Peanut gallery: Armageddon seasons

A notable point raised on the GDB about the turnover of staffers in the game: the "we can't find enough staffers" argument. It's really the bottom of the barrel, isn't it? I mean at this point, the "good" potential staffers have ethical reservations about contributing to the staff team: or the game in general.

The game had a remarkable run, even considering all the bad and all the toxicity, and I think it could have soldiered on running on fumes for 5-10 more years but this is really just the end.

They'll almost certainly do one season if only because the people who forced this change will probably will that to happen simply to try to prove they were right all along. But it'll take several more months than they're promising as anyone who has any experience with a coding project or Armageddon staff should know. Time estimates are always wildly low and the enthusiasm to implement this change will fade quickly.

Even if you put aside all of the remarkable toxicity and horrible shit that's gone down and how much loathing exists between staff and playerbase, it's kind of remarkable that the game lasted as long as it did.

Frankly, I think it's just straight up delusional to think that an RPI mud will significantly grow its playerbase in 2023. A daily high of 40+ players was actually pretty good, all things considered, and they'll never see it again because probably close to half of their current playerbase doesn't want this and a lot of whatever % is left will stop paying attention as the months of it being shut down wear on.

I don't know why I didn't just realize what this really is from the start - it's Armagddon shutting down for all intents and purposes because there's no reality where they get back to the daily highs they had in November, as underwhelming as those numbers may seem.

Hah! I missed that wacky gdb caper. I would have voted for you.

You played Canvas? Damn.

Of course I remember, Larimar only killed 3-4 PCs and Canvas was probably the one I as a player regretted. Ultimately I had to, Canvas didn't seem interested in talking anything out and when you arrived to the scrub I saw you trying to throw a spear and was pretty paranoid about peraine at the time so I had to do something..

sorry

Absolutely, there are yet still good (exemplary) Arm players that have not had their shot on the staff team. You could include me on there. I would staff up Arm in a heartbeat. The difference being is that these people, like you or me or whoever is conscientious enough, don't get selected for the game. We wouldn't get selected because of our "infamy", but even in a perfect world where we have spotless records- there's something more to it, more personality based. It's like looking at a shadow, but you can see it if you squint: there are certain driving personality factors that the staff team simply does not select for. How can we conceptualize what the staff team is lacking? Every now and then I think back to the story pinkerdlu told me while he was on staff; he was brought on with a fellow new trial guy, who had one driving vision: he wanted to create some sort of long-forgotten dwarf clan that he had been part of when he was playing like a decade ago. This priority was bizarre, distracting, not what the game needed at that point in time. But it was utterly soul-crushing for there to be all of these systemic issues with Armageddon, and on your flank your fellow newbie staffer is dedicated to creating dwarf clan content. The fire is there, and people are willfully ignorant of it - as opposed to trying to address it. pinkerdlu tells the story better than I do.

But to the original point. It's not that Arm has run out of potential staffers: it's that they've run out of potential staffers that the current clique is content in raising, and accepting. 



Assuming that the rumor about the entirety of the staff team was not made aware of the Seasons change before Halaster announced it, it then follows that there is a clique inside the clique: the ones that are actually pulling the strings, and then the busyworkers are the lessers that aren't privy to important things. This elitist approach to game management is how the highest-ups end up rupturing and ruining the trust that the lowbie volunteers are putting into the system: trust is a two-way process on a staff team. If your lowbies see that their opinions don't matter, and that they're not brought into discussions on important things? Anyone with self-respect is going to wander elsewhere; and what's going to be left are the staffers with dark personality traits that are detrimental to the game: we can all list those staffers, we've known them and seen them and dealt with them and had our investment & trust in Armageddon ruptured by them, sometimes carelessly and sometimes maliciously. But the actual health of the game is suffering because of this staff culture: player numbers are going down because of this staff culture. There was an ethical argument to be made when Shalooonsh and Shabago were still around, that a competent person contributing to Armageddon in any capacity (whether they're a staffer or just a player), that competent person's content may, potentially, be weighing on a victimized person's internal scale, and persuading them to continue to participate in an environment where they are being OOCly victimized. Isn't that a dangerous thought? Explore it to the end. Good players, by virtue of being good and providing good content, fuel an environment where abusers can function, can flourish; and it is the roots of those good players, the experiences they've brought to the telnet port, that keep the victim holding on for a little while longer while the victimizers still churn. Really, it becomes an ethical dilemma: do I continue to participate in a system where my good works are captivating fellow players to continue subjecting themselves to the cruelty of this clique? A lot of people opt out.

A lot of the staff are dull "company man" types. I think their disappointment is vastly overestimated. Sure, there are some disappointed STs... but by and large, they were completely disrespected by the Producers and think "yeah it makes sense they didn't tell us! it was for the good of the game" because they like the idea of being staff more than they care about the people playing it or the legacy that former players left behind.

That said there is definitely a clique within a clique. It's just that the out-group does not respect themselves enough to stand up for themselves.

It's pretty much peak time right now, on a Friday night, and there's ten players on.

Armageddon is officially dead, and the only hope left (if one cares enough to hope) is that the season revives the game. It's no longer an ailing game that needs improvements, it's a dead game that needs to be resurrected. Its future rests entirely with a project that most players are against, that no work has yet been done on, and has - to my knowledge - never been attempted by any RPI ever, so nobody knows if the idea is even viable.