Why (Stefan)?
 

Why does Graal keep going down?

yeah, why stefan?

Still happeninggg.

You all should just buy a bunch of gelats so he can afford better servers.

do it yourself :\

no u

ya why

And now, we hope he's going to anwser. Like if that's going to happen.

That is a pretty stupid reason, He doesn't really have to pay for those servers.. And if he does, He is stupid.

If people want to keep a server online they should pay for it theirselfs. All Stefan actually has to do is make nice big updates and let the PWA's do their job by letting them pick servers to go Gold/Classic/Hosted.

When the Owner/Manager of a server won't pay for it the server just goes down. Which would be a bad manager.
+ There could be a system where people can donate cash to a server. This way stefan still earns money and players can choose by themself which servers are online.

He actually does have to pay to run those servers which includes costs for electricity and bandwidth plus with the extra costs of upgrading the hardware and replacing broken components.

They can definitely afford adequate servers with the money they make.

hahaha

I second this.

Why's that? I assume they could run upward of 10 Playerworlds easily from one typical machine, which would run around 100 dollars a month.

I'm too lazy to check but the last time I ordered 6 months of a Playerworld, the cost was 56 dollars. I am only going to assume the price has gone up since then, so let's say it's 60 dollars for 6 months.

By running 10 Playerworlds on one machine, they are already breaking even.

Running any more playerworlds on the same machine results in a profit.

I believe a Gold account now runs for something like 50 dollars a year, meaning only 24 players would need to maintain a gold account to keep the Classic/Gold servers afloat.


All this said, I believe Graal is already running on adequate servers given the fact that it has the least downtime of any online game I've ever played before, but I do wonder if perhaps players are being gouged on accounts.

A 1/8th cabinet (enough to hold 1-2 servers usually) with a 512kbps uplink (barely enough to cover 30-50 people on one server) and 5 IPs costs $750/m with any decent co-location service.
CJ is probably paying around ~$1000/m just for Graal if I had to guess.

At this rate, he won't have to explain with no new subscribers. :p

This is what i found somewhere:
Total CPU power: 8x 2500 MHz
total memory: 2048 MB
Total diskspace: 170 GB
Total bandwidth: 2000 GB
IP Addresses: 10
350.48 Euros for 1 month.

the servers they have are probably less which means its about 100-200 euros, per month per server

These are just brief quotes from the player account Battousai90290 asking via support tickets as to why Graal doesn't advertise for new players?

"But yeah, I'm going to start advertising outside of graal, to try to get more players back. I just don't know how to go about that yet... "

Me: As a player, you shouldn't have to worry about that. But I know your dedication as well others, we want to see more players... :\

"Yeah, it shouldn't be my place to do so, but Stefan told me that he isn't going to advertise, so if we want more players, we have to get them ourselves. Pretty sad. "

"He doesn't care. He made his money, for all he cares it can die. He said advertising would be "a waste of money. if you want more players, help advertise yourself like Tig does "

There's part of the answer.

LOL
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lo
LOL

This is offtopic, sorry. You don't need to care about the costs which we have. If you have fun playing or developing then do it, but we will not discuss the details of running everything especially in a thread which only purpose seems to be to question prices or strategy.
You can find enough information about the hardware and software on the forums and we often give details when talking to players and developers.