im not the be all and end all of old classic stuff, but here's what i consider makes a world, such as Classic.
No GC (or ideally, a small presence of GC) but big events held occasionally. Remember the destruction of the NL? I'd like big events like that, except that the places destroyed should be destroyed for a purpose, not just to add a sparring arena to a world with many good ones already on it
Also, events would need to be held fairly - the halloween events, for example, was held too late for people living in the UK/europe, and other countries too may have complaints. Ideally events would be held for 24 hours, starting for austrailia and ending for, erm, some place on the left side of the world
A small LAT presence - occasionally improving areas with minor additions, adding quests sometimes (contrary to popular belief, im not totally against additions
but mostly additions of player houses (to finally fill up big city and the area to the left of nearorner/onett)
The amount of players - As several have said, the 300+ players at peak times without too much lag was the real charm of Classic. That's a dream world these days, that we coudl never accomplish, unless I were to spam like 500 ex-graalians on my ICQ list to come back
Freedom - We would need to lose spar ratings (thus giving the community the decision as to who is a good sparrer or not). Access needs to be allowed to most major areas without having to do quests first (the newbie house is an exception - a way to skip it would be ideal, but then real newbies would skip it...) although that said, some areas should be quest/item locked - such as areas requiring the hammer for entry.
Less ego inflation - Just a silly gripe, but when every quest level has at least 1 Tyhm, Zorbi, Zorba or Cid on it, we're kidna losing the fact that Graal is made by the general community, and not just the LAT. As I say, LAT = Level Admin Team, not Level Making Team.
The old levels - this is where it gets hard. Some people enjoy thm's levels, and they will play the 'new classic'. Hey, Tyhm surprises me sometimes, I must admit that I like his levels, I just don't like the reasoning behind some of them, and the drastic additions (ie heras - servers have used heart pieces before, and so has the lava cave, but making every heart out of heart pieces is a bit tiring, although the advantage is of course that we can have many more quests, the disadvantage then being that these quests tend to be mass-produced by the LAT. Sure, quests have always been made by the LAT, but that's because there were less of them, and therefore there had to be made to a LAT-standard. However, look now - classic areas have been changed, and although i started in 1.32, and therefore know very little about zol, sardon etc. im sure the people who know them would be pissed off to find them stepping into a weird paradox, and zol suddenly getting a randomly named father, Lozolin.
The main thing with levels though, is that i consider the 1.32 era the 'classic levels' because thats when i started. someone who started around 1.37 or so will remember slightly different levels. someone who started 1.28 or earlier will have another totally different view. Now, for a sort of self-advertisment - the reason i like the jedi knights games at
http://graal.jediknights.co.uk so much is because they cater for all Graal-ages, simply because the people who make JK have come from different times. But they are seperate games, and attempting to mix one world with the next is impossible, at least without good planning. Chrono Trigger/Cross anyone?
Now, there could be polls (ie. SN's arena or NL, Gold Sword or not, Number of hearts etc.) but after that, trying to sort it all out would be near impossible. Therefore, we would need to vote on a level pack to use.
Also, newer graal versions contain additions which go against the older spirit in some ways. tyhm has already explained this with AP, there's also spar ratings, amount of money dropped (which can be changed easily apparently, which is good) and of course, scripting changes. The toinventory command is gonna be removed soon according to tyhm, meaning we would either have to script a replacement with a system NPC, or just have items not appearing, except in the form of a sign saying 'you have picked up item -itemname- or whatever. Tyhm's solution was to place them as undeletable items in the NPC list, but this clogs up the list with unusable items, which really doesn't help. However, the thign thats missing form older Graal versions is some of the newer script stuff, such as new sign methods, that could be used to improve the old levels (to make things look correct, and perhaps better, although nothing too fancy - the life shrine looked nice, but it became a gateway for more and more similar things to come, and eventually they just got overused and annoying).
The thing is, I always wished for a classic that was updated often, but my choices are either tyhm's world which is updated often, but missing many elements of classic, or the old world, which can't really be updated because some people will get annoyed as much as I do sometimes
because of this, I enjoy both worlds - the new world which has more players and better scripting and more quests, and the old world which has a better general feeling about it, a more relaxed style of play, more choices, no nations (the main thing that annoys me about the tyhm-world)
Because of that, if the old world goes up, then I would play both worlds, as long as the old world were to have at least 50 players at off peak times and over 125 at peak times. The problem with that would be getting enough newer players to play it, or managing to get older players back to graal.
And to royan - sremaglaer (read backwards) has been censored due to incidents with eikufam (read backwards, it might be censored) for ages now
it's a pain, cause i means i have to use
http://graalupdate.cjb.net to advertise my site instead of the usual URL,
http://graalupdate.*******ers.net (damn censorship
03-25-2002, 04:56 PM
Linear Mode
