mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on Jan 12, 2024 5:33:57 GMT -5
Watching what happens will definitely be interesting. Armageddon is one of the oldest MUDs and defined the RPI genre. You don't see MUD developers rushing to make Armageddon-like games anymore, with the exception of Apocalypse which is Armageddon-like for obvious reasons. If Armageddon falls and gets cannibalized by more modern RPIs and MUSHes, we will basically never see a game like Arm again. Seeing Ikthe struggle with player complaints and community management, and seeing modern RPIs come out with rules that basically say "we can ban you for doing stupid shit and we won't entertain your whining about it" also shows that games do not want to court the type of playerbase Armageddon has attracted over the years: the entitled little shits who constantly dance around the game's rules and make things less fun for everyone.
As for staff's expectation that a significant amount of players will return, they're operating under the assumption that their players are deeply addicted to the game. Thanks to "CRACKAGEDDON", they believe that the people who leave will always inevitably come back, at least for a peek, and some will shrug their shoulders and say it's worth a shot. Honestly, the staff are probably right on this one. I have never seen a playerbase with such low self-respect as Arm's. The idea of "CRACKAGEDDON" is so blatantly insulting to players' intelligence that it's not surprising at all the lead staffer for the game is the one who came up with it. If players come back to the game after some of the most heinous shit, they will definitely come back for Season One. If the staff close the game and reopen it on time, even if they haven't met all of their goals for reopening, I think they'll get at least half of the people who left back. It won't bring them back to pre-Shalooonsh levels, or even post-Shalooonsh levels, but it will probably get them back above 100 players/week. I suspect that Arm and Apoc will constantly trade players, with Apoc being most active during Arm's off-seasons.
But, if staff fuck up in any way - starting Season One late, ending Season Zero late, starting Season One on-time without the necessary house-cleaning of the staff and playerbase, allowing Season One's metaplot to leak from the staff team to opportunistic players who only want to "win", allowing bad RPers to have sponsored roles that put a stranglehold on the entire metaplot and only let PCs into it if they're played by trusted members of their clique - then I think it will be more obvious than ever that staff are deeply incompetent and the slow trickle of player decline we've seen in the past decade will start again. Then as I've predicted before, there will be some kind of critical threshold that once the player count dips below it, there will be a sharp runaway towards zero. I think the Seasons thing has shown us that threshold is about 100 players or so, with an average hourly login rate around 20. Below that, players REALLY start to complain that the game is dead and no one is playing it.
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punished ppurg
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Post by punished ppurg on Jan 12, 2024 8:26:26 GMT -5
One of the benefits of world consolidation is that the "critical catalyst" floor of players necessary for a sphere to function is more easily obtained. For example, if we have 6 people in Tuluk and 6 people in Allanak, nothing is happening. Feels dead. But if we have 12 in Tuluk, then it feels not dead. Feeling "not dead" is the most important element of the Seasonal approach, and following that is cultivating an environment that respects the time of the players investing into it.
One of the off-shoots of this, and this is cynical of me to point out, is that the staff will now have a built-in excuse to disenfranchise, or "leave hanging", players pursuing activity outside of the Seasonal focus. We know that this has already been the case before with malignant staff or inactive staff, more eager in conjuring excuses or manifesting some violated clause as a reason to not do the work they've volunteered for, that they are entrusted with their position in order to perform.
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mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on Jan 12, 2024 8:59:49 GMT -5
It also doesn't help that Armageddon has fostered a culture where a large group of players think it is preferable to play a roleplaying game "under the radar" and actively avoid community and DM attention as much as possible, as a reflexive response to how draining it is to deal with the community and with staff bureaucracy. (This is what makes some Armageddon players so annoying as transplants, imo, because they take that behavior with them despite the fact that their new game is run better.) Consolidation will be a benefit to the game feeling alive in Season One, but the full effect will never be realized because people will play outside of the focus area specifically because they expect that their area of choice will be left hanging. There will always be some refusal to assimilate on some level, just because players should have options on where to play and Armageddon is designed in a way that makes rolling consecutive characters in the same location awkward at best. But this will likely be made even worse by the fact that many of the remaining players will likely hate-play Season One because they don't respect themselves enough to just do something else with their time, or are naive enough to think the game's still going well, but disrespect staff enough to go against the grain.
For a decent example of what I mean, look at how the game ran when Tuluk was closed. Allanak was meant to be the focus then, but there were still a fair amount of players playing Tulukis based out of Morin's, as well as players playing indies/tribals that avoided Allanak almost entirely. Even if staff wanted to support Allanak and all of these groups, and actually had the diligence and talent to do so, they would find it difficult simply because their attention would be split so many ways. Is it doable? Absolutely. Is anyone left at Armageddon able to do it? Nah.
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Post by blahblahblah on Jan 12, 2024 12:06:47 GMT -5
This isn't exactly new, but can be vexxing.
Not so much that players with these mindsets migrate, but the attitudes they bring and poison others with. They badger and belittle staff, skirt around rules, and try to make their own pockets of "fun" that end up becoming a huge problem, because they spillover onto the rest of the game. Some of these games are unused to this type of player, and it takes a while for staff to cotton on to the problem and act decisively to punish/ban people. They eventually DO (because they are good games), but by that time the problem players have driven off several good players.
It's also really tiring to try to teach players that play in this style about consent in character conflict. It's like they literally cannot comprehend it, and get ragey at being rejected. Rather than learn when they are being scolded or ostracized for not taking no for an answer, they double down and start screeching about the game being too soft for how they want to play. They also complain about how others won't engage with them in these behaviors, and call others gatekeepers for not letting them do what they want to do. Giving them so much as an inch, or trying to have middle ground doesn't work. It's ridiculous.There are DEFINITELY games that a more aggressive player can migrate to that have the CvC/PvP playstyle they desire. But nope. It's almost as if conflict and the distress of other players is the entire point.
I'm not going to just lean on Arm players for this. There has just been an overall shift in how people treat one another in general the world over, and it's really sad. There is almost an aggressive response to people showing that they are happy and content and thriving. Maybe it's envy, I'm not sure. Or maybe it really is that some people have a real hard time acting like well adjusted human beings, and there is nothing deeper to it than that.
I do wish they would leave more peaceful games be, and go play an actual game structured for that, but bullies rarely like getting their own shit kicked in.
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Post by pinkerdlu on Jan 13, 2024 3:05:46 GMT -5
As I've said in the past, I don't think a Seasonal model is a bad idea for an RPI. But it's surely doomed in this instance, if we ever get a first Season. It worked in Atonement because there was a compelling meta-plot and the playerbase was often united against a shared enemy, i.e. npc/virtual antagonists. Armageddon staff haven't told a good story in two decades; they left it up to the players and the emergent gameplay 99% of the time. It's well-recognized that the vast majority of staff animations were intentionally aimed at punishing or gatekeeping player characters.
What evidence is there that Halaster, Gynesis or Usiku can tell a good story? The only existing reputation is that of complacent cheaters and bureaucratic maintainers. That doesn't bode well for a story-based game that'll be heavily dependent on staff-direction if you ask me.
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mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on Jan 13, 2024 6:52:04 GMT -5
I'd take it a step further and say there's no evidence the current staff team can even learn to tell a good story. Beneath the producers is a whole slew of admins and storytellers derived from a game population that has been distilled down to what it is after a decade+ of what can only be described as brain drain. Many of them are former rejects, doing their second or third stint on staff after floundering as players: people like Eurynomos and Enthemu, who haven't played a notable character in 10+ years but are at least not-burnt-out enough for staff to push them into public-facing positions.
All the good RPers Armageddon has ever had are either hopelessly clinging on to see if this game will ever recover to the state it was in 15-20 years ago, or have moved on to games and pursuits where their talent is actually appreciated. Many of the bad RPers have moved on too, going from place to place, struggling with the basic fundamentals as blahblahblah pointed out, and wondering why they only feel most welcome when they come crawling back to Arm. So even if the staff team wanted to learn, there is no one around who is suitable to learn from.
Of course, the staff could just... play another game during this immense stretch of downtime and see how they do things elsewhere. But they are simply too incurious to try. Halaster made several comments in 2023 on the GDB and Discord basically confirming that he does not know all that much about other MUDs beyond Arm. He doesn't know that visually impaired people can even play MUDs even though Arm is one of the more accessible games in its genre. He didn't know about the leadership styles of other games. To his credit, he seemed to learn a little bit on r/MUD from various commenters (mostly former Armers) explaining how other games just do things better than Arm. But when he and Usiku participate in r/MUD, it's mainly to promote Armageddon - or play the role of defense lawyer against its critics.
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mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on Jan 15, 2024 7:53:48 GMT -5
Despite the fact that staff have given zero proof that they are actually working on preparing Season One, after over 40 days since the announcement, the unique logins for last week ticked up to 65, from 58 the previous week. Then there's the MSSP data: iberia.jdai.pt/mudstats/mud/armageddon_mudWhat's notable here is that about 10% of all hours recorded in the past 30 days have seen a count of zero. This count includes connected players and staff. Prior to the Seasons announcement, practically the only time Armageddon had zero accounts connected was when the server was down, and literally unable to be connected to. Usually a few staff members would be active overnight, and a few more would stay connected and idle. What's actually surprising here is a couple of things: - There are a couple of days where there were 0 people connected at 1 AM UTC, which correlates to 8PM EST (i.e. the start of the game's "peak time"). Jan 11 and Jan 15 1 AM UTC correlates to Jan 10 and Jan 14 8 PM EST, respectively, and both have 0 connections. - The game hasn't had more than 5 people connected to it at the same time since Jan 10. 5 is usually the "baseline" of overnight idling staff + the occasional player What this tells me is: Armageddon is not only being abandoned by the playerbase. The staff are walking away, too. Yes, we all kind of knew this already, but now the data is starting to prove it. "The game is dead" is no longer dismissible as derpboard ranting as some players wish were true: it is right there in the data for anyone who cares to look. Granted, the Producers have been pretty consistent about the fact that they need a break, even prior to the Seasons announcement. What strikes me as interesting here is that even with their break, they've been completely unable to muster any kind of hype for their own work. It's now become a running joke on the game's Discord how many days have gone by since the announcement with no updates from staff. And now we know why that's the case: the data shows the staff have checked out of the current timeline as much as the players have. If they're working, which seems doubtful given their claims of mass COVID and holiday fatigue, they're mostly doing so through discussions on Discord and the IDB, and almost certainly are not doing any kind of building on port. The general vibe I'm getting is a student struggling to come up with an excuse why their project is late. It does not bode well for the game surviving up to the Feb 10 closure date or opening on-time at all. |
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Post by poorimpulsecontrol on Jan 15, 2024 9:23:53 GMT -5
Friends, you are wasting your time on hating a dead enemy.
You should use this time in a better way. Go play Apocalypse. It is a fucking blast. Or repeatedly slam your dick in a door. Not as fun as Apoc but it will be time better spent than even glancing at the Arm numbers.
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Post by Prime Minister Sinister on Jan 15, 2024 10:31:34 GMT -5
Friends, you are wasting your time on hating a dead enemy. tbh, for me, it's more like watching a cherished childhood friend fall into addiction and because they just couldn't get it together we're now looking at a final terminal liver diagnosis closer to that than hating a dead enemy, at least idk if i can be bothered to get into another darksun rpi |
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mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on Jan 15, 2024 11:18:16 GMT -5
No hate here, just trying to point out the obvious to a group of people that increasingly don't want to look, using verifiable data that does not take all that long to look at or draw conclusions from.
Though you can argue that is still a waste of time.
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Post by anoobarak on Jan 15, 2024 20:49:22 GMT -5
The problem with Arm is the quality of the RP is so low. Most people just settle for grunting.
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Post by anoobarak on Jan 15, 2024 20:51:03 GMT -5
Go away want to twink spar for another 72 hours. *Grunt*
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Post by pinkerdlu on Jan 15, 2024 22:54:46 GMT -5
You seem like you might be one of those players.
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Post by anoobarak on Jan 15, 2024 23:22:03 GMT -5
Haha I don't play the game. Don't be ridiculous.
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Post by Azerbanjani on Jan 16, 2024 16:14:45 GMT -5
If Anoo is willing to tell me to go away he's already roleplaying better than 50% of arm players
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