mehtastic
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Posts: 1,695
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Post by mehtastic on Jan 8, 2024 5:52:22 GMT -5
Just for fun, I added the fifth week post-Seasons announcement to the chart, now that we're past the first full week of 2024. I also highlighted the fifth week of the post-Shalooonsh debacle. While last week saw a continued decline but a noticeable drop in the rate of decline (60 to 58), the fifth week of the Shalooonsh incident saw a marked uptick (146 to 154, a return to Week 2's numbers). Obviously there is another decline ahead in the post-Shalooonsh numbers for week 6 before it finally levels off, but I think you see my point.
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punished ppurg
GDB Superstar
Why are we still here? Just to suffer?
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Post by punished ppurg on Jan 8, 2024 20:55:00 GMT -5
Through all the criticism that has been voiced on the Shadowboards, it was always in the vein of: "If the staff continue like this, it is going to kill the game." Now it's bittersweet to turn from projection to hindsight.
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delirium
Clueless newb
grumpy cat
Posts: 113
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Post by delirium on Jan 8, 2024 21:27:13 GMT -5
Even if the remaining players went "DGAF" or decided "eh it's all right surely now that the BBEG is gone" I do feel like the overall decline and eventual crash is related to the way the collective doubled down and bungled things in the months before, during, and after the Shalooonsh debacle. They steadily drove away dedicated, talented players that were helping the game survive (I don't mean just myself and Ender, though I unashamedly include us in that list) and were left with... well, a smattering of delusional talent and a double handful of trash. So even if people did slink back to the game, by the numbers above, it never fully recovered.
Then, add in the fact that most remaining players had lost substantial faith in staff despite remaining, and you get the "last straw" when Seasons is announced. Yeah, the last straw probably should have been the entire clique that was driving the game into the ground and covering up predatory behavior, but...
I'll take it. I mean... it's bittersweet. Things really, really didn't have to go this way. But, they did, so here we are.
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mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on Jan 9, 2024 6:09:45 GMT -5
I'll take it too. I've made no bones about the fact that I have strongly preferred this game to die over the years. My trends post last year ends with "I hope my next report has the login count at 0.". I would have strongly preferred its death over continuation in the current state at the time, but I would have also celebrated its revival and congratulated those responsible. It just seemed like the chance of that was 0% for about five years or so.
I think the day I was convinced that Armageddon would soon die was the day Nergal came here and wrote that when he tried to ban Shalooonsh, the staff threatened to rebel if he went forward with it. This was way back in 2018 iirc, when the rumors about Shalooonsh were still in the "somewhat well-kept secret" stage and not remotely public information like it is today. And I verified it through two staff members willing to look through old IDB posts. The game's goose was cooked, it's just that very few people saw it back then.
Then 2020 came, Arm had a brief uptick in players during the quarantine, and somehow, Armageddon lost those players and more while other MUDs were growing. Something is severely wrong with your game if you're capturing people that have nothing to do but stay home and play games, and they still won't play your fucking game.
The funny thing is that while ppurg is right that our criticism was intended to point out the self-destructive path Armageddon was on, our criticism was always interpreted by the regular Armers as trying to destroy the game. Wanting the game to just die already is a bit different from trying to kill it.
Speaking for myself, I never made an effort to tamper with the game. I never rolled a max-str dwarf to kill random sponsored roles - Armers did that. I never wrote "fake reviews" on Reddit, some of which presaged the Shalooonsh debacle - Armers did that. I never covered for Shalooonsh - Armers did that. I never mocked people who defended Tuluk in its closure - Armers did that.
Armers did this entirely to themselves, and they have no one to blame but themselves.
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Post by uncoolio on Jan 9, 2024 8:30:59 GMT -5
I remember that. For like a week or two, Arm actually had 60-70 players online... and staff did nothing whatsoever to capitalize on it. Any self-respecting RPI staff would have said, "this is our chance to draw these players back in and bolster our numbers for a long time! Since we, too, are stuck at home with little else to do, let's get creative and really give them a reason to stick around." But Arm's staff did no such thing. It was like a dying arcade that is suddenly filled with children because a school bus broke down right outside, and the manager still doesn't bother to turn on the game machines, so those children leave again as soon as the bus is fixed, and they never come back because why would they? It was a golden opportunity to get at least some of those kids into retro gaming and turn them into repeat customers, but the people in charge didn't care enough to even try.
Numbers went back to normal long before the Covid lockdowns were over, and I half suspect staff secretly breathed a sigh of relief because it meant fewer people who expected them to lift a finger. What an absolute failure that was on their part. Anytime people suggest that the playerbase is mostly to blame for the game's demise, I think about situations like that and snort quietly to myself. There may be more shitty players than any game ought to have, but the people who ruined ArmageddonMUD are the people who were in charge of it. They're the reason good players have been dropping off at a steady rate for the last decade, leaving the game with a higher and higher proportion of shitty players without standards.
By the way, we're coming up on four days since anybody posted on the GDB. One month after the announcement, Arm is ready for the grave.
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mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on Jan 9, 2024 9:21:48 GMT -5
According to the MSSP data, the average players logged in hourly over the past 30 days as of December 6 (the day the Seasons announcement was made) was 22. Now the average is 4.
When it comes to community participation, conversation begets conversation - people need to feel like they have something important to say or need to have something to respond to. I think now more than ever, Armageddon players feel their opinion is not valued. Many outspoken people tried to express their severe concerns about Seasons only to be disregarded by staff. All staff decision-making is done well before the conversation stage which leads further toward the feeling that anything that anyone has to say about anything doesn't actually matter. This is not to say that all of their opinions should hold merit - after all, some of these people are those who were totally fine with the way the staff handled the Shalooonsh debacle and subsequent attempted cover-up. A lot of these people are simply trash. But they still have feelings, and the fact that they feel ignored is valid.
On the other hand, from staff's perspective, they feel the players they've retained are the wrong ones. The whole point of the karma revamp was because many max-karma players under the 3-karma scale were not performing to the expectations assigned by the system and held by staff. To put it more bluntly, many 3-karma players are not good roleplayers. They do not do plots. They do not interact well with other characters. They make poor examples of what is expected when Armageddon bills itself as a space for high quality RP. Of course, this was bound to happen when staff decided they would enforce zero roleplaying standards and let everything balance itself out on its own.
So effectively, the game is run by people who do not want the game's players around, and is played by people who cannot take the hint that they are not actually wanted there. The death of the game was bound to happen.
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hates2
staff puppet account
Posts: 43
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Post by hates2 on Jan 9, 2024 14:51:49 GMT -5
I remember that. For like a week or two, Arm actually had 60-70 players online... and staff did nothing whatsoever to capitalize on it. Any self-respecting RPI staff would have said, "this is our chance to draw these players back in and bolster our numbers for a long time! Since we, too, are stuck at home with little else to do, let's get creative and really give them a reason to stick around." But Arm's staff did no such thing.
Because there is nothing ever happening that could be dialed up. If they had conflict between Tuluk and Allanaak, decide one of them launches out forces! Even if they had something basic like gith are in the sewers, bust them up into the Rinth! But if there's NOTHING going on, what can they do? They, apparently, require a lot of pre-work to do an HRPT but, again, since NOTHING was going on they had NOTHING prepared.
Luck is where preparation meets opportunity. Arm got an opportunity from COVID, since they have no preparation, no luck. Just laziness from the top, really. If they had passionate admins eagerly pursuing exciting avenues, COVID would have been a big boon. But there is absolutely zero passion shown from the top at Arm. They mostly have always just seemed concerned with doing little and maintaining their "prestigious" position lording over something they once cared about.
People coming back to Arm after 10 years should be like Captain America waking up from being in the ice in the middle of New York City (if 7 years Arm = 1 year RL that's quite apt too). Barely recognize the place, so much has happened. Instead, in a text based game, it's the same.
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delirium
Clueless newb
grumpy cat
Posts: 113
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Post by delirium on Jan 9, 2024 17:51:30 GMT -5
Late October '23: staff semi-threatens to shut the game down, iirc, and definitely threatens to close the gdb and discord.
December '23: ...
Jan '24: good job everybody
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Post by uncoolio on Jan 11, 2024 11:39:13 GMT -5
Six full days since anybody posted on the GDB.
I had a glance at the update page and marveled at the average turnaround times. 43 days for "question" requests. 41 days for character reports. 39 days for role applications. 14 days for storage.
Looking at last week (just to get a full week), only eight staff members had resolved any requests; and of these, six had resolved just one or two requests that week. There were about 30ish in total, so it's not like they had nothing to do, but 80% of that week's requests were fielded by Gynesis and Urbais while the rest handled one or two each. It's looking a lot like the game only has a handful of active staff members, of which a select few are putting in real work while the rest do just enough to register as active.
One of these barely-active staff members was the clan staff for my last character. Over the course of some 15ish days of play across three months or so, they never did anything. And I mean they did literally nothing. There was never an animation, a staff echo, any form of communication, not even a post in the clan's forum. The clan had absolutely nothing going on, no trace of any involvement in anything that resembles a story. They did respond to one of my character reports, but it took about a week and the response was basically "noted, looks like I can close this request." In the three months I played that character, my clan's staffer legitimately did literally nothing whatsoever. These are the people now responsible for reviving Armageddon.
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mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on Jan 11, 2024 12:53:10 GMT -5
You can always count on Armageddon staff to leave the important stuff sitting around until the last minute. They probably want to get the request queue cleared before Season One starts so they can start fresh.
Go back far enough in the weekly update tool and you see some pretty yikes things, like complaints taking longer to resolve than the runlog will preserve itself (through two server reboots, roughly). What happens when someone pulls a Shalooonsh in-game and the staff wait 3 weeks to look into it, only to find there's no runlog data supporting the complaint? Let another sex pest run amok? They're aware there are more of those than just Shalooonsh, right? And that's hardly the only possible disaster scenario there is either.
It's pretty clear that none of the staff take their work seriously. Even the 20% of staff that do 80% of the work are neglecting their "office" in a way, because they should demand a more equitable working situation and warn the producers about being overwhelmed and burnt out. This is how Armageddon chewed through all of its potential DMing talent in a 5-year span: those willing to work hard were unwilling to speak up, and those who were often the loudest were unwilling to work on the game productively.
And while the GDB is dead, the Discord server is still semi-active - hilariously, a bunch of nerds were whining about the shadowboard so much a mod had to step in and remind people of the "no bashing other communities" rule. Can Armageddon's players find fault in anything besides critique of the game before the plug is finally pulled on this shitshow of a game?
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bebop
Clueless newb
Posts: 131
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Post by bebop on Jan 11, 2024 13:25:39 GMT -5
I'm still waiting for some other big shoe to drop.
My predictions are it'll be something like -
"We've decided this is a good place to end the game and this is how we'll do it - "
Some big "love bombing/gaslighting" move -
"We've decided to turn the ship, we ARE listening to you and we're doing THIS -
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mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on Jan 11, 2024 13:56:02 GMT -5
I'm still waiting for some other big shoe to drop. My predictions are it'll be something like - "We've decided this is a good place to end the game and this is how we'll do it - " Some big "love bombing/gaslighting" move - "We've decided to turn the ship, we ARE listening to you and we're doing THIS - I think the big shoe will be that they proceed towards Season One, open it several weeks behind schedule to near-zero fanfare, and then pull the "this is a good place to end the game" card when they find that no one except mansa and Lizzie logged in. Luckily there are so many RPIs now, that those who insist on an Arm-like experience don't have to settle for slop anymore.
A masochistic part of me is kind of hoping that the game will actually commit to Season One so that I can at least churn out one last weekly update trends post before the game truly dies - unable to connect, no website, no community, ashes scattered to the wind. The show isn't over until it's over.
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Post by Prime Minister Sinister on Jan 11, 2024 15:30:48 GMT -5
my bet's on them staying the course tbh
i wouldn't at all be surprised if they kept it up and running on season 1 (or 2 if they make it that far) into perpetuity with a playercount of 0
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Post by jcarter on Jan 11, 2024 17:24:10 GMT -5
I'm flabbergasted that they think the mud can shut down for months with zero players, reopen, and that a significant portion will return.
I can't think of any system besides final fantasy xiv and its relaunch that ever managed to accomplish that.
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Patuk
Shartist
Posts: 552
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Post by Patuk on Jan 11, 2024 18:15:55 GMT -5
I dunno.
Really, I don't know: I'm not smart enough to look into the souls of two dozen-odd people and see what happens.
Grill is fired up, though, popcorn's ready. Fucked up to see this shit happen and be a part of it, but that's just how it goes.
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