More (possibly payed?) development staff
 

Hey,

first of all - this is no flame thread against Tig - as he certainly has other things to do then developing graal kingdoms the whole day.

Why is it impossible to hire more development staff's? The changelog has been tiny for years now - maybe 1-2 bigger feature updates in a year, if at all.

How do you think to keep the player count up or even higher like this, unixmad and stefan?

GK isn't the easiest server to get development staff for, especially scripters (there's a large learning curve with all the MUD stuff). It's also a Gold server, which means you pretty much need to upgrade if you want to see your content in action (and it's only fair you should have access to the server you're developing for). Stefan also likes to keep people on GK fairly low-level, and not give them a ton of rights, which annoys some people.

Is there no way to make this easier, or is this caused by the whole external mudlib integration?

I renember getting some month free for the german translation.

Do you need better rights on the main playerworld to develop better content, or are you rather talking about motivating people with better rights?

It would help a ton if it was better documented, but it's still hard to adapt to, and much of the stuff on GK is based on GS1 (or still GS1), so the functions act weird (e.g. there are few player functions).
That's a unique case, as far as I know. Stefan doesn't usually upgrade developers.

Well, I can only speak as a scripter, but on Dev, you have virtually no rights (no one gets rights on main :p), and you have to use a lot of messy workarounds, which are the kind of thing scripters hate. You also have (had) to wait forever for Stefan to get on to give you any rights you need (Tig can do this now, fortunately).

I wouldn't see a problem as player if a developer would receive gold for each project (as quality control)...

GK is still wasting it's potential, after YEARS of existance.

Well, as Chris said, hiring developers isn't as easy as saying it. First, the quality that GK demands is a lot higher than the classic or UC servers, then the developers that are good enough, are occupied with their own projects.

Stephen and I are willing to pay our developers out of our own pocket money sometimes for large projects, but it's really not that easy, and John is usually more than willing to help out by upgrading people.

People underestimate just how hard we try to bring improvements to GK, so it just looks like we're idle hands.

I spend a lot of time outlining things that need to be improved to the mudlib and have sent large lists to Stefan. We are slowly making the mudlib more flexible for scripters to use, but there will still be a learning curve.

GK will always waste potential because Graal is not a large company. It cannot afford to pay it's developers, and half the time, it shouldn't even bother because a lot of developers on Graal who think they're so good, are really just crappy developers who are just good compared to the rest of the developers on Graal.