I'll just leave this here

I decided to give Arm another try because a bunch of people PM'd me HERE, on the SB, to tell me they were sympathetic to the way I was treated but how much they'd really enjoyed playing alongside, with, or even against my characters.

It's sad that I HAVE to go back to it with reduced expectations, but that's the reality of it. Staff didn't give me an honest effort before, and they're CERTAINLY not going to do it now that I've outed myself on the SB and broke their "no-OOC" taboo which is selectively enforced only when they decide to drag it out and use it against someone they've already decided they need a reason to punish.

Sadly, however, I'm not having much fun right now. I log in, twink my skills a few minutes, log back out. Maybe do that 2-3 times per day and then go find something else to do. Whereas before I was really devoting a lot of time and energy into making a character and having things happen around me. Where is the loss really being suffered? It's the game that's lost me, not the other way around. I can still play, I'm just not quite as willing to put the effort into it again that I was previously.

I lack the motivation to give it 100%. And nobody, either from the playerbase or staff, has come up with a reason for me to feel otherwise about it.

Yeah, that's always the struggle with leaving a bad game with good people behind: the good people want you back. I sympathize with that, 100%. I dealt with it personally, and I've had friends who dealt with it. The most effective way to deal with it in my experience is to leave and keep in touch, or bring your friends from Armageddon to a new game, but it's not always possible.

I got no answer for that.

We enjoyed talking about the good ol' days but couldn't seem to come together on an idea for the 'new good old days'. I think it's hard to force good stories. The relationships that formed and the events that happened before happened very honestly and organically. You can't really lay that out and make it happen.

But I'm around, I'm in the game sometimes. I might get the wild hair to focus on it some more in the future. The door's open for that. But it's not happening now.

no he just listed u for chrono sake

Returning to Arm doesn't mean the game is good. Sometimes I'll do the same with EverQuest. Return, play a little, remember why I don't play it again, and then quit. It's called nostalgia. When I play Arm, I inevitably start posting here because talking about what the game could be is more fun for me than actually playing it in its current state. Then I'll realize that's what I'm doing and quit again.
Oh no.

delerak was the OG scapegoat because he was vocal, persistent, and hung around IRC channels and went to Arm meet-ups. he was disruptive, but not in a trying to cause havoc sort of way. he just liked playing the game a certain way (focused on PKing) and Arm was still trying to figure out the line between carrying harsh themes, like templars can and will mess you up for looking at them, versus being more regulated and cutting out getting PKed while in the desert with no emotes or interaction. everyone knew who he was and somehow this paranoia spun up, where delerak was lurking around the corner circumventing bans and ready to PK you at any time with a super-twinked up character. anything bad that happened was because of delerak who was out to ruin the game and just be a big jerk, etc etc. people who had never been around when he played would keep putting in this narrative despite hearing nothing but second or thirdhand stories about him.

i don't know delerak's full stories and grievances, nor how legitimate they were. he's welcome to put them together and throw up a thread. my impressions of it were that he was mostly just an annoyance, wouldn't stop doing stuff when told to knock it off, etc. at one point a staff member, Dyrinis, basically said all right you're a PKing pain in the ass so the only race option you can have is gith, if you're going to PK people then we'll put you to use. i thought that was a pretty clever solution.

the trans-staff member peeing had nothing to do with him. that was a staff member, who's gone on to do porn, that peed on another Arm player that iirc was/became a staff member at DragonCon. afaik it was consentual, the big scandal about it was that it was on the livestream that people had going on there.

the statement about skills and transparency is funny because these things never occurred until after these boards took off. imo it wasn't done to address complaints so much as to give people less reasons to go looking for these boards. armageddon mud staff and players have tried many times to get these boards killed off, and the easiest way to do it is by removing the need for them.

it was a good idea, but i think they missed the point. these boards wouldn't exist if there wasn't such a hush-hush nature. imagine if pinkerdlu posted their complaint on the GDB. it would be locked down, told to file a complaint, and shuffled away. some players would think he was full of shit, some of them might think he was on to something. now imagine if he posted it there, and instead a staff member addressed it and posted a simple snippet from the logs that showed it was a player arrow and told sorry that sucks. that would be the end of it. maybe some discussion about how the archery code is shitty, but no resentment.

until staff take that route there's always going to be distrust. there's been plenty of examples over the years of staff shittiness and sweeping the behavior under the rug. they could be perfect angels and there'll still be distrust because of that history and ongoing lack of transparency. and by transparency, i mean discussing what happened, how it happened, and what was done to address it. maybe that'll change some day, but i think it's going to take getting rid of the old guard like adhira and nessalin before that happens.