Gonna say a few things here so sorry if this post is a cool story, bro.
First and foremost, since a few years ago it all hit me at once that there are only two reasons why you dedicate time towards developing a playerworld on Graal:
- You have a lot of free time, don't need money, and love the game so much that it could be considered a main hobby of yours
- You're an idiot
Graal, as a game, had a very ingenious model at a very early stage. It's taken the same approach as a game like Minecraft, just more than a decade earlier. On a game like Minecraft and Graal, as the company behind the game, the first thing you build is a way for your
players to develop the content of your game for you.
It can be argued that
the communities themselves are what made companies like Cyberjoueurs and Mojang rich. Without a dedicated and selfless base of players who are willing to flesh out the skeleton of your game into something that will attract lots of people, you don't have much of a game.
As Thor is a smart guy, I'm inclined to believe that he understood this years ago and he chose to develop and take a leadership role on Classic because he cared about Graal and the Classic community.
If that is the case:
- Why continue to poke fun at the iPhone/Facebook venture?
- Why continue to harass Stefan?
- Why go out of your way to try to run the game your way, and protest certain "business" elements of the game like observer mode?
It's one thing to disagree. If you've played Graal for more than 5 years, you know that the management is completely out of touch with the game. Why has Graal never put developers on salary to create additional content? Why have we never seen an advertising campaign? Why do globals (other than Bell) do so little to help the community?
I agree with many of the things that Thor took a stand against. They're obvious flaws with the management of the game. However, I think it's stupid to insult, harass, and go against that very same management on your playerworld hosted on
their servers when you knew how dire the situation was before you committed however many years of your life into pointlessly developing an entire playerworld.
I think Stefan should acknowledge and appreciate the time that Thor (and the rest of the staff, on every playerworld even) took out of his life to contribute to Graal. Players like Thor and fowlplay4 are what keep his game running. They are the people that make him money. He should recognize that. And, Thor should have a little more respect for Stefan's approach. If the management of Graal is uninterested in whatever ideas we have, even if you think it's going to make the company rich, well then that's their decision. That's how running a business works.
Hopefully, Thor will be reappointed and it all works out. And it's a longshot, but hopefully Stefan finds a way to salvage PC Graal. It's been neglected forever and it's just at the point where it's festering and rotting away now. As someone who has managed servers for games like Minecraft and CS:S, it's troubling to consider what Graal could have become, and all of the different approaches the game's management could have taken it that would have 1000 people online right now, even as I type this at almost 6 AM.
Lastly, I've noticed the Classic community lashing out and claiming that this was all the master plan of Stefan. He plotted this so perfectly and wanted to ban Thor at the perfect moment, and then he could appoint Xor as the new manager and steal all of their content and put it on iPhone!
He doesn't have to steal anything. The content is already his. Furthermore, a lot of content on Classic has been recycled over and over, regurgitated for over a decade. It belongs to Graal, it's Stefan's property. This isn't some conspiracy theory. It's a simple case of Thor being a disgruntled playerworld manager who wants more of PC Graal vs. Stefan being someone who wants to stop being ridiculed and humiliated.
