mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on Dec 5, 2023 19:58:53 GMT -5
They've finally gone and done it. They decided to pull Old Yeller behind the barn and shoot it.
If done correctly, this could actually be a good change for the game, but since Armageddon staff are incompetent it's not going to go well. This is how some other games do things (MUSHes), and it works well for them because (for the most part) they're not run by egotistical weirdos who spend their free time sending white powder to former staff members in between mudfuck sessions.
It's also very funny that they did a couple of sponsored role calls in the past couple of weeks, knowing that they were going to break this out and shut things down in a few months.
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mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on Dec 5, 2023 20:20:48 GMT -5
The amount of crying in the Discord server is unprecedented. Multiple people openly saying they will leave the game to play Apocalypse, asking Halaster to reconsider, declaring that they will not log into their current character... Yep, this is what happens when staff assume total ownership of a game and consider players as "along for the ride". Even former staff members like Erulyss and Shabago are uneasy about the change.
Other current staff members are silent. I wonder if this was like Tuluk's closure, where the Producers made a decision internally and decided to force it on the rest of the team?
btw if you're a staff member that's unhappy about this change and you want to share your thoughts anonymously, feel free to make an account here and post. If you don't want to post, DM me.
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delirium
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Post by delirium on Dec 5, 2023 20:52:10 GMT -5
This does not make me feel like a particularly nice person, but, I laughed so hard when I read this.
A dash of what the fuck was in there, but oh my goodness this is funny.
Is this what schadenfreude feels like?
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delirium
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Post by delirium on Dec 5, 2023 20:56:36 GMT -5
Like were any of these people around for Arm 2.0 aka Reborn?
Telling people things are going to end in a few months absolutely KILLS the game. Kills it dead, dead, dead.
When told their characters' lives have a specific time limit, most people don't bother trying to tell those stories any more.
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mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on Dec 5, 2023 20:58:23 GMT -5
I laughed too, then I imagined how qwerty would feel about it, then I remembered there are like 3 pending sponsored role calls for anyone willing to play a noble for a month. Then I laughed a little more.
The funniest part is yet to come. That's when they re-open the game for Season One several weeks behind schedule, because everything with Arm is always behind schedule, and nobody logs in.
How can the shadowboard destroy the game if the staff do it for us? That's the part I'm pissed about tbh.
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delirium
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Post by delirium on Dec 5, 2023 21:06:07 GMT -5
I remember when Reborn was announced and everyone straight up logged out. The game was never quite the same after that.
I'll grant you, when given a character (twice, actually) that was SUPPOSED to die, I still played them to the hilt like any other character, because I knew going in that they were going to burn bright and die young, and their existence was serving a purpose in a story arc.
This isn't the same. This is saying "congratulations, your character suddenly has terminal cancer."
People will react differently to that news, but for reasons obvious and sundry, they by and large will not react positively.
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Patuk
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Post by Patuk on Dec 5, 2023 21:25:43 GMT -5
I have no idea what goes on anywhere anymore but I must look at these proceeds with all the misplaced awe of someone beholding the trainwreck of a millennium. The fuck.
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ask
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Post by ask on Dec 5, 2023 21:40:21 GMT -5
They couldn't finish Arm 2.0. They couldn't focus on telling stories when they closed Tuluk. Now their already overbloated staff can't fucking BUILD for episodic Armageddon so they have to hire MORE staff?
pathetic-cat.gif
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Post by uncoolio on Dec 5, 2023 22:14:56 GMT -5
If I will myself into believing that they'll actually deliver on those promises, it sounds like it could be a great way to make Arm worth playing again. The game's been such a pathetic shadow of its former self for years now, and if it is to survive the next few, this kind of innovation is probably the only way to do it. At least it's clear that nobody on staff is capable of making this iteration of Arm good again. If they could, they would have, but the fact of the matter is that the game is dead as fuck these days. Years of neglect and stagnation have brought it to its knees.
It's such a huge gamble, though. I think there's a higher chance that this is what finally kills ArmageddonMUD than the opposite. It would be a much smaller task than Reborn was, where they intended to completely recreate absolutely every aspect of the game from scratch, so I'm not gonna call it hopeless--but it'll definitely require that staff suddenly put in a lot more work than they have done for quite a few years. I give it a 60% chance that this project spells the end of Arm, a 30% chance that it does launch but is received poorly, and a 10% chance to be awesome.
Don't know why anyone would want to cling to this iteration of Arm. Even though the game still has players (peaking at 25-30ish), nobody fucking does anything and nothing of any real substance happens anywhere. People just log in and exist. It's telling how engaged players are when you see 20 on 'who' and then there's a crash, and twenty minutes after the game comes back up, there's like 9 online. That's how many were actually paying enough attention to their client to notice that the game crashed twenty minutes prior, and cared enough to log back in again.
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lurker
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Post by lurker on Dec 5, 2023 22:34:49 GMT -5
It could work, but not with "months" of downtime.
I forsee Sindome getting a rush of new players soon.
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Post by picklehead on Dec 5, 2023 22:52:04 GMT -5
I thought Halaster was leaving? There's no way this works. I like the part about starting a hot dog stand in present Arm and having it be a MMH in some future season. "We've given almost none of your characters any agency over the last 30 years, but now we're totally going to give them some sort of weird quasi-agency that you won't actually be a part of in future seasons." Sweet. I suppose in this way they can potentially work to advance things that PCs are working towards with less bullshit push-back, because in a year and a half none of it will ever matter again. Who wouldn't want to jump through a million hoops for that?!
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punished ppurg
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Post by punished ppurg on Dec 5, 2023 23:16:58 GMT -5
For the sake of the thread I'll steelman some of the emergent ideas here. In no particular order.
1. People claim that this will kill the game, but from what I've seen in the MUD circuit there is little that holds a candle towards "active" development. Active, in the sense that the MUD maintainers are there making moves and improvements in the day to day, reactionary sense. By going to a seasonal model, Arm staff will presumably be volunteering themselves to only provide Storytelling content (that is, opting out of playing a staff pc); and this leads to hopefully, a more compelling and animated game world. One of the greatest losses of staff entertainment "value" is when the staffer opts to play a staff PC instead of using ST scope. It's like in a war, your aircraft carrier decides to not fly any of its planes that day and instead it wants to act as a large floating CIWS. Unfathomable loss of agency. We've got players that can play roles already, there's no need for staffers to burn time playing PCs when they should be using their voluntary privilege to deliver the content that they've been empowered to provide to the game. The seasonal aspect, 6-18 months, is a good coping mechanism to stop the STs from burning out entirely under this paradigm. You volunteered for it and you're doing it for free perks.
2. Since forever, Armageddon has operated underneath the "you can't talk about things until 1 IRL year has passed" limitation. We've all ignored that limitation in our own private correspondence, in one way or another. Everyone is guilty of it. By employing a "book-end" seasonal narrative break, the staff team has the opportunity to really cultivate & catalog actual interesting things that developed over the course of a season; even going so far as to help guide the narrative of the oncoming season, or providing a proper narrative vector for the community to land upon. The excuse for the 1 IRL year limitation is that "things could still be happening"; but if the game skips 100 years into the future, this no longer applies (save for extremely niche and esoteric plot lines that IMO shouldn't really be in the game anyway). Give your playerbase the narrative checkpoint that it desires to talk about the cool things that have happened in the game. Let people brag, let them take the victory lap for their time invested at the end of the season. Let the cool things that happened get documented, get added to the legacy of the seasonal paradigm. Whip together an engaging narrative summary of the emergent events that transpired, be a DM. It would go a long way towards making things that transpire in Armageddon feel like they matter.
3. Armageddon's skill scaling system, and especially its weapon skill scaling, is a timesink that expects the player to monotonously invest IRL weeks of their time in order to achieve competency. This is the core gameplay failure of Arm in the context of an "aging audience" that no longer has the time, or inclination, to rough circle for the literal thousandth time. In the term of MUD player archetypes, actual achievers balk at the timesink philosophy and move on to other games that respect their time; meanwhile, what sticks around in the Armageddon gameworld as the "core competencies" are not the players that you want holding those roles -- those are the disappointments, the "I'm going to go log off" instead of deal with them players. It's like a perverse evolutionary system where the players that come out on top over time are the ones that are unhealthy enough, brain-dead enough, or lacking-self-respect enough, to slog to that point. And the reason for this perverse system is the idea of "runaway" hyper-competent characters that were legendary in the past of the game, but clearly not wanted by the staff team. So, with a seasonal system, you have an environment where these hyper-competent characters driven by hypo-thyroidic players have a hard death date. They're going to get filtered at the end, the same as everyone else: clean slate. The Q&A is talking about "lifting the glass ceiling", with the implication being that there may be Red Robes or Byn Lts or what have you. It is more tolerable to facilitate that level of power when there is a definite end date looming on the horizon: if they suck, hey, you can just ride it out. Learn from the mistake and fix the role better next time.
4. Tagging onto the above thought, there's a suggestion in the Q&A about changing skill scaling to "speed up" the idea of character progression, or to lessen "the grind". A competent staff team could also extend this idea along the lines of the sponsored role "start off as a capable Byn Trooper / AoD Private", and allow more of these types of roles towards the closure of the season. For instance, let's say that Allanak season 1 ends with a siege of Tuluk. For everyone that wants in, staff could put out that: "We're taking an unlimited amount of AoD Private special apps; and you get spawned with decent equipment right in the siege camp, have fun." You can make the best of narrative seasonal content by constructing roles that place interested players immediately into the unfolding narrative; and you don't have to worry about the long-term consequences of giving special app Private Doofus master parry & advanced slashing, because he's getting deleted in 3 weeks. That nightmare no longer has to haunt your mind.
5. The seasonal system allows for spotlights on corners of Armageddon's world that have not received attention or love for IRL decades. Take for instance, focusing on Luir's for a season. This would necessitate the coded/roleplay enrichment of Luir's as a playing sphere, a "fleshing out", that can extend beyond this season into the next however many seasons. New code can be introduced to address decades-old problems that have haunted these corners of the game, simply because nobody ever focused on them enough to fix them. And these enrichments can be used in perpetuity. If the focus of the season is "Desert Elf", then it's not going to hurt feelings if most of the code changes and adjustments are made to enrich the play experience of the Desert Elf. Then, Desert Elves are enriched for future, etc.
6. It's important to remember that this is also coming with the karma revamp. One of the guidelines for the karma revamp is that karma can be handed out liberally, reward-as-seen. With a consolidation of the playerbase and an insistence on staffers that are staffers 1st, staffers only, the prospects of good players being rewarded aptly with karma increment increases. The chances are much better, and the karma revamp situation has a much better shot at working well, than it does within the game framework as it currently exists. Overall, I think it's a good idea. Armageddon is stagnant, and this will mix it up. Is the staff team capable of botching this terribly? Yes. Never make the mistake of thinking that the Arm team can't fuck something up. But, they can also do good. Arm's metaplot is non-existent, in large part because it lacks an episodic framework. This is the reason why stories have chapters, why D&D splats have turned into "themed rollercoaster rides" over the past years, why the Marvelization of all movies is so prevalent. It is possible to tell a compelling long-form story without relying on these trope crutches: it's very hard to do so. Let the game have its crutch, and see how it walks with that. Right now, it's not walking at all.
By the way, I'm still permabanned.
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baron
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Post by baron on Dec 6, 2023 0:53:46 GMT -5
It's actually a good idea. If I thought for a second that it would happen as described, I'd even consider logging on to check it out.
But taking the game offline for 2 months really means it's over. It's not coming back online.
The smart way to do things would be to leave the server running the original game, perhaps with grossly reduced staff support, until the day of transition. This isn't happening, I believe, because in their hearts the remaining staff/producers know this is the end of the road. But they can't bring themselves to pull the plug without a plan to plug it back in again. Like a nicotine addict hiding a pack of cigarettes somewhere in their house before quitting.
But unlike those sweet sweet death-sticks, once the servers are off, the scattered few crackeddon-users (who are mostly staff at this point) remaining will find that there's other games and ways to sate their urges.
This is it. Though I've advocated for ending the game for years and rationally I know it's for the best for everyone, I admit I have mixed feelings.
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nobody
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Post by nobody on Dec 6, 2023 5:50:04 GMT -5
This is the stupidest fucking idea, and I am a mixture of rage and heartbreak. I'm just at a lost. I don't understand how things just can't be changed and updated and we continue on in the current timeline without players loosing countless hours of work. If staff are unable to do that, how do they expect to create new and unique settings and make things interesting across multiple settings if they can't even do it in one that has so much ground work done for it. If you hate the GMH, fucking change them. How about Tektolnes comes out from hiding in the fucking closet and abolishes the GMH. If you hate so many magickers getting about solo, fucking change things. Rogue mages have been a huge problem ever since the change to guilds from the originals, with super warrior/mages who dominate everyone. Also why do we have like half a dozen or more tribal clans for a playerbase of 30 peak. There's so many stupid fucking decisions being made. Also when it's brought up staff shouldn't be playing characters, it's shot down by Halaster, and now it's going to be the new thing? Did the stick get dislodged from up his ass or something suddenly?
Instead of fixing obvious problems, let's just completely change the game and ruin a legacy. They should almost release the game to the public so the original can somehow be preserved, and they go and do their own fucking thing if that's what they want to so badly. This was the problem when SoI changed. If only the original SoI/SoI2 iteration had been saved, and not lost to like the 3rd version, that game might have been salvaged, but it went in a direction that was just awful.
RIP Armageddon.
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mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on Dec 6, 2023 6:44:55 GMT -5
If I will myself into believing that they'll actually deliver on those promises, it sounds like it could be a great way to make Arm worth playing again. The game's been such a pathetic shadow of its former self for years now, and if it is to survive the next few, this kind of innovation is probably the only way to do it. At least it's clear that nobody on staff is capable of making this iteration of Arm good again. If they could, they would have, but the fact of the matter is that the game is dead as fuck these days. Years of neglect and stagnation have brought it to its knees. It's such a huge gamble, though. I think there's a higher chance that this is what finally kills ArmageddonMUD than the opposite. It would be a much smaller task than Reborn was, where they intended to completely recreate absolutely every aspect of the game from scratch, so I'm not gonna call it hopeless--but it'll definitely require that staff suddenly put in a lot more work than they have done for quite a few years. I give it a 60% chance that this project spells the end of Arm, a 30% chance that it does launch but is received poorly, and a 10% chance to be awesome. Don't know why anyone would want to cling to this iteration of Arm. Even though the game still has players (peaking at 25-30ish), nobody fucking does anything and nothing of any real substance happens anywhere. People just log in and exist. It's telling how engaged players are when you see 20 on 'who' and then there's a crash, and twenty minutes after the game comes back up, there's like 9 online. That's how many were actually paying enough attention to their client to notice that the game crashed twenty minutes prior, and cared enough to log back in again. Like usual with Armageddon, the way the message is delivered always betrays the intent and belief of staff. They do not currently believe that the game as-is is worth supporting. What most players will take away from the announcement is: "You have failed to be entertaining. In 1-2 months, all of your characters will be stored." The quality of the game will take a nosedive (and yes, it can go lower!) between now and the "temporary" closure of the game. There will be many people who just quit now because there is no point continuing something that is doomed to end half-finished. It could work, but not with "months" of downtime. I forsee Sindome getting a rush of new players soon. I think the game that is going to see the biggest gain is Apocalypse. Frankly they'd be stupid not to capitalize on this and start to publicly advertise before Arm closes. I thought Halaster was leaving? There's no way this works. I like the part about starting a hot dog stand in present Arm and having it be a MMH in some future season. "We've given almost none of your characters any agency over the last 30 years, but now we're totally going to give them some sort of weird quasi-agency that you won't actually be a part of in future seasons." Sweet. I suppose in this way they can potentially work to advance things that PCs are working towards with less bullshit push-back, because in a year and a half none of it will ever matter again. Who wouldn't want to jump through a million hoops for that?! Vaguely reminds me of when Nyr closed Tuluk then immediately left the game. Departing staff members' egos are just too big for Armageddon to handle. In this case I think Halaster's ego is going to be a killing blow to the game. (snip) Overall, I think it's a good idea. Armageddon is stagnant, and this will mix it up. Is the staff team capable of botching this terribly? Yes. Never make the mistake of thinking that the Arm team can't fuck something up. But, they can also do good. Arm's metaplot is non-existent, in large part because it lacks an episodic framework. This is the reason why stories have chapters, why D&D splats have turned into "themed rollercoaster rides" over the past years, why the Marvelization of all movies is so prevalent. It is possible to tell a compelling long-form story without relying on these trope crutches: it's very hard to do so. Let the game have its crutch, and see how it walks with that. Right now, it's not walking at all. By the way, I'm still permabanned. I think the main reason I'm so pessimistic about this change is that it is very much a good idea for all of the reasons you mentioned it's a good idea, but staff as a body have never once demonstrated any sort of follow-through to a good idea. Now they're planning on changing the entire way they work and setting a deadline for themselves that just doesn't match with past experience. For example: the staff closed the Grey Forest on October 10 saying it would undergo a revamp for the next 2-3 weeks, and then reopen. At the time of the Seasons announcement, it has been 8 weeks since the Grey Forest closed with no sign of reopening soon. Even if preparing for a season is an all-hands project, it will almost certainly be delayed by several weeks. Whatever players remain to wait around for a new season to start might find a delay funny at first, but with each ongoing season, it will just get more and more frustrating that staff cannot meet their own deadlines. Then staff will break out the "staff are volunteers" stick and start beating people over the head with it until morale improves. The staff are capable of not fucking things up. But at the same time, if the bar is so low that players are assuming they will fuck up, and they don't stick around to see what happens, then there's effectively no difference between success and failure. Staff could completely meet their timetable for a season and open their doors to a waiting crowd of zero. They could have a Season One that starts off really well, but a staff member completely fucks up an interaction with a player and causes a kerfuffle in the community that drives multiple players away when the staff member responsible gets the circle-the-wagons treatment from the rest of the team. They could have a Season One that goes perfectly, but Season Two gets delayed because the transition between running a season and setting up the next one is too much work for a team of 10-15 casual volunteers. The Arm staff do well in the current environment because there is very little expectation of work, but the seasons model is actually grueling and I think what we'll ultimately see is a "school project" situation where some staff simply don't want to do the assigned work and hope that more active staff will pick up their slack. It's actually a good idea. If I thought for a second that it would happen as described, I'd even consider logging on to check it out. (snip) This is it. Though I've advocated for ending the game for years and rationally I know it's for the best for everyone, I admit I have mixed feelings. That's fair. Look, I've advocated for the game to end, too. I have for years. I'm still here watching it slowly burn. I would be lying if I said I did not have an investment in seeing what the game's final days end up looking like. And now that I feel like I'm finally seeing them, I guess it is bittersweet. I would have much rather seen a conscious effort to end the game, rather than playing pretend. I would much rather see players and staff agreeing the plug needs to be pulled, rather than staff dragging the players towards circumstances that we all kind of know are going to happen. It's really too bad that the massive ego of the game's staff simply don't allow for them to admit that the game as we all know it is over. This is the stupidest fucking idea, and I am a mixture of rage and heartbreak. I'm just at a lost. I don't understand how things just can't be changed and updated and we continue on in the current timeline without players loosing countless hours of work. If staff are unable to do that, how do they expect to create new and unique settings and make things interesting across multiple settings if they can't even do it in one that has so much ground work done for it. If you hate the GMH, fucking change them. How about Tektolnes comes out from hiding in the fucking closet and abolishes the GMH. If you hate so many magickers getting about solo, fucking change things. Rogue mages have been a huge problem ever since the change to guilds from the originals, with super warrior/mages who dominate everyone. Also why do we have like half a dozen or more tribal clans for a playerbase of 30 peak. There's so many stupid fucking decisions being made. Also when it's brought up staff shouldn't be playing characters, it's shot down by Halaster, and now it's going to be the new thing? Did the stick get dislodged from up his ass or something suddenly? Instead of fixing obvious problems, let's just completely change the game and ruin a legacy. They should almost release the game to the public so the original can somehow be preserved, and they go and do their own fucking thing if that's what they want to so badly. This was the problem when SoI changed. If only the original SoI/SoI2 iteration had been saved, and not lost to like the 3rd version, that game might have been salvaged, but it went in a direction that was just awful. RIP Armageddon. With few exceptions, the producers of this game have never been concerned about the legacy of the game itself. They have been concerned with their own legacy. From Sanvean using Armageddon to boost her own authorial career only to fuck off immediately afterward, to Nyr using Tuluk's closure as one last big fuck-you to the playerbase, to Halaster - who is officially not even a producer - still grabbing the reins for one last change to the game. At the top, Armageddon staff are ego personified.
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