[Crono]

Originally Posted by unixmad

What's about million of people making web pages on blobs, do they work for free for the company hosting the blobs? No, they do what they like to do.

But thousands of people read their blogs like daily.

When some people are reading web pages some others are using creativity to write text and make everyone enjoy what they do.

In hopes of gaining popularity with millions of people.

They don't make money with what they do but they make experience, if one day they have opportunity to create there own business they will have skills and experience.

The ones that actually pay for their space are ones who are practicing for later, when they can charge people and make websites for them.

Graal is the same for games, we give opportunity to player to create games and manage most of the administration of games. Some player world manager will only do for fun but some others will work in the game industry (we have lot of example of Graal players that work in the game industry) .

Except every non-graal run playerworld is crappy. Prove me wrong please?

You say that we have not improved the restaurant since P2P, do you really play Graal ? If I count number of professional people that have worked on Graal we have probably spent more than 50 man year of work to make graal.

Graal hasn't been improved overall since full p2p was introduced back in june (may?) 2002. The .exe itself may look fancier and gscript 2 may be more advanced, but the community of graal has been dying since.

Making an Online game is not only programmers but graphic designers, Web Designer, Web scripters, Computer technicians, Network Technicians, Administrative Staff to manage office, payment of Staff, State taxes …

We know that

To manage a Online game you need lot of hidden charges including the renting of a office (We have a dedicated house for Graal staff), Computers and Network (We are renting a dedicated space in a Paris datacenter with 3 complete racks, We have more than 30 rackable computers, we have a dedicated Gigabit network with Cisco routers ( 2 X 6509 cisco switch/routers ) , we have dedicated tape robots to be able to archive backups for 2 months. We have NFS servers to store data in a safe way. That’s a lot of money.

But the thing is, we're not saying "make graal free". We're saying "make graal better and worth paying for".

Graal have more diversity than any other game and give opportunities to everyone loving 2D games to play what they like. Our goal is not to make a clone of Ultima Online but to create lot of diversity to make everyone find a style of 2D world to enjoy playing. Also our Goal with Graal is to give advanced communication tools to be able to have fun playing but also make Online friends. How many other online game give advanced communication tools and tools to create Online world?

What makes Graal itself successful is one thing, the community. That's it. How many people pay for a graal account just to do quests on servers? Seriously, who does? People play graal because it's so social and so easy to interact with other people. That's whats made it successful since the beginning and the community itself has been dying since p2p was introduced. Sure you may have some good "boosts" like Era, New val 2003, and such but they've died.

I agree that we are not the best company for advertising or even pricing/marketing strategy but we are still there after 7 years, how many Online games are still there after 7 years? Most Online games are closing after a few years and players have no other choice than to switch from game to game, that’s not the best way to make a community neither long time friends.

Ragnarok itself has been around for quite some times, and the private servers are usually around for like 3-4 years. But you got to remember that those private servers are free for the player.

Most players play an average of 60 hours a month, Graal is less than 5$ a month for Gold and 2$ a month for VIP, and you say it's to expensive? Where can you spend that much time for this amount?

Buy paper/pen and study with that money. (?)

In France for $2 you can get only a coffee or a Bus ticket.

In Sweden, $2 dollars won't get you anything but -maybe- a can of coke. But that's not the point.

The point is that graal has gone p2p for a while now and it's not offering every-so-much professional service. Not only that but the playerworlds aren't great anymore. It's a matter of having money and waiting for a classic playerworld to be kicked out. Seriously, look at the playercounts.