mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on Feb 7, 2023 16:30:07 GMT -5
Hello everyone. A bit late, but I wanted to write about the weekly update trends for the game. I decided to cover 2014-2022 for the same reason I covered 2014-2021 last year: it's the biggest stretch of consistent weekly data that we have, since there's a big gap in 2013.
Starting with the logins, there's a pretty consistent downward trend across the years, with occasional short-term spikes week by week. Of course, to those who have read my previous write-ups this isn't surprising. So what I think will be more interesting is discussing how 2022's data compares to 2021. There are a couple reasons I want to do that specifically: 1) There were major changes in Armageddon's leadership in 2022, namely Nessalin "temporarily" stepping down from Producership with Halaster taking his place. 2) There were major changes to the game in the past 2 years, ostensibly designed to attract new players as well as entice departed players to return (Mul Outpost, Tuluk reopening, rework to the magic system, etc.)
To compare the data from the past two years, I think a year-over-year chart would be the best way to visualize growth or lack thereof.
The blue bars represent 2022's weekly logins whereas the orange bars represent 2021's weekly logins. The line shows the difference between any given week in 2022 vs that same week in 2021. For most of 2022, the game suffered losses compared to similar times in 2021, with the exception of the last quarter of the year where it saw some modest growth. However, this growth only effectively lasted a few weeks before dropping to normal levels around the end-of-year holidays. You can see the same effect at the beginning of both years as well, which makes sense since people often take holiday vacations well into January. I think there are a couple of conclusions the community should reasonably draw from this graph: 1) The efforts to draw in players through game changes paid off, but only in a minimal and short-term way. 2) The only real "lull period" is around the December holidays and in January. There are no "lull periods" around things like Labor Day, Thanksgiving, school year ending, etc.
Regarding the second point in particular, I think for Armageddon to grow, the community crucially needs to understand that its playerbase doesn't just fall for several weeks because of a one-day holiday. It also needs to draw in actual new players. On that note...
The above graph shows new account creations, week-by-week, since 2014. Like in my report last year, there were massive spikes in new account creations up until about mid-2018, where new interest in the game suddenly died. Unlike 2021, there was no point in 2022 where more than 20 accounts were created (it maxed out at 18 on the week of May 16).
Compared to last year, new accounts in 2022 just did worse overall. Week by week, 2022 only did better than its counterpart week in 2021 19 times. So that's 33 weeks in 2022 where the game under-performed on new account creation compared to 2021. The game didn't even have consistent account growth after the changes announced in 2022.
Conclusion This report is short this year for a few reasons. The main reason is, frankly, there isn't a lot to say that is different from last year. The game is still in clear decline. The announcements from last year did very little to grow the game and whatever gains it did secure were largely squandered in the last weeks of 2022 as the player count declined.
The second reason is that I'm generally uninterested in doing free labor for a community that is full of dogshit people. Sorry to the few Armageddon players that think they're in a friendly community, but they really pulled the wool over your eyes. Your game is led by some of the biggest cheaters the community has ever seen in its history, with one staff member in particular having a history of being a stalker and sexual predator who, as recently as 2022, was essentially blackmailing critics in the game's Discord server. The best I can muster for these lowlives is a report that took me about 30 minutes to prepare and write during a slow work day, because it makes me happy that people are seeing this shitty game for what it is and leaving.
The remnants of the Armageddon community continue to ignore the obvious, and I hope they continue to do so. Even ostensibly data-minded people like mansa cherry-pick small sample sizes to make the game look like it's going through a brief rough patch, rather than a decade-long nosedive that never truly reversed. I sincerely hope it never reverses, because if it does, that means decent people are being entrapped in the community only to be bullied and used.
I hope my next report has the login count at 0.
See ya next year.
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mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on Feb 7, 2023 17:26:29 GMT -5
Since there was a player staff meeting, I'll add a post script with some thoughts on a question that was related to player count.
Najdorf asks a good question, but Halaster is really good at misdirection in his answer. The idea that Armageddon has a poor reputation makes growth challenging, but he is literally the main person responsible for Armageddon's reputation currently. If he wants the game's reputation to change, he has the power to purge bad staff members, do all the things needed to fix the game community, and approach the MUD community with a laundry list of the things he did to fix the game. But he won't because he knows that getting rid of the riff-raff will alienate his buddies (and both groups have a lot of overlap, besides).
Shabago's answer is just nonsense that is easily disproven by the collected data, and it's embarrassing that the staff either feel the need to lie or fail to collect basic data on their own game.
Brokkr was absent from the meeting and posted his answer on the GDB. This solidifies that staff are going to be doing more of the same in 2023: adding new things to the game and hoping that translates to new/returned players. it very obviously does not.
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Post by lechuck on Feb 8, 2023 7:04:10 GMT -5
More specifically, adding new things that are as far removed from the general playerbase as possible. More tribes, more tribes, more tribes, isolated weird races that have essentially no impact on the broader game, and plots that are pretty much exclusive to tiny ragtag gangs of camp-dwellers that nobody can interact with. Meanwhile, the game's actual centers of population languish in total stagnation to the point where I think there's more players in the Mul Outpost than in Tuluk.
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mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on Feb 8, 2023 9:01:46 GMT -5
More specifically, adding new things that are as far removed from the general playerbase as possible. More tribes, more tribes, more tribes, isolated weird races that have essentially no impact on the broader game, and plots that are pretty much exclusive to tiny ragtag gangs of camp-dwellers that nobody can interact with. Meanwhile, the game's actual centers of population languish in total stagnation to the point where I think there's more players in the Mul Outpost than in Tuluk. 100%
As much as the old guard was generally bad at running the game in the 2010s, they at least recognized that diluting the game was detrimental to the game's long term health. Their solution was to close Tuluk, which was pretty clearly disastrous at the time for player count. I think I wrote about it in my report from last year, but if not, the dip in logins post-Tuluk closure is one of the biggest dips in the data.
It seems the current staff team is looking at dilution through the opposite lens, just adding a bunch of new stuff to create new experiences for a few chosen players who happen to get their applications approved, while everyone else languishes in the "old content". The impression I get is that the Producers know the game isn't going to be around for more than a few more years, so they're doing all the zany stuff they always wanted to do but weren't able to get approved as lower-level staff, to give themselves and their friends some unique RP experiences... before the geriatric footing the bill for Armageddon's server costs finally either shuffles off the mortal coil or realizes his credit card is still being charged.
If the actual goal was to grow the game, the producers not only would have done things a lot differently, they'd be different people entirely.
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mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on Feb 8, 2023 16:02:10 GMT -5
I forgot to cover logins minus new accounts and meant to write about that. So let me do that real quick.
The significance of the logins minus new accounts figure is that it shows the number of players with existing accounts that logged into the game. When a new account is created, it counts as both a new account and a unique login - even if that new account never logs in again. So logins by themselves is kind of a useless stat. The trend is a bit hard to see in the above graph, but...
It's a bit easier to see the slight downward trend when you take averages every 4 weeks and plot those. There's a point in early 2016 where this number goes below 200 and it never recovers. After a really low dip in 2017, the game continually attracted players until 2020, where the game started to lose players again.
Armageddon's failure to retain players becomes significantly more evident when you glance at the year-over-year data. Aside from being up ~20 players in week 12 of 2022 compared to week 12 of 2021, you have a massive reduction of players through the rest of the first half of 2021. The increase in player retention in the last quarter of 2022 doesn't even come close to reaching the same peaks as the drop in the first half of the year, and these gains are not only relatively modest, they are short-lived as well - with week 46 of 2022's gains evaporating on week 47 and not fully recovering for the rest of the year. Holidays are partly to blame for this specific lack of recovery, but what this data ultimately shows is that the changes to the game in late 2022 did little to make up for the players that had left earlier in the year. The increases in logins in late 2022 are mostly accounted for in new account signups, which could be genuinely new players or returning players looking to create a new identity.
What the staff lack in data for their own game, they make up for with meaningless anecdotal claims like "50 players on at peak". Getting 50 people to log into the game at peak at the same time is not particularly challenging. The challenge staff repeatedly fail to face is player retention. Whatever meager gains the game gets is usually just entirely lost a few weeks later, only for a smaller gain to follow, followed by a bigger loss. This pattern adequately describes the loss of players over the past decade.
Gathering and interpreting the data is simple. It is staff's job to do something with that data, or put in charge people who will do something about it, instead of pretending it's untrue, doesn't exist, or is simply "harmful to the game" as Shabago might put it.
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Post by jcarter on Feb 8, 2023 18:45:29 GMT -5
halaster is a big part of the reason why arm has a shit reputation. the dude played the plainsman, one of the most powerful sorcerers in the game, and was caught using knowledge he gained on his staff account to identify players responsible for looting his lair. he then immediately PKed them using his avatar abilities. this was well-known in the community and sanvean even outright admitted to it being wrong (after he was off staff, ofc). it only got called out after he had been on staff by players that left the game, because the ~no IC~ rule is a great cover for staff to moderate away anyone trying to complain or acknowledge it.
to date he's never been man enough to apologize or even acknowledge it.
it's not the act of cheating in the past that's a problem. it's a 50+ year old man that can't even cop to something so insignificant. why would anyone trust him?
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Post by lechuck on Feb 8, 2023 20:42:08 GMT -5
To be honest, I don't think that weighs very heavily on Arm's reputation to this day. Plainsman was, what, almost twenty years ago?
Arm has a shit reputation because too many of the staff members are pricks, and too few of them do enough to keep the game interesting. It's a boring, toxic game where most of the RP (when you can find any at all) sucks because staff doesn't pay attention to anything except their friends and their own little personal pet projects that most players never see a hint of, leaving the rest to play the game like a WoW PvP server. It's a game with rock-bottom roleplaying standards because the only thing that staff acknowledges is time spent as clanlead, or politeness in OOC communication, so nobody makes a real effort to actually RP well. It's a game that you can play for a full real-life month without ever experiencing anything interesting even if you spend all your time looking for things to do. It's a game where the cities are ghost towns because everyone's playing in one of the, what, eight tribes and tribe-like clans? And they're about to open yet another one of those, despite just recently asking the playerbase what can be done to make city play more appealing. And anytime there's a discussion about these things in places like /r/MUD, staff posts the most insane, dishonest, underhanded bullshit in defense of the game that they've driven to the brink of death with their administrative decisions and their indifference towards any player that isn't one of their old friends. That's why the game has a terrible reputation. Not because of some shit that happened in the early 2000s.
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Post by jcarter on Feb 8, 2023 22:21:57 GMT -5
To be honest, I don't think that weighs very heavily on Arm's reputation to this day. Plainsman was, what, almost twenty years ago? eh it's a bit of both. it's way in the past, but it's another thing that'll just never get addressed and swept under the rug. this has been the modus operandi for literally more than twenty years, which you point out: staff playing pet projects above what players would get away with and then wiping away any comments, criticism, or exposure of it. off the top of my head, you had ihsahn, halaster's plainsman, shalooonsh's "one fang" cat-man sorcerer with special ~dragon powers~, nyr's psionicist, the tan muark, etc. i'm sure someone can cite more recent examples. i've been out of the loop for ten years, but why would i expect staff in arm in 2023 to be any different than what they were 20 years ago? halaster, nessalin, shalooonsh, etc are still there and have never owned up. three months ago we saw halaster meltdown, delete delirium's posts, and ban her account because he couldn't take the mildest of criticism, even when he was anonymized in it: armageddonmud.boards.net/post/41152/thread. like i said in that thread, the guy was a shithead twenty years ago and he's still a shithead. nothing's changed except the churn of powerless storytellers stepping up and then down after a month.
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mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on Feb 9, 2023 8:44:19 GMT -5
Halaster is like any other person: fallible, and able to change and learn from prior mistakes. The fact that he doesn't change himself in any meaningful way and keeps making mistakes that he just covers up, while everyone else ignores it is definitely detrimental to the game's health. When I said that he has the power to fix the game and undo some of the stuff he's complaining about (namely, Armageddon's poor reputation in the MUD community), he is definitely in the correct position with the correct amount of authority to do that. He is a producer and can make a lot of decisions unilaterally, and what he can't decide by himself he can put in the work to convince Shabago and Brokkr to sign on. But he never will because of the personality qualities jcarter mentioned, which have stuck to Halaster over the past two decades with no sign of falling off.
I think the old stuff (like the Plainsman debacle) serves as a telltale sign of Halaster's prior character, and in theory it shouldn't be relevant anymore, except for the fact the staff are in arrested development. Halaster hasn't substantially changed since then. Halaster, Shabago, Brokkr, and Shalooonsh all have a history of cheating and breaking rules as well as a current tendency towards dishonesty and misdirection. You can see this in the way they write about the game and deflect a lot of its problems onto the MUD community at large as well as unnamed former players who have it out for Armageddon. For every Delirium the staff have 10 other scapegoats to blame, like Nyr who hasn't had a position on staff in almost 10 years, and Nergal who as far as I can tell, disappeared from the internet during the pandemic. It is truly pathetic that the staff in charge don't take responsibility for the game they're running.
So I think the primary value in bringing stuff up from the 2000s is to show that the people in charge haven't become better people, they've just found more conniving ways to maintain their old tendencies. Armageddon's reputation is derived in large part from the fact that it's run by a bunch of manchildren right now, at this very moment, despite these people having decades' worth of time to grow up.
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Post by lechuck on Feb 10, 2023 15:03:52 GMT -5
It transcends any one staff member. For my part, I don't think Halaster is all that bad. He's probably not the hero we all wanted, whatever, but he's not emblematic of what's wrong with the game. The problems predate his return. He's only been back for a couple of years or something, right? Or am I remembering that wrong? I don't consider him (or any one particular staff member, for that matter) to be the thing that troubles this game in its dotage. Well, Shalooonsh is a known twat, but that's old news.
It's the fact that none of them know how to make it interesting to actually play. It's so goddamn boring. And so are all of them. Collectively, they've managed to turn ArmageddonMUD into such a miserable bore that it's almost an accomplishment on its own. The fact that there's something like fifteen members of staff, and still it manages to be so cripplingly uneventful, so bereft of meaningful activity, and so empty; that's actually impressive. That seems like it ought to be the result of a concerted effort to create a game that is intentionally dull.
None of them have a grain of creativity in them. I don't give a shit what Halaster did twenty years ago. Nobody should be judged by what they did twenty years ago. I did some insane, absurd shit twenty years that nobody in their right mind would hold me accountable for at this point. What matters is that he's boring now, and so are the rest of them. This is 2023 and they've not managed to meet even the most lenient expectations of what anyone can possibly find interesting. Nothing happens anywhere, nobody cares, and now we'll get yet another fucking tribe.
Hurray. That one tribe will definitely do the trick. Yeah. Of course it will. The thryzn one didn't, okay, but this time it'll be great! I promise! Just as the reintroduction of the Tan Muark did a couple of years ago, or the gith before that. Remember that? No? Oh. Well... from the City Play thread, they'll make it cost a bit less focus to use psionics in city taverns, because that's definitely the one thing that kept folks from playing in cities, and then nothing whatsoever will happen for another two years.
Meanwhile, if one tries to actually do anything in the cities (or anywhere else, really, but especially in the cities), one is met by a deafening wall of silence, or the uncaring crushing hand of the crimecode, and summarily reminded why it isn't worth one's time to even try. And then one makes yet another d-elf raider/ruk-empowerment char, and all is well again. Unless you don't have the karma to do that. Then the game simply isn't worth playing. And this is why the new player numbers have dropped off a cliff entirely. But hey, we've got a brand-new human tribe on the horizon, don't we?! Yay! Wonder where they'll live? The Canyons of Waste, where nothing ever happens? Or will staff actually risk placing them in a city, only with a million stipulations that prevent them from getting involved in anything? Even if they do take that chance, they'll then launch the tribe and immediately leave them adrift in total radio silence.
And so, ArmageddonMUD loses 10-20% of its players year by year. And it's so fucking obvious why that's the case.
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Post by Azerbanjani on Feb 14, 2023 17:51:57 GMT -5
Armageddon suffers from shitty staff. It doesn't have a reputation issue, it has a current problem.
I was arguing in good faith on the GDB because of this, things needed to change, things needed to be more open. Staff couldn't just keep being shitty to people 'behind the scenes' and gaslight girlboss everytime someone points it out.
I'm in the discord, talking about the same things, Shabago does some 'Oh well if you can't behave at minimum like a fourth grader I'll show you the door stop trolling'. I ask how I'm trolling, the subject matter is usually quite serious, so he bans me. Says some people 'need help' because I didn't acquiesce to begging him to ban me. Basically: Shabago was acting like a cunt-y asshole to me because he doesn't feel the need to respect me, so bans me for being a cunt-y asshole in his eyes.
The difference between me being a cunt-y asshole and him is he has a banhammer and I don't.
This was what, months ago? Banning people (From the discord AND GDB) perma because they say swear words sometimes?
"It's the fact that none of them know how to make it interesting to actually play. It's so goddamn boring. And so are all of them. Collectively, they've managed to turn ArmageddonMUD into such a miserable bore that it's almost an accomplishment on its own. The fact that there's something like fifteen members of staff, and still it manages to be so cripplingly uneventful, so bereft of meaningful activity, and so empty; that's actually impressive. That seems like it ought to be the result of a concerted effort to create a game that is intentionally dull."
From what I heard of plots with a friend: He's been stuck in some camp for irl weeks with nothing happening. He can't really leave. This is staff's idea of a good plot.
"None of them have a grain of creativity in them. I don't give a shit what Halaster did twenty years ago. Nobody should be judged by what they did twenty years ago."
In this case, kinda. The issue with the grognards who want to run these games is they rarely change. Shalooonsh has been a useless waste of space for years. They aren't changing their personalities, they aren't getting 'better' or maturing. A mature Halaster should have no issue just frankly talking about it, talking about the full extent of why that was a shit thing to do, and move on. It's an adult thing to do. You don't just push it under the rug as that leaves open all kinds of people expecting Plainsman2.0 to pop up.
"Meanwhile, if one tries to actually do anything in the cities (or anywhere else, really, but especially in the cities), one is met by a deafening wall of silence, or the uncaring crushing hand of the crimecode, and summarily reminded why it isn't worth one's time to even try."
City play is pretty ass. Wanted to start a gang, message staff, get finally set up after weeks. I message them my plan of a thing I want to do and ask a question about a simple misunderstanding (I basically wanted to set something on fire). A week went by. All I needed was a sentence response. Gave up pretty quickly and decided that anything group based wasn't worth a damn.
Also Crime Code is stupidly easy to work around. It's just bad/stupid to begin with. For a new player it's basically a death sentence, for an experienced player it's a headache.
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delirium
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Post by delirium on Feb 28, 2023 11:18:00 GMT -5
I admit, I'm curious what the numbers are going to look like by June. They did their best to lure people to stay and then almost immediately stepped in the shit again... and again.
Will they actually own up and choose action over pretty words? Will those still participating in the Cult of Armageddon say enough is enough if they don't?
Find out next month in "Jesus Christ people, this is not worth your sanity or your complicity in perpetuating an abusive online community!"
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mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on Feb 28, 2023 11:29:42 GMT -5
I admit, I'm curious what the numbers are going to look like by June. They did their best to lure people to stay and then almost immediately stepped in the shit again... and again. Will they actually own up and choose action over pretty words? Will those still participating in the Cult of Armageddon say enough is enough if they don't? Find out next month in "Jesus Christ people, this is not worth your sanity or your complicity in perpetuating an abusive online community!" Given the... special circumstances... I think I'll do a midyear report this year. Sometime in June or beginning of July sounds great. Thanks for the idea.
(Assuming the game is still open by then)
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delerak
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Post by delerak on Feb 28, 2023 11:36:01 GMT -5
Yeah it's pretty fucked at this point. I probably could have saved it at one point but they're too dimwitted to realize it. Honestly I should have been made staff a long time ago. I should be a producer by now if they had any shred of awareness. I'm 6'0 225 lbs of pure muscle. I bench 315 for reps. I squat 400+ for reps. I can deadlift a car. I have 3 Master's degrees, I did 8 years in the Navy, visiting places like Afghanistan, Hong Kong, Dubai, Hawaii. I discovered who I am. I have an awesome family that I pour 100% of my time and effort into. I get 3 hours of free time at night to play games before my day begins anew of raising two beautiful daughters. I'm just built different I suppose. Nothing can shake my will. I would never have tolerated the absolute dumpster fire that you're seeing now. Day one I would clean house. I would hold monthly Q&A sessions ON VIDEO with voice so people can actually be heard and get a rational response. Why? Because deep down I don't give a fuck. The problem with this farcical fantasy above? I'm too good for Arm. I can't be bargained with, I can't be reasoned with. I don't feel pity. Or remorse or fear and I absolutely never stop... until you are pkilled.
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TedCruz
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Post by TedCruz on Feb 28, 2023 12:01:14 GMT -5
If you'd like help with this project please let me know. I code for a living and could write scripts for you if needed.
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