mehtastic
GDB Superstar
Armers Anonymous sponsor
Posts: 1,337
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Post by mehtastic on Feb 28, 2023 12:15:10 GMT -5
If you'd like help with this project please let me know. I code for a living and could write scripts for you if needed. The offer is appreciated. This project is powered by a scraping script that Nergal wrote for the game in Python long ago, then shared with me when he quit. It's very simplistic and I have to do the data manipulation manually. I'll share it with you if you'd like to propose improvements.
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Post by Prime Minister Sinister on Feb 28, 2023 13:14:48 GMT -5
Yeah it's pretty fucked at this point. I probably could have saved it at one point but they're too dimwitted to realize it. Honestly I should have been made staff a long time ago. I should be a producer by now if they had any shred of awareness. I'm 6'0 225 lbs of pure muscle. I bench 315 for reps. I squat 400+ for reps. I can deadlift a car. I have 3 Master's degrees, I did 8 years in the Navy, visiting places like Afghanistan, Hong Kong, Dubai, Hawaii. I discovered who I am. I have an awesome family that I pour 100% of my time and effort into. I get 3 hours of free time at night to play games before my day begins anew of raising two beautiful daughters. I'm just built different I suppose. Nothing can shake my will. I would never have tolerated the absolute dumpster fire that you're seeing now. Day one I would clean house. I would hold monthly Q&A sessions ON VIDEO with voice so people can actually be heard and get a rational response. Why? Because deep down I don't give a fuck. The problem with this farcical fantasy above? I'm too good for Arm. I can't be bargained with, I can't be reasoned with. I don't feel pity. Or remorse or fear and I absolutely never stop... until you are pkilled.
new exclusive delerak copypasta just dropped lmao i love this
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mood
Displaced Tuluki
JOHN DARNIELLE #1 FANZONE
Posts: 335
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Post by mood on Mar 1, 2023 17:17:56 GMT -5
Yeah it's pretty fucked at this point. I probably could have saved it at one point but they're too dimwitted to realize it. Honestly I should have been made staff a long time ago. I should be a producer by now if they had any shred of awareness. I'm 6'0 225 lbs of pure muscle. I bench 315 for reps. I squat 400+ for reps. I can deadlift a car. I have 3 Master's degrees, I did 8 years in the Navy, visiting places like Afghanistan, Hong Kong, Dubai, Hawaii. I discovered who I am. I have an awesome family that I pour 100% of my time and effort into. I get 3 hours of free time at night to play games before my day begins anew of raising two beautiful daughters. I'm just built different I suppose. Nothing can shake my will. I would never have tolerated the absolute dumpster fire that you're seeing now. Day one I would clean house. I would hold monthly Q&A sessions ON VIDEO with voice so people can actually be heard and get a rational response. Why? Because deep down I don't give a fuck. The problem with this farcical fantasy above? I'm too good for Arm. I can't be bargained with, I can't be reasoned with. I don't feel pity. Or remorse or fear and I absolutely never stop... until you are pkilled.
this is it delerak ur entire posting career has lead up to this moment
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Post by eukelade on Mar 1, 2023 22:59:12 GMT -5
Yeah it's pretty fucked at this point. I probably could have saved it at one point but they're too dimwitted to realize it. Honestly I should have been made staff a long time ago. I should be a producer by now if they had any shred of awareness. I'm 6'0 225 lbs of pure muscle. I bench 315 for reps. I squat 400+ for reps. I can deadlift a car. I have 3 Master's degrees, I did 8 years in the Navy, visiting places like Afghanistan, Hong Kong, Dubai, Hawaii. I discovered who I am. I have an awesome family that I pour 100% of my time and effort into. I get 3 hours of free time at night to play games before my day begins anew of raising two beautiful daughters. I'm just built different I suppose. Nothing can shake my will. I would never have tolerated the absolute dumpster fire that you're seeing now. Day one I would clean house. I would hold monthly Q&A sessions ON VIDEO with voice so people can actually be heard and get a rational response. Why? Because deep down I don't give a fuck. The problem with this farcical fantasy above? I'm too good for Arm. I can't be bargained with, I can't be reasoned with. I don't feel pity. Or remorse or fear and I absolutely never stop... until you are pkilled.
suddenly my choice to poke my head in here has paid off
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Post by Prime Minister Sinister on Mar 1, 2023 23:53:12 GMT -5
#delerak2023
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mehtastic
GDB Superstar
Armers Anonymous sponsor
Posts: 1,337
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Post by mehtastic on Mar 13, 2023 5:34:31 GMT -5
2/13 - 2/20: 171 unique logins - 6 new accounts = 165 retained unique logins - 15 staff accounts = 150 players
2/20 - 2/27: 165 unique logins - 8 new accounts = 157 retained unique logins - 15 staff accounts = 142 players
2/27 - 3/6: 167 unique logins - 7 new accounts = 160 retained unique logins - 22 staff accounts = 138 players
3/6 - 3/13: 165 unique logins - 4 new accounts = 161 retained unique logins - 22 staff accounts = 139 players
I don't think Armageddon has ever lost 8% of its playerbase in a month. Usually it takes a whole year to do that. Something must've happened last month.
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Post by alicatsam on Mar 15, 2023 11:56:06 GMT -5
Harshlands: Active PCs: 143
Ouch, Arm.
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mehtastic
GDB Superstar
Armers Anonymous sponsor
Posts: 1,337
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Post by mehtastic on Mar 20, 2023 5:51:50 GMT -5
2/13 - 2/20: 171 unique logins - 6 new accounts = 165 retained unique logins - 15 staff accounts = 150 players 2/20 - 2/27: 165 unique logins - 8 new accounts = 157 retained unique logins - 15 staff accounts = 142 players 2/27 - 3/6: 167 unique logins - 7 new accounts = 160 retained unique logins - 22 staff accounts = 138 players 3/6 - 3/13: 165 unique logins - 4 new accounts = 161 retained unique logins - 22 staff accounts = 139 players 3/13 - 3/20: 154 unique logins - 8 new accounts = 146 retained unique logins - 22* staff accounts = 124 players
* Staff account number might not be accurate, depending on whether staff that inactivated this week logged into the game or not. The number might be as low as 18, leaving 127 players.
139 to 124 marks an 11% drop. Definitely not something I've seen before in the history of this entire project.
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Post by Barsook on Mar 20, 2023 15:02:17 GMT -5
It's this fiasco that caused the drop and I think finally people are getting truly fed up with the Staff and is listening to us Shadows.
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mehtastic
GDB Superstar
Armers Anonymous sponsor
Posts: 1,337
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Post by mehtastic on Mar 23, 2023 18:30:21 GMT -5
Harshlands currently has 23 on with 13 characters available. Apocalypse has 8 players online. Arx has 72 characters online (players can have 2 characters there, so let's say 36-72 players online). Pretty safe to say Arm dies before the year ends.
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punished ppurg
GDB Superstar
Why are we still here? Just to suffer?
Posts: 1,035
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Post by punished ppurg on Mar 23, 2023 19:09:10 GMT -5
It's the tax season slump, everyone knows that.
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delerak
GDB Superstar
PK'ed by jcarter
"When you want to fool the world, tell the truth." - Otto Von Bismarck
Posts: 1,656
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Post by delerak on Mar 23, 2023 21:22:15 GMT -5
Those numbers are terrible. I'm not happy about this at all. Sadly I still have not heard from them.
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Post by nottriste on Mar 24, 2023 10:49:28 GMT -5
Harshlands currently has 23 on with 13 characters available. Apocalypse has 8 players online. Arx has 72 characters online (players can have 2 characters there, so let's say 36-72 players online). Pretty safe to say Arm dies before the year ends. Thank you for keeping us up to date with stats like this. Personally I don't want Armageddon to "die" necessarily because I like niche games and communities with long histories. I've often had daydreams about having time to play Armageddon when I finally retire from corporate wage slavery. Armageddon was going to be my Black Mirror: San Junipero like simulation. When Armageddon had cool/nice/good staffers and wasn't in the stranglehold of gross geeks who delusionally think they're chads like Shalooonsh, I actually made time to play. Shalooonsh is so delusional in believing he's a chad, he bent all the rules during his tenure to make himself *appear* as a chad and banned any players who called him out on his bullshit as I have for years. As soon as he and Shabago and later Hestia started kicking me to the curb for calling staff and staff pets out on their shit, I made less effort to play. I realized power wasn't equally distributed among players, and that staff were openly abusing the system. And that lack of fairness kills immersion. To go with my San Junipero analogy again, imagine if every time the two female protagonists had smex there was an invisible staffer watching them, or one of their staff pets watching the seggs invisibly with their max karma nilazi and violating consent rules but never getting punished for it (because they're a pet). Suddenly what could be a fun simulation for everyone becomes a horror story. I think about that San Junipero shit a lot because, for whatever reason, a good simulation like that has been impossible to achieve. Of course before San Junipero there have been descriptions of simulations like this going back more than 100 years to the French avant-garde movement. More recently and most relevantly, Neal Stephenson described the metaverse in Snow Crash. When Mark Zuckerberg ripped off the name "metaverse," he made some boring wannabe Roblox b******* that is absolutely nothing like Neil Stephenson's vision. When you first learn about the metaverse in Snow Crash one of the first descriptions of the metaverse users is a guy walking around in the form of a giant penis. Zuckerberg's legally wary version of the metaverse of course allows no such thing, but it's not realistic and immersive either: it is so cautious that they're even afraid to render legs on people. That is the opposite of immersive. Armageddon used to be one of the most immersive games online because of features like permadeath, and the sense that any person is capable of killing any other person just like in real life. But as soon as you pull back the veil a little bit and realize that staff and their pets have special advantages that allows them to kill any other player at will, or evade death unrealistically, then that immersive aspect goes out the window and it's just another shitty online game that serves well as a sandbox for some people but not for anyone who cares about actual realism or immersion. I just got a PlayStation VR2 the eye tracking feature is pretty great, it has the great potential of being able to read facial expressions and create more immersive renderings of players. I have hope that in the next 10 years someone will use technology like this to make a truly immersive game and I can forget about Armageddon completely. But between the two extremes -- on one side niche games like Armageddon where at face level you can do anything until you realize you are just a disadvantaged plaything at the mercy of more privileged players, and on the other side bland shit like Zuckerberg's metaverse where everyone looks identical and you can barely do anything at all -- I don't see any great options for immersive gameplay currently. (Maybe if we let Delerak staff we would finally get to that roleplaying holy grail LMFAO.)
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Post by nottriste on Mar 24, 2023 11:05:39 GMT -5
And sorry for all the BM: SJ references. I am not just a pervert who likes lesbians because (1) I was one before I transitioned and (2) that story is one of the only pieces of media that intentionally examines the concept of immersion. It also examines the topic with a beautiful story arch sometimes known as the Greek Chiasmus: the story starts where the user is fully immersed such that the game appears as reality, then details take that immersion away, only for the users to find full immersion again to the extent that they give up their actual lives. I love that shit.
At it's finest, Armageddon similarly fetishized immersion. Bebop and others' recent protests have been so effective in changing the current state of the game precisely because it's all about immersion being violated in the worst possible way, to the extent of having someone running that game literally stalk you in real life.
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mehtastic
GDB Superstar
Armers Anonymous sponsor
Posts: 1,337
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Post by mehtastic on Mar 24, 2023 11:18:28 GMT -5
No problem. I felt that keeping track of long-term trends was important when the staff and players were ignoring the trends for years, and just chugging along with doing whatever they felt like instead of what was best for the game. It's a bad sign for the game that staff like Brokkr are content with the game having 10 players online at peak, because the game cannot go on with 10 players online at peak. The reason why Apocalypse is more fun than Armageddon with roughly the same amount of players online is because Apocalypse is designed around putting players in a smaller area and in public locations where they are more likely to interact. When Apoc has 10 people on, they're usually close by. When Armageddon has 10 people on, 4 are paired off in 2 separate apartments, 2 are out hunting solo, and the remaining 4 are idling in their clan compound. Short-term trends like in my latest post are useful for looking at a snapshot of the current state of things. I wouldn't draw too many conclusions from them alone, unless regular snapshots look more and more similar to each other.
Armageddon is very clearly dying, and the players are almost entirely in denial of it because they ignored the long term trends in favor of short term trends. Saying "Oh we got 50 people on peak last Saturday" while ignoring that 12 people quit the game last year and it only got 2 new long term players. Basically, the Armageddon community believed its own bullshit for too long and is now suffering the consequences.
In 2013, it was unthinkable that any other RPI would have more players on than Armageddon. In 2023 the idea of Armageddon going down looks very realistic. But player/staff attitudes haven't significantly changed in that decade: they still think there's gas in the tank but the game really is running on fumes. To a few players' credit, they're at least cognizant of the fact that the shrinking playerbase is a problem for the game. But the only solution they can think of is "just play more" which is frankly a horrible attitude that doesn't address any of Armageddon's core problems: the fundamental lack of return on time spent on the game, and the isolation that many players choose for themselves.
Personally, in 2018 when I signed up for an account here, I didn't want the game to die. I wanted to critique it from the outside in the hopes that it would push the game to become better. I had friends playing the game and staffing it who felt their hands were completely tied. Now that we're in 2023 I would prefer Armageddon shut down, rather than continue on in this state of pathetically clinging to life, like a boring TV show going into its 20th season.
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