Player Retention

[dos]

Player retention on GraalOnline servers has always been a problem. While a bunch of the things you've mentioned are big factors, I feel like you missed one BIG one, and that is the release of GraalOnline Ol'West.

Prior to November 2014, Era was doing pretty well for itself. Graphics wise, the game looked beautiful. SNES-inspired graphics were a hot-topic on mobile at the time. Everything regarding how the game looked was consistent. The community was much less toxic, with moderators focusing their efforts on cleaning up the game's cruel players (even going as far as jailing players who'd curse in PMs.) Interaction between staff and players was much more prevalent beyond events, there'd always be an admin inside of Astro. All-in-all, a pretty decent game.

Then Ol'West announced, and with it went hundreds of GraalOnline players. With Ol'West being the newest and greatest addition to the franchise, it's no surprise that many Era players migrated to the game. This includes staff members, with a bunch of moderators, designers and such moving to the game in order to help out. I specifically remember—even months after the game's release—people selling their items on Era for items on Ol'West.

Ol'West became a dead project, however. Logging onto the game in its current state holds a large Spanish-and-Portuguese speaking audience. Many of the original Era players have quit and/or forgot of the game's existence.

With Era now in a tough spot in terms of management, new members of staff were recruited. And it's clear, at least to many loyalist and veteran players, that they had different visions for the game going forward. Their causes started out noble, with adding new items to the Event House, new bases and new quests for new players. Time went on however, and now we're stuck with items such as "the Rainbow Chemical Gun" and a broken community and basing system based around laundering as many rewards as possible.

What also doesn't help is how silent upper-level management is about GraalOnline's future (at least to casual players.) A lot of things aren't properly communicated to people who play on Graal servers. I try to stay out of drama regarding Graal players beyond the servers I play on, however it is very clear that many people aren't happy with the way their favorite game is being treated.

To add onto this as well, Unixmad is assumingly very old. I would not be surprised if his plan is to release GraalOnline Delteria and retire from the franchise living off of the millions of dollars he has already made. Era is an 11 year old game, and I don't think it's at the top of his priorities to fix within the near future. You gotta remember that he works on maintaining other servers and projects, some of which we don't even know about. If GraalOnline is about optimizing his pockets to prepare for retirement, I can't imagine there's anything incentivizing the risk it would take to revamp every single game from square one. Not to mention the amount of outrage he would get for doing something as bold as resetting the server data and giving everyone a fresh start.

I truly believe that Graal Era has the potential for success, but as it stands, it's going to take a lot more than just a few statistics based on player retention to convince any of the upper-level management to make a change. The game, as it stands, is still exciting enough to attract new players, keep loyalists around and does, in fact have a group of server staff willing to keep it around as long as possible.

Then again though, we'll just have to see. Maybe we'll finally get a sneak peak of GraalOnline 3D and all migrate over there. Who knows?

I'm not sure that Ol' West created significant problems. Possibly? I remember that a lot of manpower was sent over there during the development of the game, and I believe that there might have been more competition for players to come to Era vice Ol' West, but I don't believe that it really could have declined Era's quality at the current level.

The main scheme to invite or keep players during Era's entire existence has been to develop new shops, weapons, events, and to redesign so much of the gmap that it skewed Era's theme. All of these updates that weren't thought about more than once because they were "cool" drove Era's basing system, currency, staff involvement, and most importantly our community out the door. I disagree when people state that most of us 10-year players left because of age or responsibilities (while that may be partially true), but a lot of us left because Era's theme, style, morale, and community took a dive. That statement alone comes from talking to a good few people that I've run into who have been around the block.

Yes, Unixmad is going on 60 or something of the likes. I don't expect much from him, just the same as the entire Graal community hasn't expected much from him across it's existence. I don't expect much to come from this thread either, but I would like something to come from it. I just don't believe that the game, on all levels of management, is in good hands to solve the tough problems. Updates can be released all year long for the next few years, but I don't think that's going to solve the issue of why Era, a game with so much more life for the app store, isn't (and hasn't for the last few years) reaching a consistent playercount of higher than 2,0000 anymore.

Graal3D has been an inconsistent project since 2006. Let's see if we can make it another 15 years and see if it's released.

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I don't think a reset is a solution, you'd be dealing with thousands of angry people who committed their time for years of work only for it to be rolled back to 2010, that includes removing guns.
On the other hand, I'd like to add that the Facebook release of Era has made the player count increase, now that flashplayer is gone and the Facebook's bugs are intolerable the player count decreased.
A proper PC release to Era should be present, and I mean the kind from Graal PC and not any other client, it's the smoothest gameplay I've seen if you've ever tried playing Era PC. The only issues I think are the rights that the players receive when they first enter from PC and the vulnerably to hacks.

I wouldn't say that Era's current playercount derives from not enough cross-platform attention because I still see an ecstatic amount of new players lining up spawning in the East Hospital. I just believe that it's the game itself and community as I've stated aplenty above. Also I would agree with your first statement, and a rollback would likely be the final solution although I'm clearly not calling any shots.