Problems with Arm

I don't agree with ignoring people who purposefully try to sabotage Armageddon. They should be made fun of instead.



I've also pretty regularly said that I'm not staff.

There are some, yes. I would've been even more of an ass if there weren't.

Im not even going to shitpost about nergal.

Maybe I'll tell what went down in another thread later. It's a decent story, but it'll out me immediately

One has stakes, something to gain and lose, and both parties are invested narratively and emotionally. The other is loading mobs.

Every word I say is true. I've said I'm not staff numerous times. To you. Answering 'your' question. Every single word - complete truth. Each tiny letter is full of pure truthfulness. Though I do at times misremember things. Frequent times. Very frequent times. But I admit those mistakes ... occasionally.


What your problem is that you are too hung up on that. If I disagree with you, then I must be staff, or a shill, or whatever. Countering an argument with attacks on a persona. Even now, we are somehow talking about me, instead of problems of the OP of this thread. It demonstrates again and again, the uselessness of discourse with some people of these forums, because they are not arguing their views and opinions, they are just stuck in perpetual cycle of bitterness. Sometimes over events that are years, sometimes decades old. Lots of destructiveness, lots of dirision. Absence of actual constructive thought.

I've been called disingenuous. But are you? You support and cheer obvious attempts to cause damage to the game and then post a thread to discuss the games 'problems'.

There are lots of problems. But guess what, this forum is not a solution. There was once a time when it played a useful role. But that was lost.

Also folks, take a deep breath. I have a former Father in law, lived 30 years in a bonafide Plymoth Brethren cult, my ex, her first 12 years. They had a board similar to this trying to work their way to healing. It's a damn game folks, a really good one with lots of flawed players and staff. Take it or leave it? Enjoy life and love your family and friends.

It's the fact that if you play the way that you're ideally supposed to play, your character's skill progress will stall out so early that it isn't satisfying. Skillgains rely entirely on failure, but if you stop failing at journeyman, it feels wrong to say "yep, this is as good as I'll ever get." Especially if your character started out at apprentice. Gating everything behind access to failures, and then making failures absurdly scarce, means people will naturally go looking for them wherever they are. Then you have to dodge staff attention because they don't want you to do that, and pretty soon you're in the mindset of a criminal. Now you want to get your skill-ups done as quickly and efficiently as possible in order to reduce the chance of getting caught, so you resort to even more ridiculous methods just to shorten the time spent on it. And then you realize that you're accomplishing your goals fifty times faster than those who play "correctly."

In many cases, it's also because success rate based on skill level is a linear progression--most skills just give you a success chance equal to your skill points in percents, so if you have 50 in steal, you have a 50% chance to succeed (not counting potential bonuses/penalties from stats and environmental factors) while someone with 90 in the skill has a 90% chance. This means that a lot of skills feel terrible until they're more or less maxed. You can't really play a serious thief if there's a 40% chance of failure every time you steal. If you play the way that a game like this truly ought to be played and only use the skill when there's a specific in-character reason with roleplay behind it and everything, it'll take you so long to get to the point where your character's skills feel relevant and safe to use that it's just an unappealing prospect. Many skills are nearly useless until at least advanced and not really comfortable until master.

As much as idealists want people to think skills don't matter and you should never do anything that isn't completely in-character, that's just not applicable to the game anymore. It may have been, back when there were more important things going on and being codedly competent wasn't the #1 route to roleplay, but times have changed. You can't just talk and emote your way into anything anymore. If Armageddon were Game of Thrones, there's no longer any room for Littlefinger and Cersei. It's a game for the Hound and Oberyn Martell. Players are largely limited to accomplishments that are codedly supported, and that means having high skills. If you tried to play a Littlefinger, what the hell would you do? Who would you spy on? What political landscape would you manipulate? Which wars would you profit from? There's none of that to work with, so if you're not codedly useful in some way, you're nothing.

Some players don't want to accomplish anything significant, of course. There's a whole segment of the playerbase to whom being immersed in a fantasy world is enough on its own, and they're the ones who litter the GDB with nonsense. Skills won't matter to them because their idea of a good time is walking their character to the arena to watch some gladiators fight, or talking to Lord Fuckface about the upcoming festival. Then they go and expect everyone else to be satisfied with that stuff, shooting down every discussion that points out the issues with skill progression and balance because in their minds, those are things that get in the way of roleplay. They don't realize that if everyone plays the way they do, absolutely nothing of any consequence happens in the game and it just becomes one big circle-jerk about festivals and silk shirt sales. Unfortunately, as people on the opposite side of the Armageddon spectrum increasingly abandon the game, it moves in that direction. Then the festival players join staff and that becomes the only thing anyone supports.

Meanwhile you've got Trooper Amos who has spent 45 days playing in the Byn, following the rules, and he's been sitting at journeyman skills since day 8. Not much is going on for Amos, but he's attached to the character after spending so much time with it, so he just waits around hoping something cool will happen eventually. One day he calls an elf the n-word and the elf destroys him in three seconds because that elf was played by someone who knows how the world works. Amos' player doesn't want that to happen to his next character. He wants those years served as a gritty, bloodthirsty mercenary to actually be reflected in his skills, so he starts asking his friends how to do that. He rolls up a character, twinks out, becomes skilled, and suddenly he starts getting involved in all kinds of shit. People try to hire him to kill other people, or hunt rare and dangerous prey. His clanmates all agree that he's the next candidate for leadership, at half the time played as his Bynner. There's an RPT and he excels in combat, earning respect and a line of communication with the templar he assisted. He survives PK attempts and lives long enough to become accomplished and well-known, and the character is a thousand times more satisfying to play than old, forgotten Amos who never amounted to anything.

So he keeps doing that with every character he makes, but now and then, the necessary methods land him in trouble. Staff doesn't like him anymore. They've caught him lazily grinding skills on gith without emoting, or stealing from NPCs for no reason. They stop giving him karma, they stop animating for him, they might even send NPCs after him to show that he's playing the game wrong. He thinks, am I supposed to go back to playing Amos, about whom noone cared and for whom nothing ever happened? Fuck that, he says.