I told you so
 

Ok mates, i was cleaning out my boxes i had and found my paper copy old guns folder along with the plans for guns. So i got nostalgic and redownloaded zone for the giggles and holy **** did i hit the nail on the head when i said this game is going to hell. 195 people? What? 2 years ago on schooldays we were hittin 1000average.
Everything that i said needed to change didnt and lookie here what happended. Nuffin
So what happened and what needed to be changed?
>combat
By far the largest issue of the game. Izone was almost a copy paste iera guns and combat system but watered down with 360 shooting. So its more dull era essentially. For those who do not know ieras combat style, its fast furious close quarters enclosed spaces. Izone however, is not this, its very slow and spammy and open battlefields like conquest or iricia. Now izone tried to copy this and surprise, it failed, hard. As we can all see. Izone needed to embrace the open battlefield combat style and that can be done in 2 ways. 1 is drastically increase bullet damage. As bullets go farther, they spread farter thus more innacurate. This mixed with slow bullet speeds makes it easy to avoid bullets at long ranges and low damage output makes it easier to take a hit and run. Thus making battles long and dragged out, amplified when cover is added. This is very very boring and dull. 2 increase bullet speeds, this way it will be way harder to dodge bullets thus being hit more and allow more cautious movement. Nothing was done and infact the damage was decreased since i last played.
Guns are neutured once again and we are back to square one before i became guns admin. Guns lack variety and viability and this is because of the rippers. Why use a gp when there rippers that does everything everygun does but better? Remember when stuff like the flamethrower had actual roles to play in the battlefield? The flamethrower was a monster as it could shoot through walls and kill people in .2 seconds, great for removing campers fast, but had a veryshort range. Or how about the dreaded railgun? God damn i got so many PMs asking to nerf that gun, it was good af, hit really hard but has small ammo count and lengthy reload times. Another good example is the pink pistols, those tpre through a single target but had lengthy reload times. Or pistols that had the fastest reload time in the entire game, ran outta ammo on your run n gun spree? No problem, just whip out a lightning pistol and keep shooting with your .1 second reload until you could get to safety and reload better guns. Last example was the rippers, those things were god tier for run n gun due to high damage output and fastest reloads among all run n gun guns (.4 second), but you could not shoot those from behind a wall at all so you were forced to move out behind cover to shoot. Stuff like that is entirely gone, theres a few guns that fit some unique rolls but are ultimately stampped out by rippers doing everything better.
Invincibility timers, BULL****, if you get hit, you are hit, this slows down the gameplay even more and allows one man armys to be way more effective than they should as you can absorb multiple bullets for a time.
>bases
Still garbage, izone needed to move over to a seperate world based system and players ported into a unique battlefield world
Capping sucks, flags can eaily be abused by getting one guy in and cap a zone. Should be more people in a zone starts a countdown timer, once timer hits 0 base it lost to attackers.
Iricia and ctf should be bot events like laser tag in era and give good rewards that are worthwhile.
Those are the main reason why zone died, you let the main meat of the game be killed. Good job. I told you all, but you didnt listen.

Oh god I'm not reading that ****. Anyways, if you're saying you told us so that zone or gun stats suck, yea, we know. Been like that since before you became staff, while you were staff, and after. Same with us all.

Im saying the same **** i told everyone 2 years ago and no one listened. I dunno if youre still staff or not but no one on staff wanted to overhaul the game leading it to its death that i was talking about 2 years ago. Thats it

They were working on overhauling it 2 years ago. It's just been a management **** show that nothing ever got done about it - just like the rest of Zone's content.

I saw that, while having no manager is bad news, they could have at least kept weapons balanced. Thats the only thing i can think of that you definitally do not need a manager to watch over you 24/7

zone was meant to fail

Zone could have been really cool if the money it harvested was invested into proper development.

Not true, there was point around 2015 or 14 notsure when, where izone exploded in popularity and was averaging out at 800- 1000 players

Elk's right that if profit was reinvested into the company and the improvement of their servers then they could be much better and much more popular.

As much as i agree on the investing money back into game/servers, c'mon it ain't happening(unless it's something drastically different) All hape needs to do is throw another few servers on ios and bam another income or even be greedy delete the standalone apps and make the Graal Worlds app where he can publish pay2play servers for your accounts you've had years.lol and free servers with limitation. Sounds worse eh.. but it wouldn't actually suprise me if happened

800-1000 is not much, though

Oh fug i replied to the wrong person. But even then i doubt izone would grow. Iera and classic would be getting the bulk of the reinvestments because iera and classic have a way higher demand for it due to larger player counts during the time
It is when not long before average player count was 180-300. Thats about triple in a short time and thats good

can't decide if Unix is officially supposed to be referred to as "hape" or not now.

Unix is just "le ebin bread goy"

Well he deleted/wiped his accounts here last time I checked so probably doesn’t care anyway. Hape sounds better lol rather then Uni-x-mad pretty sure there’s gotta be story of that. If you still roaming forums Hape now your chance to join community with a new name and meaning, to actually get to hear what players want, tell them about production etc. The hiding away with no answers kill the game aswell.

Hol up, imma need a quick rundown on what happened to unix and whos this hape guy. Is hape the new ebin bread man?

unix was under name of Hape on these forums(actually owns/runs this forum now) but his accounts: Hape and GraalOnline Staff have been wiped kinda round the time everyone was on his back and lots of threads around: graal future/production have been closed. idk where that leads anything as Delteria staff feeling clear of release, Graal3D got hype, Alpho finished his stuff but seems that’s in the forgotten (Worlds + IOS editing tools) and graalnew client?

So its a whole bunch of nothing as usual of graal and we should all go back to bitching about how bad zone is now, as usual?

Not sure they want to get better lol; I tried contacting 5 - 6 people on their staff team saying I used to work on zone and would like to help out with graphics / levels. Not a single reply from anyone I messaged after a week.

I'm not gonna say I'm amazing at graphics and that they need me or some **** like that; but I worked on zone for 2 years and will say that they've never been fully manned by graphics staff. Judging by what I saw when I logged on last week it doesn't look like that has changed a bit.

I think they dont. Geno just worsened the main problem of the game being slow and dull combat by making the base killtime even lower and the bullets to kill increased to 8 shots instead of 7 shots.
But the new levels have been trash, not even named NPCs or well organised at all. The new graphics look dull. Games a mess

Give it up

I'm just now seeing this thread. If you would actually pay attention to things instead of just turning your head away as soon as you read one little thing you don't like, you'd know by now that I have plans for everything you just whined about, but whatever

Oh you do have plans for fixing the problems of combat? Please do tell in detail, because right now heres what happened with your changes
>somehow managed to raise killtimes even further and take more bullets to kill to 8 instead of 7. Thus making the game slower and punishing players less for getting hit.
>completely raped the low cost guns and now they cant compete with the higher priced ones
>decreased reload times that worsens running >drastically and dumbs down the game as now running into the open and relying on dodge strats is better, on top of that running is better
>dunno why or if you deserve the flak for it but commando is doing +2 dmg making classes even more unbalanced as that +2 can make a high rof low damage gun significantly better than a mid damage mid rof gun. Because of that theres no reason to play medic with that drastic of a kill difference
>hit timers are not 0 as they should increasing kill times and shallowing the games meta
>almost 0 diversity in weapons, still all feel the same
>dunno if this was you either but movement speed seems to be faster. Literally why?

With that being said there was some good with your update
>100hp leading to significantly nerfed regen times and health recharges also better balancing if +2 dmg on commando is removed
>melees are far more deadly and are actually good
>spar is great
TLDR
In short exactly what i told everyone would happen. You would balance the game around spar, not pvp. Problem with this game is as stated, spar and pvp style of this game are not the same and contradict each other. If it was like me during my time, pvp was great while spar was ass. Now we see the opposite, spar is great but pvp is total ass. The two cannot co exist together and one suffers while the other thrives. So what are you going to do? Continue to improve spar? Or improve PVP and bases? Your killing one by improving the other

You need to be patient and let me finish my work, im not done yet and still have a lot to do. Dmgs will be going up but not with these guns, due to the way things have been released and done, no opportunity to make that work out properly, so things are being set up for that. And yes, low cost guns can compete, that requires skill. The problem with runners isnt the guns or movement, its mainly with the bases, which im going to be reworking them all tomorrow and the next few days. Bullet speeds are gonna be tested on too, the speed increase helped overall but still needs to be worked around as well. Commando doing +2 with the 100hp makes it the same as with 50hp. Medic doesnt have a dmg debuff anymore, i removed that. Basing and pk usually fall hand in hand so those will be fixed at the same time, since spars environment never changes it has to always be balanced out. As someone whos good at pk, spar, and basing, i know how to get them alll worked out, but it requires time, wont happen overnight, which is why i ask people to let me have the time to do it, its never gonna be a quick process. And as for hit timers, they'll probably be lowered as well when thats all done, right now the game isnt ready for that. Soon tho

Oh so Geno got rehired? Interesting. But personally what Zone needs more than guns/balance changes is graphic changes. It's sad to see that no one actually replied to Simons when he was willing to help the game as he worked on it before. It's like the staff there just don't give two craps (aside from Geno from what I see in this thread) and I wish that wasn't the case. When Zone had those 800-1k players daily, it was at it's golden age. The game has so much potential and it's a damn shame to see it wasted like this. What happened to that so called graphic artist that Uni hired? The new art style? Was that all a dud?

I didnt know mr simons even wanted to come back until he msg'd me and i didnt even see it til a week later because i was off, but i msg'd him with who he needs to talk to, so im hoping to see him on the team soon.

The gfx style overall needs its own identity, needs more personality to it all. I think going the cyberpunk route, night time downtown look with darker backgrounds and having the bright colors of the bullets, surrounding objects, players and bright lighting would look good. Our night tileset has always been better than the daytime one because of that, if we take that a step further, we could really do something amazing with it. As for the tileset, idk anything about it and probably cant discuss it anyways.

The graphics problem in zone is much like that one family who never opens their garage to park there car because it simply cannot fit due to a massive embarassing heap of garbage, boxes, old furniture, lawn chairs, and tangled Christmas lights that accumulates each year roughly during the late winter/early spring time.

you're sure as hell better than blanygames at pixel art
edit: wait wtf how old is this thread
edit: wait wtf why was this thread revived

no, https://le-doude.fr/en/2017/01/07/graal-online-zone/

Well since we're talking about graphics on zone now i would like to say this:

People on zone suck at making graphics. They all absolutely suck and have no taste. Most of the graphic artists are worshipped by zonians thus making all of the community to also have disgusting taste in graphics. Not to mention the people who do graphics on zone consists of random admins who cant accept criticism or just a bunch of popular egotistical hatchasers that only know how to make gmasks, flaming wings, and any other typical 1k hat that includes pillowshading. I am praying someone who knows what theyre doing helps out these talentless children.

P.S: i am obviously excluding those good people out there u know who u r

I tried to get hired for levels but got nowhere. I got in contact with the right people but that didn't matter.

Guide on shading:

reminds me of a lamp i did for iEra

https://i.gyazo.com/a5756b3ccd71c4c2...ad312273a1.png

That's pretty good

how long ago :0

If zone went steampunk graphics wise and reset the server. Id probably download zone and get good. Zones like Cod franchise. More futuristic it gets the more dead it becomes.

Who the hell are you talking to

I agree. Zone tends to have oddball graphics staff. They either downright suck hairy ass or they're really good but don't have a style that fits. It's a horrible combination.

That's the most ******ed simile/analogy (I'm not good with figurative language.) I've yet to see on Graalians. Zone is literally Sci-fi future themed. Go say that on Era-GO or something, lol.