Do we have a chance?
 

Does PC graal community have a chance of surviving? As a community of a game within a game, even if a group of people create a fantastic playerworld with all the bells and whistles; everything a graal player could want, would this be enough to bring the Graal Playerworld base back? Or are we done no matter what?

Iphone graal is doing good, and with Facebook graal on the horizon, it makes me wonder... should we just give up?

The best move Eurocentre made is also going to be the downfall of this PC base imo. Going with the Apple App's path seriously boosted popularity of the general concept of Graal, however with what seems like 3/4 of the people in the entire western world having iProducts that can play the iVersion of Graal, the general attitude inevitably becomes "Why sit at the computer when I can play this on my awesome portable device with tons more people than PC will ever hope to attain?".

Sooner or later, the only people who play on the PC client will likely be people who don't own an Apple device capable of running apps (such as myself, preferring Android, Windows Phone or generic mobile devices over Apple products). Although, Android is projected to get the Graal app, too, only increasing that decline in the PC's community and overall odds of levelling or winning the battle for survival against it's ragingly profitable counterparts.

While we may not get deleted, so to speak, we'll inevitably get shafted one day with a stable client with no projections of updates on it, free of subscription, tiny playerbase, few developers, and so forth.

Wouldn't the best thing to do then is allow pc players to play with people on the iDevice therefore getting rid of the excuse of not enough players. Then new players can slowly find out more about servers such as zodiac and how great they are in comparison to the iServers. With atlantis, classic and delteria on the way for the pc population is there a chance that the pc population might be revived.

I bet if graal went f2p like the iServers and you just pay for customisation and such with one off payment while still retaining the current graalat system used to buy gold but could be kept to buy cards as well then alot more players would be likely to play. Not straight away of course but instead of getting thrown off by ghost mode and all they can become addicted to graal and from there they could start buying in game items with real life money. I believe this would fix the problem of the dying pc population while still providing unixmad with enough money for his bread >.>

no it's even worse than that. we're told that PC graal won't be shafted, and then it's shafted annually. it's understandable that the iphone market is more lucrative, but they won't come out and say that they don't care about PC graal anymore, and then shift the blame onto developers for not taking care of the PC platform well enough to generate the type of revenue that is apparently required to get some real updates, or more importantly some actual focus on improving PC graal

There are many compatibility differences that prevent iProduct users from just being able to jump on PC Classic or PC Era, which is why they have separate servers. It is possible to allow PC users to connect to the iPhone servers with V6 of the client, however it's inefficient. From personal experience logging into the iPhone servers with Graal V6, the most common problem is seeing people with 3G devices having difficulty keeping up with those on the PC client, packet data transfer wise most notably.

But, all that aside, let's assume it were able to get done. What of the existing PC server versions of Classic and Era, for example? There is no way I'd be happy seeing PC Classic and PC Era get scrapped entirely in the event that iPhone servers were somehow able to balance PC and iPhone connections on a single server. I would far rather see the iPhone servers get scrapped over the existing PC ones and port the iPhone users over to the PC version.

Realistically, of course, they're unlikely to ever get mixed due to a combination of difficulty level optimising one or the other version which will never get done effectively and no matter how little the playerbase is on the PC or how large it is on the iPhone, ditching one of the versions of Classic or Era is going to piss off a lot of people either side. It'd be a nightmare.

I see you didnt talk about the f2p issue, I take it then that you agree :)

i think they should just combine all of the servers and make one server. that would save it, imo. take the best of what each server has to offer and combine it into one.

unholy nation - great events, spars, holiday stuff.
zodiac - leveling/class system.
era - jobs (both mining and other stuff like ammo mart)
valkorlia - role playing (but not everyone is into this)

it would take a lot of time, and planning, and i'm sure a lot of people would be pissed they would be losing all their stuff, but in the long run its better than the alternative, which is a complete halt of development.

i remember like a week ago everyone was getting disconnected from graal. it was way late but there were like 90 people still on and we were all in the login server. but everyone was massing and it was pretty cool. that's the most entertainment i've seen masses in a long time. then again, the only server i can go on is era.

i also think they need to get rid of all PR staff. for events there can be a bot. there also wouldn't need to be FAQs because someone could just write a FAQ and people could look at that/they can ask people. or they can just simply figure things out for themselves. i find when you have to take the time to ask staff members for every little thing, it takes away from the game. i also don't think there should be a manager, so that every person would be treated as an equal.

and as for the GPs, well i think the jailing system is severely flawed. a lot of it is based on reputation just because of how easy it is to fake screenshots and videos. if you are relatively unknown and you report someone, GPs will take the time to handle it. but if you're a well known troll, then a lot of times you just get ignored because they'll think you provoked it or you're lying. it got to the point on UN where every staff member didn't believe anything i said because they all assumed i was lying and was faking screenshots.

i think tig should just hire a bunch of trustworthy people as globals and they can log everything. chats, trades, etc. and then they can ban people from the game if they harass or whatever too many times. and don't bring up privacy issues because there's always skype, aim or msn if you really need to tell someone something. this would ensure that the appropriate person gets in trouble each time.

anyways thats all i have to say. some may disagree but i figured i should put it out there anyway.

I'm still seeing 100 players regularly on Zodiac, I'm content with the player-count. It can only get better when Stefan makes the native clients more 'free-to-play' and the drive to provide a better experience for new players increases.

The day the login server ceases to work, and Stefan posts a 'Closed' sign on the graal domains will be the die when the PC community 'dies'.

Your experiences on UN shouldn't be related to other servers. It has made little strides in changing itself for the better and is ran by mostly complete idiots.

dis fowlerplay h8 un so mach ((

no hes right, UN is run by complete idiots

I wouldn't be too quick to jump onto the "Graal is dying" bandwagon. I've been hearing the same song for about 8 years at least now. Yes, it has changed considerably but Stefan and Unixmad have made it perfectly clear that pc Graal is a development platform. Take a good look at both iphone and facebook Graal. Where do they get their development talent from? PC Graal. Without our multitalented community hanging in there and growing better at our individual hobbies, there would probably be no iphone or facebook Graals. My only real issue with it at all is that the subscription plan does need to change, its really not in line with what a development platform stands for.

My guess is that things will get better, as mentioned previously the iPhone apps prove that the Graal concept works, likewise there is a desire within many from the iPhone community to migrate to Graal PC. However issues such as pricing are a huge stumbling block.

I think the issue really is that the powers that be aren't willing to introduce the changes until enough of Graal's servers and their staff have prepared for the intended setup. It is somewhat of a paradox though as server re-structuring will be a slow process while high prices and low playercount remains.
Due to this I can imagine the changes to subscriptions being more of a long transition than the flipping of on/off switches.

Just UN?