|
|
Post by pinkerdlu on Oct 29, 2024 9:06:07 GMT -5
Shade and water.
*Clunks mug* *drinks shit and dies*
|
|
bebop
Clueless newb
Posts: 131
|
Post by bebop on Oct 29, 2024 9:36:10 GMT -5
*sad trombone*
This really is the official Armageddon MUD boards now.
|
|
|
|
Post by uncoolio on Oct 29, 2024 9:42:18 GMT -5
It's actually really fucking funny that what finally killed ArmageddonMUD was not the inevitable passage of time, or the death of Telnet, or anything like that; it was staff cheating so much that other staff decided it wasn't worth continuing to run the game.
|
|
|
|
Post by generality on Oct 29, 2024 9:54:54 GMT -5
Run the game into the ground, you mean?
|
|
mehtastic
GDB Superstar
Armers Anonymous sponsor
Posts: 1,688
|
Post by mehtastic on Oct 29, 2024 10:06:04 GMT -5
I believe the staff would have had an easier time running the game if there wasn't a leak on staff and there wasn't a horde of cheating players willing to slurp up leaked information to use to their advantage. Unfortunately, a common theme in Armageddon's history is that half the community shoots itself in the foot, and drags the other half of the community down when they fall over from the wound. The staff and the players are all part of this community. Every player that thought "I know it's against the rules, but I'll just share this little tidbit of information. What harm could it do?" is as responsible for the game's ultimate demise as the producers are for being blind to this phenomenon until the last moments.
Even now, the players have been told to please not expose who other players played. Only reveal who YOU played. And they're still soliciting people to tell them who other people played, asking for DMs without actually asking. Talk about a tiger not being able to change its stripes.
|
|
bebop
Clueless newb
Posts: 131
|
Post by bebop on Oct 29, 2024 10:15:21 GMT -5
What really gets me is that, by proxy, Shalooonsh played a part in bringing the game down. Staff might never believe it (and it doesn’t matter now), but I was genuinely shocked when they tossed players like myself, Delirium, and Ender aside. I would have loved to see the game experience a true resurgence—maybe even have folks like us come on to consult and assist. I naively thought they’d make amends. When IsFriday was brought on, I thought it could be a turning point, but they stayed committed to sidelining players the community had already hurt.
In my day job, I’m a content marketer and writer for an art marketing company. I could’ve helped with the game’s marketing, writing, even developing a healthier culture. That’s literally what I do every day. I’ve even worked as a consultant to help businesses build positive cultures. There are people like LauraMars with experience running and developing games. Val's a frickin' lawyer. I don't know what everyone does, but a lot of us on here are really smart and helpful actually.
I’ve always been sentimental about old tech—hence, the Furby or two on display. I met my husband through Armageddon (to my undying shame), but after three years of marriage, it’s looking like he’s actually the one. All of this has got me thinking about how integral Armageddon was to my formative years—basically my entire 20s—in both good and bad ways.
I know I’m kind of being an unsanctimonious shit right now, but if the staff had stopped to think, maybe they would’ve realized that this board and community exist because people cared enough about the game to criticize it. There’s a whole group of folks here who were alienated but still cared enough to observe from afar. Instead, staff doubled down on this “if you’re not for us, you’re against us” cult mentality. They call our criticism unproductive, but they’re the ones who cut off channels for productive communication. Then they turn around and judge how we communicate now that we’re on the outside. It’s clear in how staff have come here to engage and criticize, rather than on their own platform. Which par for the course is just --- strange?
Was it really that hard just to apologize and make amends? Or to say, “Hey, the game’s been around for twenty years. We know you all know the spells—whatever.” Why did things get more convoluted as the player base aged and needed less hand-holding, and as tech improved all around us?
I guess what I’m trying to say is that this game meant a lot to a lot of people. We’re getting older, and it’s kind of cool we’ve kept this community going for so long. It could’ve evolved into something genuinely wholesome if they’d made more space at the table. Cleansing the rot could’ve been a turning point. It’s a shame staff chose this route, but honestly, it’s not surprising. The game was bound to go eventually. I think it deserved better, but it died as it lived—a platform for people to swing their proverbial dicks around. I think the reason people feel like they need a support group coming out of this is because of the cult-like behavior and gaslighting that ran rampant.
Even this final move feels like one last passive-aggressive “screw you” to the players. Over my 15-plus years with this game, I’ve often wondered, “Do the staff even like the players?” They turned it more and more into their personal sandbox, where players were increasingly unwitting NPCs to their own agendas. I feel like the final answer to that question is—nah.
And that’s where people might need some support, because at the end of the day, it’s not a cartridge we can dust off and revisit. It’s gone. It was more than a game; it was a community that’ll never come back together. It’s been smashed on the ground like a Lego house, or a Monopoly board flipped over because a few players cared more about “winning and controlling” than enjoying time with friends.
This is this the biggest rage quit I've ever witnessed.
Now they're posting everything they were working on publicly for a game that they're closing ... that's a choice. I don't get it? Is this to just rub it in players faces like this is what could have been? Why does this still feel like blaming the players. The leaker was staff.
|
|
punished ppurg
GDB Superstar
Why are we still here? Just to suffer?
Posts: 1,098 
|
Post by punished ppurg on Oct 29, 2024 10:37:44 GMT -5
I will accept the memorial of Armageddon with a GPLv3 release of the code on Github and a CC-BY-SA snapshot of the database.
|
|
mehtastic
GDB Superstar
Armers Anonymous sponsor
Posts: 1,688
|
Post by mehtastic on Oct 29, 2024 11:51:35 GMT -5
I have to admit to deriving some sense of joy and satisfaction from all of this. I have always felt that the Armageddon community was a terrible and abusive place, and that the MUD community will be significantly better off with out it. I am glad that I could play the role of sharing the leaks from staff and OOC cliques and tearing the whole rotten thing down. It was quite easy to slip into OOC groups. In most cases, I simply messaged people, pretended to be returning to the game and looking for a fun sidekick role to jump into, made up a PC that didn't even exist, and many people invited me to their servers and group chats believing that I was playing again. Then, a few days later, I said the PC had died, and that I would make a new one later. Later never came, and I was simply allowed to lurk in the chats with my Discord status set to invisible, for years in some cases. This effort took almost no time investment. It probably took about 2-3 hours total to get into six different chats, four of which had active staff in it prior to the end of season zero. When they got updated with something, I just copy/pasted it into a file I could easily search. It was so easy that I sometimes just had to laugh about it.
Obviously the game was never really prepared for such an effort to be undertaken. The community culture generally assumes that everyone is breaking the rules to get ahead in the game. They were wholly unprepared for someone who was just doing it for the lulz as the kids used to say.
One thing many people have been curious about is: who was the leak? I received several DMs about it, including one telling me that blood would be on my hands if the game closed. The nature of OOC info spreading is that you never know where the rumors originate. You can guess which rumors are bullshit and which aren't by looking at the consistency with which they're shared, and you can guess their source (staff or player) by the content. Staff tend not to leak stuff about their own clans except to vent, and will sometimes pick on staff they view as rivals or lazy. Players tend to complain about staff that aren't in their clique as well as the staff over their clan, fellow players in the clan, and players in rival IC or OOC groups. It's a long story, but when you are in deep long enough, it becomes easier. Obviously, I can't say for 100% certainty who the leak actually was. When I was guessing when I first started getting information six months ago, I would have said Talos or Valkyrja, for being the most OOCly connected people on the team. If I had to guess last week, I would have just said Talos. Not that it matters anymore, since the game is done, the docs are out (and surprisingly similar to the copies I received in March), and if staff ever wanted to restart the game they would have to start their work all over again. If a new Armageddon ever comes, it is months or years away and won't attract nearly the same amount of player attention. The staff all acknowledge that the game's design is flawed and encourages cheating, so if Armageddon is ever reborn it will either be designed differently, or it will be the same old dogshit.
I am so glad to have finally won Armageddon. Au revoir!
P.S. When the first announcement about the leak came out last week, I texted Nergal about it, to give him advance warning about shit popping off. His response, or at least the response of whoever has his phone number now, was "Lol". |
|
|
|
Post by gringoose on Oct 29, 2024 11:54:39 GMT -5
There's a lot of people with an unhealthy attachment to Arm and some of which have probably received significant damage from playing so long in that environment. You'll feel shitty for awhile and then eventually feel glad you don't play or staff anymore. If you're addicted to Arm, getting out of it is the best thing you can do for yourself.
|
|
jesantu
Displaced Tuluki
Posts: 386
|
Post by jesantu on Oct 29, 2024 12:07:24 GMT -5
I have to admit to deriving some sense of joy and satisfaction from all of this. I have always felt that the Armageddon community was a terrible and abusive place, and that the MUD community will be significantly better off with out it. The bad elements of Arm will scatter and go elsewhere, bringing their badness with them. In that regard, nothing has changed. I've never had an issue with Arm existing despite that I stopped playing. When Usiku and others ask for this board to end, I think: just don't read it. That's how I feel about Arm. Carry on without me, or don't, I don't care because I'm not a part of it. So I don't really feel anything about its (supposed) ending now. We also can't be 100% sure Arm's "permanent" closure is in fact permanent given Halaster's history of threatening to shut down the MUD. Don't be so certain this is the end. Even if Halaster said to himself that he's sure it's over, there's no guarantee he won't feel different a week or month down the road. Ultimately, I find this ending amusing though. They're victims, to be certain: victims of their own doing. They did this to themselves, the players and staff alike. I would say "good riddance", but as I pointed out above, it makes no difference whether Arm is up and running or not: it's not a game I'm playing. |
|
|
|
Post by uncoolio on Oct 29, 2024 13:02:53 GMT -5
They should make the IDB public, or at least the parts that don't contain anyone's personal information (names, emails, etc.)
|
|
hates2
staff puppet account
Posts: 42
|
Post by hates2 on Oct 29, 2024 13:06:52 GMT -5
Even now, the players have been told to please not expose who other players played. Only reveal who YOU played. And they're still soliciting people to tell them who other people played, asking for DMs without actually asking. Talk about a tiger not being able to change its stripes. When did you play and what were some of your characters bruh? |
|
|
|
Post by Feoramund on Oct 29, 2024 13:12:05 GMT -5
We're in a much different place then we were 10 or even 5 years ago. I didn't mean to imply it be super easy... but certainly be easier then in the past. Certainly easier NOW, then any previous time in history. 20 years ago, I could see it being a very difficult undertaking, especially if you had no prior experience programming or engineering. Today? That's just not the case. Making games is hard, yea... but very doable. There's a near infinite amount of utterly free resources in which one can learn, utilize, and create from. I would think, with sufficient motivation, any difficulty would be overcome. It's that lack of motivation... or more honestly, it's the fact it's not "Armageddon Mud" that really kills the motivation. For whatever reason folks have. I genuinely think it's worth that self reflection. You're absolutely right in that there are more resources, templates and source material to work with than ever before. However I think that's outweighed by the rest of what we encounter in modernity. This string of posts spoke to me. In so long as I've been reading these boards, I haven't seen many posts that focused on programming and the matter of incentives around how something like a MUD even comes into being. To that note, I may be able to offer a helpful perspective as a concrete exemplar rather than discussing about potentially fictitious programmers.
IncentivesTo start with, I've had a number of past lives on Zalanthas, all of them in a far-off era; Halaster and Delerak are the only names that ring familiar to me, so I can't speak to much of what's been going on lately on a personal level. I found Armageddon and MUDs in general to be interesting enough to try creating my own engines from nothing in C with libSDL to handle networking (because I hadn't yet learned how to do kernel-level sockets). I had good success with getting the functionality of accounts, characters, a database, a command parser, room movement, chat and emote commands working, but much of the drive was for the joy of tinkering and learning. Questions like, "How did they do that?" and "Is this the only way to do this; can I do it better?" were frequent in my mind. Less so were ideas of how would I even begin to get other players involved, much less what we would do in the end. It was fun for its own sake. With that said, I believe there's this sort of tinker energy that some programmers build up that drives them to blindly pursue things sheerly for the joy of learning. "To hell with profit and status, let's see what we can make." A pure engineering spirit. The next logical step is to spend some time in deep thought about what would be fun to do in the space you've created, but many people get stuck in the engineering phase and don't make it out. This is why the Rust programming language is infamous for having "3 games and 50 game engines." Having done this well over a dozen times, I can safely say: If a game you want to make, start there; don't worry about the engineering too much.
Moving OnIn my personal experience, this is about half-true. I wouldn't say it's that I moved on to 3D, or even 2D, but many years later, I recognize more what is more helpful to other people, and that's what has taken up a lot of my time. As we get older, I think we may better realize the costs involved in how we spend our time, trying to be less wasteful, if that is possible. I spend more time these days in open source software development, helping to build up an ecosystem around a relatively new language that (in my humble opinion) is a great alternative to C, so that programmers, new and old alike, can have a more enjoyable time creating. In youth, one is less aware of the cost of things; this is not necessarily bad or good, but it is a quality to be aware of. I do agree that you have to be a passionate hobbyist to want to engineer a MUD. It's a desire that still smoulders in me. Writing a MUD from the ground up is an excellent way to sharpen the mind. I used to hear people talk about MUDs being a good starter project back in the day, but that's not the case so much anymore. I would say I have more of the maturity that I would be less inclined to run off and write a MUD engine without having a solid, foundational idea of what the actual game should be, however. Having played enough MUDs and seen all the myriad problems that come about - not because of technical concerns, no, those are strikingly rare; it's more of the sociological concerns - I am aware this is a delicate situation. Those are the problems you really have to crunch down and try to solve. I've seen more than enough misery come out of mishandling of how players interact between each other. I agree there's no excuse not to make a MUD for want of resources; they're plentiful. However, MUDs are probably the sort of thing that - if someone is going in with the idea of making money or becoming popular - you may want to reconsider. This is likely why Unity, Godot, and other 3D media are more saturated. Visual has always been more instantaneously salient than text. Chris Crawford has railed for four decades that people say games are becoming better, but all that ever becomes better is the visual fidelity, for which he is largely correct.
LLM UsageThere have been a few posts about LLM-assisted MUDs before my post here. Knowing what I know about the current state of LLMs, I'm not hopeful about them bringing about some sort of revolution to MUDs. Setting aside ethical concerns, they tend to be predictable, which is how they operate: they just predict the next token. If you spend enough time reading their output, you can begin to predict how they'll write. This is why you hear some people talk about "GPT slop" or "GPTisms," where models put into the context of writing literature will fall back on many common idioms: "maybe, just maybe..." & "shivers down your spine" & "the choice is yours" & other similar constructions. You have to know what it is you're actually doing with an LLM and not consider it some magickal cure-all for a lack of players, design, or theme. Hooking a model up to an NPC and letting it speak sirihish won't get you far. People have goals, memories, lives outside of a game. They grow and change. Using an LLM as a random description generator doesn't get you much further either; that technology is already available and has been for decades with string substitution over templates (which can be even better, because you can store information in a parseable manner such as how Dwarf Fortress works with regard to creature/item descriptions). Most LLMs that can be run locally don't have good memory capacity, either. The usable contexts range from 4-8k. Some models state having tens of thousands of tokens worth of context, but the coherence usually falls off a cliff at some point. This technology is also incredibly expensive, compared to what you can get with some rudimentary if-else chains or a simple parser such as what Ultima IV and Exile I had. Making your MUD dependent on LLMs invariably means making it dependent on a cluster of GPUs that will have to scale to the playerbase. My conclusion about LLMs: people tend to be fascinated by things they don't understand in the hopes that it will solve their problems. AI is no different. It has its merits, but it's not the panacea. You can have smart NPCs without resorting to tremendously complicated black boxes.
MUD ToolingAn interesting thing about MUDs is they have really poor efficiency in their backend tooling. Both because they are so old and also because they are still a full game experience being maintained by comparatively few people. This works because it's in text and so the threshold to learn how to work with and manipulate things is relatively low. You don't need to be able to run Unreal or Unity on your computer to do QA, you don't need access to large DBs of images or renders. You don't need an art team or complex programming or a product manager or a sales department. But another interesting thing about MUDs is that text game assets are still game assets and each one is going to take X amount of time to think of, create, manage, and deploy. Images or not, the designer workflow is similar and the time it takes to bring things from ideation to reality is also similar. I am sure there is a way to modernize and make the process/workflow on a MUD more efficient, but in my opinion there is a limit to how much modern tooling would actually help here. You still need to do just about everything a normal game designer needs to do to make the world run, with the addition of being customer service agents and improv actors/writers. I actually do not think most staff members are being inefficient with their time or energy. They're just trying to do something that requires the resources of a full time job, because it was set up to require that, because it was created by unattached young people who had 40+ hours a week of free time. Nobody left on staff (or even in the game, I'm sure) has that anymore. Everyone is an adult and those 40+ hours a week are spoken for. Yes, Armageddon has a terrible infrastructure with bad tools, and while I've heard the red tape has improved a lot that's still a factor as well. But it's also an online game with a playerbase, and that's going to take the time it takes. Which is a lot, if you want to do it thoroughly/well. It's very impractical, but it is also very interesting! MUDs are a part of internet and gaming history I will always be fascinated by! I don't mind Armageddon closing that much. It makes sense that such a strange project would go out in such an utterly harebrained way. I am a little sad that the many things I wrote for the game will no longer be out there, contributing in whatever small way to stories I'll never hear told by strangers I'll never meet. To the idea about modernizing a MUD's workflow: absolutely yes. There is an incredible amount of space for improvement for MUDs created and designed in this day and age. We saw some of this with Armageddon Reborn and how they were working on web-based map editors at one point. While I don't normally praise web applications, given all the troubles that come with using a browser as a platform, I could say that was a step in the right direction. The tooling around MUDs can be so much better. It's just not a space where a significant amount of wisdom has been applied, yet. A lot of it came about by the excitable energy I mentioned earlier. Let's take LambdaMOO for instance. At the time, it probably made sense to the people working on it that code should live alongside data in the MOO database. However, I don't think anyone in their right mind would write a MUD like that these days. Code for a project of any significant size needs to be versionable, and it absolutely needs to be statically analyzable if you want to keep your sanity, so that means none of these loosey-goosey interpreted scripting languages with runtime interpretation of variable availability.
In ClosingI will accept the memorial of Armageddon with a GPLv3 release of the code on Github and a CC-BY-SA snapshot of the database. It's a little sad that a game of such a rich and storied history is fading away like this. At the end of the day, I don't know if it so much matters that they release the code and database under a permissive license. Of course, that would be wonderful for the archivist in me; it would become a treasured keepsake for the memories I have. I would be all in favor of it. But I think what really mattered were the interactions we had and the stories we told; the game was just a platform for that to happen. A buggy, underdeveloped, incongruent platform, but it had its charm. Truly, anyone of determination and wit could remake Armageddon's basic features in no more than a couple weeks from nothing but a compiler and a couple libraries, but the people were the most important part of it all. How do you get that back? The answer is likely found in the MUSHes that eukelade has talked about. It's not so much a technological problem that we have here. This one is more sociological, one of people-design. There's much more I could speak to, but this post is already becoming a bit long. I do enjoy talking about these topics, so I'll be around. I hope the good-natured players out there find a way to keep their stories alive. |
|
hates2
staff puppet account
Posts: 42
|
Post by hates2 on Oct 29, 2024 13:18:33 GMT -5
To me it just seems like the producers don't love Armageddon, they just love their status on Armageddon. If they loved Armageddon, their response would have been,
"We can no longer manage the game the way it needs to be managed to operate. Our stories cannot be told as we want to tell them so Armageddon, as we know it, is coming to an end.
However, though the game will no longer be supported, we are working towards keeping Zalanthas open to be explored. If you ever find yourself tomorrow, next year, in the next decade even wanting to go back and explore Allanak, fall off the shield wall, or wander into the silt sea we want you to have that ability. We know we would love to breathe in the nostalgia again and want to give you all that opportunity too. Check back here for more details on how you will be able to return to Zalanthas and view it in its final moment in time, to be forever cherished."
That would require people who love the game. Who are willing to put in some work to let people come back to a place that might have meant a lot to them at some point. But without players to slow-drip stories into, these producers are not willing to share the game. It's their ball, they are taking it with them and moving to another city.
They don't have to do my suggestion, just like I don't have to listen to some random guy on the street who says he's not having a good day and wants to share. However, if that wasn't a random guy and was my spouse, I'd probably take the time and effort to listen, because I love them. Yes, it would be work to give access back to Armageddon by either releasing the code or hosting it unsupported in some fashion. But if they really loved the game, not just what they were in the game, they'd probably want to do it because they'd know the game belonged to the community, not to them.
|
|
delirium
Clueless newb
grumpy cat
Posts: 113
|
Post by delirium on Oct 29, 2024 13:19:22 GMT -5
Bye, Felicia.
|
|
