No truer words were ever said. Been there, done that.

I don't know, in my opinion, I think it is better to update pw's to draw in new players, then to keep a pw the same for oldbies (even though I loved old classic, and miss it).
New players join every day, oldbies eventually move on.

*shrugs*
Graal is moving forward, the pw's should also move forward.
Just my opinion...

The original social environment of Classic was that everyone was just there to have fun and nobody cared about cheaters because everyone was able to cheat and everyone was able to upload their houses. They were just there to talk about things and freely enjoy themselves in a world of mostly anarchy. Euhh... also.. the level editor wasn't the greatest so you would be more likely to see tile errors and a lot more predefined objects in older levels. If you look at Zol's bedroom (which I just restored to its former fashion) and Stefan's House in Onnet Town, they are really similar. There were probably predefined levels too. Like for bedrooms, you know?

The quest structure in old really sucked, though, which is why I'm devoting a lot of time and space on the overworld to quests. Once the overworld is an island, and before we start adding the other islands we've (already) made and some of the old islands, I'm going to start taking player houses rather than trying to use the warptex. The warptex is good for a larger group of player levels, but it wouldn't share the environment of the other player levels.

Oh yea, and the other thing that made Classic Classic in the first place is that people didn't ***** about changes in the original level set. They were rather embraced. Let's say we reverted level14 to Yoshi's house and the Dark World Entrance... that probably wouldn't go over well...

You're missing my point. I never said it was perfect, nor did anyone else.

That level set, I believe, is ideal, not perfect. It is ideal because it is the level set most people remember, and because it had the most content.

This sort of stuff can be fixed without any real problem. Is it tedious to do so, yeah. But very simple.

Then simply ask them exactly what is in the version they want that the uploaded one does not have. If they have valid requests, work on adding them.

Chances are it will just be people complaining for the sake of it.

And no matter how many times you rework and remake classic, it will not be perfect.

Why would you be aiming for perfection?

There are 100 other player worlds where they can create and build new and better things all day.

When you work on classic, your goal should not be to bring your own vision of classic in. Classic is not just a playerworld.

Back in the day when there were 5 servers and over 200 people on classic, a system like Hera's would work.

Right now, let's think of this from a new players perspective.

You have a handful of servers to play. Server A, B, and C.

Server A has quests that can be completed in 3 hours. The population of server A is about 150 people.

Server B has no heart quests at all, or item quests. You simply log on with everything and can go right to PKing and sparring, and being part of the community. Server B has about 50 people.

Server C has hard to find quests that require tons and tons of walking and fighting. At best, as a new player, you can get most of them done in maybe 15 hours. Server C has about 20-30 people.


As a new player, A or B seems attractive to me. C seems like too much work for such a small community.


Yeah, this is a good thing if:

A) There are any newbies
B) There is a player count of over 20


Graal no longer has the kind of playerbase it needs to stretch people out. People simply want to socialize, spar, PK, and do events. They don't want to run around a server for 10 hours doing tedious quests. Thus, they pick a server that has a larger, easier community to get into.

I think we're still ignoring a critical point here. Does reverting back to the older level set lure players back onto the server? Will they stay? What will happen? Sure there will be tons more room to explore for the newbies, but will they stay? I don't think they would. If we cannot expand to meet the ever changing demand for quality, who would continue to play? I'm sure we'd satisfy the 'oldbie' population, but we aren't thinking about anyone else. What is more appealing to a player when they first log onto graal? Half detailed levels with nothing useful inside? Or what Massokre is doing (trying to give each level something useful, trying to intertwining each level, updating but not overrighting each level's style). If you say the former rather then the latter, you are lying to yourself.

You people make it sound so easy when you say that reverting back to the old levels would solve all our problems, but that is simply not true. You want to satisfy one party, and completely ignore the other. I think Massokre's vision is going to be very close to what we'd all expect Classic to be, you just need to give him some time; I will beat you with a sack of patatoes if you say something about NPC Server being up for however long, Massokre was only made LAT Admin this September and there has been tons of progress with him leading LAT, I doubt anyone else is as qualified as him to replace him either.

Now I am half awake when I wrote this, but if you can actually see what I'm saying and you wish to refute something I say, do not ignore my points and drone on about old levels, actually try and defend your position on reverting.

I think that was already addressed to some degree. People start a server due to player count, levels, and how easy it is to become part of the community (friendliness of players, ease of questing, ect)

They stay for the sparring, PKing, and events.

You can add content to levels until you're blue in the face, and people will still just spar, PK, and play events all day.

Ease of questing is a fallacy. If the quests are as easy as Walk down this hall and pick up your equipment, there's no sense of accomplishment - and nothing to defend.
But difficulty is not an end unto itself either. If you set the bar too high - and the Magic Quest very nearly did, I barely survived it myself - you scare off the newbies. The quest should be long, but not necessarily deadly, and more importantly it should have a number of acceptable Outs. You should be able to get the gloves and go PK - maybe not on even footing with the Lizardsword Lizardshield 20heart oldbies, but not so badly that you'll be squished. "You need the L3 Sword" because it does 3 times the damage of the newbie sword when wielded against other players - I don't know that that's exactly right. One more heart means it takes something like another 2/3s of a hit to force a respawn, but being able to cut down a 3heart newbie in 2 slashes verses 3 slashes with the axe or 6 slashes with the training sword...that's a big leap. Fortunately, the movement system has the capacity to narrow that gap. Or perhaps more to the point, perhaps there should be an Alternate Quest? The Bloodhoned Blade, you have to sell your Graalian soul to dark powers to gain it and forever surrender your place as a possible Hero (at least until you reset), and it grows to the Lizard Sword based solely off kills? Hell, while we're at it why not harness the bloodlust - Heroes literally view these PKers as Baddies when they're not in the common (noplayerkilling) zones. Not in the quests, as a particularly gifted PKer could make a quest infinitely harder, but the Quest to Run to the Swamp becomes that much harder...

Thank god I used GP Candy to continually keep myself at full health through the Magic Quest.

As I said, your ideas would have been fine 4 years ago. The playerbase no longer lends itself to this sort of thing.

If given the choice, 8/10 times a new player will pick the server with the easy quests and high player count.

Very few people feel quests are anything more than an annoyance. This is a multiplayer game that lives off it's community. Single player quests are not what people want to do on it.

Maximus how can it be classic if there are 20 original levels? If newbs want to play let them go on UN or Npulse.. Classic should be classic so newbies can come and see what Graal use to be back in the good days before idiots like storm and the classic LAT team Killed it. Classic is dead now anyway and new levels will not save it anyway..

I don't think you even know what you're talking about. Classic was never a server to serve as a monument to old levels. Style MAYBE. If you look at each level pack, you'd notice drastic changes as you go along. Its foolish to define what Classic was by the levels. Classic was a community thing.

There is a community, you just choose not to take part in it.

According to that definition Classic is dead, and the server should go private like other playerworlds in development.

lmao, I'm using way more of the old classic levels than that, even if the map won't resemble anything like it.

Also, Tyhm....
The first quest I'm making has no baddies, instead it has it's fair share of puzzles. Although, you might be thrown back in the dungeon cell a few times, I'm not going to give the secret away to breaking out the short way. (here's some other hints, stay in the basement until you've explored everything, and the guards can't see without light).

Why does everyone hate hera's? :frown: I thought they were pretty cool.

I liked them too, I just hated how it took more and more hera's every time.

Yeah I hated that too, but the idea was great they were just like heart peices in Zelda games.

Yea, it would be a great thing to bring them back for miniquests, don't know if storm would be up to it though. I loved the graphic for them.

Then Classic's doomed. If the playerbase is entirely unwilling to even kill their way to the best weapons, there's no longer a world on which to advance, even hypothetically.

Although, if we're going to insist that newbies not be burdened with the responsibility of questing for their stuff, we can just disallow all the "optional" quest items in PKing. Every sword does a newbiesword worth of damage, and everyone has a seperate PK health bar. :-P

Actually back in the time I enjoyed those quests, they were different.. Not the "killz baddies and get heart". *thumbsup*

*cries* What has graal came to?? New and better well maybe in some way or another but you cant just pull the classicness out of classic you would have to change the name to ***-classic and yea just put the old classic up and fix major tile errors and anything that will make a player get stuck and make a new god damn server for yourselfs

The problem with that is, the server probably wont draw new players that way.
Yes, it would be great for people who have been playing Graal since the beginning, and started on Classic.

The thing is, if Classic admins want a playerworld that is up for the oldbie Graal players from years ago, which will eventually have no players, or next to no players on it (except for the occassional person who slides on to check it out, then leaves), then they can put up old classic.
Keep in mind, too, that the community which classic had back then is gone, and Classic will never be the same again regardless of what they do.

If they want to draw in new players, who know nothing about the way classic used to be, and have a chance to actually have a decent playercount, then they need to make improvements to draw those new players in (face it, classic is not the only pw out there anymore).

I know this seems like a complete contradiction to my first post (I guess it is), but I loved Classic when I first started playing, and I would love to have it back. After thinking about it though, I have realized that there is no way of getting it back, because it thrived alot on the community, which for the most part, is gone. Things were alot different back then (Graal was free, Classic was the only server, and so on...) *shrugs* It's time to move on....

This is just the way it is, in my opinion.

Wrong, many newer players may want to see what Graal was originally like.


What are these assumptions based on?
I believe an Old Graal server is more likely to get more players, both old and new ones.
I recently quit the server (which is the only one I played besides Graal2001) along with many older players, I bet that helped the playercount.


Improvements?
How could the removal of 95% of the levels possibly be an improvement?
The recent additions have nothing to do with the old server.
Tell me, what makes the server as it is today any different than the rest of the playerworlds?

I wouldn't say many, but yea, some might. Do you think the goal should be to get new players to just "check it out"? Or should the goal be to get new players to check it out, and want to stay?

Experience from managing NP (also an old server)
Some of the oldbies might come back, and some new players might go check it out, but do you honestly think they will stay if they check out other, more updated servers?

From what I have read, the Manager is trying to keep some aspects of the old server, and building onto it. It also seems to me that he didn't have much of a choice as to whether or not to make changes, as it seems to be Stefan's choice?

Different server, different players.


I do, as no other server even resembles Old Graal.


But from what I have seen, that statement is wrong.


That's irrelevant.

sorry darlene, but n-pulse are totally different from classic, both content-wisely and also the players. You have to be their to understand it.

Classic would attract players off it's community and novelty, and that's how it should be.

It should not have to become like a "new" server to attract the new players. Why even call it classic then? Switch it back to Graal: The Adventure if that's all it's going to be.

A bit too late for that.

new manager would fix all problems.. so add someone like Inspiration as manager and classic will be good agen

That is correct, however, that isn't really what I was talking about.
The oldbies of NP feel the same way about NP as the Classic oldbies feel about Classic...see what I mean?
Also, I was there. I played Classic for a long time when I first started playing about 6 years ago I think, somewhere around there, and I loved it.
Players will have a problem with any Manager chosen, it's the way Graal is.
Everyone is different, and have different opinions, and preferences.
No Manager will ever be able to satisfy everyone 100%

To Minoc: I really can't argue with you about the state of Classic right now, as I don't really play it often enough.
I only offered my opinion on the way Classic used to be, and what I thought about the debate on whether to change it, or keep it the same.
So I really don't want to debate the issue to death.

To be honest, I am really torn between what I want to see, and what I think would be the right thing to do, both being different.

I want old Classic, but I do not believe that is the right thing to do for the future of Classic.

Why are we even having this discussion? Do you people honestly believe the only thing wrong with Graal1999 was that I uploaded the wrong frelling version?
If you want an Archived Graal, go ahead and upload it, I won't stop you. You can even manage it how you like. However, be ye warned - it's unlikely you'll have the only one, and therein lies the problem. Everyone wants there to be One Old Classic, not a Old Classic and a New Classic.

Perhaps the answer lies in convincing Unixmad to host an Archived Classic as a sort of tea garden for people who want to reflect on the Graal that was, a quiet and lightly-populated server but nonetheless bearing the Mark of the City as it were, immune to eminent domain and revision by virtue of it already has a manager who will never show up to upload your supercool playerhouse. Then the New Classic can cater mercilessly to newbies without people railing that it isn't the same as it was when it was the only server and everyone could either play on it or go play Starcraft, because those were the only two games their computer could handle.

I'm trying to save what is the best of the content (pieces of Kull's, majority of Sardon's Tower, Nimda, parts of Babord, and so on). Also Minoc, did you miss my warp ring update when you quit?
The new overworld map, I'm afraid isn't going to look anything like the old bigmap, but it will still have the same elements, just relocated and tiled differently. If that mountain in the north of the overworld had never been put there, it would probably be closer to the same. Still, everyone's that looked at my proposed overworld map likes it, so there's no fretting over it, just getting it done. The difference in the gnome caves might shock a lot of people, but that's the only thing I can really think of that would... besides maybe Kull's a little bit.

Also, I'm not going to add a new quest until we have some security issues resolved. Storm doesn't like my proposition of coping with them (logon save points that would also go in effect when the NPC Server shuts off). I'd want to save the player's current level,x,y and then also give them the warp ring selections of where to start when the player connects or the NPC server shuts down and comes back on. The biggest point Storm had in his argument was that it would disrupt players on an NPC Server reset.

Can someone besides me, please bug Storm to death about getting movement done. And also, Tyhm, you're free to come back and help with levels.

::BAFFLED BY THIS::

Players will have a problem with any Manager they DON'T LIKE.

Yeah everybody is different, but if they are focusing on Classic then they have a part of devotion to it.


Anyways, the problem is that we are depending on Old Classic and yet we are not encouraging New Classic.

Right now it is lacking the appeal for players, and with the lack of it, Classic's light will still be at yellow. Yes, IMHO the players have created a lot of classic. They created houses, they created guilds, and they well, created some stuff! And all that stuff had open room for quests.

Of course they have made some things happen; endless pking, weird player-made events, famous and infamous challengers of Graal, war waging guild-masters.

But how does Classic discourage this? EXAMPLES BELOW okay.

Some guy: Hey my friend and I made this house to hang out can you upload it at some random area.

LAT: THIS HOUSE LACKS EVERYTHING DETAIL NEEDS, IT JUST HAS, TABLES, BEERS, AND BEDROOMS.

Some guy: I don't see the point of not adding it, it can be a hangout place for certain people, I don't see why it gives off a bad impressi-

LAT: BLARGHOOHEHARHGB

Some guy: Man no wonder they don't have a, "YOU ARE WELCOME TO MAKE HOUSES AND STUFF" sign. It is already giving other people the impression to not contribute to this server, not make guilds for this, help staff, they don't bother trying. It is like a chain reaction! Jeeze how discouraging.

I agree with Tyhm if I interperated it correctly while skimming through the messages, old servers need back their old people. So why not make a new server for new people?

Oh god I have to log off bye.

No.

Pish, like I need your permission. I'm an Emeritus, by my own regulations I can return whenever I feel like it. ;) (But I wouldn't do that to you, so don't sweat it)

I dunno. I like that Classic has its Link To The Past. Maybe it needs a time machine, so people can go back to the exact levelset, in the exact month, that they like. Lots of duplicate levels in duplicate folders that way, but nobody could complain that we failed to accurately reproduce their world their way.
They'd just complain that the imperfect worlds also exist.
And I'd be tempted to put in the past events that led up to the earthquake machine in Avalon...^_~

*looks up Emeritus* ahhh.. okay.

"And I'd be tempted to put in the past events that led up to the earthquake machine in Avalon...^_~"

As much as I liked that quest, and as much as I loved Avalon, I don't plan on readding Avalon (as an island at least). btw Tyhm, I'm not manager.

Also, to Stryker. How'd you manage to catch me healing test subjects, but fail to catch some other people altering their flags and attributes through RC (or at least failing to inform me)? Some kind of incentive against me that you'd look up my name? Seriously, if you were looking through the RC Log, you wouldn't have missed what I just fired someone for, and am questioning Storm as to banning this one and removing this one's GC Items.

To the person rambling about player house submissions. We're not rejecting them, we're simply not accepting them as of yet. I want to get the overworld expanded to an island first, and might even start accepting before that.

tyhm i did ask stefan if i could remake graal 2000 agen and pay for it as my own server. Stefan did say yes but he wanted me to ask storm and storm did say NO so a good idea was denyd cuz storm is an ass.
also that time machine will be like the oldgraal we hade lol u pay 5 bux to see the old graal? haha
and to stryker: YES a new manager would make things better.

Stormy - let him have his fun. Worst case scenario, he makes some oldbies happy and they stop bothering us. Best case scenario, he's got it out of his system, it's a win-win. Clearly Extant Classic isn't as concerned about its roots as some of the more die hard conservatives insist it should be.

There would be no worst case scenario because its based on trust, raistlin (yoimbokintoray) are not the one I would like to see as manager.

I would like MS to stay, but I want massokre gone :(

What exactly did Massokre do? (lets keep in mind that he was only made LAT Admin in September).

I asked Stefan the same thing months ago.
You can't create a server without an NPC server, the levels would have to be converted. :(

Not enough old content is being brought back in my opinion, and overall, the server feels different.