mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on May 7, 2024 15:34:42 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. I don't think the staff will go back on their word on this front. It's simply too risky for them to be caught breaking their own rules yet again. If they do decide that it is necessary for them to play the game, they will change the rules publicly without discussion and go through the rigamarole of arguing with the players about it after the change is finalized, as usual. Another "secret resource PC situation" would just invoke comparisons of the current staff to Shalooonsh.
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mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on May 7, 2024 15:40:04 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! They probably thought it was a clever way to close the book on the north as a play area, but you're 100% right that it will invoke this kind of behavior.
My personal read on it is that there is some kind of resource in the Grey Forest that the GMHs want to acquire and bring to Allanak, and Tuluk will do everything in its power to stop them. This is in line with a weekly update that mentioned a new item material type was added to the game. Of course, there will be some natural threat to the Grey Forest that isn't kryl. Maybe it has to do with the secret clans, because if there's anything Armageddon staff really love, it's creating isolated clans that draw away 5%-10% of the playerbase permanently to a remote area of the game to never interact with anyone.
Overall it's not the worst update in the world for those willing to read between the lines, but I'm beginning to think that prospective players don't pay nearly as much attention to these updates as we do.
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Post by generality on May 7, 2024 20:21:31 GMT -5
The Kryl, the ma-ants and all the other insectoid bullshit are an awkward legacy of Shaloonsh, are they not? I don't like the idea of letting Valkyrja re-write everything in accordance to their status as a celebrity Web DM but to get rid of that stain on the psyche of the few remaining non-apologist players is a good thing... probably.
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Post by Azerbanjani on May 7, 2024 20:55:33 GMT -5
I really hope they don't shit out a secret clan in the Grey Forest.
Anyway I think if they wanted to completely exclude Tuluk without just closing the damn gates again the best way to do it would be to relegate them to a passive/mostly neutral third part in the background. I'd love to push for this kind of shit as a player even though I know everyone and their fucking mother would shit the bed, staff and players included, but the City States are massive ...city states, and their trading partners are ... -checks notes- uhhh. Like 3 tribes.
Where is the fucking money coming from.
Can these fuckers not make friends for five minutes then we move on to a less dumb meta plot?
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mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on May 7, 2024 21:18:23 GMT -5
The Kryl, the ma-ants and all the other insectoid bullshit are an awkward legacy of Shaloonsh, are they not? I don't like the idea of letting Valkyrja re-write everything in accordance to their status as a celebrity Web DM but to get rid of that stain on the psyche of the few remaining non-apologist players is a good thing... probably. Valkyrja's not writing everything. She's part of the staff's "newsletter committee" which is why she posts all the updates to the GDB. A lot of the stuff in these updates got approved well before she even joined staff.
Some wariness about one staff member having too much creative control is commendable, but the real person you'd want to worry about is Usiku. She handles the top-level writing stuff. Or maybe Eurynomos, who's the main guy handling the 50+ page document with all of the old PC contributions. The five new staffers are basically intern-level.
That being said the kryl came to the Grey Forest with Nyr. Shalooonsh doesn't really have a legacy beyond the Akai Sjir and his shitty behavior.
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Post by generality on May 8, 2024 6:43:20 GMT -5
Usiku does nothing but tell people off in Discord and sometimes deal with role applications, I guess she is the new Brokkr if it is as you say it is.
Considering Valkyrja played Ellenoire Terash, I'd say wariness is one hundred percent justified.
I think Nyr was before my time, barely. I never really had any experience with him.
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punished ppurg
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Post by punished ppurg on May 8, 2024 10:22:39 GMT -5
Kryl being gone is a good change. Never liked kryl.
If I'm a plot-maker on Arm then I'm using Tuluk as the "E" part of "PvE". I'm animating Tuluki spies in Allanak to contact players who I see running afoul of the Templarate and trying to turn them to the northie side. I'm putting hunting camps of Tulukis out in the Grey Forest for the new inevitable council of Allanaki mages to nuke; then I'm taking names of who participated, and then attacking them with Tuluki mindworms later on. There's "a lot" that can be done with the neighboring city-state as a monolith, since it is effectively shuttered and closed. As far as I know, you can't even be Tuluki in this new season.
It's going to be bizarre how players will have a WIFOM situation and have more roleplay with an admin-puppeted cluster of Tuluki NPCs, as opposed to how they treated Tuluki PCs with the run-in and immediate kill to death. Like, there's more content generated when a player "knows" they're being judged on content. Maybe the karma change will finally allow some mechanism of alienating the net-negatives from the game. There's been too much literature and spit-balling and theology about muh rp over the past 10 years for anyone who could be rehabilitated to not -get it- by now.
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Post by najdorf on May 8, 2024 11:06:29 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. I don't think the staff will go back on their word on this front. It's simply too risky for them to be caught breaking their own rules yet again. If they do decide that it is necessary for them to play the game, they will change the rules publicly without discussion and go through the rigamarole of arguing with the players about it after the change is finalized, as usual. Another "secret resource PC situation" would just invoke comparisons of the current staff to Shalooonsh. hold on. did they mention before they won't play avatars? I missed it. In that case things will go down even faster
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mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on May 8, 2024 15:37:33 GMT -5
If I'm a plot-maker on Arm then I'm using Tuluk as the "E" part of "PvE". I'm animating Tuluki spies in Allanak to contact players who I see running afoul of the Templarate and trying to turn them to the northie side. I'm putting hunting camps of Tulukis out in the Grey Forest for the new inevitable council of Allanaki mages to nuke; then I'm taking names of who participated, and then attacking them with Tuluki mindworms later on. There's "a lot" that can be done with the neighboring city-state as a monolith, since it is effectively shuttered and closed. As far as I know, you can't even be Tuluki in this new season. I have a feeling that's basically what's going to happen. Usiku posted this in the r/MUD thread on the most recent update: "Also, the focus of the game will be on consolidated play in the South, but that doesn't mean there won't be reasons for expeditions, adventures and exploration of the Known at large." That closes the loop on where I was reading between the lines. Subsets of the playerbase (mostly GMHs, I imagine) will have an IC reason to go on an expedition into the Grey Forest and Tuluk will be at least one of the parties that get mad about it. I would go so far as to suggest that this overall setup is an open admission from staff that wide-scale PvP is just not something that has ever worked on Armageddon. And they're absolutely right. From templars ordering entire NPC units of soldiers to kill single PCs in the Copper War, to that skirmish that happened a year or so ago in the north where one entire side got slaughtered within moments, Armageddon's sordid history with trying to create compelling large-scale PvP situations is written in the blood of many, many PCs whose players mistakenly believed that this was a collaborative roleplaying game. The things that would need to be put in place to make it work -- at the very least, some rules of engagement, but ideally also a sane combat system that doesn't allow for PCs to be gangbanged to death by hordes of leet pvpers -- are things that staff have historically been unwilling to implement. And now it's too late anyway, because the game doesn't have the playerbase to support large-scale PvP. And to be honest, I do think the karma system will help in this narrow instance, provided staff actually have the guts to reduce player karma. They should also forcibly store PCs when their players no longer meet the karma requirement to own them, frankly. But given how staff are happy to change rules for every single player to avoid having a tough discussion with just one of them, I think Tuluki NPCs are just going to get their heads bashed in by a bunch of 10-karma players running around with burning swords and humming rings before staff can type "switch soldier".
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jkarr
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Post by jkarr on May 9, 2024 2:18:24 GMT -5
Some wariness about one staff member having too much creative control is commendable, but the real person you'd want to worry about is Usiku. She handles the top-level writing stuff. Or maybe Eurynomoswait... urinemoose is back?!?! ......
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mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on May 10, 2024 15:16:44 GMT -5
Update 8 mirrored here. tl;dr follows: tl;dr: The GMHs are finding copper more and more often. Salarr's Expansion Division finds copper. House Kurac's Mobile Operations finds copper. Nobles and templars have copper. A Byn Sergeant has copper. Copper copper copper, copper copper copper copper. Also, more GMH politics, less vending machine. This is the first update that feels to me like less of a teaser and more descriptive of what the game will actually look like when Season One comes around. I always thought the staff's past unwillingness to use the rarity of metal in plotbuilding was stupid, so it's nice to see that the current staff are actually using elements of their setting to build up the groundwork for a plot. But this is a bare minimum expectation from any person running an RPG. I feel like a parent watching their child graduating kindergarten: happy, but also internally questioning a little bit why there is a graduation ceremony for kindergarten and why I had to pay for a cap and gown. The kids are learning, but they're learning the basics, and only after years and years of stagnation. Speaking in practical terms, one of the chief conflicts of season one will obviously be between the two GMHs. I said earlier in the thread that playing in these houses will be easy mode (especially Salarr), and I think that is the case even more now. The fact that Salarr controls top quality weapons exclusively already puts them in a comfortable position; the potential for them to make copper weapons just reinforces this idea further. Kurac can presumably produce other things from copper. The GMH's only enemies will be each other. Salarr has a huge advantage in the game's political arena thanks to the fact that its main trade good is not banned and the fact that they can make top quality weapons. (Edit to add: Also, the Kuraci Outriders will be sponsored roles whereas the Expansion Division will not, according to staff on Discord, giving Salarr a huge recruitment advantage.) It will be interesting to see how staff actually address that imbalance, ideally without saying "the game is meant to be unbalanced". More interesting to me than the update itself is some of the tidbits that have been shared by the new STs on Discord. GMH conflict will be colored by covering up murders or finding non-lethal resolutions (a given example was capturing rivals and selling them for ransom back to their GMH). Things will still be tense between GMHs, but the authorities won't get involved unless they escalate the conflict too far. Given that Agents are going to be combination political + outdoorsy roles, this is good, in theory. This is a tried-and-tested, good way to run conflict in a storytelling game, where the end is only death if your character is a complete idiot or there are no longer any legitimate "outs" for them. Good job. In practice... we all know Armageddon's playerbase by now, don't we? It only takes one House being led by someone willing to cooperate OOCly with other players to tip the scales. In fact, Shalooonsh did exactly that several years ago, when he played a Kadian Overseer that had members of the Kuraci Fist killed through an OOC contact. As well-laid as staff's plans are starting to look, it counts on a playerbase that just can't play for fun instead of trying to win. And the cultural changes needed to make storytelling the norm instead of winning are just not present. That being said, there are clear lines between this update and some of the player-provided feedback on the GDB. Kudos to the staff for finally starting to listen to their players. Maybe they will consider doing that the next time they think about brute-forcing a change into the game.
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pinkerdlu
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Post by pinkerdlu on May 10, 2024 20:14:28 GMT -5
Nice update. Kuraci Mobile Ops & Outriders sound cool. Plus willingness to focus on the Agent branches. I appreciate the sentiment with this idea but when the game is 30-40 players max, everyone is going to know who the PC Outriders are. Why specify 'family members' of Salarr? Just make it so that long-standing members can be adopted into the family and that this is a norm like you allude to for crafters and merchants. Otherwise you would just be giving special app'd chars and sponsored characters the potential to eventually become Agents - that is lame and hopefully not the new staff's intention. But this is a bare minimum expectation from any person running an RPG. I feel like a parent watching their child graduating kindergarten: happy, but also internally questioning a little bit why there is a graduation ceremony for kindergarten and why I had to pay for a cap and gown. The kids are learning, but they're learning the basics, and only after years and years of stagnation Okay but I'm the Dad. You can be a Dad too, we're co-parenting. But in practice this conflict isn't especially compelling. I think you're right that Salarr has a big advantage over Kurac. The Outriders being sponsored roles is ridiculous. Why does there need to be so much exclusivity in these clans? Why does every character role involved need to be carefully curated? They need to open these roles up to all players to make these experiences accessible and part of the world, not little secluded 'private plots' for a handful of players. The focus on finding/defending rare copper mines is meh, but it's hard to tell until we see how willing the staff are to truly put power in the hands of the players and have there be serious in-game consequences for plays in this conflict. There could be little to no effect, and it could all be an excuse for staff to have these clans exist in isolation and just play out slightly different obscure roleplaying niches. I don't get why the T'zai Byn needs to exist or be a thing. I like mercenary roleplay but if the copper resource war is going to be a meaningful & necessary conflict, it needs to have precedence. The Jade Sabers/Steel Talons don't really need to be a thing either? Have a couple Templars that enforce order but everyone else can be a Noble/indie/citizen. Make Kurac and Salarr their own private armies. The lack of people to fill out these clans should be a real concern for staff. 2, 3 or even 4 people actively playing in a clan turns it into a graveyard. For things to be lively and not slink into the same snoozefest that Arm has been the last 10 years, the consolidation needs to be done right. Basing everything around Allanak was an appropriate step. But there should be less clans open than they plan to have. I know. You want play a Tor Scorpion and fuck your aide gf in the barracks. You want to be a Byn Trooper cleaning shit from the latrines. You want to be a Fale Aide juggling in the noble estate. I do too. But we want a game here, don't we? Not a complacent sandbox where you can fulfill some niche fantasy role in Diku while you watch Youtube and chat on Discord. Bruh come on... Are you going to be a story-driven RPI or a MUSH? A game that lives or dies? Choose.
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mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on May 11, 2024 7:24:45 GMT -5
I don't get why the T'zai Byn needs to exist or be a thing. I like mercenary roleplay but if the copper resource war is going to be a meaningful & necessary conflict, it needs to have precedence. The Jade Sabers/Steel Talons don't really need to be a thing either? Have a couple Templars that enforce order but everyone else can be a Noble/indie/citizen. Make Kurac and Salarr their own private armies. The lack of people to fill out these clans should be a real concern for staff. 2, 3 or even 4 people actively playing in a clan turns it into a graveyard. For things to be lively and not slink into the same snoozefest that Arm has been the last 10 years, the consolidation needs to be done right. Basing everything around Allanak was an appropriate step. But there should be less clans open than they plan to have. I know. You want play a Tor Scorpion and fuck your aide gf in the barracks. You want to be a Byn Trooper cleaning shit from the latrines. You want to be a Fale Aide juggling in the noble estate. I do too. But we want a game here, don't we? Not a complacent sandbox where you can fulfill some niche fantasy role in Diku while you watch Youtube and chat on Discord. Bruh come on... Are you going to be a story-driven RPI or a MUSH? A game that lives or dies? Choose. Halaster mentioned a couple weeks back on Discord that the reason for keeping the Byn alive is because it's a newbie friendly clan, which I think encapsulates staff's line of thinking when it comes to clans in general, and how much (or how little) they're willing to actually change the player distribution of the game. It made sense to keep the Byn open as a sort of newbie school when Armageddon was getting dozens of new players every week and they needed to be immediately pulled into the meat of the game en masse. The Byn was hardly a perfect introduction to the game (imagine being a newbie who isn't interested in combat), but for those it didn't work for, some other clan would still function just fine as an introduction. The players in leadership positions were generally patient enough to handle a newbie and were just thrilled to have a new player in their clan. Now, Armageddon does not really get new players. There was a funny post on the GDB recently where a new account posted in New Player Questions asking if there would be karma in this game like the game they came from, Apocalypse. New players to Armageddon usually come from other RPIs, and the ones that don't come from other RP MUDs. The only learning they have to do is command syntax, and there's nothing special about the Byn that makes learning that easier than any other clan. The staff are just convinced that since the Byn was once considered a newbie school, it must always be considered a newbie school, without actually reassessing and wondering if maybe past staff teams were just stupid and misinformed about their own game and whether it might be time to actually take stock. By extension, the staff are likely convinced that other clans are necessary simply because they have always been considered necessary for one reason or another. Allanak needs three noble houses, because it's always had at least three noble houses. Nevermind that they don't really function together in any natural way; the players will figure something out and "do politics", whatever that ends up entailing. The game needs a criminal clan for non-elves and it needs a clan for elves who want to live in the city and a different clan for elves who don't, even though they will all basically end up under the thumb of some templar or another. And because we need more clans to fill even more niches for our cool new world documentation, there is now a clan for each elementalist temple in Allanak. And not one, but two secret clans because the game must always have something that only the extra-special players are allowed to know about. The other element to this is that clans don't just need bodies, they need leaders too. My generous estimate for the game is that it will get 100 players on week one. This is based on ~60 karma reviews being resolved plus the fact that many players just don't like asking the staff for things. Every clan needs one competent leader PC, and the players best suited to this have mostly been run off from the game long ago. Trying to get 15-20 competent leaders from a pool of 100 random people is hard enough; trying to get that from the current Armageddon playerbase is simply impossible.
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Post by najdorf on May 11, 2024 7:30:52 GMT -5
spoiler. salarr found a method close to closure to extract copper from jade (those green jade pieces) their hunters lately had been seeking jades in high quantities. jade deposits are more common and their method of melting jade is more efficient than finding pure copper ores.
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Post by Azerbanjani on May 11, 2024 22:07:03 GMT -5
"Outriders operate outside the boundaries of city-state laws and prefer to remain anonymous, never speaking of their work in public to others."
This is kind of a cringe brain dead stupid fucking thing to type when we live in a supposedly hellish wasteland world. Like. In what world do we need to be told this?
Do we need to be told 'Mercenaries aren't soldiers' next and that when they tell you to do something outside they aren't 'the law'?
I dunno I'm overthinking things but it feels like they feel the need to clarify to their players that merchants aren't 'tha law' and that makes me think they assume people are stupid. Which they are but still.
Also you can't have privacy in this fucking game we can see mdescs and we have phones in our heads.
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