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Post by Deleted on Jan 22, 2014 21:18:38 GMT -5
Don't expect answers to questions like that. In 95% of cases, it's because they just don't like to change shit.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 22, 2014 21:29:49 GMT -5
Because when Tenneshi and lirathans decided to build another apartment complex, they actually did it?
Because clan members who, let's assume, rely on their salary 'alone', already have a bed, a food source, a water source, and spot to keep their shit in. Their 400 a month is actually 2000, except the 1600 of it goes into the food/water/lodgings. Considering that this allows a non-grinding roleplaying role, I think the concept is pretty good.
Apartments are left to the indies and to people with extra activities. Well then, if you want extra, do extra things, and pay extra. I'm sure most PCs already have a house, except their entire virtual family and their dog lives there. So they have to rent apartments. Why are they so expensive? Because they are few in number and the demand is still strong.
Old twink, have you been playing the actual game in the last few years? Salarr has weapons that go for 3k each and are of immense power, all of them craftable. Certain very impressive armor pieces with some surprising skill bonuses and are craftable. Akai Sjir has A LOT of craftable items which are 'very' powerful. These days, climbing fang spikes are assumed to be be a pretty normal thing to buy. I wonder how many people remember Brethel-da, who created those climbing spikes. And by the way, they 'are' craftable.
It is true. That in the end of it all, day jobs are basically roleplaying hooks. The House hires hunters not just to hunt for materials. Most of their time, their warehouses are "overflowing" with materials already. They hire hunters so they can train them up and then when in sufficient number, they can go do awesome shit.
It's a little hard with Noble houses. In the end, a lot of it depends on the noble. If they succeed in attracting a lot of people and keeping them alive. Whatever the House's niche is, shit will happen. It doesnt always happen though, becaue it is not an easy role. I hate playing nobility. In my opinion, you sacrifice your own fun entirely for the benefit of those you hire. But rare gemstones of cool achievement are usually worth it. And by achievement I dont mean getting a tavern built, or mindfucking a Kadius merchant so bad, she dedicates all of her MCs to you.
Lately. Borsail's been running Arena games. They've been plagued by death lately, which happens. But generally, Wyverns have a lot of possible plots to go act out. Go capture a Gajak beetle, or go capture an NPC tribe. They've got the tools to do some stuff 'without' imm assistance. They've got a wagon cage to go capture and toss creatures into, and they've got the hooks to do some interesting stuff 'with' imm assistance.
Right now, the Fale lord seems pretty cool. He makes parties and impromptu shit all the time.
Oash, I dont know. Last thing of great achievement that I observed of Oash, was when they built farmland during famine. I dont truly know what they're doing right now. But I would "like" to believe, it is due to me not being privy to their secret plans. Not because they're totally dead.
Tuluk has a lot of stuff going as well, but I prefer not to talk about it. Though January is a pretty dead month.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 23, 2014 0:06:11 GMT -5
I'd agree. Oldtwink, I'd argue the problem now is there is little point is approaching a pc crafter for high enough arms and armor. The best arms, armor, trinkets, picks, etc, come from clans, and some portion of it is loaded by imms.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 23, 2014 4:46:44 GMT -5
If the -only- income you are capable of acquiring is your clanned salary, with no bonuses, no "boss buying the drinks this week cause his clannies are just that awesome," no outside interests, no commission, no free gear, no looting of corpses or finding of random crap on the ground... then you're doing something wrong. Nevertheless, it has happened and with multiple pcs of mine. Not all of them by a long stretch, but with multiple pcs of mine nonetheless.
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Post by gloryhound on Jan 23, 2014 17:04:42 GMT -5
They are enormous and powerful enough to stop single PCs from destroying them, singlehandedly. On the other hand, if that PC has a network of people who consider that clan an "enemy," and they get all their ducks in a row, can coordinate with the staff the times and places and people, they can in fact bring a clan to its knees. Red Fang vs. Sun Runners comes to mind. This was done as the result of PCs doing what the players RPed out. Yes, there was staff intervention, and yes, there were staff effects and echoes. But the staff would have had nothing to get involved IN, in the first place, if the players hadn't RPed hostilities between the clans and organized fights between them. The problem is that a lot of players think these independant merchant groups are powerful. They're not. The players of a lot of these groups just think they're a lot more influential than they are. When in actuality, they're tools of someone who really IS influential. And as soon as that influential person is dead, the independent group falls apart. This has happened recently, and it's happened in the past. When indie clan A's only sphere of influence is a templar, and no one really liked clan A but tolerated it because the templar was giving his blessing... what do you -think- will happen to clan A, when templar dies? Answer: Clan A ceases to be clan A, and its PC independent maxed-out merchant PC is going to be instructed to join Salarr or Kadius, or get lost. And of course Salarr and Kadius doesn't want him, because he's already proven what a twink he is, and that no one likes him, and that he has no interest in actually being a subordinate in a clan. So he ends up storing, or dying. And all his minions either get absorbed into clans that actually appreciate them, or they store or die too. Such is the way of independents who think they can put one over on a GMH. All I hear here is the voice of the GDB, presenting yet another contrived argument against any kind of change.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 23, 2014 19:19:47 GMT -5
Then you're not listening.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 23, 2014 20:05:10 GMT -5
Unless the leader doesn't give out bonuses (80% of the clanned pcs I've played), you don't share playtimes with the leader or many of your other clannies (50% of the clanned pcs I've played), no free gear (75% of the pcs I've had in clans have not had this), aren't allowed to leave the gates so rarely come across corpses (about 50% of clanned roles can't leave the gates), commission is never guaranteed (only had commission with about 10% of clanned pcs I've had), as to outside interests, I'm not even sure what it is you mean. When you say 'you're not listening', though, I'm curious if you mean it in regards to me or the post above it?
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jan 23, 2014 21:21:19 GMT -5
Someone says "All I hear is..."
and someone else says "Then you're not listening" immediately after that.
Is there some reason why you think either of us were referring to you? I mean, I shouldn't have to use the quote button to respond to the post directly above mine, in context. We're all pretty smart people on this forum.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 23, 2014 21:34:44 GMT -5
The person quoting you, no, but your own post, I wasn't certain. I didn't think it was, but I've had people reply to me further down a page on a forum before without quoting me or saying it was in response to me before so it was possible. That is why I asked.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 23, 2014 21:43:42 GMT -5
Back to the idea of random in thoughts here. I saw Majikal's post on the gdb that it seems like nothing is being done to retain older players. This is very valid: Last week's update (week 3, 2014): www.armageddon.org/updates/index.php?week=03&year=2014 279 unique logins, 48 accounts created 3 Years ago (week 3, 2011): armageddon.org/updates/index.php?week=03&year=2011 245 unique logins, 25 new accounts created. Now... if they were not hemorrhaging veteran players, given 156 weeks to get new players, even at a rate of -1- new player a week, that would be 156 more players. When in reality, the story of the numbers says that there were about 230 people who play regularly in 2014 as opposed to....220 who played in 2011. Where did the other 146 players go? I'd wager that most of them are part of the more than 200 people on these forums as they've gotten fed up and created an account here. 146 players of 230 - that leaves.... 84 people who played then who still play now, of the 230, unless, of course, the 'new player numbers' are falsified. /2 sids.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 23, 2014 21:53:25 GMT -5
See, to me... the problem lies with the fact that it's 400 for an 'average' "decent" apartment (aka somewhere private outside a clan compound to put personal effects and more or less "play house", and this is 400 2x/month, it's really 800/month, and your average clanned pay is 300/month. So you won't be able to do what, in my experience, the vast majority of people like to do. But then... it's not just rent... to get a buzz, if you're in the south, you need at least a bottle of sky draught, in my experience, which is 40 coins (right about), so let's say 1k sid, 2x/month to make a 2k sid monthly pay would actually be more in line with the prices, if you want to think about figuring the cost of the rent and such for an equivalent in, etc. I think double rent on a decent average apartment so you can get an apartment and 10 drinks is not unreasonable. the question that never seems to get asked, and certainly not answered, is why is there such a barrier for players to have a dump room for their equipment, and a private room for meetings? It's pretty clearly not an IC issue (a whopping 400 sids when your average commoner is destitute and can barely afford water?), so there's some mentality from the staff that's sayign let's make this space a luxury because...? Ah, I didn't see this until just now: I would venture to say that it is sheerly an OOC thing, as so many things reveal themselves to be with enough time playing. ie: Staff doesn't feel like building more, the playerbase needs to be consolidated, etc. Actually, before she left as a Producer, Vanth was working on adding an apartment building somewhere atop/beside/behind the Gaj that was supposed to go in, but it's just fallen by the wayside. As I said, though, I think it's probably because for some reason, people think it will round the players up for more interaction. Although, to be frank, I think that 400 coins is very much inline with "Cheap" via the ingame economy, as "rent" goes, given that it's about the cost of 10 bottles of hard liquor - my first cheap place was about $250/rl month, which is about 10X the price of a bottle of hard liquor. Maybe it's just me though, as to that. I think the better idea would be to simply make basic clan pay for full employees (not trainees/recruits/etc) 2x average apartment rent per pay pickup. I think that that would fix the economy, even. And it goes without saying, I think, that the nobility's pay should increase on the same scale. I was -not- happy to find that with a middle tier allanaki noble I had 5k pay to cover clothes, bribes, bonuses, and employee pay/bonuses indefinitely (this way before the automated pay system). That is in line with a very profitable salting group in an IC week or two. If you had to, say, increase average employee pay to, say, 2k/month, it would increase middle tier noble house pay to about 30k (in theory, that number could've been adjusted for me, no idea).
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Hardboiled
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Post by Hardboiled on Jan 24, 2014 6:02:52 GMT -5
I agree with almost everything Oldtwink has said. As for the fact that staff hasn't been doing enough to keep new players interested, well I don't think the staff has done much to keep anyone interested.
Before I say anything more, lets take a moment to look at Roguegunslinger's recent GDB post in the thread 'do you feel the love' . This is elitist ass kissing bullshit at its best:
You can almost see the brown on his nose at the end of that comment.
Its this kind of attitude from vet players and staff alike that ruins the game for everyone. Before Arm 2 was announced there were over 320 players in about a single week, after the announcement number plummeted and we are still nowhere near that number. Back then the staff used to do more, handle more, with less automation. I remember staff creating a custom item for a newbie character of mine within a week after I submitted the description. Anaiah gave a really good example recently, a player RPIng for a RL year before they got 15 minutes worth of work from the staff creating an item. The current population is smaller then it used to be, players are more restricted then before, lower level staff is more restricted then ever. The clans are so much more restrictive and less fun then they used to be, you have cool roles in them like outrider which are now long gone. Outside the HRPT which happens once ever two or three years, things seem pretty dead plot wise to me. I admit that the changes that occured in tuluk were a good effort, though they fell short of what was really needed, but thats another thread/post. A trip to the valley where everyone dies isn't much plot in my books but I suppose beggars can't be choosers. Oh look, I do see myself repeating what others have been saying here and in the GDB(abiet subtly) for a while now.
Every other game offers excitment, involvment, depth and co-operation NOW, its only this game that uses the golden era of its past and utter lies in order to abuse and deny its playerbase a more enjoyable experience. You look at the GDB, under code section and in just the first two pages you have examples of players and staff treating anyone with an idea to improve the game like they are trash. A year of my real life gets you what in this game? We can all write room descriptions, alot of us can fucking code, they aren't fooling anyone, it shouldn't take years of my fucking life to get a little couple lines of text into the game. On top of that, at the end of the day the selling point of this game is the plots and the overall story. It isn't so hard to just plan something out worldwide and dedicate two or three willing people to running it. Maybe these staff members can be called, oh I don't know...how about storytellers or something, and be allowed to push along plots that maybe cause a few changes to the world. It is not too much to ask to see the world around us being brought to life a bit more, not for just one individual at a time but for everyone who plays the game. But no, instead all we have is the status quo, a cool game with so many possiblility under the dark sun universe turned into a social chatting game where some of the most exciting events people throw routinely are parties.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 24, 2014 9:33:25 GMT -5
It's not so much that it's dead plot-wise, it's just that the plots have moved away from the public eye and into the cliques. There could potentially be just as many plots going on now as in 2004 (though probably not quite), but players have completely stopped trusting each other and just run these private plotlines with their trusted inner circles and AIM buddies. As a result, anyone who isn't in one of these cliques will get the impression that there's absolutely nothing going on in the game whatsoever, which is for all intents and purposes true when you're not part of that small crowd of protective elitist veterans. For years now, the game has been barren on the surface, and walking around Allanak or Tuluk feels like walking through a ghost town because everyone's just sitting in private places doing private roleplay whereas they used to be much more open and accessible.
This is due in large part to the thing that happened after the Reborn announcement. Staff decided to let everyone play just about whatever class they wanted because the world was ending in six months (lol), so the game was absolutely FLOODED with mages and mindbenders. As everyone knows, the main result of too many mages is that everyone remotely noteworthy will probably get PKed just because you have all these overpowered people itching for something, anything, to use their easily-gotten powers on. The consequence of too many mindbenders - especially in the hands of players who don't really deserve them (they let at least one 1-karma player with less than a year under their belt play a psionicist, no joke) - is that nothing is secret and everybody gets to know everything because that's what a mindbender can do and a newbie mindbender will be itching to share that information with everybody for the same reason that a shitty mage will be itching to fireball people.
So, as a result of the administration's horrible decision to indiscriminately approve all special apps, players caused immense damage to the game itself, and many realized that plots had to be kept private and secret in order to not be instantly stamped out by bored, overpowered characters scouring the game world for ways to put their powers to any sort of use. That mentality sort of stuck even though the numbers have normalized somewhat, and the damage is done. That is what it is, but what's worse is that Nyr denies this and his backpatters refuse to acknowledge that anything is wrong, hilariously insisting that there's just as much going on in the game as there always was. Mistakes have been made, but the thing that really drags the game down is Armageddon's strange culture of "don't complain about anything" and "if your feedback is critical, you are automatically wrong and we will all unite to chase you off the game." THAT is the thing that just can't be forgiven.
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Post by jcarter on Jan 24, 2014 9:41:20 GMT -5
lol, the 'relatively small staff'. I can't figure out how to see a staff list from out of game, but there's at LEAST 10 active members of staff that resolved multiple requests within the last week: armageddon.org/updates/Nyr, Welda, Leela, Euronymous, Seidhr, Calavera, Rathustra, Thrace, Taijan and Auskelos. Comparing that to the number of application reviews and who wasn't included on the 'top 10', that's another: Italis. Comparing that to the previous week, I can tack on Maeve as another active staffer, 12 total. Let's also include Morgenes and Tiernan who handle the back end stuff, 14, as well as Nessalin and Adhira. 16. Looking further back (December) and at GDB I missed Natious and Nathvaan. There are 18 people on staff. Within the last week, there were '240 unique logins', with 19 of those people brand spanking new players and a number of those likely to be player accounts of staff. And yet somehow this 'relatively small' (nearly 10% of the active playerbase) number of staff can't manage to resolve a special application request in less than 2 months time, or to get a single player their accuont within less than a month. If they're not taking care of administrative stuff like that, and can't seem to be bothered to be animating the world/bringing it alive wtf are these people doing
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Post by Deleted on Jan 24, 2014 10:52:26 GMT -5
Oh yeah, Armageddon has by FAR the biggest staff in the fucking history of the RPI genre, which makes it all the more embarrassing that they're simultaneously the one game where the staff does the least.
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