Do you approve of the state of Classic?(poll)

[Polo]

I'm not really sure who voted that they approve; I think the vast majority of us agree that Classic is far from perfect right now. Let me comment on some of the things you have said in turn.

• The overworld
  With the current player count, the large map simply means you spend most of the time wandering around without any interaction with other players, ultimately making things feel lonely and boring. A smaller map would be preferable. I also feel that the map itself is too 'open'. By this I mean that it feels like a large open space which can be walked through in anyway the player chooses, rather than having a serious of set routes and paths. The overworld should be fun to explore, not just an open sea of trees. For example, rather than simply telling a player that town X is to the east, the player should instead have to be told that to reach town X the must travel slightly north and then take the path through the mountains. Those pathways should be almost like mini quests in themselves; once the player progresses faster ways to traverse the map become available such as boats, the warp ring etc.

• Using the old levels
  When I first became Manage, the plan was to finish up Tyhm's conversion of the existing levels as soon as possible and release them alongside the NPC server. Unfortunately, I only had a short period of time to do this and it soon became very clear that the level of work still required was far greater that the amount of resources I had to achieve it. For what it's worth, at the point I took over, it was not even possible to complete the starting training quest on the development server. For about a month I worked tirelessly with Selflon to make things work, but ultimately we were just fixing things with short term hacks/solutions and still not progressing fast enough. It was after discussing the situation with Stefan that he suggested starting from scratch with a core set of levels, getting them to work perfectly and building up from there. With the time available, the only other solution would have been to take Classic down until everything was converted (and few servers that go hidden ever return). Note that I agreed to allow a group of players convert the old overworld but they 'lost' the levels halfway through the task and never completed things. Also note that as mentioned previously we were losing players with the content immediately before the switch, and so whilst it may be better, it's still not going to help us.

• Quests
  Quests are not a good use of development time. Making an interesting and enjoyable quests is quite difficult, requires coordination of multiple development staff and ultimately leads to maybe an hour or two of content at the end, with no replay value. By contrast, something like an event prize can be made with much less effort but probably keeps a player entertained for longer. Of course, this does not mean that we should have no quests at all; they serve as a good way of forcing the player to explore and can be useful for capturing new players. When a server so desperately requires new content, it's hard not to argue that the time can be better spent elsewhere. As for making quests optional, I cannot agree. A player should always have to do a quest to get the reward from it; I guess core things such as swords and hearts can be put in shorter/easier quests, leaving the larger quests for non-essential items (which the player can then choose to avoid). The suggestion that quests should be easy to find, with each quest leading from one to the next is a good one, and is something we are already working towards achieving.

• Hit detection/systems
  When the decision was made to build up from just a core set of levels, one of the first problems encountered was that bombs and arrows did not work of GMaps, and the default built-in enemies seemed extremely buggy under the NPC server. I originally only wanted to use scripted bombs/arrows, but from discussion with Stefan it soon became clear that to get things working smoothly I'd have to make the entire thing serverside. I'm not sure how bombs/arrows behave under NPC server now, but there's certainly now the possibility to make dual clientside/serverside hit detection which would massively improve things. Unfortunately, we now have a ton of scripts that rely on the current systems, making it hard to add the functionality. This is one of the reasons I want to build new systems up from scratch.

• Player submissions
  Because of the systems now being used, a number of minor things in scripts have to be done slightly differently, and this ultimately makes the checking process longer for player submissions. Because of the need to focus on getting quests or other content up, it was initially decided to restrict submissions to guild houses or other large structures (such as spar arenas). I'd be happy to reopen full submissions if I could ensure that it wouldn't overwhelm the development team. Certainly, if anyone wants to convert some major old landmarks or even modernize some of the old quests they are more than welcome to.

• Heras, health restriction etc.
  Hera's and the restricting of health at low AP were two things which I was never really sure of personally. Hera's worked at first, but suddenly you were required to do 7 or 8 quests just to get a heart, and that could be quite frustrating. Health restriction made sparring and PKing awkward, as I much prefer a longer fight that a series of deaths in quick succession. When I launched the NPC server, these were two of the major thing I asked players about, and the general decision seemed to be to remove them. Ultimately the players have since changed their minds, as they have now voted them both back in. As with all these minor things we just need to decide one way or another whether to have them and then stick with the decision. It's not good to continuously make fundamental changes to a server.

• Nations
  Nations in itself was quite a good idea, but as a player it always concerned me that Classic was moving away from it's 'core values'. I certainly remember that many players complained when races were introduced. Whilst I think it'd be interesting to see the ideas implemented as a new server, I still cant help but feel that if implemented on Classic, much of what originally appealed about Classic would be lost. I guess everyone has their own ideas on this though, and it's certainly possible to try and design some best middle ground that has the variety and flavour of nations, but still retains the same old Classic charm.

I know this has been a long post, but I hope that some of you will actually bother to read it and perhaps understand why certain decisions were made and why certain things have been done. As I said at the start of the post, we're a long way away from the position we want to be in, and a lot of work still needs to be done to rectify that. I'm always happy to take suggestions on what to do with Classic, but you have to remember that I have to balance both what the oldbies and nostalgic few amongst us want, alongside things which are going to appeal to and bring in new players.

Thanks for reading.

[Umat]

Originally Posted by Polo

• Using the old levels
  When I first became Manage, the plan was to finish up Tyhm's conversion of the existing levels as soon as possible and release them alongside the NPC server. Unfortunately, I only had a short period of time to do this and it soon became very clear that the level of work still required was far greater that the amount of resources I had to achieve it. For what it's worth, at the point I took over, it was not even possible to complete the starting training quest on the development server. For about a month I worked tirelessly with Selflon to make things work, but ultimately we were just fixing things with short term hacks/solutions and still not progressing fast enough. It was after discussing the situation with Stefan that he suggested starting from scratch with a core set of levels, getting them to work perfectly and building up from there. With the time available, the only other solution would have been to take Classic down until everything was converted (and few servers that go hidden ever return). Note that I agreed to allow a group of players convert the old overworld but they 'lost' the levels halfway through the task and never completed things. Also note that as mentioned previously we were losing players with the content immediately before the switch, and so whilst it may be better, it's still not going to help us.

Instead of making new levels and remove all old you could've just removed all npcs and put blocking-NPC's where there were quests etc until it's done. One question though, do you plan to revert the upper part of the map to the way it was instead of those mountains?

[DrakilorP2P]

I approve with the current state of Graal Classic. It's not out of spite or any personal vendetta, I just genuinely enjoy playing it.
For instance, I made friends with this grey guy in a dark room. Many friendly hugs were distributed. He enjoyed my company so much he wouldn't let me out.

[WhiteDragon]

Storm, I am sure everyone appreciates your writeup, but maybe you should come on and manage.

I really never thought bureaucracy could leak into Graal.

[jorollychu]

whitedragon maybe he should manage your ctf hammers

[WhiteDragon]

Originally Posted by jorollychu

whitedragon maybe he should manage your ctf hammers

The humor is appreciated, but don't you think he could be doing something more useful if he was actually on the server? Perhaps managing your ability to see and also your ability to loose 7-0 flawless and blame it on something no one thinks I did.

[Tyhm]

Psh, bureaucracy has always been a part of Graal. It's inescapable.

Say you wanna script a quest. Well, if you want it online, you gotta join the LAT. But as a LAT member, all you can do is MAKE the quest, to UPLOAD or APPROVE or PLACE it, you gotta be the LAT Admin. So you work your way up to LAT Admin. But LAT Admins gotta handle Hiring, and Firing, and Corruption, and Coordinate with the other Admins, and fight for Stefan's attention, and take player submissions...and really, it's the Server Manager who decides what should go where, so you gotta work your way up further...

Here's the problem; the most talented, tenacious and dedicated workers are rewarded by being pulled into a desk job where they can't use their skills. They get bogged down with secretarial responsibilities. And the alternative is let someone Else be in charge of Them who Doesn't know how, say, the movement system works.

No escaping bureaucracy.

('course, if it was up to me there'd be an executive wing that handles hirings, firings, etc., and Accepts That It Doesn't Have Any Business Meddling With Levels - and a Dev wing that did all the actual worldbuilding...)

[jacob_bald6225]

Originally Posted by Tyhm

Psh, bureaucracy has always been a part of Graal. It's inescapable.

Say you wanna script a quest. Well, if you want it online, you gotta join the LAT. But as a LAT member, all you can do is MAKE the quest, to UPLOAD or APPROVE or PLACE it, you gotta be the LAT Admin. So you work your way up to LAT Admin. But LAT Admins gotta handle Hiring, and Firing, and Corruption, and Coordinate with the other Admins, and fight for Stefan's attention, and take player submissions...and really, it's the Server Manager who decides what should go where, so you gotta work your way up further...

Here's the problem; the most talented, tenacious and dedicated workers are rewarded by being pulled into a desk job where they can't use their skills. They get bogged down with secretarial responsibilities. And the alternative is let someone Else be in charge of Them who Doesn't know how, say, the movement system works.

No escaping bureaucracy.

('course, if it was up to me there'd be an executive wing that handles hirings, firings, etc., and Accepts That It Doesn't Have Any Business Meddling With Levels - and a Dev wing that did all the actual worldbuilding...)

Perhaps if there were someone managing all of this hiring and firing. Who could manage a job like that though? I can't imanage a position that would be fit doing that.

[Tyhm]

Exactly. It'd mean giving All the power to someone who doesn't code or GP or FAQ, and Trusting them not to arbitrarily fire the head of the LAT and reverse all his decisions.
In a sense, having an admin who wants the world to do well, but has no strong opinions on how to do that and doesn't care if the admins seem to be going the opposite direction for an indefinite time.
So the Dev Head says "I need more guys who can code", and the Admin hires them; the players say "Guy A's corrupt", and the Admin investigates, (consults with that Guy A's superiors) and fires Guy A...
It's the kind of thing one generally has to pay someone for. I don't wanna do it, I'd wanna tell the LAT to do things my way, and I'd wanna spend my time developing, not gerrymandering...

[Thrashsoul3]

I don't know what your talking about Dusty, the quests in classic gave me weeks of entertainment. The desert dungeon was awesome, and I've yet to see something as impressive as it on graal.

[DustyPorViva]

Originally Posted by Thrashsoul3

I don't know what your talking about Dusty, the quests in classic gave me weeks of entertainment. The desert dungeon was awesome, and I've yet to see something as impressive as it on graal.

I finished many quests on Classic in a few hours. Of course, this is all subjective.

[DarkCloud_PK]

Oh my god I do not see why people are putting such an emphasis on quests.
Quests are a small piece to such a big puzzle that is a successful server, and compared to the other pieces, quests are quite small.

The biggest importance quests play is that of trying to hook newbies into playing long enough to build their character and get into the game, make some friends, play some events or whatever else your server has to offer.

Most people who continue playing this game grow tired of quests eventually, specially single player ones where theres no player interaction. Multiplayer quests might be a different story and peak some old interests but the fact remains the same.

Quests are there to build up your character and provide a few hours of fun, mostly to newbies trying to get into the game or people new to that server. They won't, however, give you days/weeks/months of entertainment unless you're some weirdo that would make new accounts for the sake of replaying the same quests over and over. Even with the amount of quests in GTA, it would take maybe two days tops on average to get those done. What do you have after that? Well, that's whats going to make or break the server.

With that said, the old GTA levels arent a large part of what made the old days fun. They contributed to the fun but they did not make that server what it was, why it was fun. If you think that, you're blind or just really had some creepy love affair for some levels and are probably the same people who raise **** fits when the path in level14 gets some sort of minute tile change.

If you released a fully functional GTA from 2004/2002/2000 or WHATEVER year. It would initally get a ton of players because of the hype, and once that hype died down in a week, maybe a month tops, the server would implode on itself and become a ghosttown. It's happened with Graal 2001 when they tried to bring that back a few years ago, it happened with "Graal 2000" when they tried to bring back pre GTA classic. It would either stagnate with the old levels and eventually bore everyone away with nothing new ever happening, or you'd have to appoint a LAT Admin to progress GTA further, which would end up being a huge mess since that LAT Admin would end up doing something awful in the players eyes, either by reshaping the old into something new or making something that doesnt fit in GTA. Unless you find some LAT Admin that mindlessly follows in the footsteps of the last LAT Admin and doesnt even think for a second to mold or remold something in their vision of how things should be done. Good luck with that, because that LAT Admin doesnt exist.

What makes a server successful? Community, and something constantly fun that hooks people to stay around, to log back in instead of somewhere else, if even at all.

The community is what made the old days fun, that and the fact that there was something being released all the time, always something new. That old community isnt coming back. Not for a GTA rerelease, nothing, those old days aren't coming back, they're dead in the past. As for something new, noone debates that Classic needs a torrent of new content on a constant basis, but its gotta be more of a hook than a new quest or even a bunch of new quests, Classic doesnt have the luxury of having a big playercount anymore,that playercount was a big part of what brought people in and kept them playing.
It's going to be hard for Classic to come back, it is hard to make a new community without there already being one. Some new quests aren't going to cut it on creating a community, you need a lot bigger hooks than that, something ADDICTING that makes people log back on, makes people bring their friends to play because its so damn fun/addicting.

I won't go into specifics on what to hook players with because the options are only limited by the willpower to work, the imagination, and knowledge of what would work vs what won't of Classic's dev team. Or you could be like Zodiac and just rehash whats proved to work.

[Freudian_slip]

I honestly loved the quests on Graal the Adeventure. It was the only reason i even played that server, honestly. Ever since that server went down quests in general sucked balls, other than Bravo's. I kinda wish someone would make quests similar to Zeldas. it may take a LOT of work (scripting, GFX, LAT, etc), but it'd be worth it.


...or mayeb a sports server. Graal Baseball, football and bowling ftw.