A real improvement.
 

Until Graal is F2P like it was a decade ago you're not going to get a large amount of new players. The ones that do join Graal are now experiencing the Zodiac and Era bandwagon effect, an advantage UN had a monopoly on for so many years.

So what does UN have to do to atleast try to stand a chance? Release a complicated system? Develop an elaborate event? Try to release another quest? More hats?

Nope.

The few of you that were around way back will remember that UN was never serious. It's not only an unserious server, but a bad server. UN was and has always been low quality, but that's the fun of it. Developers just developed crap and tossed it everywhere, graphics were constantly uploaded even if they sucked (stolen heads from Valikorlia made it to UN and became popular Graal-wide), levels were always being made by the LAT teams and uploaded even if they weren't top notch, etc. This is what made UN so fun to play for newer players. Even if the content released was ****, it was STILL content and both new and old players alike could enjoy it. UN isn't about deep gameplay, it's about 13 year old *****s sitting around OSL and cracking jokes at eachother. It's about egotistical 16 year olds hogging up the spar ring on their 25 win-streaks. It's about attention-seeking barely legal girls getting things their way because they are female.

UN will continue to die until it's finally removed off the playerlist because no one can accept what it really is. PWA won't intervene, because there's no drama. Era had PWA knocking on its door every year, but they can't do a thing to UN. The only thing I saw was Tig logging on and implementing a mandatory chat filter on that server alone (ty anti-censorship warrior). How can UN be fixed? It needs to be handled the way it was meant to be handled, not trying to take an old Graal playerworld and desperately mixing G2k1 economy mentality and neo-Classic questing. Even if all this were to happen, it might be too late.

Welp, got that off my chest. Cya.

Hmmmm

Yep

There's the problem, a free to play model requires some coherence and order. Stefan and Unixmad don't want to put such time towards something chaotic.

Not quite, because even after Graal went P2P UN still held the highest playercount for many years. The F2P problem is Graal-wide, but it's crippled UN because UN has nothing to keep its players interested, whereas before it did.

Yeah, not quite.

F2P doesn't require "coherence and order". How is iClassic coherent and ordered? It isn't. You can practically apply almost all of the policies there to UN aswell, so the only real question then would be "to what extent" regarding how much players will be limited.

They have fairly tight controls over currency, with at least some guidelines/procedures for item selling, while their developers do not have full creative freedom. It may not be perfect but it is to a certain extent streamlined.

Even with F2P, I doubt UN would return to it's glory. Let's face it, there is NOTHING to do on UN, that you can't do on Zodiac or Era. The only reason I played UN, the only reason my friends played UN, was because someone started us off there. With connections dying, new players have no reason to stick to UN.

UN's problem (IMO) is that it's stuck in the past. Just idling isn't cool anymore. With Xbox 360, Ps3, and more out, what does UN bring to the table? UN needs to restructure itself to have more quests, a storyline, and other features for the feel of a complete game. Player's need to feel that what they are doing is important to the development of their Character. On Era, you kill people and get money and more HP, among other things. Same with Zodiac. UN will follow Babylon, Delt, and others because it refused to change. Thats the problem with Oldbies constantly running the servers. They always want it back to the they first saw it.

This is just false, there are a ton of things you can do on UN that you can't do on Era and Zodiac, the most basic of these being actually play classic style graal with default swords and such. Just with that it will continue to hang on until another classic style server comes out. Also it has bowling, tower defense, an arcade with games, the best events on classic tab, board games, five tournaments a week, etc.

The problem is observer mode. Oldbies get bored of the content because they've played for so long. New players would try the things on the server and like them. For example, everyone on UN complains about castle wars and wants it to be remade, but its easily better than any of the forts on iphone.

The problem is nobody active on UN is very good at development, but that's not really a problem. It's UN's style. They should at least be pushing out content.

All people do is whine about how bad a server is, but they never have any intentions of fixing it. Anyone can state an obvious problem, but since you know how to make a "real improvement" I would like to see you try to get something in the works. If you aren't going to, then just let it be because if you aren't part of the solution you are part of the problem.

UN also won't get new players because eveyone that plays that dead server scares away all the new players by making fun of them, and making them feel like they don't belong. When one person picks on a noob, they ALL pick on that noob. I've watched it time and again. I never see those players back on either. They dont help them or anything. Its rediculous.

I've applied for UN plenty of times. I know my work isn't the greatest, but it's definitely equal to or somewhat greater than some of the stuff on there.

Which means rastafaria will be better then UN?

Why not just let UN die? Y'all just need to give up and play Words With Friends

There's no point in fixing it. The only thing that UN has going for it is that it's a classic server, which ironically also makes it the easiest server to replace.

UN was in a good position a few years ago because they were one of the only servers that still allowed Global Guilds and they were riding the influx of refugee guilds from other servers and using it to drive the players and really drum up some competitiveness. But then it just sort of fell flat and they settled into this tired old routine of constantly hosting events for fun.

Worked there over the last summer, made three really solid events; Bomberman, tennis, and H.O.R.S.E. (The basketball flavour). None got released, even though they were all completed and waaay higher quality than pretty much anything else on the server. All of them used special lag compensation algorithms that made gameplay smooth and enjoyable. Nobody really helped me with these, even though I asked other staff members for graphics and ganis. The only people who ever really even took any notice to any development on the server at all were Kevin and MG. It's almost like they were intentionally trying to stifle any improvements.

Most of the activity on RC was talking, but the talking only really started when a female staff member was online, or some social bull****. Seriously, if you were a female staff member on UN, you were probably under the assumption that RC was always pretty busy. It wasn't; only when your attention-whoring ass was around.

Everything was based around ridiculous social structures, really pathetic stuff.

Anyway, I quit for some reason I can't remember. I think school started.

I'd also like to note that UN is full of security holes and I can still spawn hundreds upon thousands of EP without any means of detection to this day and I discovered this exploit without access to any staff rights.

The only fun I ever had on UN was doing three things, all related to just screwing with people:

1) Sending personal PM's to everyone on the playerlist saying the same random crap.
2) Writing a bot to do the above, and plug people's stored responses to one another.
3) Writing a bot to do the above, and throw in CleverBot responses.

Yeah, I'd say UN is pretty much the cesspool of Graal.

Quality-wise yes, possibly.

I don't think it's worth trying to **** all over someone who has the ability and thinks they can make a difference. It might be more realist to assume that sooner rather than later they'll realize what a jumbled mess the server is in terms of code and how bad the player base really is and that they'll decide to give it up, but even today I see some people who are dedicated to what they're doing for UN, regardless of any of that.

I can't do anything but wish Lloyd the best of luck if he feels he has the willpower to rewrite basically the entire server while producing new content.

It's always amusing to read about how there used to be so much more to do when the overall content probably hasn't decreased at all ever.

The only valid criticism I can think of for anyone who wants to take over (me included when I took Dev Admin) is that whatever you do it's likely the players will take the change very negatively. Right now there's an unbelievable amount of complaining about some Magic Broom being nerfed to a state where it isn't just a set of staff boots available to players. It's disheartening to see how unreasonable and vindictive (you're only doing this because you only want staff to walk on walls because you hate the players) people on UN are about any minor change that's needed to make future progress.

And then of course if you try to actually talk things out about the development process or about players ideas, and explain the drawbacks of cost vs benefits, you're likely to run into stuff like this

http://i.imgur.com/Zpayx.png

Actually when UN was first released it was well beyond its time in the sense of scripts and events that we held. Before the Rain Dance NPC there wasn't any type of weather script created in Graal. UN was created because Giuliano and I were both staff on Bravo and enjoyed creating levels and scripts. UN was an extension of what we thought would bring players old and new alike to an environment that made the best of what was already available in the Graal world and also adding new elements that made Graal fun and exciting. I do agree that if Graal becomes F2P again it has the potential to be greater than it ever was especially with sourcing to iOS and Facebook through Flash.

Well beyond it's time with outdated levels and no real content players cared about? UN catered to the G3k crowd and the other smaller servers that were slowly dying out. I can't recall anyone taking UN seriously, even in 2001 people made fun of it on other servers. I'm not tryign to trashtalk the server...I'm just saying that people are overcomplicating it nowadays.

However you want to word it and acknowledge the thousands of different point of views people had for the server, in my eyes UN was a success. Is it still a success? It is in the fact that it is still up and running, something I would've never guessed in 2002. Especially up into the 2010's.

I would love to gain control over UN again and even pay Unixmad/Stefan for server rental and be able to license the Graal platform for a move into the mobile device field, facebook and even browser. Will it happen? I hope so but unlikely which is quite unfortunate.

w0rd, but we're talking about the current (dying) state of UN.

A lot has changed, I wish they backed everything up or there was a way to access the old levels and scripts. I'd love to come back and work for UN but if that can't or won't happen then I can only pay my respects to the server and the people who have stayed loyal for so many years. UN was one of my greatest achievements and I unfortunately made a stupid move to leave it many years ago.

love u

:)

I agree with this statement of yours, I used to really enjoy UN, but unfortunately those you left it to for over the years really let it down.
It was the server that made me strive to be a staff when I was just a small trial newbie.

dang crono u were ahead of ur time

Swedes have always been good at predicting, we predicted that Nomanssky would be a flop :D

one man's lie :D