mehtastic
GDB Superstar
Armers Anonymous sponsor
Posts: 1,337
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Post by mehtastic on Mar 27, 2023 20:00:32 GMT -5
Another case of rez requests only being granted to those who are friends with the imms
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Post by lechuck on Mar 28, 2023 13:45:36 GMT -5
There are also serious structural problems with the MUD that make playing it less enjoyable imo. Mage subclasses made mages an optimal choice as far as code goes. Guess who can't join 90% of clans? Gicks. There are also so many clans open and so much expected of PC leaders to involve other PCs that low player numbers -really- hurt the game. It doesn't matter if there are 20 people on Arm, it's so spread out that it can feel like a ghost town. Apoc benefits from having one main settlement and a staff that's enthusiastic about the reopening whereas Arm staff, until recently or maybe even now, were stretched thin. I liked Apoc just fine, wasn't really the same thing yet though.
I'm honestly hoping Arm isn't dead. I hope Arm can change and be better. As an old PC would say, 'Hope is shit.'
I remember on Arm, there'd be 40-50 players on before this whole shitstorm hit. I'm in literally the main play area of the game. Not a single soul to be seen, no board posts for a month, and the place is just totally dead.
This wasn't a chanced 'lull'. It's been like this for months, if not a year or more now. It is flawed game design. There is a way to 'open up alot of clans' to allow for people to play what they want, which I think is good if done in the right way, but the way it works right now is that all these other small, iso clans are far and away from any main play areas and, to boot, only encourage people to play outside the cities. Which is how you get a dead game like we have today.
Arm had 11 people on peak yesterday, whilst Apoc had 23.
Despite Apoc having 20-30 players on peak, it feels like 'the good old days' where everyone played around or in the cities, the taverns are absolutely packed most IC nights, people are interacting instead of being moody and isolated, there's new things to explore and do every single day, staff are actually interacting with the playerbase by leaving plot hooks open for everyone to take, and animating (they don't have to go through this incredibly slow bureaucracy and numerous levels of red tape that Arm staff do, they can just be GMs and actually have fun with it).
What Spyguy said about magick in Arm rings very true. Full guild mages are heavily gimped from doing anything 'conventional', and people who want to play a mage have to fully commit to it and dedicate themselves to it. In Arm, it is simply a Warrior+ to have 3 karma fireballz on your dwarf raider. There is literally no downside except not being able to join clans, but who needs a clan when you got fireballz?
Again, bad game design. I'm sad to see Arm die, but, the staff should've seen the writing on the walls.
Been saying this for ages. It's such an obvious problem, too. Told them when they announced the magicker changes that it would lead to this exact situation. There's essentially no reason to play a mundane unless you specifically want to play in a clan where being a magicker is impossible. It's clear by now that most players choose to play unclanned, or in the clans where you can be a mage, which generally means isolated tribes that have little to no impact on the larger game. Who would have thought that when you change magickers from a distinct playstyle with weaknesses and limitations into just another layer of coded power on top of a character that can do all the same shit that any mundane can do, players will choose that with any character that doesn't *have* to be mundane. But what really led to all this is the fact that for quite a while now, Armageddon has been a game where almost nothing happens. Due to a lack of effort from staff to maintain any semblance of meaningful story in the game, the cities have been painfully stagnant for so long that there's no incentive to play there. That makes it a lot easier to justify playing yet another raider with fireballs and roam the world doing whatever you feel like, which inevitably doesn't include a whole lot of plots or a great volume of interaction with the rest of the playerbase. It wasn't always like this. Before the stagnation began to set in sometime in the previous decade, people played in cities. That's because things actually happened there and a city-based character didn't feel like some dead end. Then staff made the brilliant decision to stop taking any initiative with storytelling and instead let player-run plots dictate the game, while simultaneously vetoing, stalling or otherwise not supporting the efforts of any but their favorite players. As a result, the game fell apart completely and the only thing left was to play Text Skyrim, or join the cavalcade of mindless, barely-IC PvP that the game devolved into at one point. Then eventually the playerbase declined to the point where even that was no longer sustainable due to a sheer lack of swinging dicks on the playing field. For the last couple of years, tribes have been the name of the game. As the playerbase shrunk further, staff made an even more inexplicable decision: let's counter that by opening more and more tribes! Even before Arm's recent implosion, the game peaked around 40ish players, and if you include the Masterless and Team Evil, there were something like eight or nine tribes open. It's such an absurd, braindead decision from staff. This isn't some case of gradual inertia that set in so slowly that people didn't really notice. It's a conscious decision by staff, and it amounts to self-sabotage. They chose to do literally the worst possible thing for the game. I don't think it's a coincidence that Arm's implosion happened when it did. Not to take anything away from Bebop and the way she lifted the veil on the Shalooonsh problem, but that wasn't exactly some new or unknown issue. People had just been willing to look the other way for years because it was easier not to deal with it and risk a big boat-rocking, like what happened, while they still cared about the game itself. Then the Copper "War" 2.0 happened and was such a massive dud that, coupled with the general stagnation and other aforementioned issues, made the playerbase willing to rebel. The state of the game had simply become so bad that this fact outweighed their collective complacency. Bebop's case was then the spark that lit the fuse, and many took it as an excuse to call it quits. Most of them knew what Shalooonsh is like and what he has done, they just saw it as an opportunity to vote with their feet with a stronger statement than "this game has just become too boring." If you're the only one quitting that week, it doesn't feel like your departure is likely to have any impact. If you join a bunch of others in quitting, however, you feel like your decision presents more of a middle finger to staff. I see no way for Armageddon to bounce back. It has plummeted far below critical mass, and that alone makes it unappealing to return, even if we set aside the actual problems with the way the game is run. Nobody's gonna be like, "oh, Arm is peaking at 15 nowadays? I should come back and make it 16!" It was a lot easier to cave in and make a new PC when the game sported 40+ players every night, but now I think it's actually circling the drain for real. Who the fuck's gonna come back to a game with this many problems *and* no players? It has never been this bad before. They won't shut the game down, but it's not gonna bounce back.
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Post by Barsook on Mar 28, 2023 18:19:27 GMT -5
It would of been better if they kept with the world-changing plot with the ex-Kuraci almost blowing up part of Luir's where Tuluk was forced in working with Allanak to stop Mother and Daughter from doing evil where the other HRPT's, Copper War 2.0 included, could be part of the larger world plot. Instead they allowed to frizzle out and look where Arm is now. Hopefully they are finally seeing this and will make changes towards their massive fuck ups recently and in the past. Or it's too late and the player-base is now not trusting the staff even with the new promises that they made.
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Post by ocotilloskewers on Mar 28, 2023 18:34:32 GMT -5
You put my thoughts into exact words.
To Barsook: I completely forgot about that. Insane how they just left it be.
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