Post by punished ppurg on Feb 5, 2022 22:05:57 GMT -5
Low effort post copied from the shadowspeak. Join us for impotent discussion at my signature's link.
Apocalypse has shuttered its ports once more. What went wrong?
I'm just going to itemize my points here and reflect on what I think were missteps. In no particular order
1. Apoc's dev cycle, although forgivable, didn't focus on in-world amenities and setting as much as it should have in hindsight. For instance, the Shetno opening <playing the game from the approximation of Red Storm> created a lacking environment for societal development -- this means that issues that should have been polished or addressed with game culture were never really seen, since that area (high society) was never really explored. Because it wasn't constructed soon enough. you NEED a social core of social nerds grooving around in your game world to provide some tangibility and longevity; and if you don't have that, you lose one of the fundamentals of MUD's player retention. Evolution of Esos figured this out when it killed its city and made everything the wilderness.
2. Because of that, the game's culture never really ascended from the hack and slash crap that Arm is at its core. It is, at its core, a hack and slash game. You need the spook of player culture in order to make the game ascend from that. Arm is stuck in a monke inheritor's paralyzed state because they recognize this
3. Apoc sourced for its staffers the lukewarm entities of the Arm community, that is, the opportunists who were eager to play in both playgrounds. I never noticed the effort of a grand vision or overarching plotline, or something to address the weaknesses caused by point 1. I myself asked onboard in a dev capacity and I wasn't given the privs, I know a couple other people who are outspoken in the shadowboard community asked on and were not given privs. And I recognize it's Ikthe's right to choose whoever he wants to give privs in his own project; however, when he repeatedly passes up us shadowboarders, and instead brings on these lukewarm opportunists, these toesuckers, he's going to get what he got. I know I didn't suck his toes to get on the game's staff -- maybe I needed to, like the others? Maybe I need to be humble enough to play in a catshit infested sandbox for a few IRL months before the maintainer gives me the pooper scooper? At any rate, Ikthe's choice of staffers is undeniably a factor in the lack of elevated game culture, the mismanagement, the stagnation, and ultimately the playerbase's exodus and the game's shuttering.
4. Apoc's appeal to a more "original" flavor of Armageddon was not the right direction in my opinion. We can see that Arm is fundamentally flawed in its design, by rite of obsolete mechanics and paradigms that just don't work in 2020+. Apoc should have instead focused on improving the things that ARE wrong with Arm (stat point buy, better skill acquisition, social hierarchies, codified groups / accessible player clans, etc.) and made the statement that not only are these improvements obviously beneficial to the gameplay experience of Arm - but they're also generally easy changes to make. You can't catch a playerbase by saying "We're X but an old version!" unless you are Oldschool Runescape and you have 100k+ people out there waiting for a codebase rollback. Arm's player diaspora is too small for "rollback to the old days" to necessarily guarantee an active playerbase, and because of that, effort should be made to improve the code's paradigms to 2020+ level to attract players that way.
5. Arm's crafting system is crap. With a new db, Apoc had the opportunity to radically improve Arm's crafting system. To my understanding this wasn't really done. Even this sort of thing could have offset the issues from point 1.
That's all I can really brainstorm right now. I know that when I played Apoc I had a not-too-good time. The best way I can describe it is, an Armageddon blow-up doll. It might look the same from a distance and you can fuck with it, but I don't think there's any lights on in there.
Anyhow, credit to Ikthe for trying. Hopefully the game comes back completely perfect and blows all our minds if it ever returns.
I recognize that all I can do is reflect in hindsight from my (very) limited perspective, and I can't offer any solutions aside from my criticism.
1. Apoc's dev cycle, although forgivable, didn't focus on in-world amenities and setting as much as it should have in hindsight. For instance, the Shetno opening <playing the game from the approximation of Red Storm> created a lacking environment for societal development -- this means that issues that should have been polished or addressed with game culture were never really seen, since that area (high society) was never really explored. Because it wasn't constructed soon enough. you NEED a social core of social nerds grooving around in your game world to provide some tangibility and longevity; and if you don't have that, you lose one of the fundamentals of MUD's player retention. Evolution of Esos figured this out when it killed its city and made everything the wilderness.
2. Because of that, the game's culture never really ascended from the hack and slash crap that Arm is at its core. It is, at its core, a hack and slash game. You need the spook of player culture in order to make the game ascend from that. Arm is stuck in a monke inheritor's paralyzed state because they recognize this
3. Apoc sourced for its staffers the lukewarm entities of the Arm community, that is, the opportunists who were eager to play in both playgrounds. I never noticed the effort of a grand vision or overarching plotline, or something to address the weaknesses caused by point 1. I myself asked onboard in a dev capacity and I wasn't given the privs, I know a couple other people who are outspoken in the shadowboard community asked on and were not given privs. And I recognize it's Ikthe's right to choose whoever he wants to give privs in his own project; however, when he repeatedly passes up us shadowboarders, and instead brings on these lukewarm opportunists, these toesuckers, he's going to get what he got. I know I didn't suck his toes to get on the game's staff -- maybe I needed to, like the others? Maybe I need to be humble enough to play in a catshit infested sandbox for a few IRL months before the maintainer gives me the pooper scooper? At any rate, Ikthe's choice of staffers is undeniably a factor in the lack of elevated game culture, the mismanagement, the stagnation, and ultimately the playerbase's exodus and the game's shuttering.
4. Apoc's appeal to a more "original" flavor of Armageddon was not the right direction in my opinion. We can see that Arm is fundamentally flawed in its design, by rite of obsolete mechanics and paradigms that just don't work in 2020+. Apoc should have instead focused on improving the things that ARE wrong with Arm (stat point buy, better skill acquisition, social hierarchies, codified groups / accessible player clans, etc.) and made the statement that not only are these improvements obviously beneficial to the gameplay experience of Arm - but they're also generally easy changes to make. You can't catch a playerbase by saying "We're X but an old version!" unless you are Oldschool Runescape and you have 100k+ people out there waiting for a codebase rollback. Arm's player diaspora is too small for "rollback to the old days" to necessarily guarantee an active playerbase, and because of that, effort should be made to improve the code's paradigms to 2020+ level to attract players that way.
5. Arm's crafting system is crap. With a new db, Apoc had the opportunity to radically improve Arm's crafting system. To my understanding this wasn't really done. Even this sort of thing could have offset the issues from point 1.
That's all I can really brainstorm right now. I know that when I played Apoc I had a not-too-good time. The best way I can describe it is, an Armageddon blow-up doll. It might look the same from a distance and you can fuck with it, but I don't think there's any lights on in there.
Anyhow, credit to Ikthe for trying. Hopefully the game comes back completely perfect and blows all our minds if it ever returns.
I recognize that all I can do is reflect in hindsight from my (very) limited perspective, and I can't offer any solutions aside from my criticism.