Post by lechuck on Sept 17, 2019 17:02:31 GMT -5
It's the same old Armageddon bullshit. "Be the change." Doesn't matter that ten years go by where nobody is the change, their solution is still to tell people to do something that the game very clearly does not encourage or facilitate. They somehow fail to understand that if nobody is doing something, it's because nobody has any reason or opportunity to do it. Same as the yearly discussions of "why aren't mages scary?!" -- because players don't find it attractive, practical or feasible to play that way due to flaws in game design. But staff will tell you that players simply need to get their act together, or they refuse to acknowledge the issue altogether because the alternative is to work on the game. Nah, just leave it like it is and tell the playerbase that they're doing it wrong. That'll sort things out. Maybe next year.
Staff killed spice when they made it decay in a matter of days. The prices are already completely absurd, it's like 150-300 for one pinch depending on the strain. Bricks are what, 1500? Yeah, that's a soldier's lifetime earnings. To maintain even a casual recreational habit takes a noble's entire stipend. When it then perishes as fast as food, of course noone's gonna spend their money on it. Spice is an RP prop, it's something you do when others are looking because smoking spice is part of your character concept. But you might buy it and simply have no occasion to be seen doing it for the next few days, and then it's gone. Why does it perish so fast? Judging by the descriptions, it's pretty much like slightly fluffier hashish. I can't think of any RL narcotic that rots in a week.
People are more than willing to pay for RP props if it isn't financially crippling. They buy drinks all the time even though alcohol has no real benefits. People would buy spice as well if it lasted long enough to still have it when the right scene comes along, and if it wasn't basically ten times as expensive as cocaine. This shit is literally picked up off the ground, and there's a whole village full of people who make a living collecting it. Why exactly does a single joint cost as much as an entire barrel of water? It should be like 30 'sid for a tube. Leave one particular spice as the expensive luxury drug that really rich characters can boast about smoking and make the rest cheap. We've got ragged wretches in the 'rinth who are supposed to be spiceheads; how the flying fuck are we to believe they can afford it?
The 'rinth as a whole really reflects the fact that it was conceived in the 90s by teenagers. It's like a WoW instance or something, just featureless alleys and empty buildings with the occasional mindless NPC that either attacks you suicidally or ignores your existence depending on some binary character flag. There's nothing to do there unless you make it happen yourself, and since you're alone 99% of the time, it's rather hard to make anything happen. There's no gameplay inherent to the 'rinth unless you want to play hack'n'slash with thugs which, of course, staff will come down on you like a ton of bricks for if they notice. I think fully half of the personal animations I've ever had on Arm are from staff lashing out in fury because I dared fight an NPC in this #LAWLESS hellhole where life is worthless and the NPCs kill eachother literally all the time. There are no activities inherent to this sphere save for killing NPCs, and that's severely frowned upon. Precisely what do they expect players to occupy themselves with in the' rinth? You can stand on Hathor's for six hours straight and meet nobody. There is nothing to do there.
People who play 'rinthers almost invariably fall into the inevitable trap of just being southside most of the time. At least there's some interaction there. You might start out with every intention of staying true to the spirit of the 'rinth, but pretty soon you find that the spirit of the 'rinth entails wasting away in crippling boredom and zero character progression. If you play the way they want you to, you'll spend a year doing nothing and end your life with apprentice skills because somehow in this place, which is inhabited by the most desperate and unscrupulous murderers, getting in a bit of combat practice is something you have to be clandestine about because some idiot will animate Iggs and chase you across the entire sphere to yell at you for daring to get in a fight.
Every time I've played in the Guild - One-Eye Amos, Saraan the Usurer, Sahad, and a few others further back - the same thing always happens: I play actively enough that they recruit me because any swinging dick who can log in more than twice a week is the best the clan can hope for, and then we sit around for months trying to come up with any reason to exist. Eventually we find an opportunity to carry out a hit or something like that, and since the game is a village of 50 inhabitants, everybody immediately knows all about it and some templar who's equally desperate for purpose in life will decide to crack down on the three dudes who make up the Zalanthan mafia. Snip, snap and the latest generation of Guilders are gone. Either that or they just die to random PvE shit because it's such an empty existence that you end up just doing weird things for the sake of it.
Never across any of these characters has there been any meaningful connection between the Guild PCs and the powerful shadow cabal behind the clan. You join, you get urged to sell spice, it turns out that nobody wants spice for the aforementioned reasons, and then when you try to get creative with ideas of things to do, the clan staff immediately goes into radio silence. I still recall when we tried for a month to get our storyteller to load up a fucking key we were supposed to have, for an office that was supposed to be the clanlead's actual office, and it just never happened. We wanted to turn the back room into more of a barracks for newer hires so that we could offer a locked door and a private box for belongings to people without needing to trust them with the clan's entire assets. Instead you have to vet people for fucking weeks in order to ensure they're serious and not some moron who's gonna help himself to the cash, spice and poisons that you basically have to leave sitting out since the ZALANTHAN FUCKING MAFIA can't have something that really resembles a safehouse. As a result, the clan can't maintain a reasonable population. On the eastside they have entire buildings for defunct clans, but the supposed centerpiece of Allanak's underworld has to operate out of a goddamn closet that's literally filled to capacity so that you can't drop a dead body in there. It's nothing short of absurd.
Since I started playing in like 2004 or something, the only things that have changed in the 'rinth are the addition of some useless rooftops and the removal of support for eastside clans. Fifteen years and this area, which is meant to be significant enough to have its own starting location, has not seen any improvements to playability whatsoever. It's still the same primitive mugger scripts and the same barebones NPCs who all have the same boring-ass items that nobody wants to use because 'a hooked knife' is not inspiring. Absolutely no effort has been made to turn it into a place worth playing in, but since it's pretty much the only place that lends a natural habitat to criminal PCs, players keep trying to make the best of it. Clearly they aren't able to do enough with it, but year after year after year, staff's response is "do better, you're the problem." It's one of the best examples of where Armageddon simply fails as a game.
Staff killed spice when they made it decay in a matter of days. The prices are already completely absurd, it's like 150-300 for one pinch depending on the strain. Bricks are what, 1500? Yeah, that's a soldier's lifetime earnings. To maintain even a casual recreational habit takes a noble's entire stipend. When it then perishes as fast as food, of course noone's gonna spend their money on it. Spice is an RP prop, it's something you do when others are looking because smoking spice is part of your character concept. But you might buy it and simply have no occasion to be seen doing it for the next few days, and then it's gone. Why does it perish so fast? Judging by the descriptions, it's pretty much like slightly fluffier hashish. I can't think of any RL narcotic that rots in a week.
People are more than willing to pay for RP props if it isn't financially crippling. They buy drinks all the time even though alcohol has no real benefits. People would buy spice as well if it lasted long enough to still have it when the right scene comes along, and if it wasn't basically ten times as expensive as cocaine. This shit is literally picked up off the ground, and there's a whole village full of people who make a living collecting it. Why exactly does a single joint cost as much as an entire barrel of water? It should be like 30 'sid for a tube. Leave one particular spice as the expensive luxury drug that really rich characters can boast about smoking and make the rest cheap. We've got ragged wretches in the 'rinth who are supposed to be spiceheads; how the flying fuck are we to believe they can afford it?
The 'rinth as a whole really reflects the fact that it was conceived in the 90s by teenagers. It's like a WoW instance or something, just featureless alleys and empty buildings with the occasional mindless NPC that either attacks you suicidally or ignores your existence depending on some binary character flag. There's nothing to do there unless you make it happen yourself, and since you're alone 99% of the time, it's rather hard to make anything happen. There's no gameplay inherent to the 'rinth unless you want to play hack'n'slash with thugs which, of course, staff will come down on you like a ton of bricks for if they notice. I think fully half of the personal animations I've ever had on Arm are from staff lashing out in fury because I dared fight an NPC in this #LAWLESS hellhole where life is worthless and the NPCs kill eachother literally all the time. There are no activities inherent to this sphere save for killing NPCs, and that's severely frowned upon. Precisely what do they expect players to occupy themselves with in the' rinth? You can stand on Hathor's for six hours straight and meet nobody. There is nothing to do there.
People who play 'rinthers almost invariably fall into the inevitable trap of just being southside most of the time. At least there's some interaction there. You might start out with every intention of staying true to the spirit of the 'rinth, but pretty soon you find that the spirit of the 'rinth entails wasting away in crippling boredom and zero character progression. If you play the way they want you to, you'll spend a year doing nothing and end your life with apprentice skills because somehow in this place, which is inhabited by the most desperate and unscrupulous murderers, getting in a bit of combat practice is something you have to be clandestine about because some idiot will animate Iggs and chase you across the entire sphere to yell at you for daring to get in a fight.
Every time I've played in the Guild - One-Eye Amos, Saraan the Usurer, Sahad, and a few others further back - the same thing always happens: I play actively enough that they recruit me because any swinging dick who can log in more than twice a week is the best the clan can hope for, and then we sit around for months trying to come up with any reason to exist. Eventually we find an opportunity to carry out a hit or something like that, and since the game is a village of 50 inhabitants, everybody immediately knows all about it and some templar who's equally desperate for purpose in life will decide to crack down on the three dudes who make up the Zalanthan mafia. Snip, snap and the latest generation of Guilders are gone. Either that or they just die to random PvE shit because it's such an empty existence that you end up just doing weird things for the sake of it.
Never across any of these characters has there been any meaningful connection between the Guild PCs and the powerful shadow cabal behind the clan. You join, you get urged to sell spice, it turns out that nobody wants spice for the aforementioned reasons, and then when you try to get creative with ideas of things to do, the clan staff immediately goes into radio silence. I still recall when we tried for a month to get our storyteller to load up a fucking key we were supposed to have, for an office that was supposed to be the clanlead's actual office, and it just never happened. We wanted to turn the back room into more of a barracks for newer hires so that we could offer a locked door and a private box for belongings to people without needing to trust them with the clan's entire assets. Instead you have to vet people for fucking weeks in order to ensure they're serious and not some moron who's gonna help himself to the cash, spice and poisons that you basically have to leave sitting out since the ZALANTHAN FUCKING MAFIA can't have something that really resembles a safehouse. As a result, the clan can't maintain a reasonable population. On the eastside they have entire buildings for defunct clans, but the supposed centerpiece of Allanak's underworld has to operate out of a goddamn closet that's literally filled to capacity so that you can't drop a dead body in there. It's nothing short of absurd.
Since I started playing in like 2004 or something, the only things that have changed in the 'rinth are the addition of some useless rooftops and the removal of support for eastside clans. Fifteen years and this area, which is meant to be significant enough to have its own starting location, has not seen any improvements to playability whatsoever. It's still the same primitive mugger scripts and the same barebones NPCs who all have the same boring-ass items that nobody wants to use because 'a hooked knife' is not inspiring. Absolutely no effort has been made to turn it into a place worth playing in, but since it's pretty much the only place that lends a natural habitat to criminal PCs, players keep trying to make the best of it. Clearly they aren't able to do enough with it, but year after year after year, staff's response is "do better, you're the problem." It's one of the best examples of where Armageddon simply fails as a game.
