

Quests:
Quests should be original,complex, and unalike. I see too many quests in online games that are like "deliver 15 Leather" or "Slay 15 Boars". On Graal, I see a lot of quests with either a weak plot or none at all. Quests should be inspiring and fun. However, they should not have a giant wall of text that is extremely boring to read or extremely long intros. The quests I see on the new Classic seem to be a good example of what I am looking for.

Events:
One of the most unique things about Graal is its events. I don't see many things done wrong with events, so I will skip this. Just don't make your server's events a complete rip off of another server. Its ok to copy generic quests such as chance, but don't take all of the servers events.