Educational Content
 

I feel that a server, or a portion of a server, should be set aside for "development games". Games which introduce players to development.

Consider the earliest days of Graal - I realize the baddies in this example were hard coded into Graal at that point, but ignore that for this purpose. We had hopping baddies, baddies which would slice you in two, and bullet-throwing baddies.

The fun we had with such simple systems was enough to keep a lot of us around for future developments. What if we had made them "open source" so that anyone who enjoyed them could learn how they work - improve upon them, or even make their own.

A group or system should be created so that the quality of tutorials can be determined accurately (so the players have a tangible means to measure their improvement or progress). The higher the quality rating the more they should be rewarded - yes players should be rewarded for education content.

Good educational content will last a long time and teach many people. The better we present it the more people will be interested. If anyone else is interested in forming a fair and open group to rate and reward (gelats?) good development just speak up in the thread, give me your two cents and we'll see where this goes.

Haven't there been similar things? Developers Circle?

Development is something players should be getting themselves into. The fact that there are little developers now shows that Graal is failing.

I don't agree that the lack of developers shows the failure - but I do agree it will, without a doubt in my mind, lead toward a failure unless it is resolved.

More than this I am worried that, even if effective, a group of self-controlled individuals acting as a party may damage the community over the long term if they were to peruse educational development - which is why I want to emphasize "rules" and "standards" which they must abide by... if not simply for consistency than for long-lasting dependability.

Graal doesn't have a lack of developers compared to the number of players; it has too playerworlds.

Imo Graal drew more people into development because the community was larger (more people will = more potential developers) but more importantly the game itself was fun and supported developers. Closing off these forums to gold only again was a mistake as it killed off a lot of potential to help turn people into developers. Without this place I wouldn't be a LAT at all.

Then they introduced the whole buy your own playerworld which was ok in theory but split the existing developers to too many different servers. I know i'd be discouraged to dev if I was the only LAT on a server, which is the case on Bomy Island...highly unmotivated at the moment.

Out came GS2 which could only be learned online, giving newer players no chance unless they managed to get their hands on RC/NC rights. I suppose one could argue that they can simply learn GS1 first but who the hell would now that every server is GS2?

@_@

Yes, it does have too many playerworlds. The few developers we have are spread too thin apart to support any decent development, even if ignoring quality - and this is ignoring the few developers who are actually valuable.

Ultimately what I would like to see come from this is more developers so that a a server or series of high(er) quality of servers could be maintained... creating the framework Graal would require to keep any users gained through advertising.

This is the ground work, and it is very important we definie any goals we wish to persue now so that we may work towards them most efficiently and more effectively as a group.

Think of graal as the classic fantasy book setting, the developers are magic users, and many ages ago magic users could do things we now only dream of. And there are less magic users than there used to be.

Graal never had a lot of skilled developers. A lot more player-made content used to be generated, but that was because standards were so low that healing by using "hurt -2;" was considered acceptable.

We can all sit here and complain about Graal's faults but I think we all know all of this will be completely ignored... It's not even worth the time complaining anymore.