Why isn't Era Pc a success?
 

As the title implies, why? It's such a great game beside the expensive weapons.
Let me know in the comments below what you like, dislike and what stuff can implemented to enhance the gameplay?

It's because it's on PC

It was...10 years ago.

monthly subscription fee

^ when you can get the game on ios for free.

1. graal does no advertisement so word of mouth is the way it gets its players(i would say most pc players dont tell people they play graal)

2. most good pc gamers prefer challenging games/competitive community not chat rooms

OT: there are many things that can be done to improve pc graal but I doubt anything will be done since the priority is ios graal. I think most developers spend most of their time on ios servers or their own servers that probably wont go anywhere.

Subscription plans, plain and simple. Graal decided to use subscriptions, and it simply wasn't worth it. Very, very slowly some servers started to move towards free-access with gralatshops(where you could buy in-game items with IRL money) but it took too long.

Do realize Graal was asking I think... $40 a month to play. I may be wrong though, as I never actually purchased any subscriptions.

Just... very, very poor marketing on administration end, and the servers suffered because of it.

Stefan recently requested observer mode taken off but I don't know how that's going along. Anyway, subscription ain't bad, I mean it's revenue to keep up the servers and it only cost like what $5 a month to play? All it needs is a little money put into advertisement, and some in-game stuff you can buy with real money, hey people like to be good without actually working for it and let them.

Because most of Graal's pop today would have to use mommy's computer to play. And for the price it is, its not worth it, hell Minecraft is the same price. To the current playerbase, its obvious what would be a better investment.

Gold subscription is currently now free, so I don't know why the population has not risen.

Expensive weapons makes both servers un-likeable.

igraalers have spent too much time and money in the iphone servers so I dont think many of them see any reason to go be noobs in the pc version of their server.

because the PC Graal community as of today is composed 90% of players who started in 2006-2014 and are still only playing the game because they have no concept of what Graal was when it was actually good, so they're still addicted
and that number of players that started in this timeframe is very low, thus the community of today is very small

morale of the story is "you can't miss what you never had"

imagine eating saltine crackers for your entire life
you don't give a **** because it's all you've eaten so eating it offers the same experience every time, you don't even have a concept of what something that tastes better is like
the players who started in 2006+ and still play today, that's them

now imagine that you have been eating delicious ass pizza and KFC chicken for a few years, then all of a sudden you're given saltine crackers and you're told that this is the only thing you'll be eating from now on
those are the players who started in 2004 and before (which is when the game saw the most amount of players anyway)
it comes down to those players saying "what the ****, why would I continue to eat this terrible food, I will not accept this anymore and it's time to move on" which translates to "yeah, PC Graal sucks now, I'm out"

so in conclusion, this was PC Graal in for the first 5 or so years:
http://t0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:A...dZ1X57__QDdB1p

this is PC Graal in the past 8 or so years:
http://cherryhillcottage.typepad.com...fc80522970c-pi

you have the palate of a goat if you're satisfied with the past 8 years vs. the first 5 years

furthermore, look at this:
http://puu.sh/8bZ17.png
it's not related to Era, but more to PC Graal in general, but that's the shining talent that UN has managed to produce in 17 days
37-22 is what the typical decent-tier sparrer would poop out in an hour's worth of spars on UN in "the good ol' days"

the game is dead and I literally feel sorry for the people who are still trying to develop servers for the PC platform

dang thallen dat analogy.

u either win pc graal or you die

Era PC is a very political server.

I don't even remember writing that TBH, was probably just hungry and bored

I view Era as a success.

I just have a more realistic standard for what a 'success' is on PC Graal.

it still has a playerbase, that's the standard, right?

Nah, Era P.C. Has so many Glitches (via stuck facing one direction) (Cars can't move unless you type something first/Same when first starting game) takes a bit longer to start the game (Normal internet connection) of course I'm talking about Facebook Gameplay, not PayGame or whatever you guys are talking about.

You mean strafe? That's not a glitch.... Wait neither is the second one.

I personally never liked the way TIM_ROCKS managed Era although he got **** loads of work done on that server. The events on Era are just incredible although you need to have a subscription(40 USD/8 months) to play most of them...
I personally see the cause of people leaving after 1 week is due to the disrespectful community(although you'll find this all over the internet).

I want Chris to be the manager again.

I think the issue is the guns are x3 as expensive as iEra and money making is not at all better, slightly difference. Maybe if there were packs like iOS those noobs would come running after it lol.

no, strafe is when you can click the button to fix it, I'm talking about something else. Maybe your right about the car thing not being a glitch, I'd rather fancy it being changed however, Mobile has it's advantages, but D-Pad has some flaws compared to one-directional 4 Way P.C. Controls.

...... Wut?

Ummm, just so you guys know there's no subscription fees anymore.

PC Era never took off because it's stayed in player development for sooo long. It's a 2d game on the pc when players can be playing games with ridiculous 3d graphics made professionally, why waste time with a 2d game that has a playercount of 50.

We get occasional new players, but the gameplay is so hard to master only a few stick around and we usually only have people logged on who have been playing for years.

What are you talking about? Era was one of the first player servers to take off under the P2P format, and it's been there ever since. I doubt anyone but a handful of people even remember how Era was like in player development.

Also your second point is moot. 3D games do not magically make a game better just because it's 3D. After all, the iGraal servers are doing just fine and they are also 2D.

*slowly raises hand*

:c

same here, Chris and Angel were letting some of us kind of test out Era when he was high-ranking staff on Babylon, but it was very space-themed and all of the Era levels were prefixed as "era_future" so I have no idea what happened to that idea

I got a little bored of it after a while and it feels like one of those economy servers where if you fall behind it's impossible to catch up
I'd 100% get behind a gun server if it the graphic style was similar to that of classic servers and it wasn't so tryhard thuggish and gangster

Era is still developed by players, so it's still a player developed game. When I said take off I don't mean 150 people online, I mean actually becoming a popular video game. I don't see stefan hiring computer scientists with degrees in game development to work on it.

And my point is not moot, iGraal servers are thriving because iPhone games thrive on simplicity, look at angry birds, doodle jump, flappy bird. Graal is perfect for the iPhone and just backs up my point that computer gamers don't want to spend there time playing a simple 2d zelda like game on there thousand dollar gaming computer when they can be playing LoL or Dota. Cmon Dusty I thought you were smarter than this.

look at that--^ well said Mr. PC_Dusk



lol
you better be careful you dont want all the pc nubs on iclassic after you. They love their uncle dusty almost as much as their daddy rufus.

You're trying to compare completely different genres and styles of games. Graal failed when it went full greed and just kept going downhill from there. The only time the playercount went up since then is when some iPlayers decided to check out normal Graal. The fact that people with good computers still play Graal means the graphics aren't the problem. In reality it's exposure...or the lack of.

Era staying in 'player development' has nothing to do with it. Era was successful relative to other servers, and at one point Stefan and Skyld revamped it (2006ish), so it wasn't even always in player hands.

No. People with good computers who still play Graal only play because of nostalgia and they grew up playing it back when online games were limited. The game play is so unique and hard to master, no one wants to spend time on a ****ty drawn 2d game so they can beat the same 40 kids every day. With the current games on the market PC Graal will never thrive again.

So you're saying the last revamp was 8 years ago, and since then we've had players develop it. That's 8 years of just going down hill, something obviously isn't working and the game just keeps becoming more and more outdated. If the game was good people would have paid the 40 dollars for 8 months of gold.

Say the game wasn't player developed, 3d models were made of the most popular characters and the game was developed to support a mass amount of players. On top of that say the game isn't hidden in some sketchy unknown french produced client and actually up on steam. I guarantee you Era would be 100% more successful.

I've seen iPhone players with good computers who have gave PC Graal a try.

p.s the majority of PC players didn't start when Graal was in its golden age or anything. They started well after 'superior' 2D/3D games were on the market that they could easily run.


So you're saying a properly developed game would be more successful than a playermade Graal server catering to existing Graalians? No way dude!!!

The topic is why a Graal server isn't a success. Era isn't its own game. We all know Graal isn't big, comparing it to proper games is a waste of time.

p.s2 ever since Era was first released in 2003 it was always near the top in terms of playercount. 100% playermade. It went down then went up again after Stefan, Skyld, and probably others revamped the NPCs/system. It still dominates the playercount. Era was a success, it's Graal overall that was declining hard. OP is confusing Graal's garbage state with Era's.

You keep self contradicting yourself. You just said the player development has nothing to do with it, now you're admitting that if it was properly developed it would do just fine.

This does not address anything I mentioned...
Makes no sense because PC Era was never in development very long. It being developed by players means nothing... none of what you're saying makes any sense.

Your point is moot... you suggest 3D games somehow magically make a game better than 2D.
There are plenty of successful 2D games. Whether it's on the mobile market or not, or because it's simple or not does not matter because your original point did not address any of that. You simply suggested people would rather play "games with ridiculous 3d graphics made professionally."

Why? Because I can't decrypt the nonsense you're spewing?

Lol waiting on doc and albus to throw in their 2 cents:'(:'(

The fact that it's developed by players is the reason it's a piece of ****. The whole player world concept is absolute garbage. I don't see the iPhone having 1 app where you download and pick which server from there. Era needs to be made into its own game and needs to stop allowing any player with half ass scripting and gfx knowledge to contribute to its production.

lel

Also the fact that we have over 350 active bans, around 150 of them being permanent.

It's not really that Era on PC isn't successful, it's just that Graal on PC isn't successful. It's marketed all wrong, subscription model sucks and there's nobody focusing on it anymore (too busy with the mobile servers). Even if it were free, I don't know that it'd be successful in the current state - it's sorely neglected.

It's been free since Christmas

Too late.

skyld pls. wat u do here

Do you mean on the graal client, because if you do its the most successful next to Zodiac and Delteria.

i missed u

:blush:

It was something like 40$ CAD/USD at the time for a life time Classic subscription, and like 30$ for Zone Gold

Well, I do know that since the NPC-run "Era Police' gang now has a gang gun, which is adequately powerful, "expensive guns'' is less valid of a turn-off, but still, if you wan't anything for extra versatility like Neo Rifle or RPG, the prices are still kinda ridiculous seeing as how it's expected that most players can get nearly 100k at a rate of about 100 bucks in a few minutes in the mines or shoveling without any sort of way to buy graalats (unless you USD) like in iEra.

It isn't that popular because who would want to pay about $10 monthly to be successful on there. Also, most of the people on the iDevice version of the game don't even know that there is even a PC version. That is why most of the people that are mainly iDevice users cry over not getting the PR job because they either lie about knowing about RC, or they say that they don't know how to use the RC because they don't have a clue about what it is. They just presume that if you say the PC version of Era, they are thinking Facebook Era. Also, who would want to start all over knowing everything about the iDevice version, and thinking that the same rules that apply on iEra apply to the PC version.

So, this situation is not because people don't like it, it is just they don't know about it.

Yeah I feel like they should promote it more, than lots of people would play, and I don't mean like on tv I mean on other graal servers aha.