Problems with Arm

youtu.be/BWFLztKBrLY

Not only is this a great series on Collegehumor, but out of touch staff/administration/owners isn't just a MUD thing.

There is definitely a certain level of bullheadedness amongst staff that I find genuinely baffling when it comes to things like this. I have no idea how they can be so blind to the fact that players are investing so much time and effort into their play - perhaps even more than staff, that dropping ten gith onto a tile and calling it a world response is just such an utter show of contempt and apathy.
Of course sometimes it needs to happen, or realistically would happen, Amos shaking his butt at the entrance of that huge gith lair should warrant something, But those moments are far rarer than I personally would like. And when these things do happen, like you said, all you can say is at least you had fun and just swallow it. The only other options are what.... quit, get angry and then in doing so validate every single strange grudge a staff member has fabricated in their head about you?

It truly is an apocalyptic world.

It's not all that baffling when you think about what kind of a person makes a "good" staff member in the eyes of the people who hire staff, the producers. When players effectively have no control over what happens in the game, to other characters, or sometimes even to their own characters, often the most appealing position for many people is going to be a position where control can be had. There's a selection bias: staff have had total control of the game for years, rarely giving an inch to any player they did not personally favor, so joining and remaining on staff requires maintaining a similar attitude to some extent. I think this also helps explain why the staff body takes players that genuinely seem good and chew them up until they're authoritarian assholes. It's somwehat like the Stanford prison experiment and the selection bias for getting wardens. They wanted students interested in helping with an experiment on "prison life", and they got aggressive, authoritarian people who lacked empathy. But staff seem to get a mix of such people, and decent people who can be remolded into the proper "warden" for a time. If we look at the game through that lens, it's no wonder that these people entirely disregard the time investment players put into the game. Staff have won the metagame of having control over the game, and no other player can say they've done the same.

It was 4 that ended up killing me, but they did oddly use 6 in the end after I killed the first 2

this was not an accident, and one responsible no longer is on the staff

Sirra,

You believe some Internet rumor that staff would break the rules over me telling you that we totally would never do such a thing? Noted. A staff member will arrive on the board we banned people for posting on shortly to explain that we would never break the rules.

Your Staff Complaint request has been resolved.

Nessalin
Producer
ArmageddonMUD