mehtastic
GDB Superstar
Armers Anonymous sponsor
Posts: 1,695
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Post by mehtastic on Jan 17, 2024 6:20:15 GMT -5
According to the MSSP stats, Arm went 4 days in a row with an hourly average login count of 1.
But they're still letting this drag on for another 24 days because the machinations of House Fale might redefine Allanak 50 years later.
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Post by uncoolio on Jan 20, 2024 19:36:19 GMT -5
It's Saturday evening, one day before the weekly window ends, and the logins for the week sits at 48, even though there was actually an RPT the other day. Don't know what might have happened last week to make the tally climb to a lofty 65, but one would have thought that anyone who still bothers to log in would have stuck it to the end. Apparently not. I notice that even Lizzie has stopped trying to beg people to keep playing. Halaster opened a new subforum for publishing seasons information, promising that any finalized decisions will be posted there, but didn't actually post any. They've had about six weeks of basically no in-game obligations (because nobody is playing) and they apparently still haven't made any decisions at all yet about the project that they have three months to put together. Evidently, everything is still in the brainstorm and debate stage up in staff-land.
I guess there's still three weeks left before they have to get started on the building and documentation-writing and whatnot, but if they haven't finalized even a single decision after six weeks... yeesh. But hey, maybe all of their plans are just one step short of completion and that's why there hasn't been any news whatsoever after six weeks where they've had next to no workload from the still-running game that averages 1 player per hour. Maybe the decisionmaking progress bar is at 99% and there's an avalanche of exciting updates waiting just around the corner.
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Post by pinkerdlu on Jan 20, 2024 20:08:38 GMT -5
Me personally? I'm thrilled for the avalanche of exciting updates that must be right around the corner!
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mehtastic
GDB Superstar
Armers Anonymous sponsor
Posts: 1,695
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Post by mehtastic on Jan 21, 2024 5:58:39 GMT -5
The week hasn't ended yet, but it's looking like this will be the first week in the MSSP stats where the game averaged one connection/hour for all seven days. Bearing in mind that the MSSP stats also count staff connections, it could just be one staff member idling from localhost, as a Producer with direct access to the server traditionally would.
This has been a great example of why "player-driven" games don't work. Eventually, it gets to a point where nobody is driving.
Seasons are ostensibly going to be staff-driven, but at the moment their driving skills are on par with Thelma and Louise, and we're currently watching their car sail off a cliff in slo-mo. The playerbase is Harvey Keitel's character suddenly realizing that Season One is just going to be a soft closure of Tuluk and a slightly new premise for Allanak, and chasing after the car shouting "Wait!". Nope. Too late.
What a way to destroy a piece of MUD history.
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Post by uncoolio on Jan 21, 2024 6:28:57 GMT -5
The week hasn't ended yet, but it's looking like this will be the first week in the MSSP stats where the game averaged one connection/hour for all seven days. Bearing in mind that the MSSP stats also count staff connections, it could just be one staff member idling from localhost, as a Producer with direct access to the server traditionally would. In the ten hours since my last post (which spans the entirety of Saturday evening/night), the login counter hasn't gone up at all. It's still at 48. Unless there's a whole slew of players who don't log in at all throughout the week except for Sunday, it's looking a lot like the player numbers dropped by some 30% since last week. Or, if it does suddenly shoot up to anything near 65 over the course of Sunday, that'd be... curious, to say the least. I think it would be possible for an RPI to be primarily player-driven, but players do need something to work with. Can't give them absolutely nothing and expect them to do anything more advanced than whatever hunt/craft/spar loops are inherently baked into the game. Nobody's ability to create meaningful roleplay hinges on staff holding their hands and spoonfeeding them uniquely personalized stories, but they do need something of real impact to be happening around them in order for their roleplay to have much substance. That's where Arm fails. It's like shoving some actors into a completely empty room without any form of guidance and filming the results, hoping it'll result in anything worth watching. They will at least need a basic premise to work off of, or a writing prompt or something. Even improv artists need some building blocks to work with, which is why freestyle rap competitions tend to give the contestants a few words to form the basis of their output. Otherwise you just get some idiot shouting "I'm the best, I'm the best!" Yeah. Like, there's nothing inherently wrong with the core concept of seasons, but the problem arises when the people behind the wheel are the same ones who did so little for the last handful of years that one could legitimately play Arm for months without seeing any indication whatsoever that the game has staff at all. These same people who leave their clans adrift for months in total radio silence, and haven't come up with a more engaging metaplot than "the gith are coming some day, watch out!" for years now, are suddenly going to turn on a dime and enrich the game? Eeeehh. Press X to doubt. |
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mehtastic
GDB Superstar
Armers Anonymous sponsor
Posts: 1,695
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Post by mehtastic on Jan 22, 2024 6:44:13 GMT -5
Arm finished the week with 49 unique logins, a new record. I have personally never seen a player-driven RPI that actually worked long-term, in a way that didn't feel like necromancy just keeping the game alive for its own sake. Eventually, the job of "driving" concentrates into the hands of a few players that staff can trust to move things along, but players that join a player-driven game all want to drive, which causes resentment (just think about how many people here got passed up for a sponsored role more than 3 times for no other reason than "we decided to go in a different direction with this role"). When it's obvious to everyone that the drivers can no longer be trusted, like Shalooonsh, player confidence plummets. When these drivers are actually stellar drivers, the community tends to abuse their time and take them for granted until they burn out, or they offend a staff member with the mildest criticism or offense that causes them to be banned. This isn't just describing Arm, but all of the old, crumbling RPIs that can only seem to justify their own existence by how old they are. I think what the RPI space needs is an actual, honest-to-goodness tabletop DM who actually understands what it takes to build a story that all players feel equally involved in and feel like their characters all have a useful place in it, and understands how to scale that up from a table, to an online RPG. It is so rare to find someone of this caliber. I think Armageddon had a few players and staff members who understood this, but they, too, have been abused and pushed away.
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