mehtastic
GDB Superstar
Armers Anonymous sponsor
Posts: 1,363
|
Post by mehtastic on May 6, 2024 15:19:47 GMT -5
Update 7 is out. There's a bunch of flavor crap about the Grey Forest (it's not dark anymore), Morin's Village (50,000 people used to live here. Now it's a ghost town.), and Tuluk (We're not ignoring our problems! We're being subtle!), but the only part that really matters is the available starting origins and locations and the list of initially open clans. House Kadius is gone, handwaved away as barely being active outside of Tuluk and therefore about as isolated as the rest of Tuluk is. You will have to mastercraft your own loincloths and bandeaus now.
Staff are doing that thing where they bring back stuff that used to be really popular (the Salarri ED and the Kuraci Outriders) without understanding what exactly made them popular. How do I know this? Because the rest of the update doesn't cover how these groups will function. They're just dropped into this list here. Veterans will eat it up because they wear rose-colored glasses when it comes to these sub-clans. They miss the old days and associate it with the fact the ED/Outriders were open, and not the fact that the game had 300 players and a staff team that at least somewhat cared about telling stories. Time will tell if the current staff have that storytelling spark back, but there is no realistic path to getting the playerbase back. We are talking about ~20 open clans depending on whether the temples each get their own clan, servicing a playerbase of ~120-140 people, half of which rarely if ever play in clans at all. Basically, it's the same problem the game always had and the staff never addressed.
Granted if you read between the lines of the update, it's a setup for a resource gathering plot that Tuluk will interfere with somehow, but I think those hoping for a Copper War 2.0 will be sorely disappointed.
|
|
|
Post by poorimpulsecontrol on May 6, 2024 16:04:23 GMT -5
Of all the Delf tribes, they kept the fucking lamest one?
|
|
|
Post by Azerbanjani on May 6, 2024 16:46:06 GMT -5
Honestly the Two Moons are the only delves I ever ran across that ever were not just absolute kank shit. Though I hear they wound up just being boot lickers for the city, which sucks
|
|
|
Post by poorimpulsecontrol on May 6, 2024 18:50:07 GMT -5
I admittedly saw some fun RP come out of TwoMoons, so I might have been a lil harsh for the sake of my own lolz, but Nak's Bitch never appealed to me. If I wanted that, I'd just play a Nakki loyalist.
|
|
mehtastic
GDB Superstar
Armers Anonymous sponsor
Posts: 1,363
|
Post by mehtastic on May 6, 2024 19:07:49 GMT -5
IMO the only reason opening Two Moons makes sense is that staff thought "well um uh we need desert elves, and welp they should be in the south with everyone else". Without a significant revamp it's hard to imagine them fitting into any kind of season one metaplot except as lapdogs of the templarate.
Which I suppose raises the question of why these clans were chosen, aside from their proximity to the city. Aside from the obvious staff choice to condense the GMH and tribal options, there's nothing significantly different from these clan choices from when Tuluk was closed. Which was done to refocus staff's attention, but resulted in people mostly playing indie characters.
What are staff doing differently for season one compared to then? I guess we'll see in about five weeks.
|
|
|
Post by Azerbanjani on May 6, 2024 20:58:07 GMT -5
I admittedly saw some fun RP come out of TwoMoons, so I might have been a lil harsh for the sake of my own lolz, but Nak's Bitch never appealed to me. If I wanted that, I'd just play a Nakki loyalist. I think I got into a shitfest in the Apoc discord, or maybe even arm discord, over some situation/hypothetical of a templar pulling up to the Two Moons camp and me being of the opinion the elves should absolutely just 100% murder the Templar if the Templar is acting a fool and that the repercussions for such shouldn't logically be too bad. Give a red robe a small little gift, 'oopsies sorry', and move on type shit. My hardcore desert dark sun sim is a world where idiots die and no one cares but other people apparently disagreed. I don't really see opening TM as a crazy choice or anything. We need the 2 people who play delves to feel like they have an option. Am I retarded or who are the Zeif? It seems, optimistically, like a large amount of clans. I am glad to see they stopped letting everyone and their mother play every noble house, that was as tupid time.
|
|
mehtastic
GDB Superstar
Armers Anonymous sponsor
Posts: 1,363
|
Post by mehtastic on May 7, 2024 4:27:35 GMT -5
The Zeif Akir are the rooftop elves. (a city elf clan in Allanak)
I can see why the staff want a desert elf clan and why they picked Two Moons to fill that niche. I think it's representative of staff's overall approach to developing the game, which is to minimize the amount of creative effort needed to reach specific goals. They could easily revamp the clan so it doesn't fall into the same patterns that it did before, but the fact that they didn't is a choice as well. They could have also developed a new desert elf clan that better fits their metaplot needs.
The minimized effort is apparent throughout the rest of their choices too. Fale just has new specialties haphazardly pinned to it with its information broker/loan shark bent on top of the fact that it's a party house. It looks like a dumping ground for a bunch of cool ideas staff had and believe will work well together. The GMH road thing is just a repeat of building projects that have gone back over decades, from the effort to build that Allanaki fortress way out west, to the rebuilding of Tuluk after the flood, to the creation of the Kuraci fortress north of Luir's, to the literal other road rebuilding project west of Allanak: just another way to justify spamming "forage stone" as roleplay. All of the updates feel very recycled.
The only thing that feels genuinely creative from staff's end thus far (at least, measured against the metric of other staff deeds and misdeeds) is Magefall, and even that seems tainted somewhat by the fact that it feels like they are ceding ground to a subset of high-karma players that refuse to play anything but mages while also demanding a large share of metaplot involvement.
The tl;dr is that it feels like staff are trying to cobble together all of the demands of players over the past decade or so, including the stupid, shortsighted, and misinformed demands, and make a game out of it. It's like if Blizzard looked at the Overwatch forum and implemented every single suggestion about which character should be buffed or nerfed without thinking about it.
|
|
|
Post by generality on May 7, 2024 5:08:32 GMT -5
I'm sure the 'rooftop elves' will become unplayable the moment a templar/AoD sergeant or whomever decides they are all a source of bribes or criminals. They don't have the luxury of being protected by the lawless denizens of the 'Rinth.
|
|
mehtastic
GDB Superstar
Armers Anonymous sponsor
Posts: 1,363
|
Post by mehtastic on May 7, 2024 5:57:29 GMT -5
Also, I'm just going to throw this out there. I think the closure of House Kadius is representative of the path the game has been on for the past decade and is yet another distress signal for the game.
The fact is that the two remaining open GMH houses are both clearly open only because they offer legitimate mundane means of boosting a character's coded prowess. Salarr has amazing-quality weapons and Kurac has spice and camouflage gear. By comparison, Kadius is obsolete because they offer nothing so impactful. Colored bags are useful for sorting heaps of unusable items in PC-run warehouses I guess.
Playing in House Salarr -- from being a family member down to being a grunt in the ED or a crafter -- is going to be the game's easy mode, both socially and codedly, in Allanak. No one is going to want to run afoul of Salarr, because what will happen is you'll be locked out of buying amazing weapons, and your enemies will get a discount on them. Kurac won't be a useful ally because they will barely have influence in Allanak thanks to the spice ban, and Kadius is obviously gone. Technically, someone could hit the reset button on their Salarri relationship by just having the sponsored roles killed and forcing staff to reroll those spots, but it is so much less effort to just make nice with them. Only people intentionally playing fuck-ups will have a bad relationship with Salarr.
Kurac will be less easy to play in than Salarr, but will still be easy to play in for similar reasons. The PC Tavern probably will have a still but probably won't be able to mastercraft drinks, because staff are the laziest people in the world. Nobles will probably want kemen. Hunters will probably want camo. Kurac fills all of the little niches Salarr can't and Kadius obviously can't anymore.
The only thing that will be difficult about these roles is managing the slew of orders and the impatience of those who are ordering. With seasons being a limited timeframe, the only fixes for this are severely reducing the mastercraft time limit and giving the GMHs warehouse NPCs that have every single item they make in stock. However, neither of these will happen in any serious way because it represents more work for staff. There won't be any real threats to a GMH player's position, but the burnout of having to do labor for a game because the staff simply refuse to do so will be real.
And going back to Salarr and burning bridges: there is actually one way to get an amazing-quality weapon that doesn't involve Salarr. Bring a flat piece of slate to a friendly mage (not Vivaduan) and ask very nicely. Good thing that the staff kept in a sense of general distrust of magic. Oh wait.
|
|
|
Post by uncoolio on May 7, 2024 6:27:54 GMT -5
The only thing that feels genuinely creative from staff's end thus far (at least, measured against the metric of other staff deeds and misdeeds) is Magefall, and even that seems tainted somewhat by the fact that it feels like they are ceding ground to a subset of high-karma players that refuse to play anything but mages while also demanding a large share of metaplot involvement. At least they've giganerfed the aspect subclasses to the point where they're barely worth playing, and the main elementalist classes are not so very expensive karma-wise. In some way, it's sort of amusing that they turned the magick subclasses into absolute crap and then also made them more exclusive (now requiring a spec-app, it seems), because that's quite the double whammy. Still, I much prefer that mages are of the full elementalist kind where they have actual weaknesses and limitations, as opposed to the abomination that we were saddled with for years, where you could just graft the best spells of any given element onto the class that it synergized best with and have a wildly overpowered character. I do believe they nerfed the aspect subclasses too hard, so much so that I can barely think of a combination still worth playing; and I suspect this was their intent. Removing them entirely would have attracted complaints, but a mere heavy-handed nerf that renders them codedly useless leaves space for those who can't comprehend the code to argue that all is well, and that serves as a counterbalance to those who do know the code saying that this change made this entire category of character concepts worthless. This creates a buffer zone where unintelligent people inadvertently play defense against the assertation that the change in question made the aspects worthless. That's not to say that I disagreed with that change in principle. The aspects were grossly overpowered before. However, it's not how I would have addressed that issue, and I interpret the skillcap nerf as an effort to make those subclasses pointless without committing to the controversial decision to remove them altogether. The result is that some non-zero number of uninformed players might waste their time attempting to be relevant with a scout/rukkian whose combat skills cap at journeyman, and stealth skills at low advanced. Needless to say, such a character is a dead end no matter what spells you might have available to you; but there are enough players who take misguided pride in ignorance of the code who will defend it without seeing what the underlying reason for it probably was. They're just cheerleading for Arm out of thoughtless fealty. And that change is not, in and of itself, a big problem for the class balance - indeed, it could be called an improvement - but it seems to say a lot about the design mentality that goes into these changes. When faced with the decision between simply removing the unbalanced aspect subclasses, and tackling the scattered complaints that might result from this; or nerfing them into the ground and potentially facing fewer complaints but also leaving open a trap for those without extensive knowledge of the code to waste their time on useless characters, staff chose the latter. It was easier for them. Fuck the players who haven't got friends to tell them that going down one or two levels in all your relevant skills is not worth it for the sake of a select few decent spells.
I prefer full elementalists over the aspect subclasses, for several different reasons--but what I prefer even more is a game whose coders enact changes that make sense. The aspects are absolute junk now, and I cannot ignore the feeling that staff knew this but chose to do it anyway because they value the mitigation of criticism more highly than the time of all the players who haven't got enough of a grasp of the code to realize that the aspects are now a self-sabotaging trap.
Far too often, pointing out problems with the code just invites hostility rather than acceptance of your feedback. If you show that you know how the code works, you show that you're a horrible cheater who doesn't comprehend the concept of roleplaying. If you declare that you know nothing about the code, you prove that you're a virtuous believer in the Armageddon ethos. That fallacy has plagued this game's community since the dawn of time. People take pride in knowing (or at least pretending to) as little as possible, and others are subjected to suspicion and discrimination for admitting that they understand how the game mechanics work. After all, knowing how the machine works means you're surely using that knowledge to take advantage of others! And so the wheels of stupidity continue to spin, year after year, assisted by players whose primary motivation is virtue-signalling for the sake of currying favor and furtively begging for karma, because if they know as little as possible about the code, surely that leaves correspondingly more room for better RP!
That way, code changes are inspired by ignorance and/or disingenuous posturing just as often as actual knowledge. This phenomenon is not specific to the magick subclasses at all. Time and time again, a change goes in that was clearly based on someone's lack of understanding how the game's coded systems interact. Often it was preceded by a discussion where one or two people knew what they were talking about, but were shouted down by the sheer stupidity of the mansas and Lizzies of the community who don't know what they're talking about but have built up enough social clout to where people think they do.
|
|
mehtastic
GDB Superstar
Armers Anonymous sponsor
Posts: 1,363
|
Post by mehtastic on May 7, 2024 8:53:22 GMT -5
It's generally accepted as a point of game design that if your game has a "meta", then you shore up the other options to make them more viable rather than decrease the viability of the popular options. That alone makes the reduction of aspect subclasses' power silly enough.
Another issue is that intentional imbalance is woven into Armageddon's culture, to the point that imbalance is seemingly sought for its own sake. And without blowing up anyone's spot, I'll just say that a lot of the stupid people that couldn't understand how the code works are now on staff, in a position to comment on these decisions and argue for or against them, if not outright make the decisions unilaterally.
A third issue that will become apparent very quickly (I think within the first few weeks of the game opening) is that elementalist options are so ubiquitous. The only way a player doesn't have 6 karma is if they're one of the game's kicked dogs the staff loves to bully, they're a drooling idiot who is literally too stupid to play the game, or they are a new player. 6 karma opens up every elementalist option except for Drov and Elkros, and those only require 7 karma, which should be easily achievable by any 6-karma player that happens to be noticed by a storyteller. Not every 6-7-karma player will play a mage, but almost everyone can and will take the options available to them.
And to tie all of this back to the open clan selection, suddenly we have 20 clans open, most of which will only be hiring a very limited amount of mages, except for the temples which every gemmed character can be a part of. This is a recipe for disaster. Even though one full-guild elementalist character is weaker compared to one old aspect character, groups of full-guild elementalists selecting subguilds to shore up common weaknesses are significantly more powerful than groups of mundane characters of similar or larger size. But, at the same time, groups of full-guild elementalists won't congregate in any one particular clan.
I can almost certainly guarantee that a player of a gemmed character will think to organize unclanned mages into some sort of crack mercenary A-Team group. The Byn will become the bargain bin (no pun intended) option for nobles and templars that need to hire someone to get stuff done and the gemmed group becomes the platinum option. Then the game just repeats the late 2000s-early 2010s era of the Council of Allanaki Mages dominating every aspect of the game's metaplot while everyone else gets the crumbs that were dropped in the dust.
|
|
|
Post by Azerbanjani on May 7, 2024 9:31:44 GMT -5
I largely disagree with some of Mehtastic's stuff, I think some of it is needlessly cynical (Which is funny because I fucking hate this game), but I will more blatantly disagree with Magefall being creative.
It really isn't. It's a shoehorned response to how player attitudes have been changing for, I want to say, since at least I was playing the game. 2016...2018? Don't remember. Pretty sure it's been changing before then too. So they are what...almost 10 years too late? And they do it in a really half assed way that does little to change the nature of the game by allowing people to retain a 'Oh I hate mages' mindset.
If they went full dick with it and had it be a blatant 'No, not everyone hates mages. If you do, you're a wacko' I'd be impressed. I guess if we just compare Magefall to everything else then yeah I agree it's the most creative thing but by a very small margin as everything else is pretty damn boring.
"Bring a flat piece of slate to a friendly mage (not Vivaduan) and ask very nicely. Good thing that the staff kept in a sense of general distrust of magic. Oh wait."
Sadly turning these on is still kind of annoying and they codedly made it so you can't donate as a non sorc/elementalist IIRC (Which was silly). But since hating mages is 'totally fine sometimes but not all the time' having your pal Vivaduan activate your fire sword.....lets go. That being said didn't they change it so activating non element specific weapons hurt you or something? I might be making that up.
Unironically I think a mage mercenary group would be lit as hell.
Anyway it's been a page or two: I fucking hate Armageddon magic lore, systems, and mechanics.
|
|
mehtastic
GDB Superstar
Armers Anonymous sponsor
Posts: 1,363
|
Post by mehtastic on May 7, 2024 9:44:36 GMT -5
I can accept being called cynical, but I have to ask what makes people think that anything different will happen when the same things are being tried. The players have been complaining for years and years that the mages keep taking their plots, and the staff have so far outlined nothing that will actually change that, and several things that will only make the problem worse.
The only difference between what season one will look like and what the game looked like previously is that fewer players will be filling the same roles. To staff's credit they've said that they'll adjust the open clans based on player count and distribution. There is no mathematical way to justify anything but a downsizing.
|
|
|
Post by najdorf on May 7, 2024 14:06:35 GMT -5
This is all in vain. Given that over 20 active players quit after the announcement, the staff is terribly worried and will decide to play as avatars without revealing that they are staff members. Each storyteller will take on 1-2 avatars to boost the numbers, but even that may not be sufficient.
|
|
|
Post by lyse on May 7, 2024 15:26:19 GMT -5
So…season one is primarily taking place in the south, but we’re going to do a big write up about the Grey forest?
Unless there is going to be some kind of conflict up there….why are we doing that? I mean, throw out your excel map yeah…but I feel like we know more about everywhere else except where the story is going to take place.
The writeups should get people excited about playing in the south, not wishing they could play in Tuluk. Now you’re going to have a significant segment of players that are going to go up there just to see and map it out again, possibly dying multiple times in the process.
Good job!
|
|