What will this cover?
It will cover several ideas to improve Graal for new players. Some suggestions will be new, some will be old. Some of them will be up to Stefan/Unixmad, others will be up to server managers and staff. What's your role in this as a normal player? To critique it; refine it, in case a manager or Graal admin comes into the thread and is interested (which I hope will happen)
About the Author
LOL jk about this part.
How to attract new players
The new secret to Graal's potential success is iPhone. Right now it's about noon (EST) and Streety's signature says Graal iPhone has over 100 players so I'm assuming more would play during the evening. The iPhone version of Graal seems to be attracting and maintaining a few hundred players, so why not try to bring them to PC Graal, Stefan or Unixmad?
I think it'd be cool if iPhone members were offered a few weeks to try out Graal's client version. I'm not sure how the iPhone version works, but perhaps there could be a way to prove you downloaded and played it so you can enter a code or something in and get something similar to Classic accounts for a week and then get sent back to trial No ob mode, no head restrictions, etc, they'd get to try Graal at it's fullest for a certain period of time. I'm sure after a few weeks of playing Graal to it's fullest extent, they'd quickly want to play it more and buy gold time.
P.S. I believe new players would want to upgrade more with different subscription methods are described here:
http://forums.graalonline.com/forums...14&postcount=1
How to help new players stay to Graal
This is where server managers and staff come in. I noticed that servers in general aren't very noob friendly and they are forced to beg players for help or find their own way around, which can be hard.
I'll write out specific ideas for servers:
UN & Zodiac & Era
As surprising as this may sound to you, the experienced player, new players seem to have trouble finding quests/dungeons to progress at.
What I personally suggest is having a knowledgeable NPC who is very interested in helping newcomers hang around at OSL and answer questions and/or direct you to some area to progress through the game.
On Zodiac:
An NPC confronts new players in OSL saying they look like a promising new fighter and asks if they'd want to gain experiance in combat. After the player says yes, the NPC guides them to OSL2.nw, an area now full of NPCs filled with NPCs that are having troubles with baddies around the Zodiac world.
Players from level 1-10 can talk to a feeble old man who was wounded by the necromancer trainer) and his liches invaded dungeons all across escalus. He asks you if you're willing to kill his liches for an award and the player agrees and he'll take you to a dungeon (the one that's connected to the tunnels) and bid you good luck as you walk into the lich dungeon and battle them. He also says to meet him back in OSL2.nw after killing enough liches. After killing enough liches to approximately get you to level 8 (people tend to go to crocs at level 8) or 10, the old man in OSL2.nw thanks you and gives you a reward. But that isn't enough, he wants to see the Necromancer dead and says you can keep the valuables the Necromancer drops. The player can accept or decline and the old man comes with you to confront the Necromancer who conjures several enemies to fight you. The old man says "I'm too weak to persue the mancer but I can take his minions! Concentrate on the Necro while I kill his minions". The fight basically goes like this:
- The Necromancer is weaker than a croc so you can kill him fairly easily by yourself but you have to avoid the liches he summons while the old man kills them or you'll die. The old man is a mage BTW and he fireballs/bolts the liches.
- The necromancer summons 1 lich at the beginning of the fight, 2 when he's at 75% health, 3 when he's at 50%, 4 when he's at 25%, so the fight gets progressively harder as there are more liches to avoid.
- After the Necromancer is dead, he drops a nice leveling Ring to boost your stats. You also get the Follow-Me Lich, maybe for something cool.
Basically new players would be able to encounter the plight of one of Zodiac's residents and reap rewards for meeting with the NPCs and do their dirty work. I'd also like to see NPCs like this (that guide the player to a dungeon) make the player immune to all damage so level 60 players can't farm the noobs. NOOB PROTECTION FTW.
On UN:
I have no idea, UN is kind of.. less suitable for storylines like Zod is (minus the Snatch quest line) so I guess there can be an informant NPC hanging around OSL who will tell you where and how to get to quests and then congratulate you for completing them, followed by information on a new quest for the player to go to. I don't really have much to say for this, honestly lol.
On Era:
A new player is greeted by an NPC that is dying and tells you the streets of Era are merciless, yet is is the best place to be! And his only regret.. was not killing <name of Mob boss>. He tells you his wounds are great and his time is short so he gives you a handgun and tells you to find his sister who is a nurse. He says "she's at -......." and then dies but the "nurse" comment should be enough to make the new player realize she's at the hospital. After a bit a helpful NPC says "Hey stranger, you look lost! That's not good around these parts.. What are you looking for?". The NPC gives off several basic locations (Gun Point,
Hospital, Mines, etc) that you can ask him for. You ask him where the hospital is and go there and find the nurse (the dead guy's sister) who tells you about how his brother's life dreams were never accomplished and wants you to go conquered the ninja domain and the army in the sewer in this honor. Why? This is so she directs to Era's quests (I think there's a 3rd I'm forgetting about, though).
How and Why this should be done
You're probably thinking this is a lot to do and how to do it? Well firstly every server has a scripter
But really, we have the Graal Development Team. If the GDT worked closely with server staff, making Graal more noob friendly could really be easy.
Basically, I think it'd be really neat to have things similar to what ideas I pitched implemented and I'm pretty sure old and new players would enjoy them too. Starting with interesting storylines and NPCs helping you would probably make gameplay a lot more interesting anyway.
Thanks for reading. Sorry if I went a bit overboard with some of the details xD (epecially during the necromancer fight v_v)
01-21-2010, 10:33 PM
Linear Mode
