Lack of player support is a huge issue on Valikorlia. They want a new system, but they either don't want to change, or they can't agree on what kind of change they want. But, mostly, I think the lack of player support comes from the fact that players simply don't trust any type of management. I mean, we had years and years of Clash. In case you didn't know, Clash did not care about Valikorlia. He released not-even-half finished "systems", because he was working on "New Val". He wouldn't even give NC to anybody who wanted to help on the scripting side. So, over the years of his management (and the 3 short managements between Clash being fired by globals and Omake being voted-in) a lot of players have lost faith that management can actually do
anything.
Staff being unenthusiastic about working is almost a domino effect of the players' mood. For months, on a daily basis, I personally was told that I was ruining the server, either by working on the update and not paying attention to the current server, or vice-versa. The thing with Valikorlia is that there
aren't any automated systems to keep things going while an update is being made. Levels need to be made almost constantly for new events, for example. A problem facing the LAT team while I was LAT Chief, was that I had to juggle between fixing the broken level and making new levels for the current server, and making new levels for the update. Pretty soon, LATs started quitting left and right, and I was essentially all by myself. In order for a full update, Valikorlia would really need two sets of staff: one for the current server, and one for the dev server. That wouldn't be problem, if developers weren't such a rare commodity.
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Originally Posted by eagle4
I'm going to admit that Valikorlia can't thrive on RPing alone, they need something else to pull in the players. The reason it used to achieve over 100 players online was because it had an RPG system and was ahead of its time. Also, PLEASE bring back the giant gmap, I miss it so much.
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We debated this a lot, actually. What Omake (the manager) decided was a segmented GMAP (three different GMAPs, to represent three different continents). When the LAT team started shrinking, I convinced him to just stay with the worldmap (which really is a unique part of Valikorlia -- as far as I know, we're still the only Classic playerworld with a worldmap). But, my decision was based on more than just manpower. The server itself has a very wide range of climates. We have tropical, desert, tundra, arctic, temperate, and wetland. Try fitting that all on one GMAP, along with weather effects. It just wasn't feasible, in my eyes.
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Originally Posted by DustyPorViva
There are also a ton of bugs. I can't even remember how many times I was trying to get around and had to unstick me because of link problems. Either a link put me in a dead area(water with no way onto land, or on a wall), or there was just no link giving me a way back(left a room and the link back didn't work).
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Most, if not all, of the level errors are from players themselves. At Valikorlia, we allow players to make and upload their own levels. I don't want to bash anybody here, but it's really a result of horrible standards on the part of the LAT Chief (not me -- I was demoted just after the 'update' was released). When I was LAT Chief, I was prepared to deny any level containing tile, link, graphic, or scripting errors (I really only wanted GS2 to be used) from being uploaded. I also wanted them to pass
my quality test, which included my personal level aesthetics. But, all of that received backlash from the playerbase, because essentially they were too lazy to learn GS2, or too lazy to fix all their errors. Eventually, I was forced to allow GS1, and told that I wasn't allowed to deny people's levels from being upload, just because they didn't pass my 'quality standards'.
It's horrible to say, but I really do think that it's the
players, not the staff, for the most part, that prevent Valikorlia from having any substantial updates.
How did this turn in to a discussion about Valikorlia, anyways? Valikorlia's not exactly Graal's benchmark server.