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Post by lyse on Jul 26, 2019 14:41:36 GMT -5
I'm beginning to wonder if the flaw of Armageddon is that some people want to use it for RP and some people don't. [/div]
[/quote] You just broke down one of the biggest problems in Armageddon in one sentence. |
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jul 26, 2019 14:46:32 GMT -5
That's very true. Although it's not the "biggest" problem. It is just unfortunately 'a' problem. Some people play the game for things that only remotely have to do with actual roleplaying. That is a sad 'fact'. It doesnt mean they dont roleplay, but they just do the bare minimum. While they put a lot more effort into empire building, or establishing control, or personal gratification. It's a little sad, but it's the fact in many roleplaying games. It doesnt really stop the game, it's just an extra obstacle.
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Post by shakes on Jul 26, 2019 14:47:48 GMT -5
I disagree that pk/murder isn't conflict, but I would concede that it's all in the handling of it.
First, I believe that without permadeath then we're just here playing with digital dolls. Electric action figures. If that's what I wanted to do ... well ... there's better games out there for it. Very cool games with better settings where I can have a higher population, a bigger world to explore, and more interesting coded abilities.
Murder puts meat on the table. Murder brings meaning to all of our roleplay action.
But almost always, murder in Armageddon is someone 'punching down'. Some highly skilled character killing someone who is unimportant in every possible way in a means that they could never be held accountable for. It's a closed room apartment murder. It's a body out in the sands. It's a three on one raid on a guy whose dried meat from chargen hasn't even spoiled.
If I can scare someone into begging for their life or cutting a deal, that's awesome. If I can maim somebody and let them go around telling the story of who did it, that's even more awesome. If I can kill someone after a long series of cat-and-mouse interactions, in a fight which could just as easily have gone either way ... that's absolutely the best.
I like my enemies to be stronger than me. Sponsored roles with big power and groups behind them are my preferred conflict targets. Particularly when I'm alone, unsponsored, and zero karma. The Lone Samurai trope is heavily embedded in my preferred storytelling.
Do I lose my character most of the time? Yes. Do I often have fun doing it? Yes.
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Post by pinkerdlu on Jul 26, 2019 14:55:25 GMT -5
You've lost me as well. I'll be honest.
What makes you say that staff is determined to avoid conflict? What exactly makes you think that?
... The fact that they avoid any conflict generating systems, and actually go out of their way to close down the conflict generation that players create? Neither the Sun Runners or the Soh add anything significant to the game, but staff decided to close one of them -- and surprise, they closed the one that generates conflict. It was bad conflict that didn't contribute anything meaningful toward the game, but not once did staff ever try to reshape or redirect that. I know that there were players trying to do just that over the years, but the wall of silence blocked them until staff closed the clan.
Tuluk sucked because it was anti-conflict. Everyone had to smile and pretend to get along, even the literal nobles in their literal caste society. The shadow arts system was stupid for reasons that I mentioned in this post I made about Tuluk years ago that detailed all the problems with it. Instead of reshaping Tuluk into something that generates meaningful conflict, they closed it down.
And then Luir's Outpost became the center of activity in the north, and they jumped on that. S taff arranged it so that instead of Kurac being a spice-smuggling and raider-backing band of tribals "gone legitimate", they were now part of this merchant political alliance with people who were utterly dependent on Allanak for survival, which didn't make Kadius and Salarr more anti-Allanak, it made Kurac less. It was supposed to be this "ruthless capitalism" bit with bribes determining the Captain of the Garrison, but the Captain of the Garrison wasn't even allowed to escort the Merchants to Allanak! Staff swept in and wagged a finger and said, "No no no, ruthless capitalists mustn't compete" and basically gave the Byn a monopoly over escorts to bring them in line with Salarr's weapon monopoly, Kadius's luxury goods monopoly, and Kurac's desert goods and spice monopoly.
We're not allowed to play Blackwing because they would obviously run into conflict with Kurac and Allanak, and we can't have that. The nobles we're allowed to play are Oash, Borsail, and Fale because their primary economic competitors are literally vNPCs, and in the case of Fale, their economic claim-to-fame is literally being anti-conflict and throwing parties.
Honestly, can you give me a single example -- other than the Guild and the Arm -- of two clans which are meant to be in conflict with each other? Even the Jaxa Pah is closed so you can't even claim that the rinth factions are in conflict with each other anymore. Staff has been consistently hammering away at conflict to remove it from the game for years. It's the only thing they consistently do well.
Great post. To address the last bit of qwerty’s post. Yes, it is constructive. I was elaborating on how staff, their actions and their behavior heavily impact the game’s culture and therefore the playerbase’s motivation. The “code is roleplay” was a statement made by staff on the GDB and echoed on here ironically because it’s such a ridiculous standard. The staff seemingly have no idea how to facilitate meaningful conflict and it shows. |
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mehtastic
GDB Superstar
Armers Anonymous sponsor
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Post by mehtastic on Jul 26, 2019 15:22:04 GMT -5
The idea that I started a thread about increasing player numbers to reduce player numbers is either absurd or super galaxy-brain tactics. I don't know which. It might surprise people here to know that I actually think Armageddon, as a setting, has potential. Wasted potential, to be sure, but potential nonetheless. In any case, I won't address that particular accusation; although I do plan to write a separate "how to quit Crackageddon" guide which will focus on breaking an addiction to Armageddon (something I unfortunately have seen and does exist), I don't plan on trying to convince average players to quit the game if they're genuinely enjoying it. Unfortunately, "ignore staff and do what you want" is not an answer to the problem of player numbers, which is largely a player-created problem. We discussed multiple negative aspects of player culture which drag down growth, and the game's active players can ignore those issues at their own peril. On the topic of motivation, I think everyone who goes into an RP-focused game goes in with some intense expectations, and managing the ability to be let down somewhat is not only a good life skill in general, but a good skill for being able to enjoy games. I don't think that Armageddon's problem is a vague concept like "motivation", and I don't think that threads like these intrinsically serve to demotivate people. If you're demotivated by this thread, it's probably not for you to read or contribute to. Close your eyes, cover your ears and continue to enjoy Armageddon as you like. The essence of tedium 's post is perfect and I have nothing to really add to it. It highlights yet another problem with Armageddon's fundamental design, which it needs to find a way to overcome in order to attract and keep new players. |
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jul 26, 2019 15:43:09 GMT -5
In retrospect. Conflict is indeed a problem. Meaning that everything in the game discourages it.
You're discouraged from antagonizing elves, because they might rob you.
You're discouraged from antagonizing breeds, because they greb/spy for wealthy merchants/aides and they value them more then you.
You're discouraged from antagonizing gemmed, because Templars value their skills more then yours.
You're discouraged from antagonizing abominations in the rinth, because they're likely in some form of leadership position and they can kill you easily.
You're discouraged from antagonizing anything, because it's a perma death game and to attain any kind of long lasting change, you have to survive.
I honestly dont know how can this be alleviated. Sometimes, as Tedium emphasized, if one roleplays, sometimes, it requires going against what benefits them most. I'd like to think that whenever enough parties roleplay at the same time, conflict will happen naturally.
There is an issue of survival/build up that sort of prevents conflict. Meaning that for many plots to happen, the person needs to accrue a certain amount of ability. So they keep low and dont piss anyone off until they're properly trained up, etc. That of course stifles conflict. Because everyone are nicey nice until they're uber and then they die. And before they die, they exercise a bit of conflict by antagonizing people that are Waaaaaay weaker then them. Doing otherwise would risk a time investiture of months.
The new guilds were ment to alleviate this somewhat, as some level of prowess became possible very quickly. Not sure if they had that much of an effect yet.
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my2sids
Displaced Tuluki
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Post by my2sids on Jul 26, 2019 15:53:20 GMT -5
I will say that there is currently a lot of attempted conflict going on but players frequently attempt to suppress it. Staff generally encourage conflict in my experience.
The problem is that the structure of the game encourages conflicting players to lose while encouraging boring/passive characters to thrive.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jul 26, 2019 16:12:01 GMT -5
That's very true. Although it's not the "biggest" problem. It is just unfortunately 'a' problem. Some people play the game for things that only remotely have to do with actual roleplaying. That is a sad 'fact'. It doesnt mean they dont roleplay, but they just do the bare minimum. While they put a lot more effort into empire building, or establishing control, or personal gratification. It's a little sad, but it's the fact in many roleplaying games. It doesnt really stop the game, it's just an extra obstacle. Very few games can survive appealing to only one subset of player interests or activities. Every game I've played has echoed this lament; I hate those dirty mudsexing socializers some days. I posit games have to be designed and run to allow multiple play types, whatever you happen to label those types, to have any prayer of longevity or large player numbers.
At the very least, if you like a game and recommend it to your friends, they wont show up with exactly the same interests. The more area there is for darts to stick to the board, the more players you retain from new recruitment.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jul 26, 2019 16:28:49 GMT -5
Honestly, can you give me a single example -- other than the Guild and the Arm -- of two clans which are meant to be in conflict with each other? Even the Jaxa Pah is closed so you can't even claim that the rinth factions are in conflict with each other anymore. Staff has been consistently hammering away at conflict to remove it from the game for years. It's the only thing they consistently do well. To address the last bit of qwerty’s post. Yes, it is constructive. I was elaborating on how staff, their actions and their behavior heavily impact the game’s culture and therefore the playerbase’s motivation. The “code is roleplay” was a statement made by staff on the GDB and echoed on here ironically because it’s such a ridiculous standard. The staff seemingly have no idea how to facilitate meaningful conflict and it shows.
The recent iteration of the Byn has been educational to me. In a moment of frustration, one leader said in so many words, "Can you people not live without an external enemy?!"
I really start to think storytellers want small, interpersonal conflict. I would be inclined to use all sorts of insulting terms to describe this style and scale of narrative, but I have to admit there is a conflict style in polygamous relationships, and in characters sleeping around, and in social bullying. I simply dont enjoy that kind of friction.
I want to chop shit up with bone swordz, and board another silt skimmer with my bloody cutlass held high. I want to create a pyramid of gith skulls cause they had some genocide comin to them, damned if Nilaz is stronger for the toll paid in blood and soulz.
To be more specific, I want the Byn to be a barely functional military unit OR a functional mercenary unit, and not a halfway house for those with the inability to grind on their own or a hunger for an ever changing array of revoltingly perfumed mudsex partners.
To bring this back to your point, staff are consistent about they kind of players they choose for sponsored roles. A couple friends and I watch new Byn sergeants. If they grab an apartment and a romantic partner before they lead a serious contract, we give up on any significant rp with that sergeant.
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Post by triskelion on Jul 26, 2019 17:05:06 GMT -5
the only way to restore the game to its perceived glory days is for y'all to be impressionable starry eyed teenagers again
Even peak era armageddon would look boring if you've played it for over a goddamned decade
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Post by gringoose on Jul 26, 2019 18:30:51 GMT -5
The staff were even worse during the glory days. There wasn't a recipe of things staff were doing right that created those glory days. What would restore the glory days is simply 100 more active players. With that the hustle and bustle that used to exist would come back and the whole world would come alive with player activity. You log on during an averages Tuesday night and there's 100+ players on, and that's 100+ things going on. I used to play in Tuluk which was less active than Allanak and even the main tavern there was too crowded for me. There was another tavern, I don't remember the name of it but just remember it was somewhere in the south part of Tuluk and it would be more crowded than the Gaj is now. When you rode around in the wastelands there were a lot more player encounters. Also a lot more griefing, the players were worse back then too. Like get blasted by a fire or wind mage you had never seen or interacted with before and had never interacted with except coded combat. I remember some good encounters with other players in the wastelands, like coming across a player tribe that were temporarily camping in the grasslands and having a drink with them I think it was 3 or 4 other players. That was a memorable scene for me back when I was a young teen.
When there's a lot of players you can get lost in a sea of players. Nobody knows who you are or cares who you are unless you do something to make a name for yourself.
Didn't Arm used to have 150 player peaks?
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Post by lechuck on Jul 27, 2019 3:20:57 GMT -5
Not to my knowledge. I started playing around '04 and I have never seen the game stabilized any higher than 60ish players at peak. Now and then it's gone up to 70-80 temporarily, like during HRPTs and such. As far as I'm aware, the game peaked numbers-wise around '01-'04, and I believe it was in the 60s around then. I'm pretty sure it hasn't been higher than that at any point--MUDs didn't generally have 100+ players in the 90s aside from a few particularly huge ones, and even though I didn't play Arm yet at that point, I was deep into the MUD community and knew which ones topped the lists. It was Sojourn (later TorilMUD) and Aardwolf. I believe it's a myth that Arm used to be enormous. I have bits of logs going back to around '05 and '06 where the /who during big RPTs read 50-60ish. According to really old players/staff, Armageddon's server was so crappy back in the day that the game would lag heavily if more than like twenty players logged in. I don't see when it would ever have had some kind of golden age numbers-wise.
The game has lost players, but not that many. What it has lost the most is the level of player involvement. Every week at midnight between Sunday and Monday, the weekly stats get posted on the website. It shows unique logins, which has plateaued around 190-200 for years now; but if you check in on, say, a Thursday, it's gonna be a lot lower. Arm has a lot of players who log in once or twice a week, or play only during the weekend. The number of people who are players of ArmageddonMUD hasn't gone down very much, but I'd say the number of hours spent on average has plummeted in the last decade. It fluctuates a bit and right now it looks okay, but about a year ago the game struggled to hit 40 at peak. I remember peaks around then that never got above 35. Weekly numbers were down in the 160s. Then they climbed back up a bit, next year they might drop again. And every year, the people who do play Arm become a little more reclusive, a little less involved, more insular and selfish.
That's what has really changed. The total number of Armageddon players is not the reason taverns used to be full and whatnot. It's the fact that nothing major has happened in so long that people abandoned the community aspect of the game and started playing behind closed doors. In the old days, huge things would happen on a regular basis. Before my time it was the Allanak vs. Tuluk wars, the mantis invasion of Luir's, the glory days of Blackwing, then around '06 it was the copper war and a couple of years later the big Dragonsthrall thing (which, for all its weird aspects, was certainly a major event). And since then, there just hasn't been anything that really got people invested in the game as opposed to the success of their own characters. Where are the wars? Where are the events that change the way the game is played? Where are the changes that reflect how an actual world evolves over the course of centuries? I'd say that nothing has happened in at least ten RL years that would make an interesting entry into a written history of Zalanthas.
It's probably a lot like living in any given RL community. If nothing happens in the area, you don't really get drawn into anything. It becomes more comfortable to see to your own needs. People are way more involved in their community in areas that have had, say, race riots or natural disasters. In peaceful gated communities, people can live for years and not get to know each other. Armageddon feels like the same thing has happened: when the world around you stays the same and all you can really do is gain skill-based or economic success, you have no natural reason to contribute to the game beyond your own personal needs. The story side of Arm has stagnated so severely that it has become self-destructive, with players in powerful positions so starved of ways to be relevant that they trawl Allanak for plots to squash and notable characters to kill. And since it doesn't spring from anything worth reacting to, it doesn't really create plots in itself. It's just like "oh, the Guild boss got publicly executed. That's the third one this year." There's no point investigating. You just know it happened because some templar felt the need to remind everyone that he's a templar. I wouldn't even blame him. It's probably all he had to work with.
The game does not need a new clan here or a new volcano there, it needs world-changing events that people have a genuine reason to care about. Not a weekly pack of faceless NPC gith for the clan to kill off. It needs Tuluk to reopen with a declaration of war, or Tektolnes to abandon the known world and create an era of constant power struggles where templars have to try to keep things together despite the loss of their magics and an increasingly rebellious population. It needs a reason to log in beyond raising skills or hoarding money or carrying out the daily duties of your sponsored role. Armageddon has become more akin to a WoW RP server than a living book. There are still players, they still kind of RP, but nothing noteworthy happens and nobody can make a meaningful mark on the world itself. It's just a movie set that we act on, and somehow we're expected to enjoy the same movie remade fifteen times with the same set and props and roles. If it's the only movie in town, you might still watch it; but it just becomes a place to take your date.
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tedium
Clueless newb
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Post by tedium on Jul 28, 2019 13:05:28 GMT -5
I honestly dont know how can this be alleviated. Sometimes, as Tedium emphasized, if one roleplays, sometimes, it requires going against what benefits them most. I'd like to think that whenever enough parties roleplay at the same time, conflict will happen naturally.
I think that those points you listed are potential issues and some ways to OOCly make death less painful for long-lived characters could be useful. However, none of those things are intrinsic to the theme of Armageddon, and I think that focusing on individual conflict vs. org conflict is itself part of the problem. It puts too much emphasis on individual people to drive roleplay with DM-style actions and soap-drama PC leaders, rather than by letting conflict emerge naturally from the world setting.
Maybe I should just make a post on conflict any how Armageddon can do it better. |
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Post by shakes on Jul 28, 2019 13:41:56 GMT -5
I think few and fucking far between of Arm's playerbase is WILLING to continue to roleplay their character to their detriment.
It's why every half-giant magically transforms from Curly of the Three Stooges into mother-fucking Sun Tzu and Miyamoto Musashi rolled into one when it suddenly comes time for combat.
It's why every low-ranked recruit in the Jade magically knows how to check your headband for lockpicks and knows every secret trapdoor, rooftop exit, and hiding spot like they're Sherlock Holmes on Adderall.
It's why every ... ahh ... you get it.
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tedium
Clueless newb
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Post by tedium on Jul 28, 2019 15:00:59 GMT -5
The problem isn't in a Jade Saber Recruit knowing how to search people, but the incentives structure that makes the Jade Sabers give a shit about petty crime in the first place. When they pat people down for lockpicks they should be fishing for a bribe instead of policing crime, because their priorities should be on saving the entire city from existential threats, not preventing a burglary.
Jade Sabers should want thieves to exist, as long as the thieves are smart enough to understand that their targets are independents who might challenge the power structure of Allanak. IE, rob the poor and the up-and-comers, not the nobles. The thieves should fear being outed as a thief to independents, because those independents would surely take matters into their own hands. The Jade Sabers shouldn't be there to protect the general public, but the upper classes.
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