Posted by iHot

Your post explains exactly why the council should not exist. Guild leaders will probably just support ideas that benefit themselves and will reject any sort of plan to make the game more challenging or entertaining if it gets in the way of what they're already doing.

No, my post supports some sort of council, which is what I meant by saying I'd much rather trust Rufus, Dusty, and FP4. It's just that I don't believe in this, uh… democratic council where "everyday players" would be the ones making the decisions on changes.

I'm a firm believer in the idea that sometimes the majority doesn't know what's best. If I'm good at catching bugs on iClassic, I don't think it means that I should be automatically viewed as someone who is more qualified than others to suggest and make changes to that part of the game. Especially on a game like Graal, where the higher-ranking staff are generally adults and the players are generally kids. It'd almost be natural for the average player to suggest changes that are meant only to benefit them or their friends.

It's always good to take suggestions, but I'm a lot more comfortable with smart people overseeing the whole developmental process. That's why things like a trading system, which has overwhelming support from the players, constantly gets turned down. I'm sure staff see certain drawbacks and issues that it would immediately create and want to work around that. iClassic would probably be pretty bad if the staff followed through with ever change that players supported.  

Posted by iHot

^^^^

if youre going to use a quote you have to see if theres any other post that explains it.

http://www.graalians.com/forums/show...7&postcount=19

http://www.graalians.com/forums/show...8&postcount=20



Did not read:

Posted by Dusty

I think you're thinking too much into this. These players would not suddenly start ruling all the guilds and getting whatever they want added. They'll just be there for us to run ideas past them on how our ideas would negatively or positively effect guilds. We can't just revamp the entire guild system and not have player input, and consulting the entire playerbase would just be a waste of time.

 

I didn't read that quote either, which is basically just a shorter version of what I just said, whoops.  

There is generally a pretty large update once or twice a year with smaller updates every few months, which I think is perfectly fine for a volunteer developed game. Players complain if there are only hats, and then complain when there aren't enough hats, the dev team can never win.

Off topic comment on guilds:

Spoiler

Guilds just need a way to stand out. Since iClassic doesn't allow large numbers, there needs to be other ways that a guild (or alliance of guilds) can distinguish themselves from all the other 25 man guild groups that are out there. I only play very casually right now, but the guilds I remember are only the ones who have hundreds of hours of tower time, or are one of the few spar guilds who actually stick together. There are a few small things that could be done (e.g. cosmetics that could only be worn while on tag) which might give guilds character, but I don't think the situation will change without major changes, and I don't think the current veteran guild leaders will be entirely pleased, even if they will benefit from the changes.

 

This game could totally have more content being put out. The problem is that people keep spending money in spite of lack-of-content and so adding stuff is just passed along as something that happens on the side when volunteers have time. There are people who are actually happy with towering over and over again and there are people who just love sitting around on graal all day with their cool hat collections. People were generally okay with the rails being removed and people are okay with CTF being closed. Why should it be made an actual priority to add stuff to do in the game when it can be easily funded by hiring a never ending supply of volunteer artists?

Classic is about hats, decorations, and counting numbers endlessly. It has little to do with creating new fun stuff to do.  

Posted by Eve

People were generally okay with the rails being removed

They were added back?  

Problems that have existed on Graal for a long time:

* Understaffed scripting talent

* Lack of incentive toward directives for the existing scripting talent

* Even when I was an admin it was difficult to contact stefan, and essentially impossible to contact unixmad

Now let me talk about what happened to the original Graal Classic. The NPC server had been released for something like 4-5 years, and the scripters were required to convert scripts to work with an NPC Server. The number of players waned as no new content was released during this project. I knocked through hundreds to thousands of mostly overworld and underwater levels so that the 7000 could get cut to something that seemed more manageable to everybody.

Then, one day, the NPC Server is released and the server is completely wiped save for a small set of levels and horribly broken scripting (which was apparently an all-nighter job for the then manager). After that the server's population dropped to pretty much < 20 players online at the same time and continued to fall until the server was taken off of the server list.

I spent a lot of time trying to build out the overworld, items and quests. The quests lagged primarily due to the bottleneck of making baddies with serverside-based movement and incorporate them into a custom serverside hit detection system somehow, and nobody really had the talent to develop them.

The serverside hit-detection requirement was the biggest issue because there wasn't any reliable event triggers for when a baddy came into contact with a player. Fortunately the serverside hit detection requirement was later dropped.

Since then, Graal the Adventure (another Graal Classic reboot on the PC Client) and Graal Classic (iPhone/Facebook) seem to have been released. The former looks like it recycles more of the scripts I developed and the latter looks like it recycles more of the levels I assigned and developed.

I.e. a lot of levels exist. The overworld places just need to be fleshed out. Pretty much all of my quest levels look like they've been tossed aside though because Graal Castle, Sardon's Tower and Kull's Castle (i.e. a quest site which is now the Deadwood Guild Fortress) seem to have been repurposed. Maybe the Gnome Caves levels I designed will be recycled. Maybe the original Gnome Caves levels (more linear) will be recycled.

Also, the stagnation of updates isn't a good thing.  

^^^ That is an extremely interesting post

Posted by Rufus

They were added back?

They were gone for over a year. I can't even remember how long. Many people purchased draisines specifically to be used on the rails and they were removed from the game for an unacceptably long amount of time. It was an extremely poor decision.  

Posted by Eve

^^^ That is an extremely interesting post



They were gone for over a year. I can't even remember how long. Many people purchased draisines specifically to be used on the rails and they were removed from the game for an unacceptably long amount of time. It was an extremely poor decision.

because they were being revamped and made better, and it was worth the wait.  

I think there's a certain point in time where that becomes completely unacceptable. Like if you went to a restaurant and 15 minutes into your meal the waiter comes back and says: "the quality of your food isn't to our standard; allow me to take it back to replace it." And then the waiter returns again and says "come back tomorrow if you would like to eat your meal, it will be better. Also, no refunds."

You can't just remove something that people payed to use and take more than 365 days to bring it back. The new rails are great but they didn't have to resort to what they did to implement them.  

Posted by Eve

You can't just remove something that people payed to use and take more than 365 days to bring it back.

Technically you were still able to use the drasine (in your house if you had tracks), but I see your point.

note: didnt they compensate players by giving them a new drasine for free?  

Posted by GOAT

Technically you were still able to use the drasine (in your house if you had tracks), but I see your point.

note: didnt they compensate players by giving them a new drasine for free?

Those are both very good things to point out.

I think it's important to note though that the draisine and house tracks came out very well in advance of the rail system. Everyone who was interested in using them for inside houses had already bought one by the time the rails came out. But when the rails were completed, the people who were not previously interested in the draisine bought it to travel around the overworld with. Those are the people who got screwed and stuck with an item that they had not wanted to buy for months prior to overworld functionality.

And yeah, they replaced the sprite on your draisine with a newer one (oh yay.) But just in case you might want the old one that you originally bought, the powers that be will allow you to repurchase it for only 4000 gralats again! Thank you based Graal!  

entitled players with 0 dev history ITT  

Posted by Crono

entitled players with 0 dev history ITT

I've read the entire thread and I never once thought "this person is saying outrageous things and obviously has no programming experience." Your post is also ironically on the same page of the thread where the Ex Classic LAT admin makes one of the most insightful comments possible on the subject.  

People still play graal? Jesus