baobob
Clueless newb
Posts: 119
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Post by baobob on Oct 29, 2024 13:20:34 GMT -5
Is today the day of the announcement of "What Will Become of ArmageddonMud", or has that already officially happened?
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mehtastic
GDB Superstar
Armers Anonymous sponsor
Posts: 1,688
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Post by mehtastic on Oct 29, 2024 13:43:16 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. I've seen a lot of games die, and what happens is a lot of the players just decide that it's going to be their last MU*. Some will definitely move on to other games like you said and be shitlords elsewhere. The thing is: the shitlords on Arm had a home advantage. The staff couldn't bear to get rid of their friends that they had played/cheated together with for so long. They will have no such advantage on a different game, and will be easier to remove without a second thought.
Agreed on everything else. A lot of this could have been avoided if the people on Armageddon simply gave me no attention.
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mehtastic
GDB Superstar
Armers Anonymous sponsor
Posts: 1,688
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Post by mehtastic on Oct 29, 2024 13:47:29 GMT -5
Is today the day of the announcement of "What Will Become of ArmageddonMud", or has that already officially happened? It already happened. tl;dr game's dead bro |
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Post by gringoose on Oct 29, 2024 13:51:36 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, Same. The producers could have just said they're out and the game will no longer be maintained or have staff support and just leave it running. And then include a link to donate to the server costs on the memorial site. Actually, nevermind I just remembered if Arm was an abandoned online game there would be some really fucked up stuff going on there. There's a lot of abandoned MUDs out there still up and running without anyone even playing them for years but Arm has a special playerbase. |
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bebop
Clueless newb
Posts: 131
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Post by bebop on Oct 29, 2024 13:58:20 GMT -5
But why are they now just posting things they were working on that they'll never finish? It's giving this is what you could have had! It's another bizarre move in a series of moves. We're closing and locking the GDB to self-congratulate on all of the things were gonna do but then completely failed to implement as an organization due to our own staff cannibalizing one another. What am I lookin' at here?  |
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Post by generality on Oct 29, 2024 14:03:30 GMT -5
I find it hilarious that Mansa is one of the worst cheaters around in terms of membership in 'illicit' Discord/Private Chats. Dude was the head moderator for a while.
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val
staff puppet account
Posts: 45
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Post by val on Oct 29, 2024 14:14:18 GMT -5
Whoever characterized it as a ragequit might be right, though I think it's probably more of a stress-handwash.
My final hot take: Good on them for ditching something that brought them more stress than joy. The mental and emotional health of others is not their responsibility. Sometimes, it's best to just priorize your own mental health, stop throwing good time after bad, slap some closure on it, and walk away.
I'm sure the active players aren't going to like it, but they don't have to.
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Post by uncoolio on Oct 29, 2024 14:15:25 GMT -5
I looked through those docs they posted and it's remarkable how little of it was noticeable in the game. It might look good on paper but most of it was completely fucking undetectable inside the game.
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mehtastic
GDB Superstar
Armers Anonymous sponsor
Posts: 1,688
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Post by mehtastic on Oct 29, 2024 14:17:13 GMT -5
But why are they now just posting things they were working on that they'll never finish? It's giving this is what you could have had! It's another bizarre move in a series of moves. We're closing and locking the GDB to self-congratulate on all of the things were gonna do but then completely failed to implement as an organization due to our own staff cannibalizing one another. What am I lookin' at here? I will assume the best of intentions for most of them and say they were probably just excited about the next step of the story. A DM in a TTRPG will typically do the same thing after an accidental TPK or after enough players drop the game.
Dropping the whole S1 doc is weird, and funny considering half the players already had it.
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my2sids
Displaced Tuluki
Posts: 341 
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Post by my2sids on Oct 29, 2024 14:20:51 GMT -5
Damn, guilty of having ooc friends. The ultimate sin as an Armageddon staffer. /jk
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Post by gringoose on Oct 29, 2024 14:21:57 GMT -5
I find it hilarious that Mansa is one of the worst cheaters around in terms of membership in 'illicit' Discord/Private Chats. Dude was the head moderator for a while. I had a PC that got PKed by Mansa years ago that was a long time associate of one of his PCs, and a new PC had shown up out of nowhere that was acting like he was the boss of my PC. My PC tells him something along the lines of, go stick it up your ass, and then that PC and Mansa are suddenly best buddies and show up and PK mine together. Now it makes sense, I wasn't in the OOC clique. |
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my2sids
Displaced Tuluki
Posts: 341
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Post by my2sids on Oct 29, 2024 14:46:58 GMT -5
But why are they now just posting things they were working on that they'll never finish? It's giving this is what you could have had! It's another bizarre move in a series of moves. We're closing and locking the GDB to self-congratulate on all of the things were gonna do but then completely failed to implement as an organization due to our own staff cannibalizing one another. What am I lookin' at here? Why I posted my stuff: I was in the process with quite a few plots and dropped them for the players to enjoy. They can imagine their PCs going through it and what that might mean for them. A lot of the work had been done - no reason not to share when it's over. |
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baron
Clueless newb
Posts: 119 
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Post by baron on Oct 29, 2024 14:59:42 GMT -5
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. I'm the only moron here touting for LLMs as MUD engines, so this is directed at me. You're not wrong about the technical challenges regarding context length and computational requirements. There are models-in-development now that aim to solve the context challenges. The computational requirements are dropping for inference, and Moore's Law will eventually take care of the rest. We're not there *today*, but we will be, eventually. It's a question of when, not if, it becomes possible. LLMs are not a black box to me (or rather, they are a black box to me, but only because they're a black box to literally everyone, including researchers spending hundreds of millions of dollars attempting to explain LLM features). Yes, LLMs predict the next token. But *how* they predict the next token is the interesting bit. It is not a Markov chain. The capabilities and possibilities are significantly greater than what you are suggesting. There are next-gen models that, if fine-tuned to the task, would produce output comparable to a human staffer/player, especially if an agent strategy is used (for example, fine-tuning and instructing a particular model to roleplay a particular NPC, and fine-tuning and instructing a model to marshal the other models). The context bit is the one extra tricky bit. The game would need a memory system greatly surpassing the capabilities of ChatGPT's bio tool in order to compress pertinent information and get that information into the context of the appropriate agent. I have ideas on how this can be done, but honestly? I don't believe my ideas need to be expressed or developed, as Google, OpenAI, Meta, etc. research into agent swarms will produce better results in the eventuality of time. |
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Post by jcarter on Oct 29, 2024 15:45:16 GMT -5
Lol @ this unreleased content. A brand new necromancer guild for staff alts to play in. Full elemental transformations with huge bonuses. Big scary monsters to wipe out parties.
why would anyone want to ever play a mundane character when it seems like all the cool stuff and content are things they'll never get access to or be instagibbed by?
Why do I have a suspicion that the first and most prolific necromancer would be played by halaster?
good riddance.
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Patuk
Shartist
Posts: 552
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Post by Patuk on Oct 29, 2024 15:53:31 GMT -5
A cursory glance over the past couple years' release notes makes fairly clear that Halaster just really likes magic. This isn't a secret, he's said as much himself, but it really is in fact a tip-off that playing a mundane PC means barely playing the same game, yes.
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