Weekly update trends (2010 - 2023)

Good writeup as always.

I think it's fair to say that, in retrospect, the Seasons announcement could have been done differently. For example, it could have been done today on New Year's 2024. And it could have been done by Usiku, or even a three-part editorial article where all three of the new producers (once Halaster was replaced) wherein each "head" of the hydra makes their own promises and expectations, delivers something more to hope for.

Instead, we have Halaster.

Maybe this means nothing to some people, or they say they think it means nothing; but this is such a subconscious / hypnotic cut, that it's hard to address directly. I'll try and frame the shadow.

In Producer tradition, we remember in October that Halaster Trick-or-Treated us with his "I quit" forum post. The yellow highlight is my emphasis.


Taking old boy at his word? This is a rejection of the community (mostly). "A lot of you simply disgust me"; and I'm not going to suggest that the Arm community isn't disgusting (since I am in it) - rather, take this Halaster mood as it sits. He's had his own team and community in shambles after the Shalooonsh retirement suggestion, not to mention the Shabago junk that went hand in hand. "Rampant hostility" seems to happen to you when you enable OOC sexually antagonistic admins, and hope to cover for them easy once they get #MeToo'd. And everyone in the community had a #MeToo story about Shalooonsh, or knew someone who had been violated by it. It's the reason why the old girl matriarchy, Adhira and Cat Rambo and so forth wouldn't let Looonsh have foothold back when they were around. But I digress - I only revisit the Looonsh situation in as much that, it is a catalyst for the anxiety in the playerbase towards the staff team and especially Halaster. So in October, he rejects the community and rejects the obligations of his voluntary position as Producer of the game. Instead, Halaster resigns himself to coding only. In his own words, "I'm fed up with our community." "I will not be participating in anything resembling running the game or steering it, or be player facing or interacting with the community in any official capacity." "I'm burned out, tired of it all." "I wish you all the best."

You can't fault a man for his feelings. At least we can respect Halaster by saying he knew when he had enough, and he had the dignity to make way for someone who didn't feel this way about the game & its community.  I only wonder who the new Producer will be that replaces him.




Hold on! This feels like being player-facing and steering the community!

Something happened in that month of November that made Halaster turn from his own disgust; and I think that event was the idea of Seasons. As I said in the peanut gallery thread, it has the capacity to be a good idea. A few issues in the messaging, though. It is my personal opinion that, accepting the premise that the Seasons idea reinvigorated Halaster for the game where a month prior he was "simply disgust me" levels of done with it: that wave of reinvigoration was such a whiplash for the community precisely because Halaster was at the head of signaling, contradicting his own words and expectations from a month prior. And it opens the Pandora's Box of anxiety in the Armageddon community where players are concerned about Halaster, or whomever, making sweeping changes to a game that he had been fed up with and "quit" from just a month prior.

No matter how well-written Halaster's messaging is, there is nothing that he can do to counter-act himself being the messenger — the driving force, perhaps the reason. He doesn't necessarily need to be the reason: it's just sufficient that enough players see him in that light. And by rejecting the community prior, it is only natural that some of the community rejects him. Not everybody; but a percentage. This is why you see such trepidation about the idea of Seasons. It is a good idea! In the same breath, it can be reduced down to Halaster's last ditch effort at making the game interesting for himself before he well and truly fucks off. And that, does not bode well for its longevity or its success. We all know that Halaster is renowned for his excellent decision-making in the minutia of administrative capacity: truly the Solomon of our digital era. People feel this uneasiness, but they don't know how precisely how to express it; or they don't want to say it because of the recoil they're going to receive. So, they just opt out.

If there was a new fresh-faced 3rd producer that was supporting Usiku being the primary messenger for the idea of Seasons, then I think Arm would be in a better spot than it is right now. And I think if Halaster hadn't jerked them all forward into announcing as soon as he felt the tingle in his leg, for instance delaying to something like today to announce it, the stagnation would be less keenly felt. Remember that not all of the staff team knew about this before the announcement was broken to the public. This may all seem like hurry-up Mickey Mouse bullshit, but I think that it's important from the perspective of signaling. Halaster sends mixed signals. He rejects the community, some of the community rejects him in turn. This seems like a hurry-up audible instead of a true action plan with pluralistic support. The little things all add up in the observer's mind, even if they don't realize they are counting.

You and mehtastic always make such great, rational, logical posts, where I tend to agree with 99% of the points put forward.

But you have a tendency to stain them with shoehorned references to Arx.

I imagine it stems from positive reviews of Arx you might've heard 5+ years ago, or perhaps from a hopeful position where you believe there might still be games out there in the MUD sphere that will cater towards RPI players better than the likes of Armageddon, Sindome, Haven, Harshlands or Apocalypse. Let me be the bearer of bad news. Arx is a bad game. It has cliquish staff that prevent discussion of the game, routinely ban players at the first sign of disagreeableness, that dominate the most powerful positions with their avatars and friends, who they cater to and grant their own noble houses, special items, special plotlines, and so on. They closed the creation of new characters years ago, they regularly shut down the introduction of new plots or requests for months at a time, and the game has been dead (similar to Armageddon) for the past few years. While you may type 'who' and see a hundred characters logged in, you don't see more than a handful of them on the public grid at any one time. Most of them are AFK, and you can play up to 3+ characters... so like Armageddon, it's really only about two dozen players or so who actively play the game and dominate it with their groups of OOC friends.

The only thing that makes Arx better than Armageddon is the lack of a clunky combat code that staff and mentally-ill GDBers use to murder your character, and that most Arx players tend to be somewhat literate and capable of roleplaying. I'll leave it at that. Sorry, but RPIs and the MUDs closely related to them are part of a dead genre that has been cannibalized by staff cheaters. There is no innovation and there are no healthy communities. That would require a resurrection of sorts, that I'm doubtful of seeing for the time being. It doesn't matter how many RPI players temporarily flock to a game - if it's poorly managed by neurotic individuals, nothing will change.

Thanks for sharing this data, mehtastic. I've always enjoyed the graphs. Still, Armageddon has been the type of game for the last decade where you could login with 30-40 players online and have a completely dismal experience. Either no one will be in your sphere, or they'll be hiding away, or you find a group of people and they're just the most dull, boring, narrow-minded bunch, a complete displeasure to interact with. When I was playing the game actively, I always had this idea, "Well, this really sucks and I'm bored as hell... but surely there's something cool going on somewhere else, right?" That was the most soul-crushing aspect of joining staff. I got to see that things sucked, everywhere. Every sphere was essentially dead apart from the rare interaction, or mudsexxing, or scheduled event or RPT. It sucked. I saw that there was truly nothing worth saving, only memories from a time when the game was full of potential.

Usually in these threads I like to take the time to respond to people individually, but I've been enjoying the last day of my four-day weekend instead so here's a general rundown responding to some of the posted points here.

I haven't been a fan of Arx for about 3 years. I think it suffers from a lot of the same things Arm does, and really every RPI, and it's most likely because of the competitive nature of both games incentivizing players to try to earn advantages for their characters in an OOC fashion: whether it's trading info on Discord, playing specific roster characters to help out friends, or seeking out staff characters to bang. The biggest RPI players, who tend to be like whales in pay-to-play games but with time rather than money, have extremely escapist tendencies. Escapism is incompatible with losing - there's no need to simulate failure when you already are failing IRL. The next step when faced with failure is to seek success through other, underhanded means.

The only places that seem non-hostile to RP also have an extreme collaborative focus, to the point that there is no major conflict between PCs, and all major conflict is between the PCs and staff-run NPCs. These are effectively games run like TTRPGs. I'm also wary of posting the exact games because I don't want them to be flooded with Armers, but it should suffice to say that they are MUSHes and hopefully that scares them away.

I think the only things Arx has above Arm aside from its lack of shitty combat code is that it's handling the end of its metaplot with significantly more grace than Arm is, and it fostered a community that won't throw their own shit at the wall when they hear the story is coming to an end, because they can accept that stories have endings. I think in the context of discussing Arm's self-made downfall, this is really the only part of Arx that is most relevant for comparison purposes. Bearing in mind that Arx has had a large minority of Arm refugees for about 3 years (didn't I say I haven't been a fan of Arx for about 3 years? What a coincidence...).

Seasons would have absolutely been a great idea in a vacuum. A story with a beginning, middle, AND an end? Just like a TTRPG run by a competent DM with players that don't flake out? And instead of one DM there's 20 DMs all hard at work on the same story? Wow! But I think it's important to remember that it was nothing more than Halaster's bargaining chip to retain Producer status. Like ppurg said, Halaster floated the Seasons idea months before its announcement. In fact, he did so shortly after the Shalooonsh incident as part of what was essentially an ultimatum: he stated he could not stay on staff any longer, but if the other Producers decided to go ahead with Seasons, he would come back to run it. We know this because he said so himself, and the other Producers haven't contradicted him. After Halaster's departure, it's reasonable to assume Brokkr and Usiku were no longer happy with the state of the game, as evidenced by their commentary on the need for karma system reform, stating that high karma did not currently reflect good roleplaying quality. They knew the quality of the game was down the toilet at this point, and saw a revival of the game in a new form as a solution. They were probably even more than happy to give up some of their share of control over the game and let Halaster have it - after all, the Armageddon community can fairly be described as draining. 140 energy vampires (well, now about 60)? Why would anyone willingly want to deal with that?

And as far as MUD popularity goes, I think it's helpful to remember that every runner of a declining MUD blames the fact that MUDs in general are in decline. It's easier to shift the blame to general trends than take responsibility oneself. It's not just hobbyists that do it either; everyone with some kind of meaningful stake in the success of something does it, especially when they could be punished for failure. In many cases they are at least partially right. But obviously Armageddon has something wrong with it beyond the decline of MUDs. If Armageddon was run absolutely perfectly, with the fairest and least judgmental playerbase, it would still have a declining player count because people would eventually lose interest or burn out and go off to play other games. What Armageddon's data shows is a systematic driving off. Consciously or unconsciously, staff used major changes to the game to pit players against one another and exhaust an undesired group into leaving the community. I've said multiple times on this forum about how this happened with Tuluk and the mob turning against those raising concerns about closing an entire sphere. The end result is that those concerned individuals, for the most part, took the hint and moved on. What makes the most recent dip unique from the Tuluk dip and the Shalooonsh dip is that, finally, the change was against the interests of the mob, and with apologies to Martin Niemöller, there was no one left to speak for them. The mob themselves had driven them all off years or months prior.

Those early 10s highs for Arm were more because of the death and shuts downs of Shadows of Isildur rather than Arm actually doing anything right. SoI did once have a decent playerbase and was always #2 behind Arm and had like 50 player peaks vs Arm hitting like 80 player peaks on the most active days. I'm one of the people that came over from SoI myself, and initially Arm was something that I tolerated rather than preferred. I have the opinion that Arm was the primary beneficiary of the downfall of SoI, and even though MUDs were generally in decline, Arm benefitted uniquely by gaining much of the SoI playerbase.

That's not really how it happened.

A number of SoI's staff members (most of which were northern staff) rebelled against the game's director, Kite. The rebellion was led by Songweaver, aka Jaunt. He and his faction accused Kite and certain other staff members of cheating and being duplicitous, and they left SoI, announcing that they would make a new RPI called Atonement.

A lot of players left with them, and SoI entered a death spiral pretty much immediately. They tried to close a bunch of stuff, but when it became clear that there was no way of salvaging the game, they shut it down and chose to work on a new version. It eventually went into alpha testing but never got finished because only one person was really working on it by then.

Meanwhile, Atonement went into development (during which Jaunt was mostly absent and left the work to a coder called Kithrater and some player-builders like Krelm and Wolfsong) and eventually launched its beta version which took place on a spaceship. It later had a separate full release that took place on the moon. After it shut down, some of its staff joined up with some former SoI staff and remade SoI in its Laketown edition.

In short, SoI collapsed because a bunch of its staff and players split from the community due to disagreements with the lead admin (and his wife), and the original version of SoI wasn't around for much longer than that.

Well, the Laketown version of SoI had very little to do with the original SoI except for the name. It actually used Atonement's codebase, which was a heavily modified version of the original SoI code. There were several years between SoI 1.0 closing and SoI Laketown opening, and the latter was more of a spiritual successor to Atonement than to SoI, comprisedd mostly of Atonement/Parallel's former staff and players. Other than the name and the Tolkien setting, they weren't really connected. It wasn't a case of SoI's original administration transitioning to Laketown. It would be more like if Arm shut down, and then three years later, Apocalypse's staff launched a whole new MUD called Armageddon: Steinal.

If I remember correctly, SoI was actually pretty calm and in relatively good condition when the big schism happened. It wasa rift between staff members, and most players weren't even aware that there was something going on until Songweaver/Jaunt made a big, explosive post about it, announcing his allegations against the head admins as well as the fact that his crew was leaving the community immediately to start work on Atonement. It was basically a mutiny, and to the general playerbase, it came out of the blue. Prior to that, I don't think there was a widespread perception of staff as cheaters, and to this day, I actually don't know if the allegations against Kite and the other senior staff were true. Most chose to believe it, though, so like half of the staff and playerbase left overnight.

It wasn't a result of the administration doing things that upset the playerbase. It was actually Jaunt's staff faction accusing the senior staff of lying to them, taking credit for their work, and treating them like the hired help instead of fellow staff members. Since Jaunt was very popular - kind of like a Shalooonsh without the sex pest personality - a lot of players took his side and left with him. That's why SoI went down the drain. They tried to do the Seasons thing and take the game down to remake it, but it petered out and there was no such thing as an SoI game until much later when Laketown opened, created mainly by people from the Atonement/Parallel community.