I don't expect anyone to remember who I am, nor care. But for those who require some background info, I joined iClassic during its debut week in December 2009 as a kid playing games on a second generation iPod touch. I pretty much put this game down in 2016 due to real life commitments and I'm amazed this app still opens which at the very least does make me smile as for me its a crazy piece of nostalgia now.
I have met some really interesting and engaging people thanks to this bunch of pixels yet it is sad to see it just die out as -
for the most part - an incredibly unique and diverse community who all share the passion for playing your game. I just wanted to highlight some topics and share some nostalgic thoughts that I really enjoyed playing this game and to reiterate that this game still has masses of potential and I still believe it's a wasted business opportunity to not keep this platform running at even half its capability or at a fraction of its previous forms.
Positives: - Character Customs - This gave player a chnace to relly make their experience unique and really allowed people to promote various forms of artwork and for people (like my younger self) to learn this skill as part of the gameplay. Graal characters exploded into a new kind of diversity overnight.
- Guild Allies - the fundamentals of guilds were always astaple among other old graal servers hwoever the idea that a roster could be externally extended to incorpate other people ensured there wasn't an immediate limit to the amount of people could strateggically and socially communicate through the game at any one time alongside its multiplying player base.
- Engaging GPs - For the majority, staff would alwasy be friendly, there would always be someone online during your time zone and events were held frequently enough to remind us that they were humans too and could actually engage on a friendly level. There are a fewer still that went the extra mile all the time and you deserve to be working on bigger and better things and readily entitiled to way more credit that it seems you currently get under Toonslab comapred to EUROCENTER's ownership.
- Guild Sparring - THE SINGLE BIGGEST EVENT ON THIS SERVER. Barely needs an explanation but this would captivate the whole server for at least 7 days bringing back veteran players and giving randoms the chance to break onto the sparring scene. How you guys haven't expanded this or built upon this system baffles me as it never fails to fill up the server for at least hours. Currently this is the only thing keeping this game alive right now.
- THE COMMUNITY - There are so many individual players and content creators (I'll leave it to you to give credit where credit is due) that have challenged, innovated and preserved the way of the game for the better. Tutorials, Art, Streams, New Game Mechanics etc etc etc that have promoted this game tenfold in comparison to some official adjustments to this game. I'm amazed how this game still seems to thrive with little to no new content or relationship with higher-ups.
There are more of course yet these really did change the game for the better at their time of release.
Concepts you could still deliver on:- Single Player Achievements - Something else semi-competitive to give players external and internal factors to keep them motivated to play this game
- Finishing the Renovation of the New Guild System (instead of dismantling the old one and leaving it to dry up) - how you can afford to abolish whatever hype you somehow created and lose out on all that potential revenue is beyond me...
- Server and Connection Quality - At one point this game actually amassed thousands of players at every waking hour all online at once; I can't begin to think of the total number of monthly and annual players (playing through the Facebook application alone was between 250,000 to 320,000). Surely you'd want this game to grow and grow and grow? That's the idea of any kind of business, right? More happy customers equals more money, hence a better reputation consequently encourages even more people to join your player base. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
This post is to just bring the game's current state to the forefront; the vision of what this game could've been -
what it could still be - in comparison of what it one was when all the people cared about was pushing the boundaries of 2D pixels, role playing, fantasy online multiplayer games. This isn't a dig at Unix. Its a polite reminder that this game is still worth saving.
I just hope some of you somehow manage to enjoy this game as much as I once did, because at one point in time this game was the absolute s**t and was going places.