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The economic side of this is kind of confusing. There is no doubt that the player count was indeed much much higher when the prices were lower, and I have no doubts that the price raising and especially the removal of lifetime classic is at fault for such a huge drop in the activity on Graal. However, the new prices that are proposed by Unix/Stefan do bring in a lot more money with monthly subscriptions. But consider this, exactly how far do you think this will go? More players will drop, they'll need more money, so they raise prices. More people give up on paying that monthly fee, the price rises. To be honest, I think if Graal would be changed just to that old one-time lifetime fee of maybe more than before (used to be $19, could be raised to $25 or so), and the selection of 1, 2, 3, 6, 12 months of graal at a time at maybe a few bucks a month.
However, the playerworld charge is what I find really to be insanity. In most cases, servers that are in UC are not helpful of Graal's future, and will probably never prosper merely because the staff isn't disciplined or serious enough. But sometimes servers are actually potential future pieces of Graal, so you're really paying to give Unix more content for his game. However, a big problem with actually trying to make a quality server is the problem mentioned before, the shortage of players. A shortage of players means a shortage of developers, which means a shortage of production. I propose the idea of free server purchasing with occasional inspection by multiple global staff assigned to inspection. If the server does not seem to be keeping up with development, it is shut down and no money is lost, no extra server space is taken from Graal. On the other hand, some servers may prosper, and eventually contribute to the game that Graal advertises. I hate the idea of paying $70 every 6 months (over $10 a month!) to attempt to help Graal develop into a larger and better game. I just don't understand that.
Graal is falling into a limbo here. Servers can be lent out to any idiot and worked on by any amount of unqualified workers. If there were a smaller selection of servers that actually pass their occasional inspections, the needle in a haystack players that actually have good developmental talent that are working at deadbeat servers can help contribute to the quality servers that have a fighting chance to become classic. Would work out really well in my opinion.
And maybe, since i know some people do this, there'd be an option to buy "Dev Servers", merely for development testing and building and maybe just for having fun that you could purchase without the fear of failing inspection. Those would require monthly payments.
I probably just typed a big waste of time since Unix is going to be his usual self and continue with his own ideas, but I guess it's worth a shot. |