mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on Jul 11, 2024 15:23:42 GMT -5
1. I think he's either incredibly unlucky exaggerating, they don't go out that much. 2. He mentions there are other runners. You know, people he could interact with and go through your holy schedule with. Of course, they're going to miss each other if everyone leaves the minute the sparring hall is empty. 3. This is nothing new. Sergeants take out the clan whenever they have time, and not necessarily when there's 'desert training' on the schedule. When you want to run an event (yes, even something as small as a ride), you run it. You don't cancel it for the benefit of people who aren't online. You're there to entertain the players who are there, not someone who may or may not show up later on. Your dodge of my question tells me your answer to it.
I don't disagree that the schedule is dogshit. I don't even disagree that the Sergeant should bend the rules to keep players entertained. Where we do disagree is simple: predictability. Everytime you ignore people who "may or may not show up later on", and do things on a whim, often enough without forewarning or planning, you make the play experience worse for those people when they do show up. Worse play experience = less players willing to tolerate it. It's literally that simple.
You can make excuses about it all you want, but every runner player that logs in at high sun and learns they have nothing to do until dawn is going to consider whether they want to do nothing in Arm for an hour or do something in another game for an hour.
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foobar
Clueless newb
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Post by foobar on Jul 11, 2024 15:37:29 GMT -5
I don't think staff would have an issue. Because of the points I mentioned, and because it has never been an issue in the past. There's a conflict of interest here between players who are online and want to do stuff, and those who aren't online, log on at noon, then whine about how their chores got ruined by the Sergeant not being there. The experience of the players who are there gets worse by not doing stuff. And the interest of players who are actually there is going to outweigh the interest of players who are not every single time.
> But the new players!
They're on these rides too.
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mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on Jul 11, 2024 16:26:45 GMT -5
They're on the rides if they're online at dawn for them. I feel like we're going in circles. You enjoy your random desert training and we'll see where the Byn's at playerwise next month. Sound good?
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foobar
Clueless newb
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Post by foobar on Jul 11, 2024 18:03:34 GMT -5
They're on the rides if they're online at dawn for them. I feel like we're going in circles. You enjoy your random desert training and we'll see where the Byn's at playerwise next month. Sound good? Prediction: Byn is still doing fine next month. You give all the credit to the new Sergeant. |
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Post by pinkerdlu on Jul 11, 2024 18:13:57 GMT -5
They're on the rides if they're online at dawn for them. I feel like we're going in circles. You enjoy your random desert training and we'll see where the Byn's at playerwise next month. Sound good? Prediction: Byn is still doing fine next month. You give all the credit to the new Sergeant. Prediction: Byn is less active than it is currently, game averages 20-30 players, you'll still be high from huffing farts. (What is your major malfunction, numbnuts?) |
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mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on Jul 11, 2024 18:50:52 GMT -5
It wouldn't even be a fair bet. The playerbase is still steadily dropping post-reopening. The game is settling back toward where it used to be. The Byn had over 40 members on Week 1 and I suspect it will have 10 or less by mid-August. It is better to have realistic expectations that are then exceeded, rather than impossibly large expectations that will lead to disappointment. I will be happy if I am wrong.
This likely outcome was entirely avoidable, btw, had the staff actually set these clans up for success by picking good leaders for them and supported/mentored them. The staff just don't have solid leadership experience themselves. It's impossible to teach what you don't know. So now we're here, with multiple clans suffering under inattentive leaders that actively repel players from them rather than include them in stuff. What's happening in the Byn is just an example of what's also happening in other big and/or important clans.
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Post by generality on Jul 11, 2024 19:24:22 GMT -5
Interesting trend of information tailoring going on with in game events too. Nice to see that after ten or so years people have to get their own slice of everything and will abuse the in game message system to do so.
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punished ppurg
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Why are we still here? Just to suffer?
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Post by punished ppurg on Jul 11, 2024 22:39:03 GMT -5
I don't think it's fair to come and accuse shadowboarders of making unfalsifiable claims, as if our criticisms are illegitimate. It's simple pattern recognition. In absence of anything significant changing, the old patterns will follow. And it's not like (collective) we are incapable of recognizing change, or recognizing and appreciating improvement when we do see it. Unlike other communities based around riffing or just flatly hating, I do think that - those of us who still check in every now and then, wish that Armageddon was better, was the best that it could be. We wish that Armageddon was the game that we thought it was when we fell in love with it, before we were bitten and soured from it.
The clan routine is soul-crushing repetition. The grind is soul-crushing repetition. There's only so many times you can rough circle in the Byn sparring ring over the time span of 10+ years before that blood is not worth the squeeze out of the stone. The clan players would do better to have bespoke RP sessions with the new teach command - where doofus Sergeant with his sponsored role high skills might actually impart something onto you when you go out on that contrived "desert practice". But there's a sickness in the community of that making it "too easy", of that giving too much coded agency to characters too fresh out of chargen without having to "earn" it or put in the time: you see this design with keystone skills being hidden behind branching, like enforcer sap. It's a feeble design choice that retards player agency in reaction to the game not being able to cope with ... what, characters having their skills readily available to them? Branch skills should be mastery things, game changers like multi-fighting or martial arts or something innovative: not things that are necessary for your character's actualization, things that are necessary for you to have so that the code-sick grinders bother to spare you a second glance.
tl;dr Make teach more powerful I guess. Or make the grind not suck so that newbies aren't completely useless without their "days played" of optimal grinding + years of ooc knowledge and so forth.
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mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on Jul 12, 2024 6:28:11 GMT -5
A very simple solution to the schedule problem that builds off of currently-existing code is to make "learn" more powerful depending on your clanning.
Just a stupid indie grebber? "learn slashing weapons" gets you 1 point. Part of a military group? You get 5 points then, and you ignore the mid-journeyman cap on learn's usage for weapon skills.
The schedule should function as an RP hook that brings players together at an anticipated spot, so that they can do something more fun than what the schedule dictates. Once you tie the schedule to skillgain, everything goes out the window, because players tend to want to maximize skillgain over finding RP opportunities. No one wants to do fucking weapon maintenance.
The caveat to employing this solution is that with stories like the one about the recruiter that demanded service or a bribe prior to joining, the average Armageddon player will think to sell special access to this new "learn" mechanic when only the Byn, and to some extent the Tor Academy, have a legitimate reason to charge for training.
You would need a competent staff team to rein in the players' most excessive and obstructive impulses, but you could make it so that people in clans gain skills closer to the rate that the indie hunter that plays 12 hours/day does and achieve that mythical status of "roleplaying game" where people actually get together to have their characters interact with one another in more interesting ways than "whose turn is it to skin the tarantula".
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jenki
Clueless newb
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Post by jenki on Jul 12, 2024 15:03:24 GMT -5
Desert training is cool. When I've played in the Byn I've loved it when the sarge would pop in and tell everyone to prep for desert training. It feels like that's the best use of their time, especially if they've got underlyings to support them. And then when the sarge is busy or not logged in merca can continue with the allotted schedule.
It's just fun, imo. I'm not sure what qwerty or anyone else said but I can see the value in impromptu desert training rather than sticking to a schedule that's essentially there to just simulate a busy training regiment and keep merca from looking like layabouts while they wait for the next rtp.
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mehtastic
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Post by mehtastic on Aug 17, 2024 5:52:42 GMT -5
It wouldn't even be a fair bet. The playerbase is still steadily dropping post-reopening. The game is settling back toward where it used to be. The Byn had over 40 members on Week 1 and I suspect it will have 10 or less by mid-August. It is better to have realistic expectations that are then exceeded, rather than impossibly large expectations that will lead to disappointment. I will be happy if I am wrong. This likely outcome was entirely avoidable, btw, had the staff actually set these clans up for success by picking good leaders for them and supported/mentored them. The staff just don't have solid leadership experience themselves. It's impossible to teach what you don't know. So now we're here, with multiple clans suffering under inattentive leaders that actively repel players from them rather than include them in stuff. What's happening in the Byn is just an example of what's also happening in other big and/or important clans. It's been a little over a month since predictions were made.
The Byn has about 15 active players despite being split into three units. The docs say it's typically 8 people to a unit.
There is almost zero trooper retention. One unit has no troopers at all.
There are obviously more active players in House Oash and House Kurac than the Byn. That almost never happens when the Kuraci Fist and Oash Elites are closed.
Salarr and Kurac never hire the Byn for wagon escorts, even though they are constantly using and upgrading their wagons for copper collection.
The average player count in the last 30 days is 36. In the last 7 days it's been closer to 30.
I was not completely right, but like I said, my realistic expectations were exceeded. Slightly.
Anyway, we're doing desert training again today. Get to the Dragon's Gate by dawn, runner. You can skin the scrab this time.
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Post by generality on Aug 17, 2024 8:24:51 GMT -5
The upside of TLH playing Lord Templar Cruella De Ville is Oash is burgeoning with mages and assorted hangers on.
Obviously, Kurac and Salarr have a plot going on in the form of running their respective mines and copper prospecting. There are a lot of both and they both roll around together, almost like they expect to get raided at any time.
The Academy has started again, I just hope Akra is a better middle tier leader than some of them have been. I have no idea about Bast's noble as I have never seen her do anything but talk.
And the Byn is the platform for all of the above, kind of.
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