To the people complaining:
I would love to see how you would go about hosting a mmorpg with over a dozen servers on it, and 1000's of users online a day eating up so much bandwidth that it would make your head spin. You couldn't run that from your home computer.
It takes serious server power to run Graal, and I highly doubt unixmad and stefan are rolling in money and laughing at everyone paying.
All of the stupid illegal Graal server projects crack me up. Educational purposes? You're backing all of your faith into that? Maybe you need to go GET an education. That's like saying "I'm going to completely take apart Windows, modify it, and give it away for free, oh and I can do this because it's for educational purposes"
You have to get the owner's permission before you can use their code for ANYTHING. You have not done this, you have stolen code, and then claimed you're only using it for educational purposes along with your "donations" on the side.
Back on the subject of paying.. Fifteen dollars is NOTHING. If you can't afford fifteen dollars, why do you even have internet access?
You play Graal on a daily basis, you get enjoyment from the game (obviously), yet you're going to riot when you have to pay a measily 15 dollars for LIFE.
People dish out over 25 dollars a MONTH in order to play ONE online game, where you're 1 out of 1032412412 other people playing, and you have no personal identity at all, your work (levels, scripts, graphics) would never get online, you couldn't run your own playerworld, you couldn't talk with the creators and owners of the game personally. You would be another face in the commercial gaming crowd. That is what holds Graal apart from so many other games. That is why it's worth 15 dollars.
If you don't think it's worth 15 dollars because you don't like how the game is managed, then why are you complaining anyway? LEAVE. We don't need people that hate Graal, playing Graal. That is why I love the fact that all people will have to pay now.