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Zone Insight
Original Thread: Click Here
Hello Everyone, This is a serious discussion I would like to have with all of you. In this discussion spam or useless post will NOT be tolerated. We are here to discuss Zone and what we can do to make it truly better. In this discussion I want to know what things about Zone do players not like. What are reasons players do not come to Zone? I want honest answers and I do not want you to reply to somebody else post. I want you to simply state your reason and why you think that is the reason. Some things I can think of are the following: Players do not want to buy their custom uploads all over again. Players have spent to much time on other servers. Players have spent to much money on other servers. Players do not like that the server has 360 Degree shooting. Players do not want to leave their friends on the other servers. So as stated above this is a serious discussion. Keep this clean and just post your reason why and do not respond to others. Please let me know as I want to bring Zone to the same player count as the other servers. Comments from other players so far: MrSimons: Content doesn't cater to a large enough variety of players. There is virtually no roleplay capability on zone (this is being worked on as far as I have heard?...), and it eliminates a very large portion of people. I know that there are very few people on zone that enjoy role play, which is why it has never been a priority, but thats just because it is very hard to role play, so people who enjoy it aren't going to be spending any time on zone. Unappealing interface, and difficult to use systems. Probably the biggest turn-off for everyone. One of the big things I have noticed is tiny buttons that have even tinier hit boxes, making mundane tasks hell. Personally I think it could do the server good to have an entire re-haul on its buttons and such. Things being copied from other servers. I went to place a furniture item a couple days ago and when moving it around noticed that the layer button was literally the exact same one as on classic. Sure taking things like that from other servers isn't a problem, but at least make it look good and custom made for the server. Kenovo: I love iZone. I left Classic for it and never went back. Heck, I find Medieval type servers a lot more appealing to be honest, yet something about Zone had me hooked to stay. The server itself I enjoy, but I know that it's far from perfect. These are things I feel desperately need to be worked on in hopes of improving. The Tileset Yes, it all reminds us of Zone, it's basically the look of Zone. But is that really a good thing? I find the Tileset very unappealing, it's outdated and needs to be completely removed or cosmetically updated a lot. This could be a big turn off for new players, it's just not a pretty tileset. The GMAP The updates for the map have been nice and a well improvement from the ones before it. But I feel it lacks a civilization type feeling. Zone is supposed to be a community of people who have built a city in space. As of now, it looks like a giant shopping mall. What it really needs is a total revamp of the GMAP. Make it feel as if its a realistic floating monopolis. Add houses (can tie in with RolePlaying and quests etc), UNIQUE shops, a separation of buildings (currently shops and areas are bunched up and this helps add to the shopping mall feeling), towns or some sort of indication of seperations. I truly feel if the GMAP is updated along with the Tileset itd help Zone become A LOT more appealing. UNIQUE Shops This ties in with GMAP a bit but I thought I'd go a little more into detail. I feel like Zone needs to only have a few UNIQUELY themed shops around the entire GMAP that would provide the items Zonians want. Having a lot of random, outdated shops on the Map feels like old content and a waste of space. Instead each shop (like 5 shops entirely) could be updated periodically with new content instead of releasing an entire new shop that'll most likely be random and serving no actual purpose. WILL EDIT THIS POST LATER AND ADD STUFF TO IT. Rockstar: I think we need more quests and story lines, I feel there is a lack of adventure when it comes to Zone, Era and Classic (I believe) both do Christmas and Easter and Halloween quests, during this period, their playercount does get pretty high.. Maybe something to think about.. TheRealSKT: I think it has to do with friends. People brougt this up already but if that one person in your initial circle doesn't make the first leap then no one will follow. I mean back on classic there we're those few nalnians that were from era but no one was ever from zone. And no one ever thought about it. There was no reason to. And then I think it was Tron who decided to hop on it one day when NAL2 was starting up and he said it was fun. That got me intrigued. When I was given the guild and disbanded it... Lol... And then banned from the guild after they got it back... Lol... I had no reason to play classic. And so I already was a baller on era and went to zone. It was hella fun and I got some classic players on and they stayed with me. That's what I see most of our players as, just friends of friends. I also think that there's tons of Zera things and the whole "rip off of era" is scaring people away. Era Is a pay to win game whereas zone is a play to win. It's not at all like era and it really bugs me when people say that it is. I also think that it's poor and lacking on the android side. Like lets break this down Just via tapatalk. Every "sent from my" sig has come from an android(so I've seen, maybe one Apple dev). Also, android users have more ram, at least if ur a mainstreamer, than apples. There's no excuse for us to have less since we can take more without lagging. I mean they fixed the leaderboards which is a step but we still don't have equal rights. #SeperateButEqualAmiiRight. Lastly I think the skybases were a big deal. Now everyone knows why I love them. All of my squads hours were from them but beside that fact think about it. There are already indoor bases in other servers. There's already in game mini games on era. Skybases were unique to zone in the way that pyrat was unique to classic. You didn't need a huge number yo take them. It's not about skill with guns. Its about straight up yolo rushing. And with saying rushing I don't mean just using your jetpack. I mean saudix never used one, he'd always go through the fences and he still wrecked. A lot of people do like having it ezpz hours. But some crazy people love having to fend off people from taking skybases. Its the thrill that kept me on zone and if you look at tons of skybasers ever since they were removed we've all decreased our activity. You don't take half time from football so you should leave what was perfect alone. Oh and lastly... Furniture. I know I might be the only one who cares but that's a big deal. I mean I've spent half a mil on my houses on other servers but zone lacks the furn so much I don't even bother with squad houses. Also there are also tons of bias towards players. We probably have the best staff but honestly if you've ever crossed a staff's line even just once they don't forget it. And no one will care that I wrote this because everyone will say that it's just on the person. No lmao, *that's Lord make another ogre mind you* there are honestly certain people that we can all admit are the blandest people on the server who are just ignored by staff. And this happens on every server due to basic human instincts of only surrounding yourself with the best, so I don't expect anything to be done to this. |
Assuming that anything is possible here
The main issue not just with iZone but other servers as well is how content is played. What will keep a player to stay is repeatable content, not necessarily a grind but maybe something like 'do this for x amount of days and receive this' for example. Cut down on the number of shops, like someone else suggested. Seriously, the shops made by players (no offence to Hadi or Jared) would have been a lot better as a sale/temp restock rather than introducing a whole new shop, because like someone said, it's dead content. Stricter graphic standards, please set them. The server needs to develop a style and stick to it, at first it did with the initial tileset but all sorts have been added and now it's pretty jumbled. Set stricter standards and enforce them. |
I got into zone at a certain time along with 4 others of my bestest companions and ended up staying there for a good amount of time (about 2 months). My 3 friends out of the 4 ended up helping out zone as gfx admins until there were some situations regarding one of them and another staff. That friend eventually said he was tired of the poor treatment given to him and we all left together back to classic after Unholy Nations.
The reason I dont personally like Zone is the way its set up, i'm all used to classic style so getting into zone was difficult, and then there was the rewards for some players that abused some big glitch and notified the admins, the only thing that concerned me there is why reward them for abusing it then fixing it? Those are just my personal problems, I visit from time to time although i have alot of time. I also agree with what admiral said, there are over 4 player shops and even some hidden which is pretty ridiculous. Zone needs to limit the hats, do what classic does and update a certain hat shop once in a while instead of continously making more levels that are for those certain hats, and the player shops need to really go because not only could there be one building thats updated monthly for that but I mean zone doesnt need to take player made things when it has gfx admins. Then theres the GFX problem, why is there only one admin (Kenovo) doing most of the work? I think its unfair although he may disagree and say it's okay, it really isnt because I checked the list of admins and boy there are alot of GFX there but they are all either lazy, inactive, or just bad at what they do. I hope Kenovo is getting a raise in gralats because zone needs extremely active staff |
Updated my original post. Sorry for the horrid Grammar, in a rush. Should give you a general idea of what I feel needs to get done.
Making it more "Futuristic" Zone is very lack luster in this area. The stated before reasons can help to improving overall quality of the server, but it'd till be lacking in being futuristic. Here's what I believe needs to happen: Completely remove all the Planets and remake them Planets are a BIG part of a futuristic scheme, as of now they serve no real purpose except for Basing. I find that really disappointing. What should happen is there should be Planets with UNIQUE CIVILIZATIONS; species, climate, buildings, base. Meaning we take all the current aspect of the game a revitalize them onto New planets. This also ties in with my next point; Factions. Factions I always loved this idea since Nyte first introduced it. It really should be considered as a serious system and project to be worked on. I don't want to go into too much detail with there's a thread with it all, but I'll tie it together. Each Planet could have it as own Faction. As an example, let's say Lava Planet. There's Fire Faction, if you choose this Faction you must protect this planet from other Factions. If they take over your Planet you have to win it back, in the meantime they're gaining Faction Time. This can take over Basing entirely or be a ranking system within the Factions, and the ones with more Faction Time can have access to their Factions' items and weapons that they may get and greatly improve their battling. |
iZone needs more of its core elements from the server it came from. Less squad-related content and actually make use of planets like Iricia, KotH, Gwars, etc. and make them a team vs team map vying for their objective. I understand that squads bring in revenue, but if Zone actually distanced itself from other servers and made use of Zone's guns, vehicles and maps in the way they were made, you'd probably bring in a fair bit of players once word gets out as Zone was loved. People that I've talked to and played with or who've tried iZone years after trying PC say it's utter trash due to the fact that it is nothing like Zone and is just a carbon copy of every other iServer with the way it's handling guns, health, social and PvP aspects. When GIT was working on guns he was bringing back that good PvP side of Zone and a few players actually came back because it was starting to remind them of Zone.
TL;DR: Less squad-oriented focus and have more 1v1 fixed teams with auto-balance and such on planets (Teams such as Storm Troopers and Raiders). Put rewards for winning if you want, but it needs to be less squad-oriented and the server needs to define itself more, instead of taking everything from the other iServers. I could go into more detail if you want, unless this is enough. |
Titan:
I don't really post on the forums but id like to give my opinion on this. For starters I think that most people on zone and other graal servers are mostly looking for new content or something new to do rather than the same things. I mean look at ol west before ol west came out zone had an adverage of 700-850 people online, snap we even hit 1k players. When ol west came out though we decreased ALOT, I believe people just want good quality content on zone to keep playing. They saw how new ol west was going to be with a pretty new setup and left. I feel zone just needs more content and not useless content I mean fishing: no one really does it anymore nor is it much fun or accomplishing($$) we need content that's more suitable to zone like idk this is the future how cool would it be to have a mech solider in conquest making chaos? Trust me I agree on mostly everything everyone has said above especially the tile set the same blue color ew, but content should be one of are top proaties for what good is a server without much to do? Prime example: Delitera(think I spelled that wrong XD) delt looks awesome but I played it for a week and got bored of it from lack of content - - - Updated - - - Zone also needs a whole cleanup with indoor bases. For starters: There to much like era/classic (no I'm not yelling zera) Small gangs used to have a chance at getting base hours but now? No. It's practically impossible for people to get anywhere near the base under the conditions of a whole squad firing at you while going through doors, obstacles, and 3 levels. SkyBases should be added back: they gave small squads a nice start prime example is the gang Rebels they might of never reached 1k if they didn't have the chance to start small and take SkyBases. Plus SkyBases are a very unique something other servers don't have, now some may say SkyBases are filled withs PKers and that PKers get way to much kills out of them. As someone who is a PKer I agree lots of people do go to SkyBases to PK and I agree I get tons of kills from them but it's a base your going to have people that just want to kill. Maybe we should put the whole level system in action to avoid this. Level 3+ can enter sky bases, 6+ can enter conquest and spring towers, 10+ can enter spring, Iricia. This may sound kinda unfair but it'll get people playing and doing missions. It'll also be a use for levels as well as prevent the whole PK issue for SkyBases. Ghettoicedea: I personally do not like the path zone is heading down. It is starting to feel a lot more like a more balanced era and straying away from its origins were of full blown warfare server. I would like to see zone tilt more towards the full blown warfare on iricia but considering how people dont like this and are more in favor of the era type jig. When people play zone they want something entirely different so i vote we start by revamping the bases. Ill just put in what should be done to boost player count. Revamping bases systems. What needs to be done here is very very very simple. First is get rid of god damn flags entirely. Change it so its like PC eras system of theres a countdown timer. One person = 1 second and if a defender and attacker is on the flag area the timer stops. If a defender is on the flag the timer counts towards 0. If an attacker is on the flag then the timer counts towards 30. Second is making a seperate spawn for attackers and defenders. Defenders spawn is located in a different room that then leads into the flag room. You go through a couple of rooms though to time out the deployment time so its not defenders roflstomp everytime. Third. Make irica, ctf, spring, spring towers, conquest, and cohros events. These bases are pretty much dead (not conquest tho) and since you clealry want people to use the skybases you might as well make those admin hosted events. Also you will see what graal warfare REALLY looks like on a massive scale like old zone. Buff jobs slightly. Im not talking omfg double trash spawn rate. Im just talking very small job buffs to jobs to really make this server attractive because its easier to make money. Right now trashpicking is the supreme. It would be great if other jobs like space ships and shipping got buffs so less people are doing trashpicking and that will just buff itself without any work because less people will do it since other jobs are more stable and make the same money. The goal for all jobs should be at least 10k per hour. Gun variaties and effects from guns. One of the things i tried to bring back to zone was secondary firings. See guns in old zone had alt fires that did seperate things. So the photon rifle for example if you charged its shot up would shoot out a gigantic charged shot that decimated anything it hit. I already started doing all of that and started to develope stuff like that (i had a few charged shots done actually for some guns). I had one completed for the railgun that was going to get a huge nerf standered gun but add in a charge fired that shot out 12 bullets in a stream at .1 seconds doing 6 damage each. You could not move at all while using it and it had a 5 second cool down. I had more written down but that would require me to dig out my pen and paper gun stats i have and im in the car on my way back to st louis so nothing i can do there but i had like 3 others at least. I also was on a massive verge on guns that was being blocked by a bug and wouldnt let the gun bullets do any damage or show up on the other players client so that was for mostly the mortars that i almost had but the general idea of it was it is a mega grenade launcher with a double explosion radius of a GL and like 25 damage or something with a tedious ROF and you couldnt move while using it. You could adjust the distance and how far the bullet would go like grenades in pc era. Another one that everyone knows about is the sniper rifle. I dont need to go into details about that since everyone knows about it. Third ADVERTISE DAMMIT. This is the downfall of graal, you gotta spend money to make money and unix clearly dont get that because he doesnt advertise the game. Try to convince unix to start paying companies to advertise the game and stop depending on word of mouth to go around from the players. If companies advertise the game then the player count will skyrocket for ALL servers. |
I honestly can't do much but agree with other rants here.
BUT One thing that bugs me is that iZone doesn't feel like Zone in terms of weapons. Zone was more like Halo to a degree, there were actually guns that went bang alongside energy weapons. Infact, most of the guns on Zone were of the gunpowder-propelled variety. So please, bring back the bang. |
Zone is confusing, also. There's nothing much to do on there.
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The problem with all graal games is that there is no story. It'd be kind of cool to implement some sort of tutorial in the beginning that launches you into a mission.
Also, yeah. Advertise. |
I disagree with what a lot of people have posted. It's not the story, advertisement or even a lack of content nowadays. It's the way the server is run.
The problems stems from the direction that you (and by extension the rest of the staff team) are moving in: Quote:
The server has had so many opportunities to create a different type of game. But every time, there is zero innovation. You could have gone in the direction of PvE missions, and actually created ones that weren't ****. That would have been completely different than what is on the other servers. The planet system could have been great. Instead of being actual worlds to be fought over, they're just glorified towers. In fact, they're worse than towers, because they aren't even in the regular world. There is so much you could have done to distinguish Zone from every other iOS server, but instead you look at what is already popular and try to hop on the bandwagon to grab a few more players. Focus on making an appealing, different game for new players then you can move on to the minutia like customs. Custom heads aren't the issue here. The issue is that there aren't enough Graal players to support 5 servers the size of classic or era. So, instead of trying to cannibalize the market by actively trying to take away players from other servers, actually make your own game. The way it is now, Zone is a **** server, but it has a ton of potential. If you want to be great you have to play on your strengths. Don't just be era in space, use your setting to the full advantage. Don't take ideas from other servers, expand upon them and create your own. Originality is what peaks interest in people viewing the appstore, and I'm telling you now, as someone who looks at the game from the outside, zone has zero personality, it's boring. It might sound like I'm flaming, but its not a hidden fact that a lot of players dislike zone. I'm not going to beat around the bush. As it is, Zone is not appealing to me and, based on the player count, not appealing to a lot of other players. TL;DR Make your own game. Don't copy another. Originality draws in players. Edit: Also I understand that it's hard to find good staff (especially on a server that isn't one of the most popular) but you need to work on quality control. It's great that you have dedicated members of the staff team, but sometimes you have to tell them their work is not good enough. A lot of the graphics on zone are sub par and the levels are pretty hideous (although that might be the fault of the tileset, it's pretty ugly). Quality control is one of the biggest changes in Classic over the past 3 years. If you look at an older release like yorktown and compare it to newer content like the railways or MoD town, there's a huge difference. Never underestimate the effect of polish. |
I'm going to be honest, but one of the reasons I left was because of the graphics. If graphics don't appeal to players, don't expect them to stay very long. You need a solid team in charge of graphics standards as already mentioned, as well as a team in charge of advertisement. It seems to me that you have very limited staff when it comes to things like this, and my guess is that it's due to too broad of assignments.
Example: if you want to develop a website, don't just take a couple of guys from your graphics team and ZP. Instead, go for quality and hire a team to do it for you. This may seem too farfetched, but it takes work in order to get good results. Edit: I partially agree with what Imprint said, not completely. It's a big game of cause and effect. The way you run the server reflects on the content, advertisement, and everything in between. I can't go too deep into an explanation because it's such a broad topic. Another thing, that tileset definitely needs to be updated. Hire a decent graphics team to help with the development of an updated tileset that works well for what your gmap goal will be rather than putting the puzzle pieces in the wrong places and hoping it looks nice. Yeah... One last thing :D Competition. Whether it's against other graal servers, or a completely different company, it's a competition. This may be graal, but you're in control of the way the server is run, and I don't think your superiors would be mad if you drew in more players than the rest of the servers through advertisement, because in the end it's them getting the money. Do whatever it takes to draw in players as long as it doesn't degrade the other servers. Everone who replied to this post before me and those who will reply are proof that zone has massive potential, because we wouldn't be replying if otherwise. It's only a matter of whether you use that potential for the better. Lastly, if I were in your position, I'd treat it like a business, not a game. In order to make money, you gotta spend money. Don't go cheap, because quality is key. |
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I would personally love not to have been banned for 24'000 days (No exxageration, either it was some auto-ban thing or a staff member). I will live with it if I have to, but 24'000 days? A tad overkill maybe?
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