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Post by jcarter on Mar 10, 2024 11:09:13 GMT -5
What's wrong with humblebragging about getting laid? All I will say to this is the last time I encountered someone humblebragging about getting laid, I was in high school. And that's not because the adults I surround myself with today aren't fucking. I mean like - okay. Plenty of sex positive people out there.... mehtastic's point was very clear. big, long threads and posting about ~sex-positivity~ in desert dungeons and dragons probably isn't doing many favors for arm's player recruitment. |
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punished ppurg
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Post by punished ppurg on Mar 10, 2024 23:48:14 GMT -5
I'll be the first to admit that I don't have the answer to this dynamic, this "cringe cycle" of secondary issues brought into a community through the relative lack of conversation topical boundaries. Back in ye olde days of which I was online enough to catch the tail end of, a community likely had an IRC presence. It likely had presence in 2 channels on whatever IRC node. #community and #community-admin. And being or lingering in the IRC was considered "heavily" engaged in the community, far and above the normal engagement of a member who was only accessing the game server or what have you. And reflecting on this change in dynamic (now there's Discords that want to be conversational general forums, and so on), the boomer take inside me is that since the form of conversation changed or rather the noise-ratio of conversation within a community was expanded, necessarily, with these new channels and digressions -- it nurtured a more noxious personality for general engagement.
Consider the humble IRC channel - one text scroll, you get what you get online while you're logged, no scrolling back forever -- unless you set up a proxy bridge and had a server constantly logging for your connection man-in-the-middle style, which only a small percentage did. And there was less nonsense tolerated in the single channel because of the necessity of keeping the channel noise-free for community discussion, since this was basically what you had. And I don't mean to go full boomer. But showing up and talking politics, or talking about sexual achievements, or oversharing about these side "life" things: these things would get rebuffs from the channel Ops since they were 1) distasteful to general community discussion and 2) #community wasn't the place to discuss these things.
There was plenty horny posting going on in IRC whispers, sure. But there wasn't the same tolerance for the type of person who aggressively, went out of their way, to signal their politics or their sexuality or their trauma. It was very stiff-upper-lip kind of culture. And it was better? Less abrasive than it is now. Stepfordish.
But now it's a "chicken or the egg situation" of, which is the solution? Do we narrow the scope of the community's appropriate means of engagement back to the proverbial "single channel" of ye olde IRC days? And how does that mesh with an internet culture that has evolved to constantly be seeking these signal victories? It's not like you can just GO BACK TO THE PAST and be rid of the cultural paradigms that the rest of the digital world is trending towards, is engaging in, is conjuring deeper and more rhetorically powerful polemic to justify itself engaging in. I would say that Arm's decision to restrict topical scope in the community is a good thing, in only that it provides the community less cause to hate one another for published signaling ills that are irrelevant to the game itself.
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mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on Mar 11, 2024 6:36:56 GMT -5
Armageddon has always had a problem of not really knowing what kind of community dynamic it actually has, or what kind of dynamic it should foster.
A lot of MU*s do have tight-knit communities where everyone shares details of their personal lives. I wouldn't specifically say that it is comfortable to log into a new MUD and see that it's mostly people who have been playing for 20+ years who use the OOC channel to talk about their soul-sucking jobs and their dialysis appointments. But that's only because I'm new to the space and don't actually know any of these people. To the people who have been there forever, who have known each other for half their lives if not longer, it's perfectly normal because they are practically found family at this point. If you want to join their MUD, hearing their gripes and commiserating is part of the deal. If you can't do that, turn off the OOC channel, grind to max level and never hear anything from another player again.
Armageddon's community was neglected for a very long time, with even most staff not really participating in it. In a way I almost feel bad for a lot of the people who only played Armageddon because they never really experienced the "home MUD" dynamic. Armageddon just doesn't have the camaraderie that a tiny little MUD no one's ever heard about, yet always seems to have 10-20 players logged in, will have. A member of the Armageddon community is not among friends.
But now, things are tricky because Armageddon is trying to recruit, with its season updates undoubtedly about to be followed up with regular posts in the general MUD community. I've written about this before, but it makes no sense to recruit into a community that is so awful that anyone who joins would be repelled away from it almost immediately. It's a waste of effort. So on some level, the staff understand that the community has to align with the staff's recruitment drive by being more welcoming or a lot of their work just goes to waste. Part of the reason #off-topic is going away and the community rules are getting stricter (or more accurately, the standards for rules enforcement are getting higher) is because of the recruitment drive. MarshallDFX alludes to this in his post by comparing the community space to a local pub, which is something open to the public and will have first-timers and regulars alike:
When you are about to have guests over, you spruce up the place a little. The bittervets are the old pizza boxes and beer bottles lying around the crusty apartment.
The staff and mods are surely aware of the vast chasm of differences between how a veteran perceives the community and how a hypothetical new member would perceive it. And it's clear that the staff, and the mods by extension, view the community as a dirty place that needs to get cleaned up by the time Season One starts, so that the push to announce to the MUD community that "We're different now!" doesn't look like bullshit when people actually join the GDB and the Discord and see the same people doing the same things as before.
Should Armageddon embrace an IRC-like mode of communication? Hard to say! It could certainly be part of a broader solution, and I think in a way the #off-topic removal is a step towards that. Lots of ideas get thrown around the main community, up to and including getting rid of Discord and getting rid of both Discord and the GDB. These more extreme solutions don't address the fact that many of the people that make up the community are just not very good people. Armageddon needs to show some of them the door and hope that the math works out, so that new and returning players > bitter weirdos who just don't have a place in an actual friendly community, or all the effort goes to waste. Telling the bitter weirdos to just be nicer isn't gonna work.
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Post by gringoose on Mar 11, 2024 10:04:53 GMT -5
Arm staff view the players with suspicion and often animosity and it's usually mutual. It's not an environment that fosters good community. I remember once staff treating me like some trouble making kid once and accusing me of coordinating outside of the game with another player. I'm an adult and I don't cheat in games, but I was being treated like I did. Not only was I not cheating but staff had gotten wrong what even happened and there wasn't even some kind of weird coincidence. The thing they said I did didn't even happen.
It really offended me because up until that point I thought that I was on good terms with staff and thought that I would be viewed as an upstanding member of the community. But I was actually being treated with suspicion.
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mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on Mar 11, 2024 10:32:44 GMT -5
Yes, and the players view each other with suspicion as well, which I would argue is just as bad for community building. Players regularly work together to bully people out of the game, or will sing praises of unjustifiable staff behavior if it means that an unwanted player was most affected.
The people that make up the community aren't very good people. And some players eventually become staff...
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Post by uncoolio on Mar 11, 2024 16:18:49 GMT -5
Some time ago, I was falsely accused of multiplaying. One day, out of nowhere, staff had opened a request for me. The conversation went something like this (paraphrased but accurate): Staff: "You have been caught multiplaying. The evidence is clear. One of the two accounts will be permabanned and the other will get a one-month suspension, and then you can apply for the right to continue playing after that month. Choose which account to keep. Me: "...what? I have no idea what you're talking about. This must be a false positive or something. I only have one account." Staff: "We know it's you. We've recorded a clear pattern in logins and logouts between the two accounts. One logs out, the other logs in soon after. Also the two email addresses associated with these accounts are very similar." Me: "Uh, okay? I mean, whoever that other account is, it isn't me. I don't know what else to say. If you could contact the other player, I'm willing to do a screen-sharing Skype call so you can see that they're a separate person. I have no clue who they might be." And then I got no further responses from staff. After two weeks of silence, they closed the request without any comment or clarification. I never heard about it again. To this day, I don't have the faintest clue who that other player was or what was really behind this bizarre case, but I find it seriously hard to believe that there really was some long-standing coincidental login/logout pattern between two complete strangers, and it's a one in a trillion chance that they should also happen to have a very similar email address to mine (which was a catchphrase from a 1990s children's movie and then my birth year, with an uncummon mail carrier). It's so far-fetched. No apology, no explanation, no "we figure it was a false positive, so carry on." The request was just wordlessly marked resolved after weeks of no responses from them, and it never came up again. They accused me, declaring me guilty from the beginning, and then ghosted me when I didn't immediately accept it (because I literally just hadn't done what they said). I wasn't punished - because I had done nothing wrong - but they could just as easily have kept insisting that I was guilty, and then I would have been banned. That's what they had in mind at first. This was like six years ago, so not very recent; but not the distant past, either. It's not as if there has been some huge shift in staff culture since then. This was the event that finally made me realize that some of the people at the very top of the game's hierarchy are either complete imbeciles, legitimately mentally ill and hallucinating, or power-tripping griefers who just enjoy ruining players at random. I mean, this case can only be explained by one of the three.
To my knowledge, I wasn't even some hated player that they had a reason to want to get rid of. If I was, surely they could have come up with a better excuse than... declaring that I had a second account. I mean, who was that charade meant to be for? It's not as if they need to convince a jury or something. It was such a baffling experience. Made no sense, but it's what happened. They have never explained it, never accused me of anything since, or otherwise showed any signs of wanting to get rid of me. My best guess is that the admin in question was so stupid that they saw patterns that weren't there, drew a conclusion based on a tiny sample size, and then gleefully jumped the gun because they were excited to ban a player. Then when other admins saw the request and replies, they looked into it and told their colleague that this was nonsense, and the admin in question was then so embarrassed about it that they decided to just ghost me.
When people like that are in charge of this community, it's no wonder there's an irreparable rift between players and staff.
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eugene
Clueless newb
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Post by eugene on Mar 12, 2024 10:35:14 GMT -5
Garbage in, garbage out. At this point, a community split is probably the only solution.
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mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on Mar 12, 2024 11:48:27 GMT -5
A community split would probably help, but all I can think of is Apocalypse and how that's going so far. Like, its main appeal is precisely the same as Armageddon's, so of course it attracted the same type of people, including fairweather Armers who are only playing Apoc either because Arm is down, or they're waiting out a ban or a bad staff rotation at Arm. And last I checked it had no real community to speak of since Ikthe (rightly) locked his server down when a bunch of Armers flooded it to whine about Seasons.
If Armageddon's community were to split, a better idea might be for the "bone swords, MCB, combat is RP" people and the "let's write a story together" people to have their own separate games with separate communities. An Allanak MUD and a Tuluk MUD. Or since the Baobob comics made a resurgence on the GDB recently, a MUD for Grunt and a MUD for everyone else.
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Patuk
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Post by Patuk on Mar 12, 2024 12:14:59 GMT -5
A problem with those sorts of requests, or even any kind of requests, is the fundamental nature of such a conversation.
I maintain that 80% of player/staff issues would go a hell of a lot smoother if they defaulted to (logged, recorded) ten-minute chat conversations on the client itself/Discord as opposed to the request system. There is a lot you can handle by talking to someone like an actual person, listening to what they have to say, and hashing that out.
The request tool does not do this. You are not talking to a person, you are shouting into the void, a dozen members of the staff team are praying they aren't the ones who have to do it, and finally someone resigns themselves to being the one. It is a chatbot experience, and not a good way to resolve stuff
But it's legible for the sorts of top-down structure Armageddon continues to favor. And it looks formal. And it avoids the old 'such-and-such promised me XYZ and now you're not following through!!1!' (a trivially easy issue to solve, but that's neither here nor there). So they stick to it rather than trying something else.
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Post by uncoolio on Mar 12, 2024 12:37:32 GMT -5
Well, they obviously can't split the game up into two when Arm's most pressing problem is low player numbers.
I think they can cultivate better roleplaying standards by simply doing the opposite of what cultivated the awful standards that the game has become known for. These stem from the following:
- Lack of stories for people to engage with, leaving players less in tune with the game and their characters
- Philosophy of "anything goes in combat" which means the biggest twink wins and survives to become influential
- Terrible skill progression system that encourages wildly unrealistic playstyles and punishes staying IC
- Very outdated and unwieldy emote/speech system that limits expression and fosters a lazy "say (nodding)" style
- Little to no recognition of good writing and realistic characterization, or efforts to discourage the opposite
- Unbalanced combat code that allows for absurdly fast kills even with low/mid-tier characters
- Unbalanced stat system that encourages and rewards obsessing over stats, suiciding to reroll, and a general "gamer mindset"
- Generations of bad staff creating embittered bad-faith players who don't make an effort when they play
All of these are fixable, and most of them are even easy fixes--but it does require that they actually want to do it.
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eugene
Clueless newb
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Post by eugene on Mar 12, 2024 12:50:36 GMT -5
All of these are fixable, and most of them are even easy fixes--but it does require that they actually want to do it. Frankly, I'm surprised that no group of Arm players have said "we're going to build our own MUD, with blackjack and hookers." That's really what I'm getting at. |
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Post by uncoolio on Mar 12, 2024 13:06:07 GMT -5
They did, didn't they? It's called Apocalypse.
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mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on Mar 12, 2024 13:13:17 GMT -5
Making a new thing is hard. Someone creating a new MUD at Armageddon's scale by themselves, and actually trying to do it right, can expect years of work ahead of them. A small team can cut the time by a bit. Then once the game is open, it requires staffing, which is a part-time job in and of itself -- and extremely thankless when your playerbase is just former Armageddon players, who are known far and wide throughout the MUD community as being entitled, self-important, and conniving. Of course, there is no guarantee you will even get a playerbase at all.
It's not too surprising that the most successful Armageddon spinoff, Apocalypse, uses Arm's code: that takes care of the programming work needed to get a MUD started. It still runs like shit thanks to its playerbase being indistinguishable from Armageddon's as far as personality types go.
Hypothetically, if someone were to create "Armageddon but good", it would essentially have to be designed to repel Armageddon players.
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Post by poorimpulsecontrol on Mar 13, 2024 16:15:32 GMT -5
I was kind of excited to see the BAN EROTIC ROLEPLAY thread spin out of control.  |
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Patuk
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Post by Patuk on Mar 13, 2024 17:01:01 GMT -5
Don't worry, it got me a (IP, fancy shit) ban before it was locked because I can't behave (^:
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