baron
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Post by baron on Mar 28, 2024 23:40:46 GMT -5
Ideally, if mages are rare and powerful, they're content-creators, not content consumers. Presumably (though it does not work out in practice) high karma players should be trusted. Trusted enough to build out their evil lairs, room descs included, build out their stable of NPC minions, and create a story of sorts.
(which i tried to do with my one semi-long lived mage, only run into requiring staff support. It would have been far better, far easier all around if the system was based on forgiveness rather than permission. Just let me build out my lame rinthi elf tunnels, and if staff decides they suck, bury them in an earthquake.)
Like imagine if the Drovians, in order to enter the shadow realm, had to have some sort of altar/portal/comfy couch set up. And setting up that altar involved getting a bunch of resources (which they could contract out to other players). And they could also use those resources to summon up minions and make dumb wierd objects and echos in their lairs, and scripted tricks and traps, and hire PC minions to watch their shit when they're logged off.
(That's sort of the idea behind material components as they existed in the dead game, but it doesn't go big enough. )
For example, The Silt Sea could have been populated by player-crafted islands, and players would get to say they left a mark on the game with their shitty emo nilizi. And it would be stupid easy just to say "A big storm swallowed it." if a particular piece of player-crafted content is bad.
Maybe that fluff doesn't fit with Armageddon precisely. But the OOC goal of high karma roles shouldn't be to amass power and "win the game", but instead to create meaningful activities for other players. *And it should say so on the tin.* Big flashing letters: if you play a powerful character, you are expected to use your bullshit superpowers to create content.
Also, live or die, these roles should have hard expiration dates. The biggest mundane advantage could be they get to play their characters for months and years on end, whereas mages and psions all get eaten by a black robe or converted to an NPC-in-hiding from black robes after a certain period of time -- which acclerates the more noisy and overt they get.
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pinkerdlu
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Post by pinkerdlu on Mar 29, 2024 1:01:15 GMT -5
Ideally, if mages are rare and powerful, they're content-creators, not content consumers. Presumably (though it does not work out in practice) high karma players should be trusted. Trusted enough to build out their evil lairs, room descs included, build out their stable of NPC minions, and create a story of sorts. This would be plausible if they remade Armageddon in Evennia, which is one of the better ideas that I've heard Halaster mention in the recent past. Lack of player agency and lack of tools for player storytelling has always hurt Arm.
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Post by najdorf on Mar 29, 2024 1:04:47 GMT -5
reducing mundane skill caps for mages is a good trend I'v been advocating for years. I heard it happened. (Or only for sorcerers?) One thing people might miss is players who play mages powerful and skillful are mostly players like myself. And when caps are lowered, those are the players who will lean towards more mundane.
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mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on Mar 29, 2024 4:57:29 GMT -5
If the 10-karma system actually works as intended, and staff actually lower people's karma for being stupid with it, then they should also store a player's character when they no longer meet the karma requirement to app it. That would get rid of the mages whose behavior is indistinguishable from trolling very quickly.
Of course, staff will never do this because they have never been known to actually set objective standards for what a collaborative story should look like. They have no mission statement for the game. They abhor the idea of confronting players that are bad for the game's health. They believe in the "code is RP" mantra that was defined by GDB oldbies Back In The Day™️.
The staff talk a big game about letting players create content for the game from the perspective of their PCs, but this has never historically happened. Once everyone realizes how annoying it is to actually do this with Diku, they're going to flake on this particular promise. A determined coder would find it fairly trivial to make a "builder mode" so that PCs can enter an OOC area to create their rooms and objects, and request approval on them from staff before they go live. But the game has had several coders over the years and this never happened.
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hates2
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Post by hates2 on Mar 29, 2024 12:10:35 GMT -5
If the 10-karma system actually works as intended, and staff actually lower people's karma for being stupid with it, then they should also store a player's character when they no longer meet the karma requirement to app it. That would get rid of the mages whose behavior is indistinguishable from trolling very quickly. Of course, staff will never do this because they have never been known to actually set objective standards for what a collaborative story should look like. They have no mission statement for the game. They abhor the idea of confronting players that are bad for the game's health. They believe in the "code is RP" mantra that was defined by GDB oldbies Back In The Day™️. The staff talk a big game about letting players create content for the game from the perspective of their PCs, but this has never historically happened. Once everyone realizes how annoying it is to actually do this with Diku, they're going to flake on this particular promise. A determined coder would find it fairly trivial to make a "builder mode" so that PCs can enter an OOC area to create their rooms and objects, and request approval on them from staff before they go live. But the game has had several coders over the years and this never happened.
Agreed. Staff is constantly making these documents with what a person must exhibit to get more karma trying to avoid giving these types of people more karma because they know what they WANT AND NEED out of a high karma player.
The only thing I've never liked in most of Arm's karma docs is the time requirements. I get you want people to gain more experience, but it's obvious when a great player rolls into Arm and it's sad to watch that person wither because staff doesn't encourage them enough by giving them opportunities. You remember their characters and 6 months later you see them make a sad post saying they have no karma and you're like, this is a top 5 player I've played with in the past year WTF IS GOING ON WITH STAFF DISCOURAGING THIS PERSON. It's that person you let go who actually was using the draw command because they wanted to find a cool way to use it. That person taking the time to change the description of dropped items in a meaningful way. The person with characters that say essentially, "I don't want to do this, but I need to do this" and do something risky because they made a real character. 3 months later they're gone, what a failure at the top. A real STEWARD of the game would championing this person. Maybe the fear is this person might burn out soon? Who cares, I'd rather they burn out because they ran out of good ideas than because they are so wrapped up in red tape.
Arm is filled with these boring 8+ year vets. This person isn't a very good roleplayer in terms of making the world seem alive, but they don't really go against the docs. They respond to the world by wanting to hold a clan meeting, but they don't really do anything. They play with their clan in their compound, but they don't take risks outside and stir the pot, instead relying on using the Way to mostly communicate. They are quick to use their character's innate strength like their jacked up skills and coded clan/city power against others but they never oppose those who possess stronger skills or more coded power. They post on the GDB without stirring the pot too much or being that memorable, they're more remembered by simple fact of seeing their name scroll by and memory of their whatever avatar picture than any actual personality. They play regularly. They apply for role calls. A bunch are ex-staff.
But when push comes to shove, and this person asks for karma... staff is alright with moving this person along. They are too lazy themselves to cause any conflict with this person by denying them. Is it a surprise this person plays a sorc that doesn't take big risks? Is it a surprise this person plays a psion that is an unknown character to the entire world? Now staff find themselves having limited these roles but the people in these roles aren't doing anything, time to karma revamp and fix this. Then this process restarts.
Poor game management, which isn't a surprise because as was said earlier, Arm at the top seems to have poor leaders.
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mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on Mar 29, 2024 13:31:50 GMT -5
Time requirements are scattered throughout Armageddon's documentation, with karma and the MMH system being the two big culprits. It's nasty game design, and I would even call it predatory almost on the level of mobile games/MMORPGs that are designed around using time as a sunk cost to keep players hooked for as long as possible. And the time cost is always one-sided: YOU need to wait 6 months for karma and YOU need to wait a year for an MMH, but if you write a particularly long report or need help with background details for a special application, staff can't take 60 minutes spread out across a week to communicate with you.
The staff have previously promised to knock down the time-based barrier somewhat with the new karma system, but the Karma Revamp 2023 post that was made around November 6, 2023 is just gone from the GDB. Not suspicious at all. I think they're worried that seasons is already too big of a change for the player base, and throwing in what would essentially be a mass karma reduction on top of that will effectively kill the player base. The top karma holders are people like Lizzie, who have literally come out and said (paraphrasing) "I don't want people to gain karma more quickly because I gained karma slowly".
And with MMHs, Seasons as an idea is completely incompatible with extremely long commitments to characters just to get a warehouse or whatever. It's crazy that someone thought it would be good game design to basically make players sit and watch a clock even when they have all the resources and political capital to get what they want.
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Post by Azerbanjani on Mar 29, 2024 21:33:44 GMT -5
Time requirements are awful for a game where just to interact with people you have a time requirement. Oh you want to do -thing- with Lord Fuckwad?
Well he only logs on during X Y times, and you need Z bribe, and AA influence, and AB minions, and...
Oh well you also need to wait AC time as well because staff said so.
Oh you actually /just/ missed him. So you need to wait till next week to start this. Sorry.
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pinkerdlu
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Post by pinkerdlu on Mar 30, 2024 1:01:40 GMT -5
Yeah, the more things that players can do on their own, the better.
This is why reducing the scope of gameplay is usually one of the best game design moves you can make. The range for this is quite wide.
Players leading their own 'clans' or 'gangs' is better than a PC being part of a noble family with 100 NPCs that are more powerful/influential than them. Players crafting their own weapons is better than a staffer loading them in just so a sponsored PC can sell them a few days a week for whatever Microsoft excel price. Players leading a patrol through an area with dynamic NPC spawns is more reliable than staff loading in an attack. Players being the sole authority in lawless areas is better than staff arbitrarily enforcing things through random NPCs with buffed stats. Players competing for existing resources is better than staff loading in resources for an event arranged through the request tool.
Systems like FutureMUD or Evennia implement some of these principles functionally through the codebase, but Arm could still manage most of this through intentional planning from the staff.
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Post by uncoolio on Mar 30, 2024 2:11:11 GMT -5
Yeah, I'm actually somewhat optimistic (as much as a rational person can be, which isn't too much) that the first season will have a great honeymoon period. What happens after that when the months drag on is anyone's guess, and their decision to run three-year seasons is so idiotic that it beggars belief, but I honestly think that S1 will be a lot of fun for at least 2-3 months. Putting everyone in the same place just opens up for so much more interaction and so many possibilities that haven't existed since the old days when we had such things as, say, a templar getting fired and banished to live in the 'rinth, taking up refuge with the Guild who then eventually decided that it wasn't worth the risk of housing him and ended up cutting his throat. That kind of shit is what I want out of this game. I think we'll get that for a while, but then people will be like, "We've got three fucking years of rubbing shoulders with the same people? Ugh, no." Seasons need to last one year tops, and shorter for niche seasons like Tablelands tribes.
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mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on Mar 30, 2024 5:26:43 GMT -5
I can see why someone would be optimistic about the opening period, but I actually think the opening of season one will be a shitshow.
As much as I'm 100% there for new MUD openings, they are always rough experiences, even with the perfect player base. But combine that with the average Armageddon player's personality -- very eager to be in the limelight at the expense of others; to often be the exception to the rule; to take out aggression on other PCs -- as well as the fact that five new staff members are going to be learning on the job, and I think Armageddon is going to feel a lot like Lord of the Flies when it first opens. There will be early-game power plays by players looking to take advantage of the fact that every PC is unskilled. There will be some wacky murder attempts, and some cheap ones (I predict at least one sparring circle death and at least one wrongful execution carried out by a templar in the first month). A sponsored role or two will probably get ganked by trolls.
Then there is everything that comes with Magefall and players not really knowing what to do with that. I was a Tuluk player. Let me let you in on a little secret: Armageddon players can't do nuance. Or rather, the ones that could do nuance are basically all gone. They read documentation, and to them it's all or nothing. Much like how the Tuluk docs used to present subtlety and deep respect for the sharts shadow arts as key, Magefall currently only presents players with extremes, and by God will they play those extremes to the absolute fucking hilt. There is a ton of nuance to be found in between "mages cursed my family" and "mages put food on my table", but that will totally be ignored. Even if the final documentation on Magefall includes hints toward these nuances -- "Allanakis tend to respect Rukkians and Vivaduans the most, but often blame digestive issues on them, but they trust Drovians the least because what do they even do besides spy on people mudsexing?" -- or whatever, the players will ignore that and dive straight toward the extremes because that's what they always do when they are handed documentation.
The staff have to take a firm hand in guiding players from the opening onward, and actually crack down on stupid behavior that threatens to drive multiple players away from the game, but they've never enforced standards on the playerbase before and certainly won't start now.
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baron
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Post by baron on Mar 30, 2024 10:38:35 GMT -5
There's not going to be enough players for it to be a shitshow or to replicate the dubious glories of the MUD back when it was well-populated.
Arm is going to be the same ghost town it was when it closed. The game's reputation is just too mired to attract new players, and there isn't that large of a pool of new players to be found for a text-based time-vampire of game regardless. A lot of the old guard have moved on naturally or been chased away (for good and ill).
They need to fully open source the bloody thing already, so we can a nice little monument tombstone to stick on github for all eternity.
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mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on Mar 30, 2024 17:46:32 GMT -5
I suspect Arm's peaks will be 25-30 on opening and the first full week will get ~120 unique logins. A lot of Apoc players are of the fairweather variety and will head on back to Arm when it opens. Those numbers are not astounding for Arm, but would adequately represent the community the game still seems to have, despite... everything.
Like before, the numbers will steadily fall at probably about the same rate as before until it reaches a "critical" threshold where PCs can no longer find each other, and then another nosedive akin to the post-seasons-announcement numbers.
You have a very good point about the game's reputation. The last Reddit post about Magefall got pretty much nothing in terms of interest. The top comment chain is about how the game's staff have historically given the best roles to their friends. At this stage the game needs to do something astounding to get the MUD community's attention, and Arm is just holding a dominated hand at this point. It may have some value in a vacuum, but other RPIs and MUSHes blow it out of the water, and its best, most active, most contributing players are either all historical, or in rarer cases, on staff (and can't play).
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Post by Azerbanjani on Mar 30, 2024 21:32:28 GMT -5
I would love if we viewed mages like how we viewed surgeons in -insert appropriate time period here-, where they exist and are respectable a good chunk of the time but we are a bit iffy on them because they sometimes break into cemeteries to steal bodies to practice because our archaic as fuck religious laws won't allow them to dissect donated bodies. Only instead of necromancy the issue is uh. I dunno the magic mounts are scary sometimes? (Probably the whole gated elementals thing. Is that really something we can't just have people know? Mages are mostly harmless, downside: Sometimes they summon LITERAL ELEMENT DEMONS.) You'd think that would be something popular culture picks up on. Not uh. 'Vivaduan made me piss myself one time '. Basically I'm leaning more 'magic as a science' I think over time, or at least 'magic that has rules as a science', though I think there is still room for quackery/sorcery being the big naughty bad. We have people telling fortunes and selling fake alchemical treatments in the bizarre and some guy claiming to see the future is 'completely fine and okay' (Every Arm player will scoff at that of course because how dare their character be superstitious/religious/stitious in any conceivable fashion) but will spout off some nonsensical untrue fact about elementalism because documents say so. Am I making sense? Am I losing my god damn mind? Staff have already told me (Not directly but you know, the game exists) they don't give a fuck about actual mysticism. Staff go full reddit Atheist with religion barring the 76 places it shows up in game already (God I hate Shalooonsh that bastard was big on this), staff would never actually animate a proper cleric a la dark sun (Probably for the best. Of course this doesn't apply to staff animation sorcerers or elementalists and their sacrifices, of course, those are allowed. Also uhhhh I dunno give them room reach for their excellent RP. No of course don't give it to a regular character that'd be crazy) So instead of going backwards to wanting an interesting system of magic gimme fuckin' more mundane additions of magic to the world. Mages are rare and, apparently, born. They have an innate talent of sorts that can't be given (Except when staff wants them to). They have traceable spell paths. They all use the same resource. They all use the same words. Good god I can't believe I'm agreeing with the Oashis on this. This isn't even something you could /study/ it's that bare bones. Magick is as boring and mundane as the old cure system and I'm honest to god more mages don't treat it as such. The craziest it gets is with component collecting. You don't need every player believing 'DROVIANS GAVE ME THE BUBONIC PLAGUE', that can exist as some 'bum fuck hillbilly belief system' helpfile still for the fun of it but I'd listen to them as much as I listen to the crack heads on the road.
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mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on Mar 31, 2024 4:53:05 GMT -5
Too nuanced for the average Armageddon player to handle. It's either "Drovians gave me the plague" or "Drovians are the supreme representation of His Shadow beyond His Glorious Tower".
If you want nuanced takes on world documentation, seek another game with other players (and no, Apoc doesn't count).
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mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on Apr 2, 2024 5:12:54 GMT -5
gdb.armageddon.org/index.php/topic,60175.msg1102534.html#msg1102534 (bold for emphasis) This display of addictive thinking is why I assume Armageddon will have a fairly high player count on reopening. If there is one person who thinks this way in a group the size of Armageddon's community, there are undoubtedly others as well. And I think the creator of the term "CRACKAGEDDON" being at the helm of the seasons model knows fully well what he's actually doing with these people. I can't help but wonder what will happen to these people when Armageddon crashes and burns yet again, this time permanently.
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