Problems with Arm

- The game is the personal plaything of a select subgroup of staff (mainly Nessalin but a few of his cronies as well).

- Neither staff nor players take criticism very well. It's shunned on official community spaces and interfered with as much as possible on unofficial community spaces. If you take complaints to an unofficial community space you are often shunned. Staff are hyper-defensive when they're personally criticized, particularly at the topmost levels.

- Many game design decisions are poorly-thought out and rarely, if ever, tested before full release. When they are tested, the testing is poorly done and/or insufficient.

- Many game design decisions are done out of self-interest and/or to promote a meta that a particular staff member or group of staff members enjoy. Staff who enjoy indie hunting as a concept were responsible for closing GMH hunter divisions. Staff who enjoy tank mage and stealthy mage play created the current class system. The only player clan to get a sponsored role call for it was founded by a staff member's mortal character. Etc.

- Efficient and semi-efficient means of gaining skills are seen as "not roleplay" or "sub-par roleplay" which gives staff the excuse of interfering with players who don't conform with whatever staff decide is realistic roleplay at any given time.

Those are just my top five.

Simply put I don't feel like there's anything to actually do in this game. The world has clearly been scaled down to fit smaller sorts of plot lines given the dwindling player base, but even so. Where are they? What is there to look forward to at all?
Of course, I don't feel like I need a staff member to put on a little puppet show for me so that I may enjoy myself, but with how many staff members are on board (I do not know how many exactly) you'd think there'd be something to show for it.

Instead, it feels like you're just dropped into an empty room with a wooden stick to play with. And maybe a bit of string. And the stick is tied to a chain to the wall so you can only move it about half a meter. And if you lose the string you don't get a replacement.

And you're wearing a baby bonnet.

There isn't anything to do. Staff doesn't know how to tell a story, and the player-base struggles to tell their own because staff hoards all of the story-telling tools.

Yes. Part of it certainly comes down to preference, and to be quite honest I could just socialize the entire time and enjoy myself with how many different personalites you can bump into for better or for worse.
Though... there still feels like something is lacking to me. Dark Sun is ripe for adventure and excitement, but the last time I picked up Arm a few months ago it just seemed like the usual topic of the week being "An elf was mildly rude at the Gaj" or something like that - Then of course, the players who have little to go off cling to that plot hook with a complete death grip until it's quashed with no satisfying conclusion for anyone. We are starving out here.

Still, if you can stick with it this long and still find refreshment in the game, more power to you. I envy that.

I guess it depends on one's perspective. To me, worthwhile story and stuff-going-on is, first and foremost, visible from the outside. If there's some plot that's completely undetectable to anyone who isn't immediately involved, it doesn't do a whole lot for the game. People run their own private plotlines all the time, but it tends to be confined to the same 20% of the playerbase that knows eachother. If you don't talk to people on Discord, and especially if you're new to Arm, it is a game where nothing happens. You can spend a full month walking around the city for six hours every day and not see the first sign of anything remotely interesting. You'll also barely meet anyone. People mostly stay behind closed doors, as do their plots.

There's still the occasional murder plot and whatnot, but there'll be three people involved, and there'll be nothing going on that actually matters in the grand scheme of things. It's all meaningless, small-scale, short-lived and always reeks of "there's nothing better to do." With no real changes in the game's dynamics and almost no player agency, these mini-plots tend to fall into the same handful of repetitive categories. I can't remember the last time anything happened on Armageddon that genuinely impressed me. It's been years of 'who killed Amos?' and 'which templar should I side with this time?' That and an absolutely endless cavalcade of gith attacking Byn/Kurac patrols, with no real result in sight for years.

Compare this to the days when Allanak and Tuluk warred repeatedly, when Tuluk and Luir's were conquered and subsequently liberated, when the dwarven race rebelled against Allanak, when world-renowned sorcerers struck fear into the population, armies moved out to conquer lands or priceless resources, noble houses were defeated, etc. Even if I take the rose-tinted glasses off, I have clear memories of these things, nobles whose accomplishments are remembered to this day, logs of 10+ players in each of Allanak's taverns on a nightly basis, etc. While there could still be dull days back then, they were not the norm. There weren't these stretches of literal RL years where time basically stood still.

Can you name one thing from the last three years that warrants mention alongside events like these?

That happened within a single RL year. Two years before, Luir's was liberated from mantis invasion. The year before that, Tuluki rebels freed Gol Krathu from Allanaki occupation. Compared to events like these, what passes for story in today's Armageddon is like six-second vine clips compared to blockbuster movies. It's simply not worth taking part of if one cares about more than low-level personal intrigue. The history of Zalanthas has not moved forward since the Reborn fiasco. The closing of Tuluk is the only exception, and that wasn't exactly a positive and game-enriching event. It was just an administrative decision that was rammed into the game and forgotten. As far as actual story goes, the game is stone dead.

The five latest entries in the game's chronology have to do with gith. That covers twelve in-game years. The two preceding entries are from when some templars fought eachother. The one before those is about some senate meeting. The one before that is from when Tuluk closed, almost five fucking years ago. For five RL years, there's nothing in the timeline that matters to you if you weren't involved in the gith shit or closely affiliated with the templarate during that ministry plotline. Even if you were, it only really affected the templars.

Having played exclusively in Allanak during this "era," I can attest to the fact that I never heard about any of this until tavern posts described it after the fact. Hell, the Tablelands stuff never reached Allanak's gossip channels at all. I played the Guild leader's right-hand man during that so-called HRPT and we legitimately did not hear even so much as a rumor about it. If I didn't read forums, I wouldn't know it happened. Absolutely none of the timeline entries from the last five years had any effect whatsoever on any PC I played during that period.

If you want some simple combat fun against NPC gith, Byn and Kurac have that. If you want front row spectator seats to whatever staff do for templars, the militia has that. If that's enough for you, you might be satisfied with Armageddon. If you want anything more advanced than that, however, it doesn't really exist anymore, and certainly not on any consistent and inclusive basis. It went from a game that could legitimately be compared to things like Game of Thrones, to something more akin to a WoW RP-PvP server.

I remember a time when a templar was cast out of the templarate in disgrace, fled into the 'rinth, took refuge with the Guild, and was eventually betrayed and assassinated before he could finish teaching the Guild boss literacy. I can't see anything like that happening today. The templar would be force-stored, and in the unlikely event that I'm wrong about that, it would be the biggest thing that happened all year and half the plot-starved playerbase would flock to the 'rinth to stake a claim to a role in the plot, resulting in the templar's demise within hours. At the time, this was a fairly minor and isolated plot. It wasn't considered a huge deal, because at the same time there were wars, significant political maneuvers, universally feared PC villains, 15+ active clans, and other things like that. What was then a minor plotline would today be deemed too big for the game. That's what has happened to Armageddon.

I've never lacked in game activities to do. But in the end, I'm not going to take the game too seriously.. I've always lost. Always rolled with the punches. Even when I've been murdered by packs of animated gith that chased me all the way to about 6 rooms from Alllanak. It soured me a bit when my character hadn't done anything to rattle 2 waves of gith that proceeded to still run after me when I climbed the shield wall. Felt like they wanted to kill me. And they did. I rolled with the punches and hung my head then got to say it was at least fun huh.

I think most of us are here because Armageddon MUD isn't improving.. It's been diluted through an epidemic of taking away things people enjoyed or have the possibility to enjoy rather than making existing things shine. Playing a ranger was the only time I got to really enjoy myself in the game because they could do amazing things all by myself, if I invested in it. I didn't need others and that's what I wanted! I enjoyed higher benchmarks for starting in the new system now. But some of the class changes seem short-sighted though, and they make little to no sense. At a glance, the middling classes look BAD. SCOUTs can't Scan as well as laborers and Inflitrators can't infiltrate with sneak and hide as good as miscreants either. Artisans are shittier merchants, and enforcer looks deceptively good because 95% of the players won't be able to branch the skills that'd make it great. Why do miscreants get higher forage than the merchant types? Oh right, why does miscreant get master poisoning too?! And brew? Yeah... Based on what I've seen and the couple of friends I've spoken to this hasn't been well received. At all.

I'm discouraged and deeply disheartened to try again because of many factors now. It's a hard pill to swallow when you know someone doesn't want you, or your ideas, in their game. I still won't blame staff as Armageddon's biggest issue. Problem with some people nowadays is they analyze other humans flaws through a moral microscope, find the first grain of filth that validates their opinions, then demonize in hopes of eschewing others views to fit their own personal agenda.

I don't know staffers in real life. My staff talks were courteous.. The game isn't terrible. RP and the characters around me has always been stellar. The new systems is to be set up where you can, supposedly, get in game and start playing a character able to immediately do stuff. That's good in premise.