punished ppurg
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Why are we still here? Just to suffer?
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Post by punished ppurg on Apr 6, 2024 20:05:03 GMT -5
Then they store month 1 or have shit stats and use the new elf express road that's built to the silt sea to suicide. This is the real reason why they don't want city elves to have movement capabilities outdoors.
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Post by uncoolio on Apr 6, 2024 20:13:58 GMT -5
I would love a serious, believable explanation for why they won't change the idiotic stat system. It's so fucked up on a fundamental level that this is a game where, in the year of our lord 2024, one will frequently feel the rational temptation to suicide one's character because its statroll wasn't good enough to have any desire to play it. I'm guessing the real answer is that nobody wants to deal with the code for it.
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Post by Azerbanjani on Apr 6, 2024 23:55:35 GMT -5
I want a serious believable explanation for literally every change they made from Dark Sun including the class system and magic system.
Not because I need one, but because I'm a petty bitch.
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Post by picklehead on Apr 7, 2024 0:15:39 GMT -5
I want a serious believable explanation for literally every change they made from Dark Sun including the class system and magic system. Not because I need one, but because I'm a petty bitch. It was built by a high school student in 1993?
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Post by Azerbanjani on Apr 7, 2024 0:16:44 GMT -5
I rest my case.
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mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on Apr 7, 2024 6:29:04 GMT -5
I would love a serious, believable explanation for why they won't change the idiotic stat system. It's so fucked up on a fundamental level that this is a game where, in the year of our lord 2024, one will frequently feel the rational temptation to suicide one's character because its statroll wasn't good enough to have any desire to play it. I'm guessing the real answer is that nobody wants to deal with the code for it. IMO this is just another aspect of minimally changing the game to appease the most current/former players. Advertising to new players obviously isn't having the hype building effect they were hoping it would. Posting update 2 to Reddit was such a bust that Usiku hasn't even bothered with posting the most recent one on r/MUD. Modernizing the game to include things like a new stat system risks alienating players who are used to/like the current system. Incidentally, many old MUDs still have features like pwipes/rent/item resets because the players enjoy them. They don't care about recruiting new players if it means fundamentally changing their game. I don't think Armageddon's stat system is as crucial to the game it's in, but obviously there's some appeal to it if players are more willing to suicide/reroll their character in a badly designed game than they are willing to play a completely different game.
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Post by Azerbanjani on Apr 7, 2024 10:18:33 GMT -5
Thinking about it I do think a less robust stat system would make things less anal/annoying.
Not sure if just straight up DnD is the answer but it honest to god isn't a bad one (Don't have 3d6 down the line though...please)
Races go from 'I am elf I AM SPEED' to 'I am elf, my max agility is a bit higher than human but I'm NOT SPEED my main ability is my ability to run like mad'.
Same with Dwarves.
Give muls a smaller strength bonus than dwarves (1 vs 2/3) and higher endurance than humans (Maybe match with a dwarven +2). Main benefit for muls should come from a massive stamina boost. Give them the desert elf stamina boost (Also, remove the elf stamina boost, make desert running slower, but have it minimum 1 in outdoor rooms. Elves are meant for long range, nomadic to semi nomadic traveling. Not godspeed. They make good scouts and raiders because of it they aren't demons)
Dwarves should probably not have some innate bonus but seeing as this game hates infravision (For....for some reason. Honestly it doesn't come up that much anyway. Why no innate infravision? WHY?) But if you wanted to get fancy have dwarves be the only race that's kept it.
Half elves get uh. Get rid of their mental illness and that fixes them mostly. Slightly more agility, slightly less strength. Everything else is fine.
Humans are human.
Everytime I suggest this someone goes 'But then no one will play human!' as if people don't just enjoy humans. Or that the game doesn't already have a human bent anyway even if we did blanket open up the demi humans for all organizations (Which I also think we should do. Non human noble houses are /sick as fuck/) It was one of the things I disliked about Apoc (Give me an elf noble house you bastards!) Go look at 2e humans. You know what they got? Jack shit. 'Oh but you can go up to 20 in all classes!' you bitch we are playing to level 8 max. 'Oh but you can dual class'. Once again, level 8 max. And your elf friend is currently a warrior/wizard/rogue. And people /still/ played them. And I /still/ played them. (Not gonna lie tho humans being able to /be/ all classes was convenient).
Does race locking classes help balance this? Probably not. I think the 'desert elves can't go city city elves can't go desert' thing is kinda silly/dumb anyway. Thrizn (Got I forgot about them....) not being able to have backstab basically at all is kind of funny to me.
....What is the Thrizn bonus in this hypothetical?...uhhhh Could say 'fuck it' and make them just humans with infra. Didn't they live in a big canyon or something? Makes sense to me. Maybe give them a wisdom boost and give them some kind of magic buffs. Aren't they supposed to be wacky connected to a tree of life? That'd make sense. Give them a random spell from a list. That'd be cool.
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mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on Apr 8, 2024 6:07:29 GMT -5
Usiku finally posted Update 3 to r/MUD yesterday and it was DOA like the last two updates, with the only comment being one from our dear friend qwerty about the map they drew for Allanak.
I find it interesting to compare this to Untold Dawn, an in-development RPI in a pretty standard-fare dystopian sci-fi setting, or Sundering Shadows, a relatively new fantasy RP game. Both of these games have a huge amount of community crossover with Armageddon, with at least half of the players (or in Untold Dawn, players in waiting) being either current or former Armers. These games are able to keep their community engaged with updates on both their own servers/forums and Reddit, yet Armageddon struggles.
Why is that? Sure, Armageddon's updates are a bit underwhelming, but a loyal community could be mobilized toward signal boosting. Is Armageddon's brand so tainted that few people want to be publicly associated with it? Or is this just another case of bad organization on staff's part?
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Post by Prime Minister Sinister on Apr 8, 2024 6:51:48 GMT -5
Is Armageddon's brand so tainted that few people want to be publicly associated with it? Or is this just another case of bad organization on staff's part? tbh the only time i bring up being a former armer is when there's a pissing match to be had about who played a shittier mud prior
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Post by Azerbanjani on Apr 8, 2024 23:57:55 GMT -5
Consider what the average armer gets out of these updates.
Even if I was keen on playing these updates tell me: Exactly nothing. None of it is material I will work with when creating my farmer from Yaroch that can't farm.
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mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on Apr 9, 2024 3:48:35 GMT -5
Armers seem to get more out of feedback request threads, like the GMH Feedback thread that is currently running. The difference is that updates seem set in stone, and represent the way the game is going to be regardless of player input, whereas the feedback threads at least provide the illusion that staff are listening.
On the other hand, updates in the newsletter (which get copied to Reddit) should be targeted at non-players who could potentially be players. Whether these are former players or completely new players is also an important distinction. Jcarter asked earlier if these posts had a target audience. I think the answer is they don't all have the same audience, but each update has different audiences. Sadly the nature of newsletters is that if someone isn't interested in Issue X they're unlikely to bother reading Issue X+1.
But hey this is all just me rehashing shit I've written here before. Not my problem if the game flops because the staff have adopted a "if the shadow boards are for it then I'm against it" attitude.
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mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on Apr 12, 2024 6:07:00 GMT -5
I finally sat down and read the entire GMH Feedback thread on the GDB, now that it seems to have slowed down. It's interesting how most of the feedback is regarding how characters/players act entitled and treat GMH characters like shit (the vending machine treatment, nobles/templars acting whiny when an order is late, forcing crafters into a gameplay loop that is comparable to a sweatshop, etc.). The lack of self-awareness stops the player base just short of the realization that the players are just as engaged in disrespecting each other's time as the staff are engaged in disrespecting the players' time. It is this dynamic that will ultimately hold the game back from anything remotely approaching success.
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punished ppurg
GDB Superstar
Why are we still here? Just to suffer?
Posts: 1,038
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Post by punished ppurg on Apr 12, 2024 12:05:33 GMT -5
Some news today. 10 point karma is implemented. Update 4 is posted. A few thoughts. I notice that with the updates, as well as the traditional scope of Arm, the goals and responsibilities and "successes" / "triumphs" that are set up by the storytelling team are triumphs of maintenance and status quo; rather than novelty or creation. Got a great example here in this update on the road. Let's see. The road isn't going to be safe, there's still going to be monsters jumping onto the road. The Byn are still going to be doing escorts along the road. BUT! The Merchant Houses need to cooperate together and figure out who is going to pay for the road, or else the road is going to fall into disrepair and the utility of the road is going to be taken away! Whatever the utility is. There is little novelty here, that I can see, expressed in the concept of the road. Precisely because its implementation falls into a few traps of the framing of the game that impede its progress towards development into something finer. Can we make the road better? No, it codedly is as much a road as it is going to be. Can we stop monsters from wandering onto it? Yes, but, the coded solution for that would be "too OOC". Can we put watchtowers along the way and spawn GMH sentries to fight the mobs? No, combat / corpse object spawn bloat. So really, in my mind, the concept of a road is like an inverse occlusion culled object. It exists and functions for the virtual world until the player lays eyes upon it; and then the player has to go through these mechanisms (Byn transport, bribe, etc.) that are hinted at with good faith means of involving more people- but that fundamentally undermine the existence of the road as an object of utility on its lonesome. Not to mention the idea that even this could be taken away if the GMH's don't pour some coin towards it or whatever that thread is supposed to mean. There is nothing truly novel to be constructed from the road idea. Why is there nothing truly novel? Because to achieve true novelty would be to undermine the design implementation of the reason why the road exists in its current state. It is a triumph of status quo. Frankly I'm sick of persuasive arguments that frame "status quo" as "improvement" IRL, maybe that's why I'm hypersensitive to it here in this Dark Sun text game. Maybe a sponsored role can drop 10,000 obsidian coins into a void and get the staff to spawn a shady spot at the halfway mark. Maybe that can be someone's esteemed and accomplished legacy with the road. Instead of implementing a where command, Arm is relocating the hotspot of Allanak into the Bazaar. A player-run tavern! The last one ended up so well and the legacy of it, the work that the players put into it, was treated with such respect by the staff team. I'm sure that this one will be in just as good hands.
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mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on Apr 12, 2024 12:59:27 GMT -5
I read every update after putting myself in the shoes of a potentially-returning player, or a MUD player that has never heard of Armageddon before. I set aside the understanding I have of Armageddon over the course of decades of experience with it and try very hard to pretend that every update from staff is in good faith. And honestly, that just makes the update-reading experience so much worse. How is any reasonable person supposed to believe that Armageddon's 17 staff members are excited about the following: - "Flattening" the staff hierarchy by removing a rank, and adding another rank in its place that functions slightly differently. - Changing ~40 rooms to have a road description because it gives the GMHs some politicking to do to keep those road descriptions in place. - Centering play in the Allanaki bazaar, the functional center of the city, like every other MUD in existence does with its main city (usually around a fountain). - Making that center of play a "player-run" tavern which is founded by staff. Either Usiku is outright lying when she says stuff about being so excited seeing stuff coming together behind the scenes, or she genuinely is excited about something so underwhelming because staff's bar for what makes Armageddon an interesting game is on the floor. And while ppurg is spot on with his argument about the road, I can't help but think back to my review of the GMH feedback thread. What people wanted: For family members in GMHs to be involved in compelling stories instead of being living vending machines and replicators What people get: You have two choices. Fund road. Or defund road. And um, consequences or something. I would love for even a single person planning to play Armageddon to come here and explain why they are excited about any of these updates at all. Not the fact that the game's opening is likely imminent. But the updates specifically.
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Post by najdorf on Apr 13, 2024 7:03:06 GMT -5
i m glad to have quit the game, i m getting disgusted at every new update news, also regretting my decades wasted on arm
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