Monthly Classic: Ideas to help Graal
 

My ideas are getting buried in the Lifetime Classic thread, so I'll start a few new ones.

Monthly Classic
Purpose: to bring in money from our classic subscribers on a monthly level
Options: offer this in addition to Lifetime instead of replacing it; refund existing Lifetime players by crediting their account an equal time of Monthly Classic
Expansion: If we allow Anyone to keep their lifetime account, they should be required to rescramble their password and charged to change the email to which it is sent, probably with a grace period of a month or two to figure everything out.
Requires: Just another spot on the shop.

This is the heavy Pros and Cons debate. On the plus side, doing away with Lifetime Classic means more money. Unless it scares everyone off and alienates the existing playerbase, in which case it means less money. If we stop offering it, our existing players aren't likely to riot over newbies having to pay by the month...but unless we take steps such as automatic password scrambling, the Lifetime Accounts will continue to be recycled for generations to come. If we offer subscriptions at a lower introductory cost than Lifetime, we stand the further risk of the scriptkiddies returning, dropping $5 for a month of Classic, getting banned at the end of the month, then starting a new account. This could be offset by requiring the first purchase be at least a Year of Classic in advance, then they can buy smaller increments after that...

Which version of this will be most tolerable to the most people? I mean, it's inevitable Unixmad's going to have to enforce one of them, but we can negotiate the least onerous option if we try.

All I have to say is that if I am required to pay x dollars a month to keep my lifetime subscription I will quit Graal. Think of the playercount when p2p was introduced. GraalOnline is the only computer game that I have ever purchased online and it remains the only MMORPG game that I play only because of the lifetime subscription. If I have to pay money to keep saving my character data then to hell with it.


then again this is only me talking.


but if "expired classic" accounts were still able to save their character data I wouldn't be as angry...

and that's an entirely valid opinion. I fear the riots to come myself. Anyone else? Someone come to say that anyone who won't upgrade doesn't deserve to play?

I think its a given that lifetime subscriptions have been a draw for many players and keeps them hanging around for many years. I've heard many people who were around classic pre-npc complain that when we went npc server they lost all their gains. Obviously thats because those items were no longer available but it brings me to this. We all complained bitterly, myself included, when old classic would have a reset and we would have to repeat the same quests again to regain the same items once again. Why not make it so that when an account expires they keep what they've gained so far, but cannot save new items until they've upgraded. If the quests and rewards are worth it, they will upgrade. If they don't feel they are they will continue to sit in level 14 and look regal and impressive to the newer players that come along.
-Bell

There is nothing wrong with lifetime classic. As Nikomi said, it keeps people around for years. The problem is that there aren't enough new updates to get people to want to upgrade. We need a new Gold server.

The trouble with Return to Last Save for formerly-registered accounts is what if they ended with 99 arrows, 99 bombs, and a zillion Gelat/gralat/rupees? They can drop 'em on a friend, reconnect to restore their last save...
Mind, that'd be an easy exception to make, but it bears consideration.

My big problem with the idea of NonLifetime Classic is - Werewolf96 gets $30 for his birthday. He can register one account and hack once, or he can register 6 accounts for 1 month each and, at the end of the month, hack 6 times for the price of one - and he doesn't care, because his month was up anyway.

So do we require people to start with at least 6 months at $5 a month? Then they'll choose Lifetime if it's an option, so we can't do that in this scenario. So they play for 6 months, complain there weren't enough upgrades, and leave. Two years later...well, they can pay $5 to play again, but why bother?

With lifetime registration, you got less hackers and more Returning Oldbies. It built what community Graal has left. I fear removing it will remove the community as well. It is my opinion that if the server upkeep fund needs more money, Graal needs to find other options to charge for - Premium Content, rather than taxing the cheapest of the cheap players. Thus the Expansion and New Gold ideas, thus the Hubworld - or Graal needs to find new people to charge - thus advertising and the newbie world ideas.

But this is a guided discussion, not a parade, so - anyone have a response to my theories?

hmmm...what if, instead of A Month being defined as 30 days from the start of the subscription (whether they're used or not), we defined it as 30 individual days the play can use?

Then if you stopped playing with 5 days left, you could still come back a year later and pick up where you left off...

I dont think its right that if we paid for a lifetime account and thats what we were agreeing to pay for that they should have the right to change that, we didnt pay for a monthly account,

I would totally quit playing and find something else to do.

I don't believe that lifetime should be revoked as it is the initial draw. We saw a great example of what happens when people are suddenly asked to pay for what was once free when graal went p2p. People left in droves. On the other hand I think Tyhm's wording may be confusing as well. I don't see it as paying monthly as the ability to pay monthly if you chose. Its just an alternate method of being able to pay for those who can't afford a large lump sum. We may be looking at this cost thing backwards though, maybe the price should be lowered at this time to increase sales of VIP and gold rather than raised. In trying to stay on topic I won't go into the fact that this is only one part of the issue involved such as first impressions of the game itself when a new player is searching for Zelda online but as the saying goes "You get what you pay for." I just checked Guildwars, they are advertising HUGE 30% across the board discounts. People like sales, the words 'Sale' or 'Limited Time Offer' drive in customers. By calling it a sale you're not saying that its going to permanently stay that price.

On another note, Tyhm, you're right, the player saving problem would be an issue with the abusers. It would have to be modified so that droppable items would not be saved.

Hmm, a Pre-XMas Sale could be a good idea; driving in some critical traffic, especially if it isn't something so regular people just wait for Graal to be on sale...
And if we combine that with the switch to Monthly, people could get more Days of Graal for the same price...but maybe introductory prices is a bad move.

The central issue to all of this is that Unixmad's losing money on people who register once and stay forever. I can't imagine it's all that expensive to Store inactive accounts, so it's the lag of active accounts plus the loss of new accounts from transfer. The second, transferring lifetimes, can be countermanded by forcing password changes and tying it to the email-unless they sell the email account too. In which case...this is a dangerous and possibly illegal idea, and probably impossible, but we email them invitations to use The Same Credit Card to upgrade to Gold...if that don't scare people off selling their accounts...
Or we could require them to confirm their billing information to receive their new password. What is your address?, please confirm the last 4 digits of the card you used, etc. If I'm giving the lifetime account to my brother I don't mind giving him that, but if it's some stranger in New York, why should he know enough to steal my credit card?
I still say that if Unixmad wants more money out of the Registered playerbase though, putting up another surprise-toll booth ain't the answer. More traffic or cheaper premium content maybe, revoking old contracts no.

It's ridiculous to think you can revoke the lifetime classic option. I don't even know why unixmad brought it up.

The whole point of "lifetime" is that it lasts your entire life or Graal's entire life. Not "lifetime... until we decide to change it".

As far as making it no longer lifetime only for new account upgrades... That's just as bad. Then you have hundreds of people who get lifetime classic and any new people don't? I don't see how that would encourage new players.

There doesn't necessarily need to be more servers. Instead there needs to be more focused development. Lifetime Classic going = me going. Not to mention I'd want a bit monetary compensation if that was the case.

What I don't understand is that guildwars charges 50 dollars for their game and there are no subscription fees, and they seem to be doing pretty damn well. Classic is 30 dollars, so thats 20 dollars less; but then again their playerbase vs GO is obviously different. But then they did release an expansion pack but still keep it free to play online.

Maybe it was poor management of funds coming in, and investing it into the future of the company.

Basically there needs to be a business plan created by GO so they can survive without hurting their current player base. Which includes hiring paid server managers and developing their own content / servers so they don't have to rely on customers to do so. It wasn't what GO was built upon but if they want to be successful they have to stop relying on the players content.

It would be a big kick in the pants to people who upgraded to "_LIFETIME classic_" in the first place.

You can't give someone something, and then change the service to meet your needs. It was called lifetime for a reason.

I too, this is NOT a solution to the problem. Doing this simply is a short-term financial option, but then you limit very much the amount of new upgrades, and new players will leave, resulting in less money made in the long-term.

It doesn't need to be done like this. Graal needs to tell people it exists, so that new players join. The solution is new people, not screwing over current customers. If we had SOME sort of a small free server, it doesn't have to be that big or magical like classic was, but some good sized and good content, free server (perhaps also with a weekly hourly limitation, of say 16 hours - 2 for each weekday and 3 for each weekend day) then it'd become a bit more 'viral' and people would log on as word would spread around more about it.

I think unixmad didn't like the idea of making a server free right now, which to be fair is fair enough as any server you make free with (assumably) become popular - and all servers online have quite a lot of content (albeit some of it hard to find). But we should have a purpose built server for this situation - and perhaps have features from other worlds (i.e: a little quest/event with a Zone style gun and enemies, which at the end of the quest will reward you with a heart and show you a little information about Zone) - so basically the server is one big (yet semi-discrete) advertisement of the other servers, while still allowing those who can't/don't yet wish to upgrade to wait around.

You want more people to upgrade give them more content to upgrade to. As it stands, feature wise, there are enough now. We have all the things like forums, guilds, mini games and what not else - its the game content that is lacking. It should be a case of a set day each week having a noticeable and WORTHWHILE update (not just a new item or something) on both gold servers. Zone is very undeveloped. What ever happened to Zone single/multi-player quests? That would add a whole new and exciting dimension to Graal but it was never done!

So we all seem to be in agreement that charging the Lifetimers again will destroy Graal - how do we convince Unixmad of this point? I haven't known him to be one to accept "No" at face value, nobody likes being told what to do and admins less than most people...
Do we say "Just charge them for changing the email/require them to confirm their upgrade data/send the new accountholder the original's card#, then they won't be able to transfer their accounts"?
Do we say "If you follow our Simple 9-Point Plan, it'll generate more revenue"?
Do we say "Okay, don't sell any More Lifetime Classics, but neither should you discontinue the oldbies'"?
Do we say "You'll make more money by charging for updates"?
I mean, I'm at a loss here; what do we say aside from "No, we have a plan"? Last time he trusted someone who said that, we wound up with Lifetime Classic in the first place *guilty*

I'm sure a very large portion of the playerbase would leave if it happened and that should be enough to convince him not to do it.

A good start for new people could be putting graal on xfire

Graal on xfire.LOLOLOLOL

Wtf is xfire?

whats wrong with graal on xfire
i think it would be a good start

XFire is, apparently, an AIMlike client for video games. One-click join-their-game, shows an icon for what game they're currently playing...

...and given that we can make graal://maloria links, why not? It's a good idea, I just don't think we'll convince Unixmad that's the same as making money off Lifetimers...

me paying to keep playing a game i BOUGHT = me quitting.

Unixmad could try it and see what happens, LMAO

To what Mykel said about another Gold Server, though it might be irrelavant to the rest of the thread :

If Stefan gave Konidias some help with Graal 2001, and it was really good and was moved to be a Gold Server, I would probably upgrade.

Brr hell no. It's been on there many times before after many attempts to revive it. Granted previous attempts to revive it weren't that well done, it would still suffer badly if added to the gold list regardless of the content on it now.

If it has a future at all, it'd have to be on classic. Besides, it'd probably be better for Graal overall on classic, as more people may upgrade as they can afford it, so they get some money instead of no money.

I don't think it would be better for Graal overall if it were classic. Who would upgrade? Only the few new people who don't have classic access. Everyone else would just play it and possibly leave the gold servers.

I have a lot of faith in this revision and I think it will be really popular. It's really up to Stefan or Unixmad in the end, but my suggestion would be to have it go gold and allow limited weekly access to non-gold, and a small area for trials to let them learn how to play and find out what the server is about. But not actually play the main part of the server.

Expired gold accounts could play for like 2 hours a week or something? I don't know... just an idea. I think having a time limit to play on a gold server would encourage people to upgrade better than any other method. Then they can have full unrestricted access to the server, plus have their data saved and whatnot, but they can only be online for a brief amount of time. Just enough time to get them interested and wanting to play more.

I didnt really open up the whole "It would be a good idea" thing.. I just said I would upgrade for it.

Good reasons going monthly with Classic is a bad idea:
1) Hackers. If it costs less to have a month of Classic, it costs less to screw with the servers. Also, if you're down to one last day of Classic, why not get yourself banned? It's not like you're losing anything...
2) Punishment and Appeals. If you're jailed on Mithica for a month for insulting the GP Admin's mother, it's one thing if you've got a lifetime paid for anyway...and another thing entirely if you're paying by the month. A month out of a lifetime account is negligable, but if you're paying let's say $5 a month, are you entitled to get $1 back?
3) Playercount and community. It's already been demonstrated that going pay cost the Playercount dearly - with less people on (and more servers for them to Be on), the sense of community dwindled. Going even more elite will mean an even smaller chance of finding someone online on your favorite server

Pray continue...

Um, what kind of fool would pay monthly for this?

a idiot.

I hardly think such thoughts are going to convince Unixmad not to charge for Classic; that just files under People Will Quit Rather Than Pay. The relative intelligence and gullibility of the people who stay is irrelevant to this discourse.

He's making a good point, this game as it currently is, is NOT worth paying to play for.

Valid or not, it's not a NEW point. If all we're going to do is rehash that GRAAL SUCKS, WE NOT PAY MORE, this thread may as well be closed.

Well, let me speculate as to what I think the reactions would be to a monthly charge.

1. It will certainly shrink the player base considerably, particularly on Classic servers. This would have a negative impact on the inflow of new players, because the players on Classic servers are generally the ones that advertise Graal the most.

2. The amount of playerworlds on the serverlist will become smaller as a result of the player base shrinking. There wouldn't be enough resources to keep them all running, especially with most development falling into the players' hands. There also wouldn't be enough resources to keep them populated.

3. The amount of efforts in the development of Gold servers will increase substantially. This is a result of playerworlds disappearing.

4. The player base of Gold servers will increase, though not nearly enough to offset the loss of the player base by charging monthly classic.

5. Stephane will have a lot of people upset with him about the advertised product keyword "lifetime" being turned into "monthly" and therefore would have to pay extensive legal fees, that may or may not surpass the amount of money Cyberjoueurs would receive by charging monthly classic.

Congrats, you just made my signature quote.