It looks like everyone shouted their opinion already. Who said it would get locked anyways?

Im pretty sure if the thread was locked and you didn't like SN as a super moderator, you will be informed to PM Darlene about it.

i don't see why there would need to be any other thread for it. it's pretty obvious the situation here, it doesn't need long diatribes and drama added to it with multiple locked threads and a flood of responses, our population isn't that big anymore. it'd be a waste for us to have to repost it

again

Well, at least it looks like SN has been going around and policing, there have been a lot of edits/etc from him. ib4lock

Hey Supernanny congrats to you! Welcome in the team. :D

Grats Supernanny.

SN got the job because he understands that unixmad and Stefan makes the calls, and whether we agree with everything or not, the rules have to be enforced.

Your insult towards me is one I am used to, and falls on deaf ears, or eyes as it were. I'm not old, but am middle-aged. Boring? yea, maybe...I like it that way.
I have plenty of opinions, and each time am told that I'm not allowed to have one because of my age, or the fact that I haven't been able to enjoy the game for awhile because of my laptop. Just because most of my opinions are disagreed with, doesn't mean I have none.

As for the ones trash talking. I just look at the history on them on the forums, and consider the source. No big deal.

I understand people being upset about the state of Graal. I really do, but it isn't my fault, and not SN's. I dont know what is going on, but I do know that Stefan is busting his butt doing something regarding Graal, and he definately does care. He also works closely with SN on Zone, so I dont believe he would approve of my making him a supermod if SN was bad news.

SN wants to try to bring new life to the forums. He wants them to be fun, but he wants them to be fun for the ones who wont post here because of the negativity. He wants them to be fun for the decent population of Graal, as do I, and the Administration. It's simple. If you are only here to post negativity, and to bash new people because they arent in your clique, or popular, then please just leave. If it is so hard for you to post and be polite, and constructive, then why bother? Being rude, and insulting to people, anywhere, will get you nowhere in life.

It's going to take more than cynicism to make the forums a better place.

Holy **** Sam's on.
Holy **** Darlene didn't lock this thread in her overly-long and boring post in attempt to have the last laugh.

Do you just not realize what kind of an impression you give the people that aren't blinded by their attitude towards the forum management? It is not a favorable one.

1. Some of graals best gfxers and scripters are criticizing him, so how are they bad sources?

2. How can he do a good job bringing life to the forums if not many like him?

3. Stefan posted that he doesnt care about graal, and bomberman on the iphone isn't beneficial to graal.

4. Having stefan work close to SN on zone really help it get to 0 players players much faster. And oh wait, shouldn't stefan be doing that stuff anyways? He gets PAID to do it.

5. Criticzing Darlenes age has no point to the issue at hand

It's true though. When has Sam made a post or moderation in a while? And I always see in Graal announcements that have a lot of bashing that Darlene makes an exaggeratedly-long post that bores me to hell and back and then locks the thread.

What's this post people are talking about all of a sudden?

Something that was taken completely wrong. The post stated that they aren't into this to be rich, not that he doesn't care about Graal. It's people reading something into a post that wasn't there, and not what this thread is about.

To be honest, that post sounded more like Stefan is just trying to keep Graal close to its roots, and also go down other routes like iPhone development in order to earn money rather than corrupt Graal. He even said himself in the post that he's working on v6.

I think saying that "he doesn't care anymore" is a bit of a far-stretch. I think he was almost saying the opposite.

That is exactly the way I saw it too.

"The beauty of Graal is that you can become staff" isn't really what Graal's roots are. It was a game before it was somewhere you could become staff, hell, I didn't even bother to try to become staff when it was closer to its roots as they didn't just take anyone onboard, nor did I feel like I had to in order to squeeze out any possible enjoyment remaining. People desperately want Graal to fix its massive amount of problems, and one of the main problems is that there's no server that is professional and up to any kind of game standard. What Stefan insinuated pretty much goes against what a lot of the players want so blatantly; I am not surprised at all that they don't believe he's interested in its future as what people post isn't just about the money the business could make, that's just an incentive behind the reasoning for them to do it.

Apparently he's using Graal as a learning platform to delve into other aspects of the gaming industry, but companies like Blizzard would highly disagree with the notion that the online gaming industry does not bring in enough revenue. Although he did not say that he does not care about Graal, he did imply that he feels the game will not make them rich, thus, there's no point on giving as much effort into it when they can be working on other projects that will bring in more profit.

dropping fairyland, dropping graal 3d, little to no updates, imo shows he doesnt care.

Edit: can't forget about when he posted in the avatar resize thread avoiding the topic and answered some random question about GK. He went out of his way to totally annoy every play in there asking for reasonable update.

Hm. :\

Although what you said is arguable, I don't derive from what I said that Stefan himself still enjoys working on Graal and does work on it to achieve is own vision of it, unlike what everyone else is saying.

Although trying to interpolate what Stefan said any further would just be entirely warping his post, this is what I believe he thinks:

• Graal can not immediately pull itself into making a lot of money beyond charging all of it's current players more (which they can't really do any further, since they are already pushing it).
• Other technologies like iPhone games etc. bring in the money very fast, and that money can be used to keep Graal up, in addition to supporting Stefan + Unixmad's actual lives.

From what I have heard, Graal had to be bailed out more than once because it could not financially support itself. And now, they don't have the option to bail it out again.

If it goes down, it stays down.

I think Stefan finally realized that, and has started to balance work between making money and working on Graal.

I have also heard that Stefan works almost all day and only gets ~6 of sleep at night.



Now keep in mind, I am no official and I don't have any direct line to anyone. I believe that Stefan is doing his best to keep Graal up without risky financial plots that could take it down (forever).

If anyone has a serious beef with that, I think you should speak up and say exactly why.

Those positions have absolutely nothing to do with forum moderation and management. I learned to script long before I stopped being an immature jackass, and not everyone agrees with that either.
He'd need to make an effort to turn that opinion around. Don't know how that would work though.
See below.
And you know this how?
Darlene just said SN was hired because Sam can't be around often. Secondly, if you don't want to read Darlene's explanation about why she does things you don't like then that's your own fault.
I'm having trouble seeing how that equates to Stefan not caring about Graal.

so you are saying that you have no idea what is going on to cause the problem of graal. at the same time, you and the forum management are blocking any and all discussion about it because of unixmad's rules

so you are blocking our discussion while at the same time not understanding what it is at all?

and i don't see "following your job" as viable excuse for not having common sense when it comes to the forums. if anyone would have the best chance of getting the forums more relaxed, lenient, and more open to discussion, it would be you. out of anyone on the entire forums it would be your opinion whom unixmad might actually consider putting into implementation; but you are just doing your job, you don't want the changes, i daresay you even like the current state of the forums, and there is nothing we can do about it, so much so that now we have another person following the mold and moderating our discussion

why can't you be one of the stronger members of this community instead of a spectator in the background )8

@Sam: That's exactly what I'm trying to say.
@Darlene: I never said I don't like Darlene's way of doing things (though in some cases I do), I just hate reading her posts.

Welcome to the forums. People do, and their threads and posts are deleted, they're infracted, they're censored, and they're banned. It makes no difference what so ever, but when you're stuck in a **** heap there's not much else to talk about. I wonder when the last time discussion occurred regarding anything related to Graal in a positive light.

What are you talking about? Darlene stated that everyone complaining is basically a non important member. I then pointed out that some of the best artists are complaining as well.

http://img89.imageshack.us/img89/5572/lol2i.png

enough said.

i mean seriously (and i feel as if this needs to be a separate post from what i just posted) the biggest problem here is the totally lack of communication between players and staff. it's what i meant between there being a fine line between being a player and a staff member, and it get's really hard to hold the role of both at the same time, and to sometimes lose your focus when you concentrate to hard on the other

we can't even make threads about how to save graal. the communication break is so terrible that the staff owners don't even let us post about an obvious problem that we all seem to care about in one way or another

of course people think that stefan and unixmad don't care about graal. it's an understand perspective since we haven't heard anything out of them. we get no information out of them other than the rules they set out, so much so that when stefan makes a post (in a thread that was hard enough to discuss about in the first place) it's vantage points are so extreme as to "stefan is busting his ass just to keep graal alive" and "stefan doesn't care about graal at all"

we are getting nowhere by adding new super moderators to the forum unless those moderators are going to be taking some responsibility for getting some quality discussion in about graal. i'm not the type of person who is going to personally attack someone while discussion the finer points of graal subjective-opinions (like i got out of hand with dusty and apologized for) and almost no one else around here is either - we just want to actually start discussing and doing something rather than fighting for the ability to discuss it. actions like these (which i have in no way intention of somehow adding into the fray SN) in adding people to moderate us only makes the apathy grow stronger

either we need to start looking like a community with an owner that works together with us, since this is a development platform and a forum based around that development platform, or graal is going to stagnate at a level of MMO-mediocrity that only it's most hardcore and devoted fans will ever keep up with it

in fact i think we're at that point right now don't you think?

From what I can remember, a number of these threads were either

1. Bashing Stefan without any evidence and just calling him lazy or stupid for not working on Graal (while there is perfectly good reason for him to work on other things, i.e., to get money to keep Graal up)
2. Crazy financial plots, which while they may work in the long run could kill off Graal forever.

I personally do not believe anything should be censored, but everything should be handled with a personal response.

It's hard to do that sort of thing between all the trolling that tends to happen around here though. Often good ideas are hidden in between a lot of negativity.

This thread is going entirely off-topic.

I think SN earned his chance to prove himself, wait how the situation evolves and then decide :)

Also, hes just a Super Mod, not a big deal! I think that doesn't stop anyone from posting, it is just a left hand for Moonie and Sam to deal accurate as they would with according situations...if he would judge them differently then he would not be Super Mod, it is just a tirening work for 2 or oftenly 1 single Mod to deal with every imappropriate post ^^

Stefan is a good scripter and a good person, I think he knows what hes doing and he will definitely not drop Graal because it helped him so much himself.

I remember when Stefan and I used to talk much and he always told me that there is so much work and its exhausting, going home earlier than he planned from vacations when errors occured...give him some air?

you, sir, have no idea what you are talking about. your perspective on the threads of last...they have not viewed CJ in a negative light. if anything, we are looking for a beacon of help, and all that's done is that it gets deleted before anyone important can look at it

I like a lot of what you said, and I agree that Stefan should be more public about the updates he makes and what he is working on.

I also believe there should be a streamlined interface for making suggestions so you know they will be heard, rather than ignored.

This way, the playerbase can also work off of other peoples suggestions and rank what they think is important (a rating system).


There is a lot of work to be done, but some of the negativity that has been floating around like "Stefan doesn't care about Graal anymore" is really just crazy.

I think if we can keep things in a positive light and make a good list of suggestions then things can get moving.

Well played, sir.

I meant, I dont know what Stefan and unixmad's plans are regarding Graal. They dont talk to me. I'm not a global, not anyone of much importance, just a forums Admin. If they dont want something on the forums, then it wont be on the forums. If I dont enforce the rules, they will, and/or find someone who will. Who am I to tell them what they can and cannot allow? I dont have to like it. It's their call. If they want me to do something differently, I will surely comply.

They want a community that can at least be civil towards each other, and maybe even respectful of others feelings. For crying out loud, members come on here and bash others for grammar, spelling, and for other things. We dont want people to be afraid to post here over such stupid stuff. But it's ok for those popular people to purposely misspell stuff because it's cool? It is not going to work like that. I dont care if no one posts here anymore. It is not hard to e nice, and helpful to one another.

As for the things Stefan dont want posted, you will have to speak to him, and stop making it look like I, SN, or Sam can just ignore what he wants, and do what we want. It doesn't work like that in business. You do your job, or lose it, or walk away if you cant do it. Simple.


Now, please, let's not further this discussion in this thread.

I think all of us WANT to help Graal. If stefan would just take the time to say open a thread and have people post there ideas in a well thought out manner and then he posted reasons why it should/shouldn't be uploaded, i think players would get a much much better view of him and graal.

they have been in a positive light! go back and read my "this needs to be discussed" thread!

that is a call for us to band together and make something to save graal!

are you saying we can make a new thread for this discussion then? if so, as forum admin, can you please start that topic for us? a sticky would be nice

and also, i don't see why you are degrading your position as a forums admin. it's about as hard to get as any global job, and it's got it's share of the workload. i bet if you tried to talk to them about things (or let us have a thread to do it with you) we could come to a good conclusion on it. this is exactly the type of mentality that will get us nowhere before we even start

And you are more than welcome to delete any posts that aren't beneficial to the cause if you do this :)

I'm not saying specifically yours nor anyone elses has been negative.

Just, in general, there is a lot of bad air going around that the administration doesn't care at all.

They do, otherwise Graal would have been knocked out 3 times before from going bankrupt.


Like I've said, there sure are a lot of problems, but my point is bashing isn't going to solve any of them, and I hope everyone can agree with that.

well, i completely agree.