mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on Feb 28, 2022 14:30:35 GMT -5
A couple of years ago, I took a look at the trends in Armageddon's weekly updates, mainly looking at player numbers. Since Armageddon staff (to their credit) actually provide data on weekly login and account creation info, it only makes sense to analyze it. Since staff seem unwilling to actually make tools to do that, I retooled a Python script written for me by a former producer a couple years ago to take a second look at the game again.
Looking at the GDB recently, specifically at a thread staff used to collect feedback, something struck me. Many players deny that the player base is shrinking and offer no proof to their claims. Let's look at actual data.
My previous post from 2020 covers 2014-2019. I'm not going to try to repeat myself too much, as a lot of the trends are the same and the reasons for them are pretty similar. This post covers data from 2014 to 2021. Why start at 2014? The full data for 2013 simply isn't available on the game's site. I chalk it up to website updates rather than any malicious intent. The data stops at the end of 2021 because, well, 2022 isn't done yet.
Anyway, let's start with player numbers, week by week. You probably notice that there are many dips and spikes in the data, but there is clearly a general downward trend throughout the entire set of data, including the last two years which were previously not covered yet. Interestingly, at a glance, it looks like there is a steep spike that coincides with the start of the Covid pandemic in most of the world, followed by a sharp drop several weeks later. It seems like there was a chance to recapture players during quarantine, but about as many people left as the people that joined/rejoined the game. In fact, the last time that the game had more than 200 logins per week was a 7-week stretch from the end of March 2020 to the middle of May 2020, which lines up almost perfectly with that time period.
Next, I've taken yearly averages of the data and plotted them on a less messy chart: Think of this as a half-decent trend line for the previous chart. The average loss of logins amounts to about 12 per year. The steeper-than-average losses occur in 2015 (-17), 2016 (-16), and 2021 (-14). Overall though, it's pretty steady and doesn't show any signs of slowing down. Theoretically, it should slow down and curve toward a horizontal line once everyone that would ever consider leaving actually does. But it seems the game isn't close to that point yet, even if it's eventually going to get there at this rate. Let's take a look at new accounts next: Week by week, Armageddon saw a really large amount of new players (or at least, new accounts) entering the game between 2014 and mid 2018. Then, for some reason, new accounts dropped to a rate below 20 per week pretty consistently, with a few exceptions. The spikes do not really easily match up with world events, suggesting a lot of the spikes in logins from the past two years are from returning players logging into old accounts. The sudden drop is also easy to see looking at a chart that tracks yearly average new accounts: There is just a sudden drop from 2017 to 2018 and into 2019 that the game never recovered from to this date. As far as why this has happened, I can only speculate. First of all, the game has made zero effort to modernize. It is stuck in Diku while other roleplaying MU*s that are attracting more new players are distancing itself from this system and similarly old systems. Secondly, the game's staff haven't bothered to make itself available on newer MU* directories like Grapevine. Finally, the game does not have a good reputation. Its primary reputation in the wider MU* community is that of a game that harbors sex pests and petty power-trippers. People who refuse to play nice in a sandbox. If Armageddon happened to fix all of these issues it might have a better chance of seeing an uptick in new players.
If you subtract the total weekly logins from the amount of new accounts, you can get a rough idea of what player retention looks like week-per-week, and on average. The story these two charts tell, in my opinion, is one where Armageddon seems to have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Armageddon's player base was in free fall for several years, losing more players than it could gain. For a relatively short time in the game's history, it seemed like it was turning itself around. And then the game squandered its biggest opportunity for growth: when everyone was stuck at home due to a worldwide pandemic, Armageddon's players and staff still failed to pull in the influx of players who were new to MUDs at a rate faster than it was losing members of its player base. In conclusion, a few stray thoughts: Counting errors: While the numbers are pulled directly from the website, the website makes no distinction between player and staff accounts. It is very likely that the logins-per-week number is inflated by about 10-15 depending on how many staff log in at least once a week.
Predictions for the future: Armageddon will continue to lose players at a rate of roughly 5-8% of its player base until it hits a minimum comprised mainly of the lifers: long-time vets of the game and staff. (A Venn diagram of these groups probably has a lot of overlap.) That being said, I don't think it's realistic to expect that Armageddon will "die" in the same way other MU*s die, where the server is up and running but the game consistently shows 0 players logged in. Why bother?: This data is open and available to everyone. But nobody analyzes it. Staff used to analyze it back when the numbers said good things about the game. Now that they say depressing things, they just don't comment, and allow players to believe the delusion that the game is still as alive as it ever was. If Armageddon is to be "restored", players need to be honest with themselves and each other about how and why the game has failed. As for me, I don't mind checking on the numbers once every year or two. I think it's funny tbh. |
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delerak
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Post by delerak on Feb 28, 2022 16:20:33 GMT -5
Solid post Mehtastic. It's good to see you're still around.
I tried coming back pretty hard during the Q1 of 2020, I had plenty of time with the pandemic in full force and did some good work with the CW. I already laid out why I left in my video but I like to reiterate my points that staff avatars are still my main issue. Ultimately none of that matters though because I actually feel that the staff (or majority of them) harbor ill will towards me and don't even want me playing the game.
I was one of the few people who used my YT channel to promote their game, make funny videos to entertain or talk about my feelings about the game and give feedback but I was never approached to do videos or host streams for the game. Why should I spend my precious time playing or thinking of ways to help the game when it seems clear to me they don't want any help (at least not from me). I always had a bunch of ideas but again my time is better spent these days on my academia rather than Arm. I'll always revisit these forums once a week to see the latest and greatest.
PS: Their absence from these forums will always be a testament to their stubborn refusal to engage with players that left.
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mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on Feb 28, 2022 18:20:34 GMT -5
Solid post Mehtastic. It's good to see you're still around. I tried coming back pretty hard during the Q1 of 2020, I had plenty of time with the pandemic in full force and did some good work with the CW. I already laid out why I left in my video but I like to reiterate my points that staff avatars are still my main issue. Ultimately none of that matters though because I actually feel that the staff (or majority of them) harbor ill will towards me and don't even want me playing the game. I was one of the few people who used my YT channel to promote their game, make funny videos to entertain or talk about my feelings about the game and give feedback but I was never approached to do videos or host streams for the game. Why should I spend my precious time playing or thinking of ways to help the game when it seems clear to me they don't want any help (at least not from me). I always had a bunch of ideas but again my time is better spent these days on my academia rather than Arm. I'll always revisit these forums once a week to see the latest and greatest. PS: Their absence from these forums will always be a testament to their stubborn refusal to engage with players that left. Thanks!
Armageddon is just not efficient at using volunteered time to its own benefit. Combined with the fact that they absolutely hold a grudge against you (Nessalin in particular is a grudge-holding champion), Armageddon metaphorically kicks itself in the dick a lot when it comes to something as simple as promotion. Armageddon is big enough to have a bunch of things if the staff simply wanted it: a custom browser client, top billing on MUD listing sites, Youtubers and Twitch people covering the game with video essays and streams, professionally-written text promotions on places like r/MUD, etc. It doesn't get any of those because no one on staff bothers to reach out to even its own playerbase, which has a handful of people in various areas who can handle this sort of thing, and the only producers that actually matter are too proud to accept help when offered to them by people like yourself.
Armageddon staff and prominent players tend to blame the game's woes on a few convenient scapegoats like yourself, Nyr and Nergal, the shadowboard in general, etc., at least when they're not outright pretending there are no woes at all. I feel like the stats show that the real problem is mismanagement, and to a degree, pride/complacency. There's really no other way to explain the multiple missed opportunities over the past 8 years to grow the game. |
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delerak
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Post by delerak on Feb 28, 2022 19:41:15 GMT -5
Solid post Mehtastic. It's good to see you're still around. I tried coming back pretty hard during the Q1 of 2020, I had plenty of time with the pandemic in full force and did some good work with the CW. I already laid out why I left in my video but I like to reiterate my points that staff avatars are still my main issue. Ultimately none of that matters though because I actually feel that the staff (or majority of them) harbor ill will towards me and don't even want me playing the game. I was one of the few people who used my YT channel to promote their game, make funny videos to entertain or talk about my feelings about the game and give feedback but I was never approached to do videos or host streams for the game. Why should I spend my precious time playing or thinking of ways to help the game when it seems clear to me they don't want any help (at least not from me). I always had a bunch of ideas but again my time is better spent these days on my academia rather than Arm. I'll always revisit these forums once a week to see the latest and greatest. PS: Their absence from these forums will always be a testament to their stubborn refusal to engage with players that left. Thanks! Armageddon is just not efficient at using volunteered time to its own benefit. Combined with the fact that they absolutely hold a grudge against you (Nessalin in particular is a grudge-holding champion), Armageddon metaphorically kicks itself in the dick a lot when it comes to something as simple as promotion. Armageddon is big enough to have a bunch of things if the staff simply wanted it: a custom browser client, top billing on MUD listing sites, Youtubers and Twitch people covering the game with video essays and streams, professionally-written text promotions on places like r/MUD, etc. It doesn't get any of those because no one on staff bothers to reach out to even its own playerbase, which has a handful of people in various areas who can handle this sort of thing, and the only producers that actually matter are too proud to accept help when offered to them by people like yourself. Armageddon staff and prominent players tend to blame the game's woes on a few convenient scapegoats like yourself, Nyr and Nergal, the shadowboard in general, etc., at least when they're not outright pretending there are no woes at all. I feel like the stats show that the real problem is mismanagement, and to a degree, pride/complacency. There's really no other way to explain the multiple missed opportunities over the past 8 years to grow the game. That hasn't always been true. Arm had a great community at one point. Staffers met up at the APMs and I have very fond memories of DragonCon manning the table and handing out cards to people with Arms web address. We had a big flyer. This type of stuff could still happen but of course it's up to the staff to make it happen. You hit the nail on the head though, I think plenty of players would be willing to do stuff for the game but it seems unwanted. Playing devils advocate I could say perhaps they want the game to remain a bit elitist and with few new players so that it doesn't sully the RP but that seems implausible given the quality of RP the past few years and the fact that plenty of staffers seem to want new players and the game to grow or at least be back to the "golden age" of Arm. |
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ibusoe
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Post by ibusoe on Mar 1, 2022 21:18:14 GMT -5
Armageddon is just not efficient at using volunteered time to its own benefit. Combined with the fact that they absolutely hold a grudge against you (Nessalin in particular is a grudge-holding champion), Armageddon metaphorically kicks itself in the dick a lot when it comes to something as simple as promotion. Armageddon is big enough to have a bunch of things if the staff simply wanted it: a custom browser client, top billing on MUD listing sites, Youtubers and Twitch people covering the game with video essays and streams, professionally-written text promotions on places like r/MUD, etc. It doesn't get any of those because no one on staff bothers to reach out to even its own playerbase, which has a handful of people in various areas who can handle this sort of thing, and the only producers that actually matter are too proud to accept help when offered to them by people like yourself. I'm usually not that good at understanding what motivates certain personality types. Staff, for example. I can't always figure out what motivates staff to make some of the decisions that they make, but I just had another of my crazy theories. Help me out because this isn't my forte. I have to wonder, for certain staff how much of their motive for showing up (every day?) and doing their job, is sitting on the staff channel and shooting down idea after idea, unless something really wows them. Do a few of them take joy in PKing people and fecking with players? This has been pretty well established, but I tend to overlook things like this as long as they don't target any single player overmuch and leave characters with a few escape routes for those astute enough to use them. But how much of what they get out of the role is simply shooting down people's plans? I'd welcome feedback on this and I apologize if I sound melodramatic. The whole thing is pretty silly I'd suppose. I don't want to accuse anyone of anything, because I have zero proof. And certainly some staff try to enable players, and for some it must be with regret that they feel compelled to axe an idea. The whole thing becomes melodramatic after a certain point. I've come to agree with what I think the rest of the gang is saying in this thread, is that with time I've become increasingly cautious about volunteering my time for people's pet projects without compensation. The video games that I play, I play because I have a good time. I see nothing wrong with volunteering time for humanitarian projects, but people's pet projects to me should provide tangible benefit to volunteers. Edit: I'm not trying to say that staff are bad people or that all of them are jerks, but it seems that some of them are irresonsible. But seriously, people hang out on the shadowboard and play mafia or other games because playing mafia here is more fun than Armageddon. That's the funny thing. This chat board is more fun than Arm, or I'd just go play Arm. Isn't that a fairly low hurdle to clear? But Arm isn't more fun than the shadowboard. |
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mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on Mar 2, 2022 6:59:17 GMT -5
Armageddon is just not efficient at using volunteered time to its own benefit. Combined with the fact that they absolutely hold a grudge against you (Nessalin in particular is a grudge-holding champion), Armageddon metaphorically kicks itself in the dick a lot when it comes to something as simple as promotion. Armageddon is big enough to have a bunch of things if the staff simply wanted it: a custom browser client, top billing on MUD listing sites, Youtubers and Twitch people covering the game with video essays and streams, professionally-written text promotions on places like r/MUD, etc. It doesn't get any of those because no one on staff bothers to reach out to even its own playerbase, which has a handful of people in various areas who can handle this sort of thing, and the only producers that actually matter are too proud to accept help when offered to them by people like yourself. I'm usually not that good at understanding what motivates certain personality types. Staff, for example. I can't always figure out what motivates staff to make some of the decisions that they make, but I just had another of my crazy theories. Help me out because this isn't my forte. I have to wonder, for certain staff how much of their motive for showing up (every day?) and doing their job, is sitting on the staff channel and shooting down idea after idea, unless something really wows them. Do a few of them take joy in PKing people and fecking with players? This has been pretty well established, but I tend to overlook things like this as long as they don't target any single player overmuch and leave characters with a few escape routes for those astute enough to use them. But how much of what they get out of the role is simply shooting down people's plans? I'd welcome feedback on this and I apologize if I sound melodramatic. The whole thing is pretty silly I'd suppose. I don't want to accuse anyone of anything, because I have zero proof. And certainly some staff try to enable players, and for some it must be with regret that they feel compelled to axe an idea. The whole thing becomes melodramatic after a certain point. I've come to agree with what I think the rest of the gang is saying in this thread, is that with time I've become increasingly cautious about volunteering my time for people's pet projects without compensation. The video games that I play, I play because I have a good time. I see nothing wrong with volunteering time for humanitarian projects, but people's pet projects to me should provide tangible benefit to volunteers. Edit: I'm not trying to say that staff are bad people or that all of them are jerks, but it seems that some of them are irresonsible. But seriously, people hang out on the shadowboard and play mafia or other games because playing mafia here is more fun than Armageddon. That's the funny thing. This chat board is more fun than Arm, or I'd just go play Arm. Isn't that a fairly low hurdle to clear? But Arm isn't more fun than the shadowboard. Staff definitely aren't a monolith, but there seems to be a trend where certain personality types rise to the top, or return to staffing after a hiatus, and others just wash out of staffing (and often also the game) entirely.
To take for example the grudge I referenced in reply to Delerak, I was referring to a phenomenon where staff use account notes to track suspected returning players. There are probably a dozen accounts with an account note that says something to the effect of "This is probably Delerak". I can say with confidence that Delerak doesn't have a dozen accounts. However, staff have convinced themselves that Delerak is a gremlin who has it out for the game and sneakily multiboxes Arm because people with the same ISP as him happened to make an account or whatever. In a similar vein, they also pay careful attention to places like r/MUD and try to match people who post negative reviews and comments about Arm to possible accounts.
On that note, I think the most "successful" staff personality types are: - People who are overly socially aggressive from the get-go, and start staffing with a pre-made list of players they already dislike and plan on fucking with as soon as they pass their 90-day probation, or just enjoy making random people's lives miserable
- People who are paranoid and watch players mainly to see if they are breaking the rules, rather than to see if they can support them in some way - People who are otherwise normal, but the Stanford prison experiment that is Armageddon staffing turns them into horrible people until they leave the staff team
It's important to remember that the vast majority of staff never rise past the rank of storyteller. Most staff join the team and instantly realize they don't have enough time to be good storytellers. Or they get a peek behind the curtain and get so disgusted that they leave. Or they actually start to play a character of sorts, where they pretend to be a certain way to appease producers, because they have a delusion that they can change staff culture from within.
It's also worth noting that staffing rules are super-attractive to those who would use a staff position to cheat. Even as a storyteller it is relatively easy to cheat because there is no oversight or auditing of commands staff use, even though there are systems in place for it (runlogs). It is relatively easy to change a random gith's strength to 100 just as your character's rival hits the North Road, or drop a modded weapon in your character's apartment with ridiculous damage dice. You'd only get caught if someone looks at the logs. You could even prevent staff from looking at the logs by just finding a way to crash the game a couple of times in quick succession. This kind of cheating had only gotten worse since the rule change to allow players to join staff without storing their current characters. By the time I stopped paying attention to the community in 2020 there were multiple staff that were doing this, one producer was aware, but wasn't able to mobilize the staff team to do something about it because a certain level of cheating is accepted as long as the staff roster is full.
With all that said, Armageddon isn't a good "cause" to volunteer for. Setting aside obvious better uses of your time, Armageddon players are often completely unaware that there even are newer, more successful roleplaying MU*s. I think one of the main reasons Armageddon still gets new staff and new builders is because many players are just completely ignorant about their options. For those who do know more about what's available in the MU* world, I think they're more motivated by nostalgia than the actual quality of the game. I think that was one of the driving reasons behind how well-received Halaster's return was: because players vaguely know the game used to be more fun when he was staff, and our dumb lizard brains can't understand correlation doesn't imply causation, and here we are with more known cheaters on the staff team than any other time previously.
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Post by lechuck on Mar 9, 2022 21:08:08 GMT -5
Interestingly, at a glance, it looks like there is a steep spike that coincides with the start of the Covid pandemic in most of the world, followed by a sharp drop several weeks later. It seems like there was a chance to recapture players during quarantine, but about as many people left as the people that joined/rejoined the game. In fact, the last time that the game had more than 200 logins per week was a 7-week stretch from the end of March 2020 to the middle of May 2020, which lines up almost perfectly with that time period.
Yeah, numbers swelled dramatically right around then. Peaks of 60-70ish for a while. Then, to nobody's surprise, staff did absolutely nothing whatsoever to capture those players. They came back to Armageddon to give it a chance while the lockdowns kept them at home, and they found a game so stagnant and boring that it couldn't keep them interested even while they were trapped in their fucking homes. A month later, numbers plummet back to normal. It's not as if the pandemic lasted a month. Those players just dropped the game again once they realized that it wasn't worth their time. Staff could have seized the opportunity to shake things up and capitalize on this opportunity to revitalize the game. Instead they did nothing at all. It doesn't take weeks and weeks to come up with some impromptu world-shaking event that can dazzle those returning players who decided to give the game another chance. Even if it's something that comes out of the blue, nobody's gonna complain. It would have been something cool that makes players want to see how it pans out. Have the gith army attack Allanak or something. Have the Sandlord make a power play and recruit some tribes to claim all the lands south of Allanak. Have a black-robed templar declare that all dwarves are slaves again as they were in the past. Something that players can react to and take sides on, something character concepts can be shaped around. But no, they did nothing whatsoever and the game kept spinning its wheels while dozens of players were reminded why they left in the first place. |
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mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on Mar 10, 2022 8:45:23 GMT -5
Just looking at the numbers, it's difficult to say whether the game failed to keep new/returning players interested in that time frame, or if the game simply traded away portions of its player base for a smaller amount of the new/returning ones. But anecdotally, from my discussions with old friends as well as glancing at the GDB in that time period, it does seem like a lot of old names had returned, saw what had happened to the game, and left within a couple of months.
I think staff definitely let an opportunity for growth slip through their fingers, and the general stagnation of the game that has existed well before Tuluk's closure does not exactly inspire anyone on the player- or staff-side to tell a compelling story. Compared to other RPIs that are currently running, it seems like Armageddon staff are still stuck on the doctrine of providing as much combat spam as possible to thrill players into thinking meaningful things are going on, when in reality no one really knows what's happening except maybe a noble or templar.
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delerak
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Post by delerak on Mar 10, 2022 10:06:45 GMT -5
People leave for all sorts of reasons. I seriously doubt it's because there aren't any "world spanning events." I've already documented my reasons and can only guess why others leave or return and don't really care since I can't control others. I left because I was pkilled by a staff avatar for loose nonsensical reasonings. Same shit that's happened to me in the past happened in the "changed and new Arm" so really I just don't see any point in playing if that will happen again.
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Post by Azerbanjani on Mar 18, 2022 23:44:27 GMT -5
I'm very drunk but
I don't agree with lechuck's statements.
I don't think 'world shaking events' gets people invested. We have them all the time and they are always the same thing.
Untouchable staff avatar shows up (Blackrobe no one cares about, random cult no one cares about, random sorcerer no one cares about)
They try to fight someone they obviously can't fight (Allanak generally)
They die
And depending on the time of day half the Byn or Arm dies (Depending on your preference as a staffer)
These plots don't bring anything to the table. A player coming back to the game who has left because he wasn't able to do anything with the plots he wanted to run (Me, many others) doesn't get reassured with 'Oh the world just had another earth quake and now theres another weird stone formation outside that won't ever come back up again'. I don't give a shit about that stuff, I want to be able to run my own plots.
And no, I'm not interested in the monthly 'Hey heres a uh super secret plot group be sure to send us in barebones information so we can look at your notes and arbitrarily pick who we want (JK they pick who they want based on ass kissery or their perceived notions of player 'success', which is how a subjective system works)
Karma is supposed to represent staff trust right? Open up the aps for anyone with X karma and let them fucking play it.
Let me advance medicine in the world you fucking bastards.
And let me use wagon making.
God damn.
Tired of these sorcerer plots.
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mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on Mar 21, 2022 7:05:24 GMT -5
Recycled plots are recycled because it's easier for staff to recycle plots than it is to do new and unique things. Armageddon is basically the "clip show" of RPIs at this point. Understandable that a 30-year-old game would finally run out of ideas and its runners would run out of any desire to make it better, but it would certainly be better if they acknowledged it out loud.
That said, I don't think you can pin the decline of the playerbase's size to any one thing in particular, like lack of world-spanning plots or staff killing PCs with their avatars. It's all of those things at the same time, because different players have different "last straws".
Even so, if any one thing can be blamed, I would say all of these reasons tend to stem from a lack of respect upper-level staff have for players, the time they put into the game, and their intelligence. These staff busy themselves with policing the game and putting stamps of approval on storyteller work when the game would be much better off without this useless middle management. That's not to say "kick all the admins off the team" but rather "make them do real work or tell them to fuck off, just like a storyteller would be told".
As a group Armageddon players are, frankly, not very good at standing up for themselves or respecting themselves, and are more likely to leave out of boredom than out of feeling disrespected. But I do think staff's disrespect does lead to player boredom, because staff's energy is focused in the wrong places all of the time.
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Post by lechuck on Mar 21, 2022 9:51:09 GMT -5
I was never talking about world-shaking events in the sense of teleporting volcanos and cities closing. I'm talking about anything that changes your character's circumstances via outside factors, i.e. not just you deciding to join a clan or some shit. Let's take an example, because it was one of the first awesome things I remember happening in the game:
Some templar fucked up in some way. Can't remember what he did, but he was cast out of the templarate and fled into the Labyrinth. The Guild boss took him in (Serpent; I think Ghost posted some logs of it somewhere once) and harbored the exiled templar for a time, hoping to learn literacy and government secrets. In the end, political pressure forced him to kill the guy.
So for the duration of this plot, everyone involved with law enforcement had a new thing to care about: an exiled templar is now hiding in the 'rinth, leaking who-knows-what to the Guild. Everyone in the 'rinth had a new thing to care about: holy fuck, a disgraced templar in our midst. Anyone playing a spy or assassin had a new thing to care about: what can we find out about this situation, and what's the reward for killing the templar or reporting the information we find? And even to players with no real way into that plot from any angle, it was still just fucking interesting. It was something you don't see every day. It was the kind of plot you could legitimately make a movie out of.
Things like that happened to varying degrees up until... I wanna say when Nyr took over and implemented his trademark policy of naysaying obstructionism. Since then, the story of Armageddon has become so boring. You get the occasional highly contrived scenario where staff spits out some echoes about something, the proverbial lightshow, but it's never really impactful in the grand scheme of things. It's never something that players have any real influence on. Today, there aren't things going on that faces a templar with a range of decisions where one choice might get him cast out of the templarate. Even if that happened, he would be force-stored or executed instead.
It's just dull as fuck. People log in, spar, hunt, mudsex, plan the upcoming poetry recital, and log out. It's gotten to the point where the only things happening that might raise your eyebrows is when you run into a sorc in the desert, and he's under such strict supervision from staff that he's scared to kill anybody, so you know you just get to walk away unless you literally jump him.
It's like what happened to Game of Thrones in the end. Still the occasional visual spectacle and Big Event(TM) but missing all the in-between stuff that weaves characters together and makes it interesting. Just look at the state of nobles and how utterly irrelevant they are in today's Armageddon. That's because all those threads that weave the roleplaying scene together have been lost, and now it's just a game where you log in, spar, hunt, craft, and log out again because nothing has happened in so long that your character just has nothing to work with story-wise.
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Post by Azerbanjani on Mar 21, 2022 18:09:45 GMT -5
"It's gotten to the point where the only things happening that might raise your eyebrows is when you run into a sorc in the desert, and he's under such strict supervision from staff that he's scared to kill anybody, so you know you just get to walk away unless you literally jump him."
Nothing else to comment on but I will say: I've literally ran into like 5 or so sorcerers in the desert, and having one just be a dick to you for no reason (Literally just: "Imma pull up on people and hands of wind them around for fun") is not engaging gameplay, so to an extent I'm fine that staff has told them not to just fucking kill people.
3 Karma player + Spec app should be fucking big IQ enough to NOT think a fun plot if 'Getting harassed in the desert on my grebber'. If they think that they are Shalooonsh.
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ibusoe
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Post by ibusoe on Mar 26, 2022 18:39:18 GMT -5
Just had a glance at the update thread on the game.
In last week's update, Nessalin added software capability that caused herbs to age. On the one hand? This is kind of cool.
For a moment.
But then reality sinks in, and you realise that Nessalin just made things "more realistic" in a way that subtly makes the game less fun to play and dumps on the non-magic instance of the healer class, a class that almost nobody wants to play in any game and is already somewhat pointless in Armageddon.
Good work, Nessalin! This Bud's for you!
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Post by Azerbanjani on Mar 26, 2022 18:46:21 GMT -5
That was my major complaint with it.
Sure. It's neat and realistic. But everytime you try to ask for something 'fun' that's neat and realistic you get the 'WE AREN'T A SIMULATION' argument from staff and players aslike.
Being a healer is a pain in the fucking ass.
I played a Borsail who had master brew.
I had a safe as fuck mansion.
I had an herb table filled to the brim with as many herbs as I could beg borrow or steal.
I still had CONSTANT issues being able to make consistently colored cures. It was basically impossible and I have/had a microsoft word document with every herb combo and every herb flavor that I personally had.
So me, someone who had the absolute best circumstances with little chance of losing their herbs, still had a supply issue. Still had issues using the shitty color system (Should just be a 'add a dye to your cure' to color fucking tablets but noooo).
This is going to make playing a doctor all the more fun(tm) (AKA worse)
I already have my complaints about doctoring, with how you can't advance the medicine beyond it's 'really shitty, beyond shitty, no advancement' era.
So now you have a game that hates you for playing a doctor twice, with no means of advancing your doctoring. Where common sense or offering a possible alternative (There were people in the time of the ancient greeks proposing what amounted to germ theory) would get players acting like you're crazy and staff probably pming you over it.
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