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Post by uncoolio on Mar 26, 2024 21:46:11 GMT -5
A max combat skill of 95 gets reduced by 30% (28.5), so 66 assuming they round down? That's still the middleish of advanced -- way more than enough skill to handle any content a staff member is willing to throw at players in an RPT, especially given that other characters will be there. Skills that cap at 80 go down to 56. There aren't any combat skills that go to 95, and most of them max out around 70-80ish for the classes that have the highest cap. A handful can go to 90, but not many. The penalty basically brings heavies from peak potential to bottom advanced.
90 becomes 63, and advanced is 60 80 becomes 56, and advanced is 55 etc.
Max parry for a heavy class is 65, and the penalty lowers that to 45 which is the very first point of advanced. Going from the highest possible parry skill to what is effectively the lowest that any class gets (not counting the actual crafting classes) is a gamechanger. Stalkers and miscreants are extremely squishy and can't really become great at combat, so if that's the maximum potential for any mage subclass, that's a BIG drop in power. While spells like Stoneskin and Sanctuary can make you very tanky regardless of combat skills, you'll also have to rely on those for almost any combat encounter. And most aspects don't get these spells anyway.
There will be a big drop in the overall power level of mages. That's not a bad thing at all, I think the mage subclasses were unhealthy for the game all along, but it's definitely a major meta-changer. There's also no such thing as mages with master stealth anymore. Many of the PvP-based combat skills (backstab, sap, archery) become essentially worthless when you max out at the bottom of advanced. Backstab isn't even worth trying to use if you miss half the time and do like 30-50 damage when you hit.
By and large, there were two types of mage subclass "builds" that were powerful and popular:
1) Raider/enforcer/infiltrator with Rukkian Empowerment or Vivaduan... whatever the one with Sanctuary and Invulnerability is. These were the combos that scaled high combat skills with buffs. The defensive skills in particular really define how your character fares in combat. The other aspects don't combine particularly well with mundane combat--they don't make you tankier, they don't make you hit harder.
2) The top stealth classes (miscreant, stalker) combined with offensive spellcasting. These leveraged the power of undetectable stealth to come out of nowhere - maybe even in your apartment - to double fireball you faster than you could put down your coffee and type a response. They will now be limited to high advanced stealth, which is easily detectable with scan and only reaches no-fail status in crowd rooms. That's a crippling blow to these characters, especially since their combat skills will now be so low that they might as well not have any.
The rest of the mundane+magesub combinations were always kind of bad and better served as full mages because they have no meaningful synergy with combat or stealth skills. Also, I haven't been able to confirm whether they put the instakill spells like Paralyze, Summon, Demonfire and Sleep back into the game when they reintroduced full mages recently. They were not given to any of the aspects and so were effectively removed from the game, and if they're gone from full mage spell lists as well, magick as a whole is nowhere near as powerful as it used to be. I have no problem with that, but it's definitely a thing.
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mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on Mar 27, 2024 4:27:15 GMT -5
I think the change is good, too. Anything that makes the uncreatives that essentially roll the same 1-3 characters over and over sweat a little is actually a good thing for the game, especially when their pathetically-empty bingo cage of concepts only contains solo antagonistic roles. Genuinely, the staff should be happy regardless of whether these people decide to give the new system a try, or stop playing because they can't play one-sided rocket tag with the rest of the players anymore. It's been known that the game has had a player quality problem, and while reassessing karma was certainly one way to address that, another way is absolutely to encourage players to quit if all they want to do is play roles that contribute nothing to the mythical "collaborative story" that the game is supposed to have, or even worse, ruin the story for everyone else.
The problem is the staff have historically lacked follow-through, and worked to make sure their favorite builds are still viable even when other ones aren't. This is hopefully somewhat mitigated by the idea that staff won't be able to play at the same time, at least unless they change that rule or decide not to follow it for reasons. It's also worth noting that full mages were still played in a stupid fashion prior to all of the changes to magic that led us to this point. If we're going back to the days of Whirans invisibly knocking people/animals around with hands of wind to set up PKs that don't get logged as PKs, but now also Rukkians can pick a decent combat subguild and still be sort of scary, nothing effectively changes beyond what flavor of grief griefers will be serving up and what methods mages can use to trivialize RPT combat.
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mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on Mar 27, 2024 4:53:32 GMT -5
On an unrelated note, the staff team has recently established a "newsletter committee" whose goal it is to provide updates on a more regular basis, which potentially means more posts/promotional material to come soon. Better late than never.
Interestingly, there's already a member or two of the committee watching the shadowboard for our reactions to news updates. I won't give away who because they're cool, but they've been members of the shadowboards for a long time. And I can see why they would watch us. I think the feedback here has generally been significantly more interesting than it has been on the GDB and Discord. We actually have shit to say. The kicking and screaming on the GDB and Discord, while funny, is completely useless as feedback.
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Post by uncoolio on Mar 27, 2024 16:52:51 GMT -5
They just recruited five new storytellers. I don't know how many there already were before this latest staffing call, and of course they have to have whatever amount of storytellers their game model requires; but this is effectively the loss of five of the game's presumably most active, experienced and trustworthy players. How is that sustainable? Shortly before launch, they basically remove five of the game's best players (insofar as we can assume that they don't recruit new/inactive/bad players to staff, at least in principle) from the playing field. It just seems so... counterproductive.
It's kind of like taking out a payday loan to service another debt. On one hand, the debt needs to be paid. On the other, you're not really fixing the problem. This game was already teetering on the edge of critical mass, and one of the main reasons that they cited for doing the seasons project was player shortage. Then they essentially eliminate five players who were good enough to qualify to help run the game.
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punished ppurg
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Post by punished ppurg on Mar 27, 2024 18:14:46 GMT -5
this is effectively the loss of five of the game's presumably most active, experienced and trustworthy players. Then they essentially eliminate five players who were good enough to qualify to help run the game. I don't see it this way. Let's say for sake of argument that these are the best 5 players in Arm's stable right now, best as in delivering quality content to the game (and not grinding or making number go up). By empowering them with a staff bit, these best players who told good stories within the means of their player agency, that is, the scope of their agency as a character in a game with a very low agency ceiling: now they have the capacity to stretch the boundaries, make the DM calls, and empower narratives that are (rightfully?) not launchable by the normal player. What we have seen up to this point is the paradigm of staffers who grotesque onto the staff role as a means of acquiring coded power in their player agency: that is the likes of Seidhr and so, who were more interested in playing sorcerers with their staff karma than enacting any means of engagement or plot or, really, telling any story that was respective to their responsibility in the game and their voluntary status for the game. By cutting at the knees of those types of potential staffers through the means of preventing them from playing at all, you select for potential staffers who recognize that their time spent for the game is best put towards doing staff things; and that's a naturally true statement, since staff agency is a superset of player agency. My first post for the thread was steel-manning this change when I first read it. For a staffer that decides that he just wants to play a PC... I compared it to an aircraft carrier just deciding he doesn't want to launch any planes today. Well, that's why you're an aircraft carrier: that's why you have all those planes! That's why you have a naval support group around you. If you wanted to be a patrol boat, you could be one: you can give up the charade of being an aircraft carrier, and the producers could find someone more interested in fulfilling the space of that position you volunteered to do. IF you have to be on the line, if you have to be delivering Storyteller content: that's going to filter out the bad storytellers much faster than the previous paradigm. For one, the unfulfilled don't have the pressure-release of playing the game with high karma and shirking. They have to meet the expectations of their voluntary obligation on the port. For two, the insistence on delivering story content is going to filter those who cannot deliver it, because they will be failing to deliver at a higher frequency than before. Some people aren't cut out for it, and that's okay. It's better that the wrong people get filtered earlier. We've seen what happens when the wrong people don't get filtered.
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Post by uncoolio on Mar 27, 2024 19:07:07 GMT -5
It's still five fewer players, and players who were probably among the best and most active, in a game that has been so underpopulated that they decided to relaunch it with a new model due primarily to a lack of players. Did they have no storytellers left, or what? Five is a lot to recruit. They said that one of their goals with seasons was to maintain a smaller wizlist, so if they needed five storytellers, does that mean they lost pretty much all the ones they had? And then seasons is launching with a lineup of all-new, inexperienced storytellers?
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baron
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Post by baron on Mar 27, 2024 22:44:42 GMT -5
I know it's mentioned on this thread before, but pondering why this is "Required for Season One":
> - Finish Grey Forest revamp - in-progress, nearly done
The smart thing to do there is set up walls of Tuluki NPCs that are hostile, since any PC that comes wandering through will be Allanaki.
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punished ppurg
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Post by punished ppurg on Mar 27, 2024 23:49:48 GMT -5
Because the grey forest revamp has been going on since before Seasons announcement/thought and it would be a massive L to ship Seasons with the grey forest revamp still not done. That's why it's required.
Free halflings
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mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on Mar 28, 2024 4:32:23 GMT -5
I have it on pretty good authority that not all of the five new staffers were active players in the run-up to the game's closure. Three of them are players returning to the game after seeing the Seasons announcement and associated staffing call. One of the returning players is what I would call a top-notch player, and has good skills to be a game runner, and I would say in all honesty that they would make the ideal staff member for any RPI. (They'd make a good game owner, for that matter.) The other four storytellers are okayish. None of them are questionable choices, but my reaction to hearing who they were was more like, "huh, okay then. I guess they did play the game for a long time and it's their turn to be staff now." I also believe the Peter principle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle) applies heavily to Armageddon's hierarchical structure. The skills you need to be a good player don't translate 1:1 into being a good storyteller, and the skills you need to be a good storyteller don't translate 1:1 into being a good admin or producer. So everyone is promoted to their respective level of incompetence. Out of those five new storytellers, expect one or two to actually stay on staff long-term, and maybe one of those two will try their hand at being a producer in a few years, but only until the workload gets unsustainable. Same as it ever was.
That being said, it looks like their plan is to have about 12 storytellers. The staff not interested in Season One have already been removed, so unless someone gets cold feet in the 11th hour that's basically where they're at, based off of who has staff roles on their Discord. Given the player:staff ratio prior to the Shalooonsh debacle, they're probably hoping to have pre-debacle numbers logging in for the start of Season One. I think that's a tall order. Unless the game sees a ton of hype and promotional material come out in the next month or so, with a convincing argument to the MUD community that Armageddon has changed for the better, it's just not going to see the numbers. And frankly, I don't see how they can make that argument when Halaster is still a producer after everything he did to slow-walk the Shalooonsh thing and tamper with the conversation about him on the GDB.
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eugene
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Post by eugene on Mar 28, 2024 10:50:00 GMT -5
Just thought I'd throw my two cents in: having a high player-to-staff ratio can not only help with running RPTs, but also make the world feel more lived-in with random echoes and animations. It's not always a bad thing.
I also agree with ppurg: it is safer to have a staff model where staff members do not have their own active player characters.
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mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on Mar 28, 2024 12:33:20 GMT -5
One thing to consider is that you can have an ideal player:staff ratio, and the game could still feel understaffed for a wide variety of reasons. Staff members slack off (or they burn out because everyone else is slacking off). They get sick. They go on leave. A new game comes out and they play that instead. Or they just disappear and everyone's left to wonder where they went.
Even if the game reaches what the producers feel is the perfect number of staff, they have to introduce sweeping changes to the staff culture when it comes to fair distribution of work. They should use some kind of buddy system for coverage purposes, not just learning the ropes and whatnot. They have to pay attention when staff members are overworked, or when they are coasting. They can't wait for those staff to say so, either. Some people are lazy asses that are just fine with coasting. Some people overwork without even realizing they're doing it (a common thing among neurodivergent people, I've heard). The producers have to pay attention to how many PCs a staff member is supporting at any given time and swap clans and responsibilities around until it's even.
I'm just not convinced the producers have the wherewithal to be good leaders. They're good bosses, sure. They love to tell people what to do, and be the big decision maker, and sit in the big chair. But they haven't demonstrated an ability to actually lead, have they? Mostly they just talk big and then stamp their feet when people don't like what they're saying.
"Ohh mehtastic you sound like an oxygen-wasting CEO posting on LinkedIn": Yeah, I know and I hate it. But staffing is a job and it should be treated as such. Long gone are the days of "staff are volunteers". Yes, they volunteered for a job and they should treat it with a certain level of professionalism. One thing you don't do in a job is knowingly waste a co-worker's time. Another thing you don't do is zero work on a project you are a part of and expect everyone else to get it done for you.
On being unable to play a PC: that will make staff less likely to slack off, although the producers themselves argued it would make it more likely for staff to burn out. I don't know what caused the sudden about-face there. The producers being logically inconsistent doesn't surprise me anymore. Maybe seeing that other RPIs did it without losing anyone on staff? Who knows. It just underscores the idea that Arm is a passion project and staffing on it should be treated as such, rather than as the influence-building/networking/karma-gaining exercise it was often treated as by a plethora of barely-there staff members.
Like... big staff teams and not playing PCs are things in games that run well. But therein lies the rub. And it's up to Halaster and Usiku to turn the entire culture around? Yikes.
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delirium
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Post by delirium on Mar 28, 2024 16:37:57 GMT -5
There's two glaring issues with all I'm reading here:
1) Game decision-makers still don't seem to understand the whole "this story arc could be fun in a novel, but doesn't translate well to a multiplayer permadeath RPI" issue. 2) Nor do they seem to have a clear idea of how to curate a healthy community around the game. Considering who is still at the helm, this isn't terribly shocking.
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pinkerdlu
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Post by pinkerdlu on Mar 28, 2024 17:29:38 GMT -5
There's two glaring issues with all I'm reading here: 1) Game decision-makers still don't seem to understand the whole "this story arc could be fun in a novel, but doesn't translate well to a multiplayer permadeath RPI" issue. 2) Nor do they seem to have a clear idea of how to curate a healthy community around the game. Considering who is still at the helm, this isn't terribly shocking. Agreed. I haven't seen a single plot point or story arc revealed thus far that seems like it will be conducive to Arm's actual "gameplay", i.e. the janky RPI medium. Apparently they debuffed mages and shook up the meta, though I'm skeptical of this, because most spells still serve as cheap "one trick pony" style abilities that serve the whole rocket-tag PK dynamic that always ruins PvP and any sort of emerging conflict or competitive narrative. I foresee increased social mobility for mages, especially long-term, as they'll be the most experienced and loyal players who stick with Seasons past the initial launch. Related to point 2, they haven't learned how to market their MUD yet either. This supposed newsletter committee that mehtastic mentioned seems to be a good step in that direction. I assume that I'm still permabanned from the community for calling the staff team rats and refusing to play a rolecall Byn Sergeant that no one else (presumably) applied for. So sad! Seasons should be launching soon and I imagine I'll be missing out on... something.
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mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on Mar 28, 2024 18:52:48 GMT -5
There's an archetype of character in Armageddon that my friend and I liked to call "the long-lived elf fucker". The general idea is that it's a long-lived human character that becomes the staple of a play area, becomes pretty beloved by all PCs, has few to no enemies, and then starts to openly fuck an elf. Of course, the character doesn't have to be a human who fucks elves. It could be an elf who fucks humans. Or a half-elf who openly has a human mate. Whatever. You get the idea. But the point is, the RP required by others in this situation -- to be skeptical, disappointed, simply disgusted -- gets heavily outweighed by the character's popularity, or unique status (say, the only Byn sergeant in the area or whatever).
I think a lot of mages are going to become long-lived elf fuckers in a way. They'll gain a cadre of adoring fans and make everyone forget that they are actually witches who can rot your nose off and make your firstborn come out a mutant. The game's writing has never been particularly consistent, but it's about to get interesting, but in the way Minnesotans say interesting. Which is to say, shit.
I look forward to the 14 GDB threads where six guys heavily debate how to roleplay post-Magefall Allanak "correctly".
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Post by jcarter on Mar 28, 2024 19:54:08 GMT -5
as someone that played a few mages, including a near max Krathi, and was the templar in charge of the Council of Allanaki mages, my (maybe out of date) thoughts
-mages trivialize massive parts of the game. as a krathi, I was able to easily solo salt worms, mekillots, and so on without any significant risk to myself. i went out with the byn once or twice, and was vaporizing tarantulas. -when mages trivialize those parts of the game, it's not fun for anyone. it's boring for a mage, and it makes mundane characters basically useless. -the game isn't built for mages and doesn't have mechanical content that is interesting for them. in fact, it often offers a disappointing look behind the curtain. i had a drovian that explored the silt sea, and it was empty. exploring exotic locations that were dangerous to get to, just to see that there was absolutely nothing of interest there. -there's not much in the way of good integration for mages with mundanes, code-wise. mages don't support the mundanes, they replace them entirely by filling their role entirely, accomplishing more, and having much less risk.
the only good way i see of overcoming those hurdles involves significant changes to mages, and the game system. e.g. mages provide support for fighters by disabling enemies and/or empowering mundanes.
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