Peanut gallery: Armageddon seasons

Malifaxis was fucking awful to watch as staff, and when I found out he was Shalooonsh I was dumbfounded. Armageddon maybe does deserve to just die, but its bs as I can see so many ways to fix it and could do so much with it's codebase.

At least Arm forcing me away permanently will get me enthusiastic to be working on my own project again, and I won't keep getting distracted by going back to play.

Yeah I meant to say that staff's excuse for all of this is "staff and players are too stretched thin". Not being facetious per se, but I don't personally buy into the staff arguing that they are stretched thin. They have more than enough people to do the job, but no direction and poor management, like you say.

I do genuinely believe the playerbase is too small for the size of the world though, but that's a self-inflicted wound.

This idea would be an easier sell in a game where the staff are actually actively supporting player plots. "This is working, but there are also serious flaws with our organizational model, so we're going to do this a different way."

In this scenario, the staff are flailing, unwilling to put the work in to support the game, and their promise of future support in a seasonal model is just "trust us bro". They have done nothing to prove they are competent at running any game at all, let alone one that will radically change in 2 months max.

I foresee a successful spinoff game or two from players who can actually put the time into developing one, as opposed to whatever this is.

Oh fuck I wasn't even thinking about this yesterday. Now I'm not laughing anymore.

It's been a day since the announcement. Let's check the MSSP stats: iberia.jdai.pt/mudstats/mud/armageddon_mud



Oh dear. If you thought the 40-person peak was a myth already, check out the 17-person peak today, with an average player count of 12.

"And they were like, 'Please spare us! The game is running well enough already!' Hilarious. I love this job." - Halaster

Yeah. Ever since Nyr installed his weirdly totalitarian red-tape philosophy, the game has been on a downward trajectory. It's been about a decade of that, now. It used to be better back in the 2004-08 era (though the Reborn farce was a large blemish on that period), and then it had a few years where it was losing its mojo but still in relatively decent shape. Then the rot truly set in and Arm became a parody of itself.

Nyr launched a two-pronged attack on the playerbase:

1) He was just a piece of shit, a truly awful human being who was impossible to reason with. Anyone who has had the displeasure of communicating with him directly can probably attest to the fact that he was very likely a legitimate narcissist whose primary goal in any interaction was to make the other party feel bad. He'd look for any reason to scold, punish or otherwise shit on you, often for no real reason. He needed to put others down in order to make himself feel bigger. This created a huge rift between players and staff, with many players growing embittered. Some quit, others stayed but adopted a distrust and antipathy towards staff. This was, of course, felt by the staff, some of whom came to loathe the playerbase in return. It created an 'us vs them' mentality from both sides. This has gotten better in recent years, but there's still some of that stink left.

2) He wanted to be in control of everything. His infamous red tape bogged the game down with stifling bureaucracy. His default approach to any and all player efforts was to look for a way to say no and turn them down, and even if he didn't formally reject your request for assistance, he would either stall until your character was gone or find some other way to prevent you from doing what you wanted. Former staffers have said that the same applied to them, forcing them to ask his permission for anything they wanted to do, and often getting told no if he could contrive to see the slightest fault with whatever they proposed. As a result, the game ground to a halt and Arm entered what I like to call the Nothing's Fucking Happening era. The game never got out from under that. It just drained the entire community's energy.

Because of these things, a lot of the good players quit, the ones who had the drive and ability to do noteworthy things. Players with standards found other places to spend their time. Many of those who remained were of the type who are content to just live in a simulated world where basic activities like hunting and crafting are enough to satisfy them. They're the ones who will respond to complaints of stagnation with "what are you talking about? I'm having a blast," and then their version of fun gameplay is logging in to hunt, then craft something useless out of the shit they skinned from the animal, and then log off. There was another group that also remained: the ones to whom the whole RPI thing was a sidenote, something to lend a sense of gravity to their joy of PKing or the pride of having the most skilled warrior in all the land. These two demographic now made up the majority of the playerbase.

It's no surprise, then, that the roleplay turned to shit. Half the playerbase had no concept of meaningful, worthwhile roleplay and the other half didn't really take it very seriously in the first place. The small minority of good players who still remained found it increasingly hopeless, and in some cases they joined one of those two majorities because it was at least a way to justify playing. They stand out as the rare individuals who can actually emote, portray a believable character, behave realistically and so on, but they've largely given up trying to actually accomplish anything because today's Arm is like a cooking show where the chef tells you to make a filet mignon but hands you a packet of wheat toast and an onion as the ingredients you have at your disposal. No matter how much you love filet mignon, you can't make it out of toast and onion, so why even take the trouble to try?