mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on Apr 19, 2024 12:19:37 GMT -5
Hmm, I don't think June 15th falls between April 10 - May 10. Maybe the staff's calendar was printed wrong?
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eugene
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Post by eugene on Apr 19, 2024 12:35:36 GMT -5
Ah, I see your point and agree with it.
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mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on Apr 19, 2024 13:11:06 GMT -5
So they're getting rid of Administrators, but keeping what made them an actual hindrance to the game's development -- the constant duty of approving everything that is going to be added to the database.
Administrators could already do storytelling. Nergal was the storyteller for House Kurac when he was the GMH administrator because he didn't want to shove it off to either of his two already-busy STs. Rathustra did storytelling for the Legions when he was admin of the the northern team before Tuluk closed. Before the game closed, Enthemu was doing storytelling as well as admin duties. The staff are presenting the senior storyteller role as this amazing new thing, but the fact of the matter is that every admin that has tried to do their job correctly was already doing this, and every slacking POS that just wanted to middle-manage and play the game wasn't.
Why do the staff think that the other storytellers can't write? Or do peer proofreading? Do they think a ST's going to try to pull a fast one and get a gun into the game, or a Joe Biden NPC, or a Taj Mahal room? Or are they so scared of change that they have to keep things as samey as possible while claiming to improve things?
Between this, the gemmed civil rights movement that happened, the noble restructuring, and the fact that everyone and their mother has 5+ karma, Season One is going to be jam-packed with magic. I always laughed at the designation of Zalanthas as a low fantasy setting, but I'm always happy to be proven right.
Remember that update that ended with something like: "Fear not, Bynners, rinthis, etc, there's an update coming for you soon too!" Good times.
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val
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Post by val on Apr 19, 2024 13:32:51 GMT -5
Does anyone actually believe that Arm is a low-magic setting? All the existential threats are magical. Everyone at the top of the hierarchies are magical. You couldn't swing a baby's arm without hitting a secret mage.
I mean, you can say that a setting is low magic despite these things, but I can also say that I'm a dragon irl. You can say whatever you want.
And as long as mages get the development (how many new spells have been announced?) and the cool abilities that mundanes can't replicate, and mundanes get no new abilities (well, camping I guess) and have no abilities that mages can't replicate, why wouldn't that still be the case?
Insert loud shrugging here.
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Patuk
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Post by Patuk on Apr 19, 2024 13:36:54 GMT -5
I'unno. Let's see what the helpfiles have to say. From HELP MAGICK:
People could be forgiven for wanting the game to live up to this. That the community is a little bad at portraying this, is a separate issue.
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Post by najdorf on Apr 20, 2024 1:50:07 GMT -5
Hmm, I don't think June 15th falls between April 10 - May 10. Maybe the staff's calendar was printed wrong? getting armageddon 2.0 vibes
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mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on Apr 20, 2024 5:33:21 GMT -5
That reads to me like classic scope creep. I do think they will actually open on June 15th though, whether they are ready or not. They simply can't afford dealing with the eventual whining about "I trusted staff to open the game by now" while they are trying to work on the game.
What surprises me is how the community seems to have completely glossed over it. If anything, they seem excited to have a promised date although it's out of the initially promised range. I would have expected the addicts to be a bit more pissy about it. Maybe they'll show up on May 10 wondering if the game has opened yet, and get pissed off then because they didn't read the newsletter?
As for magic: it would have been difficult at this point for Armageddon staff to work to portray magic as originally intended. It's clear that the player base has largely rejected this, so from staff's perspective it makes sense to cater to player habits rather than trying to change them. Remember, Seasons is all about retaining as many players as possible in a post-Shalooonsh community. To do this, the staff need to give the players what they want. And what the majority of players have obviously wanted for years is more magic, not less. Despite all their claims about too much magic in the world, they keep on doing the same thing over and over again. The magic players keep playing magic characters, and the non-magic players that complain about too much magic keep playing the game instead of leaving it. At least when Allanak becomes a Lords & Ladies RPG where 70% of the characters are playing house in their elemental temples, the mundane players will have less competition for animals to grind their skills on.
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mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on Apr 21, 2024 5:25:52 GMT -5
"Skill Gain Alt Stats": gdb.armageddon.org/index.php/topic,60327.0.html Tired of your skill-ups only happening once every 90 minutes? Hate grinding up your characters for 10 days in the desert before interacting with any other human being, and prefer it to take 9.5 days instead? With the power of ASS-G (Alternate Stat Skill-Gains), now you can avoid all of that! Just walk all of your characters that don't roll above "very good" into the silt sea to maximize those bennies!
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Post by najdorf on Apr 21, 2024 15:36:40 GMT -5
useless, I always put wisdom at last and still didn't have any issue maxing it. Train once every 3 4 hours, 2 skillgains a RL day, in 40 RL days you have it maxed. What else do you want?
Grind has only been stated as an issue because some bitches wanted to bitch about it because they are bitches by birth.
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baron
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Post by baron on Apr 21, 2024 19:44:07 GMT -5
40 RL days, 2 skill gains a day. If you did some online work at just $20/hr for that hour's worth of skill grinding a day, you'd have $800 (minus taxes, if you bother to pay them).
The question is, did you have $800 worth of fun mindlessly grinding skills?
A hard grind in an RP-focused game is insane. I can't believe I ever thought it was a reasonable thing to have to play for 40, 80, 120 hours before having a semi-viable character...that can be tossed into the digital trash in 3 seconds by someone typing "backstab" or "cast mon harry potter bullshit".
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mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on Apr 21, 2024 20:26:20 GMT -5
For $800 you can buy a PS5, Baldur's Gate 3, and $200 worth of beer and edibles and play that for 40 hours, and not only will you not grind at all, you will get pretty deep into a story where your choices actually matter and where the "staff member" isn't a vindictive little shit (sarcastic, maybe, but not vindictive).
You could also get a pretty decent bicycle or set of weights and improve your IRL physical health rather than your character's necksnap skill.
You could pay for a year+ worth of community education courses depending on where you live.
But even if none of those things were interesting to you, there's no way I would ever believe that 40 days of Armageddon grinding is somehow more fun. The only reason I accept that state of things at Arm is because it makes players more likely to quit the game and find something better to do. And luckily the new system does not change the skill timers all that much, just how they're calculated.
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Post by najdorf on Apr 22, 2024 0:51:31 GMT -5
40 RL days, 2 skill gains a day. If you did some online work at just $20/hr for that hour's worth of skill grinding a day, you'd have $800 (minus taxes, if you bother to pay them). The question is, did you have $800 worth of fun mindlessly grinding skills? A hard grind in an RP-focused game is insane. I can't believe I ever thought it was a reasonable thing to have to play for 40, 80, 120 hours before having a semi-viable character...that can be tossed into the digital trash in 3 seconds by someone typing "backstab" or "cast mon harry potter bullshit". no man. 4 hour is between when offline. dont need to be online for timer to work
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Post by najdorf on Apr 22, 2024 0:55:36 GMT -5
and frankly speaking, it is not a grind at all just do training sessions for 10 20 minutes and then role-play as much as you want
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baron
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Post by baron on Apr 22, 2024 1:27:54 GMT -5
you can do that shit. i'll be busy doing things where my time is half-way respected.
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mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on Apr 22, 2024 4:41:41 GMT -5
I'm a bit of a weirdo maybe but I sometimes find grinding in RPGs relaxing. Sometimes when I'm sick I pass the time grinding skills in RuneScape or something. Armageddon grind doesn't have any elements that can make grinding in RPGs fun:
- The numbers don't show, so there's no dopamine boost from seeing the numbers go up. There's no sense of progress beyond seeing the skill level descriptor go up and seeing things branch.
- Resource gain from grinding is weird. In grindy games, you're supposed to get items that help you continue to grind (e.g. grinding Mining in RuneScape gives you ores that help you grind Smithing, which gives you gear for combat and for grinding Fletching, etc.). On Armageddon, the items you get from grinding are useless. You can't craft some of them, you often can't sell them because of the 5-item market cap in shops, so they just end up taking up space or getting junked.
- There's no intrinsic reward to grinding. Grindy MMOs will at least throw an item or something at you for getting to max level. Single player RPGs toss random encounters at you to let you grind in between story beats. Since Armageddon is supposedly a collaborative storytelling game, grinding locks you out of the story for as long as you are focused on grinding.
- There's no extrinsic reward to grinding. In other games, you could get bragging rights and what not. But on Arm, not only does the community hate "twinks" despite most of them being one, you might even lose karma if you don't grind in staff's preferred way. (Although, it's worth noting that the new skill gain system is an acknowledgement from staff that players will grind their skills no matter what, so any actions they take to penalize players for grinding from this point forward is inherently hypocritical.)
Basically, grinding in an RPG is supposed to have the same appeal that an idle clicker game does. When you have literally nothing else to do, you can pass the time with mindless play. Does Armageddon want to be a game where people log in for hours to tell stories collaboratively, or a game where you log in for 20-30 minutes here and there to get some skill ups? Regardless of people's personal choices with regards to how they play the game, it's incredibly bad game design that does a disservice to the game's stated goal.
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