Armageddon MUD crumples to the ground.

Fair enough. Now apply this to more situations; like running a dynamic MUD.
I mean, you were cool enough to a part of the biggest and most powerful clique, the staff team. Kinda squandered that though, didn't you?

Or you can stick to the idea that your execution of Seasons was... actually kinda awesome. If that's the case, you have a long way to go for True Enlightenment. If you had actually engaged with the community over here on the Shadowboards, I feel like there's a lot that could've been smoothed out. We had similar interests, wanting to fix the game. I suppose you'll never see it that way, and it's too late for that at any rate.

Now, I have 3 questions for you.

1. Are you African?

2. Why did you name this account after the hyena that did Scar's bidding? Does Halaster = Scar? Do you plan to devour him? Do you see the irony in this?

3. Did you like when I called you a rat using the request tool?

So you're not going to unban bebop (or presumably the other whistleblowers) from a game...that no longer exists. And you're lording that over them, like a queen in her high castle gazing down on the unruly peasents.

I do not know all the sordid details. I bloody well don't want to know. But you're right that game masters in a silly amateur run internet elf game shouldn't be expected to have the education, wisdom, experience to deal with complex real life issues.

Except the issue isn't all that complex. At heart, the problem is that the secrecy of the game enabled awful behavior.

And here you are still complaining about people communicating with each other, as if that was the problem.  Oh no! Half of everyone was talking about a video game in spaces you don't control! The fucking horror of it! People talking to each other! They might say things you don't want them to say!!

And so, it falls me to to roleplay the king in the high castle. I'm older than you. I played the game for longer. Thusly, with divine mandate, I gaze upon thee, little unruly peasant, and declare you, Usiku, BANNED. You may no longer play Armageddon.

Mostly because it's dead and buried. ha ha.

Staff has always loved to insist that there's lots going on in the game, but they seem to base this on the number of threads on the IDB that concern some clan or plotline. The reality is that 99% of that stuff never reaches any given player. Armageddon has always failed really badly at plot visibility and accessibility. It doesn't matter how many threads you have detailing something that's going on when the overwhelming majority of it is completely undetectable to anyone outside of the one clan or the one player that it revolves around. Doubly so for players who aren't part of some OOC info-sharing clique.

Let's take the copper rush stuff, since it was supposed to be one of the most prominent features of the season. Before quitting, I played first in AoD, then in the Guild and Magefall movement, and then a rogue mage with the express goal of being an antagonist for the GMHs. Not exactly far-flung hermit roles where you'd expect to be totally isolated from even the game's primary metaplot. At no point did I ever hear anything, anything at all, about the GMHs or whatever they were doing. Never met them, never heard anybody talk about them; they might as well not have existed. And I looked. My last character was devoted entirely to trying to get involved in it. I couldn't. I could never even manage to find a GMH character.

And that wasn't from a lack of effort or personal myopia or whatever. I asked a number of characters IC and always got answers like "Uhh, I used to know a couple of their names but I haven't heard from them in ages. Dunno if they're dead." I spent quite a lot of time standing outside the GMH camps hoping to meet anybody, and simply never did. It looked to me like everyone else had the same issue: the thing that was supposed to be one of the flagship plots, something that carried the storyline of S1, was impossible to get involved in. You never even heard rumors about what was going on. You never heard a passing mention. You never met the PCs. It was effectively not a thing that existed.

The same thing largely applies to most of the game's so-called plots, and has for years. If you don't happen to be in the actual center of it, to the point where that IDB thread has your character's or clan's name in the title, that plot is probably out of reach. You might never even hear about it at all. Arm has long been like a D&D game where the DM communicates only with one of the players and the rest of the group just hopes that this player is willing to share.

Another big problem has been the lack of options for conflict resolution besides PKing. The game's general fabric is too weak for things like political reprisal or financial loss to be relevant. If you have an enemy, killing them is just about the only thing you can do that helps your own position. Combined with the fact that staff has been absolutely atrocious at maintaining anything resembling a healthy and fair PvP environment, the game has been an arms race of twink-PKing. This has encouraged players to keep their plot cards close to the chest and share as little as possible, because this culture of "PK first or get PKed, and any trick goes" has made it suicidal to be inclusive with your plots.

This just feels like you stated it, but didn't really believe it.  

I find it hard to believe staff awareness of this issue was so low... especially when I know fuck tons of staff who happily broke this rule when they weren't on staff (before and after).  People colluding didn't break the game or kill the game.  It went on since the game's inception.   I also know plenty of folks who knew shit was going sideways for their favorite char... but played it out.  
We're all in cliques, it's just Armageddon MudSexers are too proud to admit they are in fact "Mean girls" sometimes. 

Hell a little staff self awareness on this issue might of done the game better than clutching to a 20 year old rule that literally everyone was breaking.     

You let Lizzie / Hestia bully actually talented people away from the game, and when they complained to you Lizzie's 'old lady' defense was accepted wholesale.

You defended Malifaxis/Shaloonsh in the face of accusations and evidence, and some of you have even been quoted not knowing what gaslighting is, while actively engaged in gaslighting.

It is telling indeed that Eurynomos is the most switched on Producer in recent times.

See—this is the issue. No accountability.

I have to call your bluff on this because claiming ignorance of these people abusing power out-of-character and communicating OOC? That was literally a huge part of what I posted when the game imploded, and I was banned. You would’ve had to work really hard to avoid knowing this.

I explicitly said—Shalooonsh took inappropriate photos of Delirium in person and distributed them without her consent. I told staff (and you’re staff, right?) that Shalooonsh showed up where I lived and worked, taking pictures, which were sent to Draugr and Nessalin. Cuusardo came forward and said Shalooonsh groped her at a party. Delirium said she was removed from the game for refusing to interact with Shalooonsh. Belgiokiss said he tried to offer her roles to get her attention after she blocked him, and when that didn’t work, he stalked her husband and started messaging Fnord on social media.

Before I ever came forward, staff had all those screenshots.

Val is married to Zoltan. Delirium is married to Ender. I’m married to Captain Shmarmy. As early as a few years ago, Aromit, Drinn, and Shalooonsh were meeting up with players half their age in Portland. I believe Sanvean and several staff members were at Shalooonsh’s wedding when he married a woman he started dating when she was sixteen, and he was like, thirty-six. There’s been meet-up after meet-up over the years. Mansa and Drinn/Ourla dated. And when I made “the whistleblower post,” Drinn was staff for Mansa, who was a Templar, had a special weapon, and got skill boosts three times faster than me. It's well known that Mansa has regular communication with staff, if he isn't staff himself and then was first inline to become a moderator.  So please, spare me the “we didn’t know” act. Of course you had some inkling of the OOC communication and corruption—look around.

You came on as a staff member during the community’s biggest implosion. You had access to all these complaints and aspects of the community that most players will never see. This was all made public when I came forward. If you didn’t know, you chose to ignore it, because the information, screenshots, and signs were all there, glowing in the dark. And if you truly didn’t know, you should be questioning Halaster for onboarding you without preparing you for the environment you were entering. So, which is it? Halaster is blameless, or Halaster lied to the PB, covered for Shalooonsh, and wasn’t open with you about the state of OOC communication in the game? Which is it?

That’s the problem. That’s where staff is culpable. Instead of doing any real "healing" or work, you refused to apologize to the women who were hurt or welcome them back. Staff covered this up for years. Sanvean dismissed Shalooonsh, and the current staff let him back in. This was a slow-moving train wreck that staff had every chance to divert, but they didn’t. And now, instead of owning up, you’re still blaming the players for management’s failures.

Even framing this as "I guess I just wasn’t cool enough" shows you’re still stuck in a victim mentality, which doesn’t suit someone in leadership. And you're sticking with the idea that the victims of sexual abuse and harassment "hurt staff by putting them in a position they didn’t know how to handle." You’re still posting that and standing by it. You still can’t see your part in all this. Real healing would have been accountability and doing right by the players who were hurt. But instead, staff (and yes, this is where you come in, Usiku, because you were part of this) chose to ostracize and bury the victims of staff abuse and just keep plowing ahead.

And now you’re acting shocked that there was widespread OOC communication?

---Who cares? You can't control everyone on the internet and their private conversations.
---Gatekeeping the game’s code was a bug, not a feature. It’s a hallmark of bad game devs. Imagine playing a character and not even knowing what skills they’ll have because, shhh, magick.
---When people enjoy and love a community they're going to meet up and talk about it.  Look at literally every game and LARP.  That should have been a compliment, but staff needed secrecy (or at least the toxic illusion of it) to keep cheating and manipulating their players.  They created and enforced this to cover their own terrible behavior.
---You all broke the game by breaking its rules. You set up the pins and knocked them down. You claimed no staff were playing sponsored roles, and not only were they doing that—they were manipulating the entire game.

No one is buying it that the staff aren't the problem anymore.  You have been so eager to point fingers at the players, the leak, the "anomaly" bad apple in the staff bunch.  Yet even now, when the game continues to be shut down, has lost all brand equity and trust - ya'll still won't sit with the simple fact that staff were the stewards and leaders of this game and they led it into the ground with systemic cheating, harassment and strategic secrecy to cover their tracks and poor decisions.  What's worse, is people got hurt in real life.

That's why the game is where it is right now.  It's not those pesky players.  It's not the shadowboards existing to keep abusers accountable.  It's not the leak.  It's not that people can't know how the code of a game they play works.

It's the staff.

The chance to "heal" as you put it is gone.  It's time to end the game, but ya'll can't even do that with finality and grace.  It's more drama, and a leak and a sad addiction to rigged theatrics that are seeping into the real world since there is no virtual world left to play in.  The players made that virtual world and the staff destroyed it with all of the aforementioned bullshittery.

I don’t know bebop and I’m too new to even understand half this drama. But holy shit that post was an epic mic drop.

+1