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Post by Prime Minister Sinister on Apr 16, 2024 3:19:45 GMT -5
shiet just have something connected to wisdom that determines how accurately one can judge their own skill
makes wis slightly less of a dump stat and it would be funny watching people who care way too much grapple with either imposter syndrome or the dunning-kruger effect
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Post by uncoolio on Apr 16, 2024 3:56:48 GMT -5
Perhaps the greatest collective failure of the Armageddon community is its stubborn adherence to the idea that roleplaying and skills are mutually exclusive. If you care about skills, you must be a bad roleplayer. If you're a good roleplayer, you must be liberated from the nefarious sin of wanting your character to be skilled. You cannot be a good RPer and also have a codedly effective character. A not-insignificant portion of players and staff appear to think this way, and it leads to bad coding decisions and profoundly stupid discourse like the aforementioned GDB thread.
You can't have a thread about skills without these people chiming in to vow that their best characters were the least skilled, or something similarly dumb, as if a codedly useless character is some kind of virtue that makes room for roleplaying where there otherwise would be none. In a game that often has a direct link between your character's coded competency and your ability to make things happen, it makes absolutely zero sense to hold that mindset. Nevertheless, the faction that I've dubbed "the Lizzies and mansas" cling to that misguided and fundamentally flawed ideal, and it stands in the way of everything. You cannot discuss anything to do with the code without them spewing their irrational nonsense everywhere.
I'm reminded of a pickpocket I played many years ago, before skill levels were made visible. I think they were made visible sometime around 2006 or 07, so it was before then. Pickpockets branched hide from sneak, which I knew (probably got told by someone on AIM!) and you had to get sneak pretty high to branch it. I snuck and I snuck and I snuck, for like ten days' worth of play, but just did not branch hide. I took to sneaking everywhere, anytime I could possibly justify it, because I really wanted hide. It's a pretty crucial skill for a thief, after all.
I got really frustrated with the lack of branching. I had spent at least a couple of months sneaking everywhere, which I hated doing because I knew that it was an obnoxious pattern of play. However, I had no idea if I was actually approaching the "goal" or if something else was wrong. I obsessed over it. Why wasn't I branching hide?! I knew what it branched from, it just wasn't happening! I tried all kinds of weird shit that made no sense, on the off-chance that it might be helping. Eventually, I got so fed up with it that I decided to see what would happen if I filled a bag with rocks and snuck around with that in my inventory every couple of hours. And then within a day, I branched hide.
The inability to see if my skill was improving compelled me to do all kinds of idiotic shit, and to play in a generally obnoxious manner (sneaking everywhere at all times, just in case it helped), not knowing if I was getting any better. All these years later, I now know that the cause of this was the fact that my pickpocket's AI agility gave +25 to sneak, and crowd rooms also give another +25, so I was reaching 100% success rates before the point of branching--until I started lugging bags of rocks around in order to force failures.
I'm now very good at analyzing the code and planning how to skill up my characters, having learned all the tricks, and that's largely because I cut my teeth in a time when the lack of visible skill levels meant you had to do all sorts of ridiculous shit to see if it might work. It taught me to be a twink. When skill levels were made visible, you could see if the things you did were effective, and eschew the things that aren't. In the context of the aforementioned character, it might have made me go, "I'm not gonna improve sneak in crowd rooms anyway, so no point sneaking from A to B. I'll just walk." Then my character would have been more present in the city, because when you're sneaking, you don't wanna stop to strike up a conversation with someone since you're kind of embarrassed about the fact that they'll realize you were sneaking. Instead, you just keep going so they don't notice you.
I'm sure the GDB zealots would have said that it was wrong to even care about my skills at all, I should just live the innocuous life of a Zalanthan inhabitant and approach every facet of the game as if it was reality; but who the fuck wants to play a pickpocket without the hide skill? All this to say that hidden skill levels nudge players towards habits and play-patterns that aren't good for the game and leave less time for other things.
Hidden skill levels make you feel like you should work on skills at all times, because you don't know if you're progressing, so you want to take every chance you can get to improve. With visible skill levels, you learn what works and what doesn't, and you know when there's no longer a need to keep working on a skill. There isn't the same FOMO pressure. You know when you aren't missing out.
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mehtastic
GDB Superstar
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Post by mehtastic on Apr 16, 2024 4:14:06 GMT -5
The players that want hidden skill levels just want hidden skill levels for other people. They are more than happy to shoot a DM to their staff-friend and ask them to check their PC's skills for them and give them the precise skill percentages over Discord. They will also do this to a lesser extent if nothing changes and you just see the rough skill level, because having the exact percentage is useful to certain people, and they are too stupid/lazy/risk-averse to deduce it through in-game actions.
A common cause of Armageddon's woes is the unnecessary obfuscation of game mechanics for its own sake. Making information forbidden just causes people to seek that information in more discreet ways.
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deadelf
staff puppet account
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Post by deadelf on Apr 16, 2024 5:29:10 GMT -5
Hiding information gives those who know how the code/game works an advantage. The ones with many years playing benefit the most so of course they want to keep the newbs in their place.
Kudos to this board for leveling the playing field.
I think the game was more FUN back in the day when you could see the actual numbers for your skills ('90's). Sure, some people will spend all their time making numbers go up but then it's a choice, not an advantage.
I'm out for another reason. Last time I tried to play (just before the shutdown), I swear the timer for crafting was way too long. I watched youtube videos because crafting was taking so long. Maybe I imagined it. It was an unpleasant experience that I do not wish to repeat.
Making 20 arrows/sling stones/whatever has always been boring. Forage <whatever> for more than a few minutes is also to much for me. We've talked about this before on these boards so I'm not going to rehash it (too bad Apoc kept the miserable grind). It adds nothing to the game.
At least in the past, it was easy to find some good rp to be balance it out. One of my favorite memories is a random encounter in the Sanctuary: swirling a glass of wine, describing the wine in the glass without using modern terminology (like "legs"), while IRL swirling/drinking from a glass of wine and my compatriot doing something similar - 2 pseudo-connoisseurs. Little creative (well, semi-creative in my case) moments like that made the grind endurable. Of course that was before Tuluk was closed so a long time ago. Allanak felt too much like playing caveman (ugh, give me your boots) so no interest in playing there.
I enjoy reading all the posts here and remembering the good old days. But, even thinking about that grind has me shaking my head and saying "fuck this" and I don't see any changes being discussed that will fix that.
For the record, I don't have any bad memories about people, players, getting pk'd or not being able to build an outhouse for uh legacy. Just that fucking shitty grind keeps me from wanting to play again.
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eugene
Clueless newb
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Post by eugene on Apr 16, 2024 13:49:39 GMT -5
Hiding the numbers is stupid. Players figure it out anyway. If you don't want people to focus on numbers, then play a MUSH. There is no shame in that. DIKU-based MUDs are basically online tabletop games.
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baron
Clueless newb
Posts: 55
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Post by baron on Apr 16, 2024 15:03:17 GMT -5
re: magical rinthi elf gang.
Probably talking about the Association/Painted Elves/Den Elves. Fun facts: there was just one sorc PC that I know about that was a member (the founding member, in fact) of that psuedo-clan. (And he died to a gemmed earth elementalist randomly) It was a bloody great psuedo-clan that gave c-elves a tribe-like structure when staff refused to otherwise support rinthi elves. Many "members" were mundane. The assassin with the most PKs under her belt was mundane, and she only rarely and incidentely participated in the magical side of things, and mostly only killed characters on behest of paying clients, ie southside nobles.
There was a problematic Whiran elf in the later days of the psuedo-clan who did some stupid, unfair shit, and that eventually resulted in staff loading in like maybe a dozen mul NPCs to scourge the eastside. But that's because the Whiran spell list is bullshit, and should have been drastically nerfed like a couple decades ago.
Also, I have to keep calling it a psudeo-clan because despite literal real life years of consistent participation from the playerbase, staffed never gave the Association a thimble of coded support. It was all player-run fun that was partly squashed when the Valuren were introduced as an (unfun) c-elf tribe/gang.
My last Association character was killed by an asshole playing a psionicist, and that marked the end of me playing the game on the regular. Generally (though not universally) the c-elf players of the Association (and related psudeo-clans) would give people chances and stories rather than outright death, and that sort of community spirit spoiled me whenever I had to interact with the rest of the game and the play-to-win "high karma" players/sex-pests.
Which, to rope this back to karma, proved to me that more structure doesn't nessissarily result in a better experience. Players can be self-organizing to create a fun-ish experience for everyone, and with a few obvious exceptions, it was generally the players at the top of the staff pet list that were the worst at spoiling fun.
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Patuk
Shartist
Posts: 445
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Post by Patuk on Apr 16, 2024 15:09:55 GMT -5
No, no. This was later, during the final year of the game. I've played with a couple dudes who got left over from what you're talking about, and they were a lot more chill (and less magical) for sure.
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baron
Clueless newb
Posts: 55
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Post by baron on Apr 16, 2024 15:21:17 GMT -5
Ah, I wouldn't know anything about that. Haven't logged in since 2020. I guess I just had that rant loaded and ready. 🙃 It's both sad and amazing that I'm still kind of butthurt that the Association (and/or related c-elf psudeo-clans) never got a serious track to becoming a coded clan.
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Post by Prime Minister Sinister on Apr 16, 2024 15:28:45 GMT -5
Ah, I wouldn't know anything about that. Haven't logged in since 2020. I guess I just had that rant loaded and ready. 🙃 It's both sad and amazing that I'm still kind of butthurt that the Association (and/or related c-elf psudeo-clans) never got a serious track to becoming a coded clan. be the change you want to see **not like that tho
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mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on Apr 19, 2024 5:26:19 GMT -5
Mildly interesting bits of news: - The player moderator team is trying to recruit 1-2 new members. - mansa is no longer a mod. - It's been a week since Update 4 was posted to the GDB, but it still hasn't been mirrored over to r/MUD. Supposedly it was removed as spam, as r/MUD has rules about the frequency of promotional posts.
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eugene
Clueless newb
Posts: 83
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Post by eugene on Apr 19, 2024 9:24:01 GMT -5
Mildly interesting bits of news: - The player moderator team is trying to recruit 1-2 new members. Maybe I should apply, brown-nose my way up to staff, and then reveal myself to be Nergal before going into a soliloquy about qwerty being right?
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Post by najdorf on Apr 19, 2024 9:38:08 GMT -5
I love their player retention con, by recruiting 100% of players to either staff, moderator or discord puppy, etc.
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Post by uncoolio on Apr 19, 2024 11:10:34 GMT -5
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eugene
Clueless newb
Posts: 83
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Post by eugene on Apr 19, 2024 11:10:55 GMT -5
I love their player retention con, by recruiting 100% of players to either staff, moderator or discord puppy, etc. To be fair, what else are they supposed to do? Put out a job posting on Indeed.com?
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Post by najdorf on Apr 19, 2024 11:52:11 GMT -5
I love their player retention con, by recruiting 100% of players to either staff, moderator or discord puppy, etc. To be fair, what else are they supposed to do? Put out a job posting on Indeed.com? They don't need that many staff. They don't need that much bureaucracy. Trust in players and simple rules is sufficient. Such policing mindset is coming from their stupidity.
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