Yet for the last... nearly 10 years people have been paying them to make stuff for them. I'm not saying this is good, but to say that suddenly developers need to start being paid is stupid. Maybe for Gold servers, maybe, but the percentage they'd get after being distributed through staff would be minimal, at best. I can't say I'd be motivated by money.

However like I said, some people actually enjoy making stuff, but with a small ungrateful playerbase of the same players for the last 10 years it gets dull. For a long time developers of Graal were motivated by a playerbase that simply appreciated their work and commitment to their servers. To see players happy to get something was incentive enough.

Also, thinking that Stefan is going to suddenly remove the need for players to pay, to doing a 180 and PAYING the developers is unrealistic. BUT THAT'S NOT IMPORTANT. Subscriptions sucking is what is important. If Stefan wants to gather a team of hand-picked developers to pay them to make a worthwhile server, then fine, whatever. That'd be great. But it should not delay this suggestion because subscriptions need to go now.

Okay, here's my opinion on the whole 'quality needs to be addressed before subscriptions, for fear of scaring off potential customers,' apparent dilemma.

Right now the current PC Graal market, in my opinion, is compromised of older players. At least those in their upper teens. As you get older you can begin to pick apart and pay attention to quality much more than you would when you were younger and more immature. People can fall back on nostalgic memories of Graal all they want, but the truth is it was just as bad, if not worse, back then as it is now. Pre-P2P was pretty bad in terms of quality(not that I'm saying post-P2P was all that great, but G2k1 wasn't exactly bad ;)). Scripts were ALWAYS broken, the "quests" sucked ass, the levels were horrible. This stuff didn't matter to most of the players, myself included. Why? I dunno. It just didn't matter, and I think that has a lot to do with how young I was. However as I got older, and more involved in development(which most of the small current playerbase has done in one way or the other), my standards started to grow. I started to want MORE. And more importantly, I started to see the potential of Graal when some servers/projects gave me a hint of it, like Oasis.

The problem is that people think that the iPhone market base and the PC market base is different, and I don't think it is. All potential PC players will not have higher standards for quality compared to the iPhone market base. It's about the demographic Graal attracts, and mostly it seems to be the younger kids. I'm not basing this off numbers, but I feel the iPhone average age is much lower than the PC Graal playerbase. The iPhone app makes Graal easily accessible to the younger audience, and the gameplay itself apparently appeals to them. This has a lot to do with what I mentioned above. Younger players are more easily content. Is the PC market base suddenly devoid of the younger audiences? No it's not, but Graal on the PC is hardly accessible. The observer mode is horrible way to market a game and it's hard to even get a feel for the game when you have to sit and watch the screen for 5 minutes every few minutes. Then you have the subscriptions themselves, which are very expensive. Good luck, Timmy, getting your mommy to buy you a $50 subscription.

However, getting rid of subscriptions resolves those issues. Observer mode would be gone for good, finally, and potential players will easily be able to drop in and see what the game is like. The demographic that will most likely be attracted would be of a younger audiences... I know, sucks for us, but that's exactly what happened to the iPhone servers. They would most likely not be scared off by the quality of the servers. Look at the iPhone Classic server. It looks HORRIBLE in my eyes. The cliffing, the tile errors, the mash-up of graphics and style. But the players there don't have a problem with it.

In lue of that, the sudden influx of players, in my opinion, would no doubt be a huge inspiration for the Classic servers to get **** done. Especially since they apparently don't have very high expectations. You can release a hat once a week and you know what, I think they'd be happy.

It actually pains me to say this, because I would hate to see the overall standards of Graal drop even lower than they are now... but what can I say? I'm tired of what we have, and anyways, the main thing I'm trying to address is that getting rid of subscriptions and making the game more accessible right now wouldn't hurt business as much as you think. It should be done as soon as possible.

I've just been skimming posts, but I guess the main point I got out of Stephen's was this:

If we fix subscriptions, get a bunch of players now, but our developers don't have incentive, then the players will get bored (due to lack of new content), leave, and there goes a bunch of potential market.

Obvious counters that have already been posted:

• If we have more players, then the developers will have incentive! Problem solved.
• If we don't do anything about this now, developers will leave entirely and we're all screwed.
• We don't need good developers anyways, Graal's main demographic is fine with anything.

Main problem here is that all of these ideas are kind of opinionated and its hard to tell who is right. Is there any possibility for some sort of stats or hard facts to get added in here?

Also, if PC Graal suddenly has a 1000+ playerbase and Stefan and co. start losing money because, say, UN isn't updating enough, I'm sure they'd intervene quickly. If the business model is sound and the only thing making them lose money is some lazy staff on a Classic server(which don't have to pay server fees) I see no reason why they'd sit and watch their money disappear because of it.

I'm suprised Stefan didn't realise the playercount drop from 200+ per server to 80- per server. Blah, whatever, it's his game; his loss.

I'm not 100% following this thread but just a idea mainly targeting the pc Graal. Lowering prices for more players seams like it would fail due to the lack of updates... However the people who develop want the prices reworked correct? I know I am not all that great of a developer but if the "dev" community could come together with a list of set server ideas.

Lets say i have a project, and 3 other people have one. Each of the 4 people become the head of there own project. All 4 of the projects could combine said staff team as a over all goal to get them all complete. Each project ongoing at the same time would be rather small , lets say only able to hold roughly 30 people. The projects are small so there not over whelming if each could get completed that is 4 little servers that could boost the over all player count 30x4players. The more players the more the cost of subscriptions could be lowered. 6 people paying 50$ is the same as 12 people paying 25$. Clearly everyone would rather go with the 25$. I don't see the 25$ option possible without the Graal community putting in there helping hand to make it happen tho.

As dusty said "to say that suddenly developers need to start being paid is stupid." If what I talked about could actually happen. The developers wouldn't get "paid" but the cost to develop would go down saving them money in the long run.

I wouldn't want the iPhone servers merged with PC. That's silly.

That may apply to the majority but there were some servers that were still good in their own ways. Xone and Delteria 2002 had great levels for their time (compare Delteria's town style to UN's ****y levels, they were from similar periods). The reason why Pre-P2P servers could get away with half the crap they did was because they were old. Graal hadn't really evolved until after p2p, after custom ganis were allowed on normal servers, etc.

Content is what drives a game. This game lacks content, until that is fixed the problem will remain. You could make it free and that would be the only game has going for its self.
Take Era for example, if you released a gun per week or even month, you have more than a year's worth of content right there. That's not including other items such as melee weapons, grenades, etc. Content is not hard to get, finding people that WANT to make the content is.

Too bad this game is too screwed up to fix in the first place.

Also Shaded Legend, VERY underrated server. The only server I think to have cutscenes wasn't it

What's funny is they aren't even adding any new content to the iPhone if you think about it. They are just adding old updates. Like the Skateboard shop for instance, that isn't anything new. Yet someone actually made that without getting paid for it. People actually scripted it and put it up on Era for free, and now it's on iPhone so that Stefan can make money... LOL. Stefan, it was only recently I started hating you, but honestly you are a thief. You steal the engine for Zelda, make an online game out of it where other people are the one's that make the content for it, and you make them pay to make the content that other people have to pay for? Pretty silly if you ask me :rolleyes:

All in all Graal just needs to be free again, because it isn't quality enough right now for people to have to pay for it.

Please stop speaking about Era iPhone if you don't have any idea about how it works and who made the scripts and content.

This is probably what I would have replied regarding the untrue Zelda engine accusation, but when it comes to the point of who made the said content and that they were a player, that it was originally put up for free and is now being sold he's hardly making it up, albeit I'm not advocating his arguments.

o snap

we re-script everything for iPhone, as the PC version is laggy as hell for iPhone devices.

by your logic you're basically saying that the player has no input on what happens to the game etc. why even have these forums then?

/checkmate