Don't forget how changing your email address also gets it removed.

Never did for me. :p

You should really read what you are buying before you confirm an order :P

I'm talking about account email, not forum email.

This explains why the game has died so much. :[

ta-da!

To be honest, everything takes money to run. If everybody had Lifetime Classic today, nobody would even bother contributing. Why bother? You'd be able to log in for free on the mainstream servers, so why should you care that nobody else is contributing?

Endgame: In the event that all it took was buying gold once and receiving Lifetime Classic, that would have probably killed the game by now. Sure, a lot of people may still be playing, but there's no point having a lot of people if you cannot maintain the monetary factor of running it and it'd be shut down.

So your options would be:
A) If you don't already have the old Lifetime Classic, pay to play and deal with the lower playercount, or
B) Let anyone who can afford the specific subscription required to get Lifetime Classic buy it and watch as the game goes downhill faster because it's impossible to maintain the service to the customer.

The problem with the tone of TSAdmin's post (and basically everything CJ says) is that all the blame and responsibility is put on the players. Many of the forum users are people who HAVE stuck around Graal, while tons of others (even those with lifetime subscriptions) have run away. So why are we the ones being guilt-tripped as though our logic would 'ruin' Graal? We're the reason Graal exists--whether we are currently paying or not, players join this game because of us. There would be no reason to join up at all if there weren't any persistent players. And boy are we persistent.

What is killing Graal is not a lack of money, but a lack of effort. CJ puts little to no concern into a game that they seem to see as just some little hobby. They can pull the plug whenever they want, because it's their game. Due to this same contrived logic, I believe both Stefan and Unixmad have considered and will always consider Graal to be something temporary. Every effort they have ever put into it has been temporary; their interest soon dissipates from any project they work on. They don't seem to feel indebted to players at all either, which is a really sad state of affairs, considering how much we train our eyes on them, anticipating acknowledgment. This attitude trickles down and pervades the Graal community. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy: We know that Graal is not cared about and that our efforts are ultimately wasted, so why should we do more than what we distinctly enjoy doing?

Cyberjoueurs, try making money not by finding new, more clever ways to exploit players, but by actually making the game worth buying. Graal may only be an easy buck to you, but to us it's actually something meaningful that we players would like to see live on.

Door is absolutely right, you make it sound like we are the ones forced to keep this game alive.

I think you may be reading into TSA's post something that is not there tone wise. I believe he was just explaining why lifetime subscriptions no longer exist. We all agree it takes more than money to keep a game alive.

TSA is Australian though and we all know they sometimes come off sounding a little harsh. Its the heat of the outback affecting their minds :p

Bell's post has made me suddenly attracted to TSA. Crikey.

Honest question to the global staff who have posted in this thread:

What is the plan to keep the playercount of PC graal alive? There isn't one, is there?

We have already said that with v6 the client will work much better on peoples computers (also works full speed & full featured on Mac). We are also planning to switch more servers to an item-based + free system. The scripted tools also need to be finished sometime so that we don't rely on the old editor anymore. We plan to use Graal more as a developement platform, and with Classic on iPhone it's proven that we can spin off Graal servers to make successful commercial projects and expand the audience of the game.

This is true.

This is also true, though I'm not sure how much of it has to do with my nationality. I'm surrounded by people who try so hard to sound kind hearted and the sort, whereas I'm just plain blunt.

;) lol
God I hated Steve Irwin though for trying to be the front for our culture. I think he had ADD or ADHD or something.

Though still in the beta stages, I can already confirm this is true. It was a shock to my eyes when I first got onto V6 and was able to walk around more smoothly and also notice after 5 minutes of playing that my memory usage didn't suddenly skyrocket anymore.

Stop saying I'm kind hearted TSA or the people who think I'm an evil monster will start catching on. My reputation will be ruined.