Quote:
Originally Posted by bradigger
The community is an important part of any MMO. I know my friends pretty much only played while I did, and I haven't been able to play for around a year due to the forced update to get on the login server combined with the seemingly abandoned GNU/Linux client. I check the downloads page as well as the forum pretty frequently in hopes of being able to play. I don't usually subscribe to the belief of "better late than never", but I would make a bit of an exception for Graal, considering it's one of my favorite games of all time.
The devs are clearly not getting done as much as they should. There's currently a public-facing download for a client that is essentially broken. Not only that, but it says right there that it was last updated in 2012, while the other two PC platforms have had more recent updates and can play just fine. If you dig into the forums you'll see myself and several others complaining with no signs of a solution. There are a lot of problems right now that could probably be solved in a week or two.
That major issue aside, the website is honestly quite bad. This isn't just nostalgia on my part, although I do think the older site looked better, the purple kid-friendly theme that was adopted is both uglier and harder to navigate. It's also been untouched for several years and still advertises subscriptions that I don't believe are still around. You should be able to easily access the forums or the downloads page with a single click, but instead you have to choose from playerworlds/zone/whatever before getting to downloads. It just shows you different crap and adds an unnecessary step. As for the forums, despite removing the restriction that required a gold membership to post on the forums, you still have to jump through a message telling you that you need gold but that if you really want to you can view the forums as a guest.
I'm glad Graal isn't dead for real, but it sure as heck looks dead from the outside. We need some new player relations people to let the community what's going on. We need a good web dev, new client devs, clarification on if anyone is even actually working on anything these days, and if this sounds impossible, perhaps it'd be best to just slap the game under the GPL and really give the players control. Let us submit some pull requests to fix these issues. It should be obvious by now that there are people on the forums who are capable of developing things for the game but are not able to because of the closed source nature and hush-hush administration who barely talks to us.
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You make a lot of valid points. Yes the community is important to a MMO however there needs to be some emphasis on playability that extends beyond MMO for times which lower player counts will be reached. I proposed servers upped there quality to something more similar to Graal The Adventure. Which IMO should have been your showcase/flagship server for pc. I like how you focused on the "MMO" part and didn't add "RPG", because In my opinion the competition for an RPG based server is much greater then a Action Adventure server.
I don't use linux often but I am kinda a bit disappointed by the lack of the Linux client. Luckily and happily I use a mac as my main machine and a windows pc as my secondary. Times that I use linux I am usually on an ARM architect which wouldn't run traditional desktop applications. (such as the raspberry pi)
I also completely agree that a lot of dev work that should be getting done is not. And I am not just talking about other dev's, I myself also, not getting stuff done. I also completely agree that the new website is hard to navigate and the fact that you have to navigate to other pages to download is pretty embarrassing, but not as embracing as the subscription's that you mentioned that have no use now. But one thing I kinda disagree with is that the site is ugly. It's not ugly it just has a different taste that might not fit your's. I myself kinda like the look but the navigation and consistency is just terrible.
I also don't know if making the game open source is the way to go. They still use a lot of proprietary stuff in there mobile games that could be compromised. It just wouldn't make sense from a business perspective. However I do think they should have more dedicated staff/employee structure, as well as greater communications to the general public.
This is a game that we have all played over a decade, yet has anyone actually seen any advertisement? I heard about it from a friend (word of mouth). At the same time if someone tried advertising the current quality of the game my impressions would be tainted by the lack of quality so much so that I would hear about the game a year or 2 later and just not even click to see the updates or news.. I would just have this prejudice of a tainted quality towards the game.