I'm Done With Armageddon

I don't see or understand how all those fancy arrow types affect archery damage.

Likely higher quality arrows add a +archery when equipped? Would provide slightly better chance to hit, crit, and can add damage if it brings skill to multiple of seven.

I will say that RPIs in general - not just Arm - have always had more potential than substance. Without intending to paint myself as God's gift to RP, there aren't many I've played where I didn't think that it would have been great if not for the fact that far too high a percentage of the playerbase is totally inept at roleplaying. People who can barely put out a three-word emote, can't use punctuation, totally fail to grasp the game's concept, and constantly play with their OOC motivations painted on their characters' foreheads. These games could be fantastic if if only half the players weren't below average, but I guess that's the law of averages. What puzzles me the most is how some players (e.g. X-D) can roleplay for two decades and still suck at it. Arm is definitely the one that most fails to foster good roleplayers. I think '04-09 SoI was the golden age of RPIs, mostly because the LOTR movies were an immense source of inspiration and emulation for players to base their roleplay on. Most of Arm's players probably haven't even looked at the Dark Sun source material.

Every year the game resembles a WoW RP server a little more, and I can't play for more than like a month out of the year before I give up again. After Sanvean's departure, there just seems to have been noone left who gave a shit about the actual quality of people's roleplay, so noone's really rewarded for it or punished for failing to present something resembling a real character. The number of characters who could possibly fit into an actual work of fiction just continues to dwindle, making way for empty husks and cringeworthy caricatures. It's a shame, and it's certainly not something you can bring up on the GDB.

An RPI is a lot like a movie, and if you tried to make a movie with fifty people plucked from the street at random, it would probably be a really shitty movie. You'd think, over the years, that they would then become better actors until eventually the core players are at least passable, but that simply doesn't seem to be the case. My guess is that this is because the staff of recent years has neglected to acknowledge that there's more to a good player than obedience and time served as clanlead. There's no money in roleplay anymore, it's all about being easy to work with and not rocking the boat. There were certainly things Sanvean did wrong, but I still think she was the most important administrator the game has ever had because, as an author, she actually recognized the importance of good roleplay in a game that's all about expressing yourself in writing.

I don't even know what the metaplot is supposed to have been in recent years. How long has it been "The Gith are Coming"? Did that ever turn into anything more than the weekly culling of NPC gith, with echoes of distant gith drums for atmosphere? It has been a long time since the plot aspect of the game has been anything more than a minimum viable effort made to shut people up. Honestly, I suspect that the ripples of the End of the World events from the ArmReborn farce still make staff a little seasick and wary of doing anything really impactful. That whole plotline was so heavy-handed and overwrought (because people were convinced that there were six months left, so why not) that it probably affects things to this day.

Yeah. I recall posting at the time that I thought it was a strange decision because the game was in a better state than it had been at any point since I started playing. I'll admit that I initially believed they were truly going to make Arm2.0, but even with that wool over my eyes, I still thought that the way they went about the ending was unpalatable. The game turned into Forgotten Realms almost overnight. It wasn't a worthy ending. "Going out with a bang" shouldn't have to mean abandoning all the principles of the game. All the Dragonthrall stuff, the heaping of psionic abilities onto all kinds of random characters, the approval of any and all special applications (literal newbies were playing fucking mindbenders, for Christ sake), the hilariously stacked Guild crew that noone could oppose... it was like the American gold rush, turning society completely on its head and leaving the whole thing to rot after the source ran dry.

The game still hasn't recovered from it. You can still see the effects of taking a game that used to have values and principles and throwing it all away in favor of confetti and instant gratification. Everyone wanted to drive the Ferrari they'd always dreamed of, without regard for the fact that when everyone's driving a Ferrari, it isn't cool anymore; and when they had to go back to their Buicks, the whole playerbase became mired in apathy and disillusionment. Hell, sociologists might have an interesting case study in what might happen to the global population if it became clear that the world was going to end and then it just didn't.

We were probably all a bit naïve to believe in the Reborn meme. The initial prognosis of six months was wildly optimistic. All the same, it took quite a while before realization dawned. It seems they never even really got the ball rolling. After about a year, I asked a friend who'd joined staff what had actually been done and was told that only the barest framework of a game had been built. They had the capacity to build rooms and move around in the cardinal directions, and that was about it. That's when I knew it would never happen. Still, staff continued to string the playerbase along for another year or so with blog posts and bullshit, cracking down hard on anyone who voiced doubts about the whole thing. I don't think it was officially cancelled until 2010.

It's hard to say if things would have turned out very differently if the Reborn debacle hadn't happened. The damage done to the game by people like Nyr was not predicated on this fiasco, it was just the natural outcome of a toxic narcissist leader. Maybe the general apathy amongst players was what let him get away with it for so long, I don't know. However, I definitely think that the story aspect of Armageddon is still tarnished by the fact that the game once went through the RPI equivalent of a six-month coke bender.

Stuff like the occupation/liberation of Tuluk was before my time, but the best world event I've seen was the Copper War. It should really have been the template for future metaplots. It affected the whole game, as opposed to being relevant exclusively to a certain area like the Tablelands nonsense from a few years back. Almost all clans had some part to play in it, whether as actual soldiers or as profiteers and agitators. It was avoidable for those who just didn't have an interest. It had a focal point that everyone could understand and was deeply ingrained in the setting's lore (winning the priceless copper mine) and also great potential for abstract stuff like political alliances, double agents, etc. If you didn't like the chaotic nature of large-scale DIKU combat, you could still get involved with the social aspect of war. If your character wasn't important, you still had the opportunity to become a war veteran. It was just really good.

Then the game devolved into teleporting volcanos and generations upon generations of gith suiciding against Allanak for no readily apparent reason. Remember when we were supposed to get excited that a third moon appeared on the sky, as if this would fuel roleplay and shake things up? If one were to write the history of Zalanthas, nothing that happened in the last ten RL years would warrant more than a passing note. This began as a game where the conflict between north and south was the foundation and focus of everything, and it has ended up a game where there no longer is a north, nor any meaningful conflict.

The total lack of any kind of follow-up to the closing of Tuluk is particularly perplexing. When it happened, even my cynical ass thought it would at least lead to an increase in southern staff activity, but I never saw the first sign of that. It felt more like when a franchise simply shuts down one of its stores because it wasn't profitable. It left such a gaping void in the game, and while I never liked to play in Tuluk very much, its existence as a fixture of the playing field was really fucking important for the game's general dynamic.

Hell, I didn't even feel like its closure led to an increase in character density in Allanak, even though player numbers haven't changed much. You'd have thought that whatever portion of the playerbase resided in Tuluk would be shifted into Allanak, but either that didn't happen at all or it did so in a manner that failed to bring any appreciable change in activity levels. They probably shouldn't have left Morin's open as a pseudo-sphere, because anytime I've bothered to go there, there's always a handful of players sitting around being completely worthless to the game as a whole.

I suspect what happened was that without two cities to alternate between, players just grew more insular instead of congregating in Allanak's public scene. Many players used to switch cities when moving on to a new character just so they could be around new faces, and without that option, they may simply have started to play behind closed doors instead. It's no secret that players have increasingly done that in recent years, especially nobles who nowadays barely set foot in Allanak proper. Luir's is only a suitable sphere for members of Kurac, and Red Storm is really more of a suburb to Allanak.