Why is Armageddon bad at retaining players?

Players did sort of challenge staff at one point, causing Nyr to quit. Unfortunately, not much changed--his replacements were not quite as vile as him, but they're still similar types, probably handpicked and trained by him. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. There's four main things that Nyr brought to the game:

- Disdain for and hostility towards the playerbase
- Crippling bureaucracy preventing lower-level staff from doing anything
- Systematic culling of content and options
- Gaslighting, lying and generally misleading the playerbase

None of these things are as bad now as they were then (except maybe the bureaucracy), but none of them are gone, either. However, these issues aren't readily apparent to a new player and probably have little direct impact on retention. Instead, what deters new players is the two primary consequences of these four issues: a lack of story and a culture of PKing for sport. These are the results of a disillusioned playerbase that sticks around out of habit but doesn't hold the game in high regard.

Before she left, Sanvean used to make these videos where she talked about Armageddon and being on staff. At one point she explained that back in the early days, the game had a reputation for having the rudest staff amongst MUDs. She worked to curtail that, and for a number of years the main problem was something as comparatively benign as favoritism. Then she left and staff bounced right back to treating players like shit. There's relatively little favoritism now, in large part because having favorites amongst players requires actually liking some of them. I'm sure there's still members of staff who have friends in the playerbase, but not to the extent of visibly pampering groups of them. I would take some gypsy snowflakes and Sandman crews over callous indifference and naysaying any day. At least shit actually happened back then.

When favoritism was more prevalent, it meant some players got a lot of support, and others strove to become the new faves. People actually tried to do things of note and were enabled, sometimes unfairly, by staff. The game had a real story to it, and world-changing events that drove players to care and to share their excitement. Nowadays, with nothing to get excited about and no story to channel one's efforts into, the game has become this mercantilistic power chase where the only way to feel relevant is to prey on other players. A new player will discover this very quickly as they're often the prey, and then they'll be left with a feeling of "why should I bother with this? It's not like there's a great story to participate in. Best case scenario, I learn how to become powerful myself and do the same to others."

Closing so many clans and areas has really taken the wind of the game's sails. Coupled with the lack of meaningful HRPTs, it has turned the game into something more akin to an MMORPG where you pick your class, grind your skills, get your gear and then proceed to use it all to compete with other players. What else are people supposed to strive for anymore? There's no Tuluk or any of its associated conflicts with Allanak. There's no meaningful threat of defilers anymore. There's no noticeable political tension as noble houses have diminished to such an extent that they're basically just pointless celebrities now. You can't expect every player to have the tenacity to start the next Crimson Wind, nor would most players be supported in doing so.

A new player will arrive and see nothing to this game but the incentive to beat others in PvP. As soon as they find that karma is the main factor in that, and how absurdly long they'll have to chase that carrot, they'll leave wondering what's supposed to be so great about RPIs.

The worst part is how preventable this state of affairs is. How hard is it to drum up a war between Allanak and Tuluk? It requires no new content, just a very basic plan. They've had several years now to do something with Tuluk and they've done nothing whatsoever. Just fucking reopen it and have Muk declare war on Tek. It would have the whole game buzzing with excitement for ages, it would be a healthier outlet for those who enjoy PvP, and the two cities are far enough apart that anyone without an interest in PvP can simply choose not to partake. Every clan in the game could have some part to play in that, whether as soldiers who finally have a purpose or merchants choosing sides or nervous tribals wary of getting caught in the middle.

Instead it's year after year of NPC gith vaguely pestering the Byn and Kurac. Yay.

Do they though? Or do they observe code savvy players and work to thwart their progress?

It's particularly puzzling how staff seems deathly afraid of some aspects of the code and completely laissez-faire with others. You mention stealth and magick--these two things can be used to such gamebreaking effect that it almost doesn't make sense to try anything else. Meanwhile, mundane weapon skills are apparently so dangerous to the game that rising above journeyman is something they simply don't want you to do. Sneak and hide are undetectable invisibility on the right classes, backstab and sap are consistent OHKs if your character is developed correctly, peraine remains an almost failproof PKing tool despite efforts to prevent stockpiling it, and magick has become something you just graft onto a character for more power. But god forbid someone manages to master their fucking slashing weapons skill.

Of all the mechanics that can be used for PvP, mundane round-by-round combat is by far the worst. There's a whole category of classes whose main selling point is that they can raise the standard combat skills higher than other classes, but you're pretty much not allowed to do so. The infamous plateau occurs somewhere around journeyman, and Brokkr has opined that anything above this is exceptional. Fucking journeyman. You almost start there if you make a heavy-combat character, and you'll reach it inside a month of play with any class. They've gone to great lengths to remove all the tricks that people used to get past the plateau. Meanwhile, nobody seems to give the remotest of shits about literally any other skills in the game. Noone bats an eye when you max backstab in two weeks, noone cares that half the playerbase has master sneak and hide, etc.

Recently there was a big discussion on the GDB about how all PvP seems to take the form of surprise attacks and OHKs. Well, it's no fucking wonder when the only skills people can realistically train to meaningful levels are the ones that facilitate that. Every combat character easily maxes their parry and shield use, but pretty much all of them are stuck at the midway point for weapon skills. Unless you're in the extreme end of the strength spectrum and use a bludgeoning weapon against newbies or unarmed people, you can't kill anyone with a character like that. Two characters with master parry and journeyman chopping can hack away at eachother for a full minute. Unless you can physically prevent the other guy from leaving the room, you won't be killing him. So once you've learned that fact, you plan your next PC around backstab or poisons or magick.

Brokkr has staunchly resisted any attempts to address this issue. In fact, he made it worse when he changed the code so that merely missing was not enough, the target also had to have high defense in order for you to gain weapon skills. This removed the last few tricks that one could use to overcome this obstacle, e.g. blindfighting and high-agility animals. The only way to surpass mediocrity now is to spar extensively with extremely long-lived fighters, and most of the time there just isn't one of those in any given clan, let alone any that want to train constantly the way you need to do it in order to get anything out of it.

If I ever make a character again, it sure as hell won't be a heavy-combat class, knowing that its class-defining skills are treated like nuclear bombs despite the fact that they're anything but. Since there's no story left in the game, I'll plan my characters around the PvP that I know will come my way whether or not I seek it out. Why wouldn't I choose to play miscreant #1512489 and master literally every non-combat skill, or an infiltrator for the highest possible backstab? I sure as fuck am not picking a class that blows in the sole remaining active venue of roleplay.

Ok, this is a great post.

Accurately and concisely describes the current situation (problems) in Armageddon.

That's not correct. Weapon skills are subject to the same off vs. def check. Brokkr has confirmed it a few times in the past.

gdb.armageddon.org/index.php/topic,54282.msg1024139.html#msg1024139


gdb.armageddon.org/index.php/topic,54582.msg1028929.html#msg1028929


gdb.armageddon.org/index.php/topic,54518.msg1027925.html#msg1027925

One particular consequence of this is the fact that characters usually get pigeonholed into one weapon skill. Unless you can raise multiple weapon skills in tandem within the same timer windows, your offense will outpace them. It's especially bad to alternate weapons without making sure at least one of them keeps up with offense or you might end up with 20 in one, 30 in another, 35 in a third, and 60 offense or something. Whenever your offense reaches the point where it no longer goes up doing whatever your character typically does, your weapon skills will no longer raise, either. Even one that's at the starting point for your class. In the past, as long as you could miss, you could raise your skills. These changes were made to stop people from maxing their weapon skills and offense by blindfighting gortoks and stuff like that, which makes sense, but they have some severe side effects.

Frequent unarmed training is absolutely ruinous to your long-term skill growth for the same reason. Anytime you gain a point in offense without a corresponding gain in your desired weapon skills, you saddle yourself with a -1 to your effective weapon skill caps. When Bynners show up for unarmed training, they're literally hurting their own characters' future effectiveness. In theory, if you maxed out your offense exclusively through unarmed fighting, you will be left with a character that can never gain a single point in their novice weapon skills even if you can fight things that'll dodge you (unless those opponents have maxed defense, which essentially noone/nothing does).

Offense is your enemy. It always was, a little bit, because high offense makes it harder to miss; but now it can also stop those misses from improving your skills.

I do have to correct myself, though: it seems Nergal made that change, not Brokkr.

If this were the GDB, you two would be arguing for 6 pages about who's right. Good thing this isn't the GDB.

Speaking of the GDB, Is Friday asked a question about tracking PKs that staff never answered, and then players like Heade and HavokBlue convinced themselves that staff do not in fact have reliable tools to track PK.

Is Friday: I assume you have a way of tracking them besides PK reports, or at least notice "hey this many a month usually go unreported".
HavokBlue: There's not an easy way to pull the data but even if you generously assume that there are three times as many PKs as are reported you're getting percentage points
Heade: If they have no way of enforcing PK reporting, since they can't pull data on PKs directly from the server

Staff, since you clearly read this, log in to your staff page and pull up the kill log. Learn what a regular expression is if you don't already know and search for lines with two sets of parentheses. This will at least get you occurrences where one account's character landed a killing blow on another account's character. After that, I dunno, pay attention to who dies in your fucking game of suspicious circumstances, like poison or bleeding out, and figure out what happened using the runlog. That would require caring about your game, but it's so much fun, I promise.

I believe the better discussion to have would be why player-killing overwhelmingly sucks, as opposed to the current way the conversation is spinning on the GDB of "there's too much PK!"

Let's assume I am renting a property. While I am enjoying said rental property, some crackhead comes and shits on my porch. What a terrible experience for me as a renter. I am not interested in my landlord telling me, "Oh, that barely ever happens!" Especially when my neighbors complain about the same alleged two or three porch-shitting crackheads that the landlord likes. See where this metaphor is going?

Losing a character in Armageddon is more an issue than a porch-shitting crackhead: you don't lose hundreds of hours of effort dealing with the latter. If the landlord isn't interested in protecting the property and resolving the issue, we move on to other options where the neighborhood isn't infested with crackheads that enjoy shitting on porches.

Unfortunately, fixing the combat system and making player-kills not suck is too much effort for the current staff team. Nessalin isn't codedly competent enough to pull it off, and he would never tolerate someone better than his amateur self on the team to do it.