This is a joke, right guys?
 

All I know is I found what seems to be an actual AD for Graal on youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAdekSpw5Fk

and it should be sooo much better...

What do you guys think? I would like to redo what they have done here and promote on some gaming forums since Stefan and unixmad never have found a way (or cared enough) to promote. All it takes is some word of mouth and the right words/presentation.

I'm leaving for a month and a week for Europe in like 10 days, but when I get back I plan to try to promote a little, if anyone wants to join me...

Looks like Tig made that.

I'm not exactly hating, ESPECIALLY if it was a player who tried :)

I would like to put together some sort of promoting team with a goal of a video similiar to this but also promoting on gaming forums and anywhere possible for that matter.

So if it was Tig, nice try, lets plan something.

What I mean is, he is a part of the Global Administration so yes, it looks as though it is supposed to be an official advertisement.

Personally, I don't think Graal is a product that should be marketed right now. Look at our website, the quality of our servers, the player opinions and general negativity, the state of the forums, the lack of gameplay. The product needs an overhaul before the promotion is pursued.

good point rufus, everyone I talk to says the website has too many pointless places, no news, and an ugly interface.

I still think some word of mouth promotion could slightly increase player count though.

What also kills things is the horrible subscription plans in place, and the word Gelat being in them. I mean, I don't even know what a Gelat is really, so how is a new player going to know?

I'd have to agree, adverts are something that are in general something good to have, but there really isn't much to advertise right now.
The state of the game right now is not good. There are many things that need an overhaul, and many systems, procedures, and problems, that need looking into and corrected for the overall long term success of the game. Right now the developers are spread thin, which stagnates new player made content and progression, which makes it harder and harder to sell the game in the worsening state of things under such spread out development. These are all issues far beyond the control of the PWA, or even for someone as far up as Ibonic reached.

I understand your drive in this, but there is very little that we can do in reality. 'Word of mouth' is something that is influenced by someone's feelings towards a product. It could be a means of encouraging the players to spread the word positively, but with a huge amount of negative or even nonchalant opinions, there's no drive for players to promote the positive aspects of the game, but rather the negative ones.

It is hard to get out of the reputation hole that Graal has got it in, but it hasn't been addressed and probably won't be addressed. In that regard, the "word of mouth" promotion that Graal entirely relied upon in the past isn't going to work beyond the minority that feel like they need to do this. Additionally, if people are introduced to the game through "word of mouth" they are going to be introduced to how amateur it feels and that overall negativity from the current players. Coupled with the pricing plans they've got, it's very unlikely that they will stay where as they may have if these problems were addressed appropriately.

I'm embarassed to play this game in front of any irl friends. They need to improve the overall quality of it and get rid of this garbage "4 KIDZ" theme they started playing along with that isn't working at all.

Honestly, GK, or Maloria are the only servers on Graal that I see attracting players. The rest of the servers seem very pointless. I guess I can't really blame the Classic servers because they don't have any "Monsters to kill" or "Levels to gain," but jeez... they can get a "LITTLE" more creative than what they are now. And yes, I left out Zodiac because that server is kiddie-ish-lookin' ... Well atleast it was the last time I logged on about 2-3 months ago.

Actually, when I showed my friends a few Graal servers Classic was one of the few they could be like "oh ok, that looks Zelda style". Servers like UN, Zodiac, and Era looked like jokes. And it's true, it's almost 2010. The SNES was pulling much nicer things almost 20 years ago, though, and Graal has the potential.

GK is the only server currently up that looks ok. Too bad appearances aren't everything, huh?

Yeah too bad, but I haven't ever played Classic for real, so it might be an OK server, idk.

The problem with Zodiac is that we have never really had much of a graphics team, so we were always trying to make due with what we had since no one really wanted to help.

Now, improving the quality of the server is definitely something we are aiming for in Zodiac v2 as well as making it accessible to new people.

Keep in mind that there are many developers who aren't making a dime developing, and there's only a small handful of people out there who will make those SNES quality graphics for free.

Have you seen the dinosaurs? The first thing a buddy said to the other the moment I was in my corner playing Graal one day was "LOL SHOW HIM THE TREX".

Zodiac is a public server, a lot of that content is inexcusable.

Fair enough but I only used the SNES comparison so people would realize what time period we actually live in.

I was diligently working on revamping Zodiac graphically(with Tom) and most of my work got shrugged off. There are still quite a few graphics that I made that never even got uploaded, regardless of being finished. I ended up quitting because of the lack of support from staff and the apparent waste of my effort. The only thing I see after my departure was my tileset being recolored and edited to a horrible degree.

Yeah, also, another thing Zodiac needs is a decent Gani Team. I remember shaking my head in disappointment when I saw some of their ganis. Well actually, it's not just Zodiac, many of the servers are like this. Even GK has plenty of errors :P... When I gani, I make sure it looks perfect, I consider myself one of the best On/ and Out of graal. When I ganied for Crystia they looked great.