Dead forum is dead but...Arm GDB: Request feedback

If we look at the mudding scene as a whole, I don't think its downward trajectory has accelerated in the last handful of years. We've got games like Arx that thrive, and while one would be an idiot to deny that players eventually grow older and move away from their hobbies, Armageddon's decline does not fit into the natural parameters of the toll of time. People have been "growing old" and "moving on to graphical games" for ages. We've heard staff lamenting how the shift away from university computer labs to smartphones is to blame for this, but the steep decline in players can demonstrably be traced back to a time about five or six years ago. It's not as if smartphones were invented in 2016.

No, what transpired was that ArmageddonMUD became a game where nothing happened. If one had to put a pin on the point in time when this began, it would be the year leading up to Tuluk's closing. It's not so much that the closing of the city was in itself the reason; but much like Trump's presidency was a symptom - not the cause - of the rise of far-right extremism in the US, the decline of activity in Tuluk was the result of a game where nothing happened, and where Allanak had always been the place where you could expect at least some measure of dependable activity. So people stopped playing in Tuluk, and it was shut down, and then those who preferred Tuluk left the game, and then the loss of those warm bodies were felt by others, causing more to quit, and so the cycle goes. Now it's a game with like 150 unique weekly logins when in 2015 it had almost twice as many. Smartphone mud clients were not invented in 2015, Brokkr. People stopped playing because nothing kept them interested. If the whole RPMUD community was too old to keep going, why has Arx got 150 players every evening?

Personally, I suspect that this can be traced back to the whole Reborn fiasco around 2007-2010, or whenever that was. For anyone who wasn't around back then, it was suddenly decided that the whole game would be remade and start again from a new era. The reasons are irrelevant by now so I won't go into those, but staff began to work on a whole new client and a fresh game world that would represent Zalanthas in a semi-distant future (with cat people!) and then Armageddon would start afresh from there. Needless to say, that never happened; but in the time leading up to the supposed end of the world as we knew it, ArmageddonMUD embarked on an ending so naively ambitious that it was frankly funny. There was an "End of the World" plot including Dragonsthralls and whatnot, with levels of high fantasy that would rival the most frivolous Forgotten Realms novels. I'm not even joking--they basically approved any and all special applications, allowing anyone to play whatever they wanted, because it was all ending soon. And the plot itself was so over-the-top and so far outside the reach of common man that many players wondered what role they even had in it. In fact, people began to complain that things had grown so far-fetched that they felt detached from the setting as a whole. You couldn't even feel like you were relevant if you weren't a quasi-psionicist Dragonsthrall defiler minion.

And then, of course, it came to pass that Armageddon Reborn was not in fact going to happen. It took quite a while for it to sink in, especially because staff denied it for quite a while and kept pretending that work was still being done, but finally it was cancelled in... 2011? Something like that. By that point, players had been complaining rather vocally that they had no agency, because no fucking wonder, anyone playing anything resembling a normal person was washed away in a sea of crazy nonsense and unrestricted special apps. I recall playing in the Guild at the time and it had no less than three mindbenders, two Nilazi and an immortal vampire demon in it, all at once.

So when it was officially declared that the game would continue as it had, staff also noted that they would change their policy: due to the complaints from people who had become jaded with the hamfisted, Forgotten Realms-esque nature of the End of the World plot, they would henceforth leave it up to players to decide the outcome of the game. In other words, they built a wall in the middle of the Formula 1 track mid-race and declared that from now on, you were responsible for keeping the show going. And so, under the dubious leadership of Nyr the Narcissist, everyone had to suffer through that ridiculous whiplash of going from "everything is balls-to-the-walls crazy" to "nothing happens whatsoever unless you personally construct it from absolute scratch, with little to no assistance - and often outright obstruction - from staff."

And thence followed several years of players finding that nothing would happen unless they could fully construct every step of the ladder themselves, and every other step that they tried to build, they were told no; that step does not align with staff's prediction, so it is not approved. Unsurprisingly, the gears ground to a halt. For years, absolutely fucking nothing happened because staff offered no support for anything, clinging desperately to Nyr's offended and intentionally obstructionist notion of "do everything yourself or else it won't happen." Player numbers began to dwindle, and then it gradually became clear that noone wanted to actually play in Tuluk - the sphere where DIY roleplay was the norm - so finally it was shut down. It was rather sudden, in fact; I won't say it happened literally overnight, but it wasn't much more than a month or so from warning to action.

And then we were left with a game that was at one time designed wholly around the concept of two warring city-states, but where one had been shut down. Now, when it happened, staff promised that the resources that had once gone into the maintenance of Tuluk would now be focused on Allanak, but... that just never actually happened. Allanak was not awash in plots and intrigue. There were no signs whatsoever of any increase in efforts to make the game's sole remaining city more attractive than it had been. If anything, I'm tempted to say that staff efforts in Allanak decreased in the following handful of years which, if we get right down to it, appears to me the reason that the player numbers started to dwindle. I believe the playerbase could have tolerated the closing of Tuluk if it had led to a single city rife with action, intrigue and vibrancy, but that did not happen. It was a city - and a game - where absolutely nothing fucking happened for several consecutive years. And that brings us close to present day.

Finally they opened Tuluk again. People had asked for it for years. Unfortunately, they had begun asking for it during a time when the player numbers were still healthy enough to sustain it, and staff offered no response whatsoever at the time. Then, as the numbers dwindled for the next four or five years, I suppose someone panicked and went, "what do we do?!" Lo and behold, Tuluk is back, but it's back in a time when Armageddon struggles to claw itself above 30 players at peak, and rarely maintains it for more than an hour or two. To make matters worse, Tuluk opened up again with a very brief spectacle that immediately turned to total inactivity as literally nothing happened since. It opened, and then nothing fucking happened since. The gates were flung open and then it was left to stagnate from day fucking one, with no effort whatsoever to attract anyone or keep it thriving.

No fucking wonder this forum is dead. There's nothing happening for anyone to talk about. Staff has proven unable or unwilling to keep the show going, and those players who once had the crativity to make shit happen have been chased away after years of "no, request denied, not allowed" until Armageddon is left with people who think that hunting and crafting is good enough. It's a farce, it's a shame, it was wholly unnecessary; but having watched it happen over the years, it's not some kind of mystery.