yeah lets drive off graal's playercount, great idea folks

I agree with your sentiment, however, it does kind of illustrate a portion of the problem regarding the current system: Many recently upgraded members have upgraded because they believed they would have more to do and to look forward to than reality actually permits. Instead, often times they're ridiculed and driven away by obscene players, inept and/or abusive server staff, and lack of progressive, integration-based content on each server. Upgrading doesn't grant much in the way of permissions or customization for the new player on the default-end. In essence they've sometimes paid only to find themselves unable to do much of anything and subsequently miss out on the more fun aspects of Graal. Add to that constant harassment and lack of help and the mindset becomes "Wow I just spent how much to save stats I'll never get at the luxury of having no 'Wait Time'. " This is a very destructive business model.

Classic and Gold servers specifically should be providing more ways to get potential subscribers to want to stay as well. They're (including my own server for that matter) contributing equally to the lack of new players simply by not doing this through a variety of ways.

In short, between the illogical business model and the lackluster server staff and/or content, we're continuously dooming ourselves to defeat.

Which leads to the question,

why do we have to pay to play it.

I say leave it to 1 fee, or bring it back to Gold servers = Subscription and Classic playerworlds = lifetime.

absolutely no downsides to being a trial?

I don't know about Zodiac but on Era there are a lot of restrictions on trials. Trials can't join gangs/businesses/parties, raid, use powerful guns, use cars, or level their HP, among others.

Which makes it perfectly fine to scare them off.

I didn't mean it like that at all.
Since most of them probably pay for the Classic Iphone features, they are probably intrigued with graal and wanted to try out the bigger and better PC version. Witch is great because in a way we are expanding the market, but the trial restrictions are a little confusing.

I didn't know much about the restrictions to Era when it comes to trials but on Zodiac (witch is a very popular server for both trials and p2ps) they can do so much and like you just said for Era, they can't do that much.
So back to my main point

If we did this correctly, there would be no need for unbalanced restrictions, they would get a taste of graal with full benefits and what not.
BUT we do have the major problem of scaring the trials away like you and Crono said.
Either way I'm just tossing around an opinion

s> 7 lifetime classic accounts ;]

So true baby
<4 letter accounts

Accounts with spaces > this.