Weekly update trends (2014 - 2021)

The moment I realized the vets were worse RPers than the newbies was back in the CAM days, when I was on an excursion with X-D's Krathi, who decided to cast walls of fire in a room in the Grey Forest. Being naive, I wished up thinking a staff member could make an interesting scene out of X-D basically starting a forest fire. The response I got was somewhere along the lines of "don't worry about it" and nothing else happened.

The game had almost 300 unique logins per week back then...

I'll play devils advocate here for a sec and just posit that this is probably a trend with every mud. Muds have been in decline for a while and I'm curious if there are any muds where you don't see decline such as these observations you're making? Don't get me wrong I'm more than willing to shit on arms staff for losing me as a player and I already addressed that in a video so they aren't blameless but I don't think any mud (or very few) are going to show growth at this time.

That was kind of nice of me above so now I'll be a little mean to Arm and relate how I felt after I started my "first look" mud series on YT. I always made YouTube videos for fun and when I asked on TMS for muds that want me to check out their games I had around 30+ messages. I got to maybe 10-15 of those games but not everyone resulted in a video. The funny part is the admins at those games were always super nice, very grateful and really cool with me making videos about their game, and some of these got 100-200 sometimes 300+ views on YouTube. That seems like not a big deal but in my opinion any views are good for getting attention to the mudding community, anyone making videos on muds is a huge deal these days and not many do. It felt good to do something for those games and know they appreciated the time I put into those vids. Arm on the other hand has never approached me or talked to me about my Arm videos. Quite the contrary I was regularly ridiculed on their forums by players and staff alike, even if my videos were supposed to be funny I would be insulted or they would talk shit in general, which doesn't feel good. I feel like they squandered an opportunity there. Anyone who is willing to put time energy and effort into a video for YouTube for your game especially a MUD with like 100 players tops should be appreciated and fostered so that your game gets some free advertising and attention on it.

MUDs on the whole are in decline, but the good ones do just fine. The wider MUD community isn't like a lake where removing some portion of the water leads to a uniform drop in the water level across the entire thing. The MUDs that are good continue to thrive, and new ones can crop up and find success--see Arx, an absolute smash hit that launched, what, four or five years ago? At the moment of writing, on a Tuesday afternoon, it has 95 players online. While the total number of people playing MUDs has dwindled, that doesn't mean it's just natural and inevitable for a particular MUD to lose players.

While Armageddon doesn't advertise itself all that well, it is a staple name in the MUD community and everyone who's into roleplaying surely knows about it. It remains one of the most frequently discussed games in places like /r/MUD. It's not as if the game is dying because it has slipped into obscurity. People just don't want to play it. It still gets 10-20 new accounts per week, but almost none of them decide to stay, and established players have been leaving at an unsustainable rate for the last six or eight years. Armageddon has been losing players at a rate that far surpasses the overall decline of MUDs.

In my view, there have been three primary factors in Armageddon's downfall:

1) Bad staff. This actually seems to be a lot better than it used to be; or it did, last time I played. Can't say anything about anything recent since I don't know, but the real problems mostly went away when Nyr finally fucked off. It's still far from perfect, however, and the game suffers immensely from a lack of staff members who are actually able and willing to make the game exciting. They're mostly RP police and paper-pushers.

2) No story. Nothing happens in Zalanthas anymore. The game is totally stagnant and offers nothing to anyone who wants more than the most basic routine of logging in to spar, craft, talk or fuck. This has become progressively worse over the years. There is no longer even the vague pretense of a forward-moving story, and clans are so severely stuck and rigid that there's nothing going on between them. The game is a complete snoozefest.

3) Ancient, crappy code that sucks to play with. The combat code is a grotesquely unbalanced mess rife with instakills and wildly mismatched options, the skillgain code is terrible for reasons that have been discussed to death, and the same can be said for the stat system. Crafting is borderline useless, stealth is busted as fuck, the economy is a joke, no way to communicate with someone whose playtimes don't match yours, etc.

A hell of a lot of players have quit because of these problems, not because they stopped playing MUDs.

It really is impressive how dysfunctional the game's economy is. Money matters for the first little while since you don't start out with everything you need, but once you've got the regular equipment and cures and whatever your concept requires, money pretty much becomes irrelevant. Even for the rare concept that might genuinely have a need for large sums, there are so many ways to effortlessly generate infinite money that it has no actual scarcity. This also means that most characters won't be particularly interested in it. Ever try paying someone not to kill you? How often has that worked? Hell, bribing templars and soldiers usually has the opposite effect of what you intended as it gives them a reason to investigate you and find reasons to fuck you over, which they invariably do. Bribing is suicide. It's much, much safer to just not give the plot-starved authority figures an excuse to look into your activities.

And once you have the basic stuff required for your role, what else is there to do with money? You're not gonna buy fancy furniture for your apartment because a) it serves no purpose whatsoever and b) your apartment will get broken into approximately eleven times per week, so anything of any value whatsoever is gone next time you log in. You can't buy slaves. You can't buy property or rent a shop. It takes about as long to create a merchant company as it takes to complete a bachelor's degree. And since money has so little value, players aren't going to respect money. As I pointed out, try handing your local templar a gigantic bribe and then do something that could get you executed. You're still getting executed, because that money had no real value, but the opportunity to briefly break from the day-to-day tedium of Armageddon is worth something to that templar.

And crafting is so completely pointless. Hell, pick making and brew are the only ones for which there is any demand whatsoever, simply because these are things that are both useful and not readily available. Nothing else is worth a fucking thing. Storebought stock items are every bit as good as crafted stuff, and you can just go and buy it anytime you need it instead of having to track down a crafter, explain what you want, wait for him to make it, then wait for a chance to meet up again, and probably end up paying more for the same quality of stuff than you would in the bazaar.

They've completely failed to implement the most basic necessities of crafting in games: scarcity and desirable products. The main things that people would actually want to buy from a PC can't be crafted anyway: camouflage gear, wearable glow-crystals, and spice. Lockpicks are essentially free to make and the only hurdle is finding somebody who actually plays a fence and therefore has the ability to make the good ones. Cures are cheap and you only really need to buy a few of them and then you're most likely set for life since it's not as if you're gonna get dosed with terradin on a regular basis. Get a few for bloodburn, one for terradin, and maybe one for grishen and heramide if you're feeling adventurous. Odds are high that you will never need to buy new cures again.

For an example of what actually does work, look at the SoI-Atonement-Parallel category of MUDs. It was actually difficult to get the best crafting materials, so it had a lot of inherent value, and the best equipment in the game was crafted, with no other way to get it. The NPC shops sold some basic stuff that would let you play your character, but if you actually wanted good equipment, you had to have it crafted or buy it from someone who did. It worked amazingly well. Crafting was the backbone of these games. A skilled armorer was incredibly valuable to a clan, and it was a tragedy if they died. Wealth was really important if you wanted to become powerful, because having high-quality weapons and armor mattered a lot and it took a hell of a lot of resources to get there.

Instead, Armageddon has this garbage economy where some dude's mastercrafted razor-edged obsidian tactical swing-sword is no better than the generic one you can buy from Salarr for 150 'sid, and armor does so little that there's no meaningful difference between the best of the best and the sandy-yellow chitin shit you can buy in the bazaar or loot off of that one NPC that a 0-day character can gank at night. And that's to say nothing of basketweaving, clayworking, stonecrafting, flower-whatevering and all the other trash crafting skills that produce nothing of any use whatsoever. Anytime I've tried to play a crafting class, I was immediately struck by that feeling of "why the hell am I doing this? I could have just made a fucking miscreant/tailor or something."

Recently got word from a friendly face on staff that since Armageddon has been getting a lot of votes on Top Mud Sites, it's had an influx in new account creations compared to previous months. However, retention is basically zero.

I've said this before, but without efforts to address the underlying issues with the game, attempting to attract new players is counterproductive. Without improving the game itself, new players will just see a bad game and stay away from it forever. If you improve the game, then invite new players to look at it, they're more likely to stick around.

On a different note, I know a player who was addicted to Armageddon, quit, and out of wanting to scratch a severe itch for online RP, dipped his toes back in Arm. He quit a couple of days later because the taverns are full of quiet people and the cities are full of PCs who zoom past without interacting. Most of the people who play, are playing by themselves.