stop letting managers have the power to close servers
 

i think it's unfortunate that managers have the ability to close down their servers whenever they feel like, just because they are the manager. speaking strictly about servers who are either public or close to being public, it's very unfortunate that at any point a manager can simply shut down their project whenever the feel like it, no matter how populated and active the server is

i'll recount to two personal examples of this rule that i have experienced to really outline why this rule sucks. the first would be in the case of doomsday, where tifakhan was able to shut down the server even when the population was reaching an average of 60 players on a regular basis with higher numbers during more active hours of the day. instead of passing the server onto another manager, the server was shut down for good at the egotistical whims of the manager, resulting in the loss of my home server, making many people quit graal for good, and forced me to try and bring back the server multiple times as well as many others attempting the same feat. it was just bad all over, when it could have been avoided by having a global staff member simply remove tifakhan and replace her with a more active/enthusiastic manager

the second example would be the recent demise of armageddon, the server that i was managing with decus owning the actual server. as you guys know, we were about 90 (percent) done with the foundations of the server which would have allowed us to go public within a couple of weeks (if our staff was working to fix things up). however, the owner of the server (and hence considered the 'actual' manager in the eyes of graal) decided that armageddon would fail in comparison to other UC servers such as delteria, and that making a server that would only be used for 60-or-so players wouldn't be worth the time and effort. this was decided by one person, whom shut down the entire project even though the rest of the staff, especially myself, still wanted to complete the project. i could predict that had armageddon not been shut down, that we would either have applied and been on the classic tab at this point, or we'd be incredibly close and waiting for inspection. instead of a global staff member taking control of the promising and almost-complete server and pushing it to completion, it would closed at the whim of a disgruntled manager who seems to have quit and never signed onto graal since, thus making it virtually impossible for myself or any other staff to finish it

while these two examples are very different, they both outline the same problem with graal's server policy: managers can close down their servers pretty much whenever they want, and no one can do anything about it except perhaps stefan. if streety wanted to close down unholy nation, he could probably do it tomorrow if he felt it was a good idea, and then we'd have no more unholy nation, ever. if (whoever is managing era after deo left, squirt or chris vimes or salesman or whomever i don't know anymore) decided to close down era because they felt the server was going down a road it wouldn't recover from, they could do it, and it doesn't seem fair to the players who play on those servers

my suggestion is that we remove this ability from managers (or owners, whatever) once their projects have reached a certain stage of maturity. it's a better opportunity for graal if we instead establish new managers in the place of these server-shutting-down managers: graal gains no advantage from allowing managers to close their servers forever. it seems a better option to let them quit and for global staff to step in and either manager the server for awhile until a predecessor is found, or to appoint a new manager when the time comes. let's not let one person's decisions decide the fate of a server that multiple people contribute too

Urgh, you are seriously suggesting that the reward for someone paying money to start a playerworld project and then doing well with it should be a loss of control over it? This might have been a neat idea back in the day, but in these backwards day it just reeks of exploitation.

Well, when it comes to Classic servers, they can't just shut it down. I don't know of a case where that's been legitimately done (although more than one manager of a Classic server has gone rogue and deleted the content before leaving).

But in cases where the Manager is not the one who paid for the server, or, like I said, if it's Classic, they shouldn't have that power. But the examples you gave don't seem to be the case. It's their money they spent, they decide what to do with it.

It's typically the Managers who are the only thing keeping the server running though, if they quit the server is probably doomed anyway however that didn't seem to be the case in your Armageddon example.

Anyway I'm pretty sure me, the Era crew, and Streety have no plans of dropping our servers because we don't feel like it's worth it anymore. So that shouldn't be considered.

It would be nice if there was an incentive to bring up new servers to the Hosted tab, 10% off server rental maybe?

if ur server is good you shouldnt have to be paying graal so that graal can have a good server

u catch my drift?

I agree, Manager's of classic servers should not be able to close it down at a whim's notice.

However, if you are the Owner and created it in the first place and you're still helping run it, it should be your decision alone to shut it down.

They can request it be taken into UC status, from which I rarely see servers return. Kind've silly because a server should always be being worked on. :rolleyes:

This thread is silly. UC server content is under the control of whoever rented the server, or whoever that renter has placed in charge. Saying they can't close down the server if they want would be pointless because once the manager leaves, there's no one who would be able to keep the server running anyway.

And for Classic servers, I guarantee Sales couldn't just decide to shut down Era for good, Streety couldn't just shut down UN, etc. The PWA would no doubt take over the server and find a decent staff team.

doomsday was just like era and unholy nation, and the manager just shut it down. the PWA didn't step in and take doomsday into their own hands

especially for classic servers, the other staff should take over once the manager decides to quit. saying that once the manager is gone the server will fall apart is untrue

while it may not be an issue with any current management, i doubt the staff lineup for any given server will always stay the same, and who knows who will lead era or unholy nation years from now

I have to say the management on servers like Zodiac, UN and Era is way more now stable than it was half a year/a year ago..

Well, really, classic server managers have no say over whether or not the server is going to be shut down when it comes down to it. Like Grey said, they can request it be taken UC, but now, even that is pretty much the PWA's decision in the end.

To be honest it's probably just because nobody gave a crap about those servers.

The guy who originally made Zone (Dell) got perma global banned (by Angel IIRC) for trying to delete his content from the server while it was still UC. After that globals took over the server, restored the content and released it anyway.

Yea, the whole "you upload it to our servers, it's ours" bull****.

The majority of Zone content was significantly overhauled before the release, anyway. Writing some sort of hoverbike movement script is probably the last useful thing I did on Graal.

Though, a global ban seems a bit harsh :p.

I guess.

That is what you get for opposing the will of the people. Damn counter-revolutionaries, etc.

I also think there is a distinction between server managers and server owners that needs to be acknowledged here.

It was well within the server owner of Armageddon's rights to close down his server that he was paying for. In the case of Delteria, since it was Classic technically the server is owned and paid for by Graal itself, in which case it shouldn't have been shut down the way it was, but like I said, in that case it was probably just that nobody cared enough to really do anything about it. This is the reason that UN, Era or Zodiac could never be shut down like that.

Having said that, in the case of Armageddon, even though Graal has ownership rights of the content you create, the original content creator still maintains some distribution rights.
So if you wanted to upload the content that you originally made for Armageddon to another Graal server then you could still do that. Or you could release it for everybody to use. If you were the server manager then you would have backups of the server content, yeah? If you got the approval of the previous staff you could probably even launch your own revival with a server owner who isn't a ****.

There are no server owners, the use of that term was officially discontinued to avoid making a false impression of property (everything is Graal's property). Stop trying to make it more complicated.

I always wondered what they'd do if you'd claim ownership rights before uploading your stuff to Graal. You know, kind of granting Graal Online usage rights.

By uploading, you agree to transfer ownership. If ownership is not transfered, it was uploaded against the rules and will be removed, just like when you upload some guy's mp3s.

It's amazing what some people will do to ensure a few more bucks.

Nice work think I'll take it, then get mad at you or someone else for taking the work of another. Gotta love them hypocrites.

So granting Graal Online the rights to use my stuff would be against their rules, eh? Well, whatever..

When you accept the Graal terms of service, you actually agree to transfer any ownership rights to any content that you choose to upload that is intellectually yours beforehand. When you upload music that you did not create, it is not your property therefore you do not have the right to transfer ownership, which is where it becomes illegal to upload a track that you did not create.

I know the stuff is written in the ToS, but there should be a way to keep ownership rights and just grant Graal Online usage rights. That would be quite cool.

I just checked the ToS recently and didn't see this anywhere, has it been updated recently?

though it's kind of unrelated to this thread, i'll just mention that i lost my gold account a good week before the server was closed, so i was unable to get a copy of the files before deletion, and i cannot find anyone who has a backup, and the PWA won't help me since "decus was the owner" and even though we both combined servers with a mutal agreement that it was "our work" not "decus's **** i helped him make" it still hangs on decus to somehow grant me permission for the **** i helped work on already. apparently i have no "ownership rights" to keep working my server

as for saying that no on cared about those servers? that's just ignorant. i'd still be playing doomsday if graal didn't let them close down the server, and i've talked to quite a few players who would say the same thing for other servers

Why don't you just ask Decus for rights to continue, then i'm guessing Stefan or some PWA would give you levels, graphics, etc.

Both Cyril and Decus have disappeared from Graal is what I was told.

I agree with Hiro of how inconsiderate it was of Decus to throw away a server that many developers put some time into, and not have anyone else at least attempt to develop the server elsewhere.

That sounds extremely weird, in all the years I wasn't the actual owner of Mythic Legends (or Maloria for that matter), the PWA always provided me backups of the servers if I requested it.

I was talking to Stefan about this the other day and the impression I got was that he won't immediately give server backups to people who didn't manage/own the server (presumably to stop people just pillaging a server if it goes down for a short while), however the longer a backup is sitting around unused the more likely it is that a request to use it will be approved.

Well yeah, you obviously need to be either manager or owner, but since he is (was) it shouldn't be a problem.

Wow hiro still fussing about doomsday.. get over it and besides if half the things your saying was true.. Like the 60 playercount ...ect Doomsday would of been alive.. At the end if doomsday was honestly a home to many at the last day there would have been more players on beside Tifa herself... I mean if everyone know it's gonna be the last day of there fav server it would of been flooded right? Guess what.. Tifa was the last person on that day before admins came and closed it.

To be honest i would bring doomsday back up,. I could also get tifakhan on here like i did many times in the past and if i really want it she would hand over doomsday to me :)
But old players are gone so it be a waste of time.

I agree, my point however was that if he isn't currently allowed access to them for whatever reason which I'm presuming the case is here, that he will be allowed eventually.

We didn't want to release everything out in the case that the server comes back. Graal is f*^%kin boring right now, and there isn't really anyone on anymore. Besides that fact, Decus did ALL the levels on the overworld. There were a few other levels, probably 10 max, that other people did. Once I get time, if you level creators want them back, thats fine. GFX was submitted by a global team person, and other images should be on other peoples computers that they made. Hiro's stuff was never actually implemented on the server as far as I remember. All nats that made things had backups as far as I know. There was 0 reason to keep anything open.

Also on a different note:
Staff was extremely inactive. There were 3-4 lats, and Decus still did all the overworld himself except maybe 2 levels. Even if lats were working on the insides of houses and stuff, there were only, MAYBE, 15 levels tops in a 2 month period. Nats came and went as they pleased pretty much. We had 4 nats or so, but only 1 would be active at a time, and sometimes that was only for a day or two, a week at most, then we'd have an inactive period with no nats for almost 2 weeks sometimes. GFX did go ok for the most part, but Decus was doing the majority of that too until right before Armageddon was closed down.

Fact of the matter is it was not this "candy" world ready to be put up. We still had a TON of things to do to get to classic. No quests where actually done whatsoever, all of our systems except 2 of the really important ones were glitched and half-ass, and staff was getting more and more inactive by the minute. Honestly, if someone wants to pay for the server, and I can be promised 3-4 ACTIVE NATs, LATs (and LATs that can do what decus did, and not just be ****y and say they can), GFXs, and GANIs each, I'll be glad to come back as Admin, Hiro as manager, and give another 2 months or so.

Like I said, main reason to not release it, in case it comes back out. Message to be continued... (BOM BOM BOM)