Random thoughts and comments

It has. That role app didn't come from nowhere.

The state of the game... well... these are just my thoughts from what I've seen for some time. We have had a year since Tuluk closed. Has ARM, or Allanak even, improved since it's closure? All these people who bitched about Tuluk sucking and that those players would improve numbers in Allanak... has Allanak improved? Forced to now play in Allanak for a city life, seeing what I have seen since then, if those people think Allanak has improved, it must have been a boring, shitty place before hand. The Tablelands role call seemed like a great idea, and there was a lot of work put in by staff and the info that was written was well done. Why wasn't that work just put into fixing Tuluk? I'd like to think that would have been better received by a bigger audience. At the time Tuluk was closed it was doing well. It had improved heaps from it's downfall. Rath had done great with it. Tuluk when it was closed was shitloads better than Allanak as it is currently after the migration.

Ok. Tuluk closed. Get over it. The opportunity to take advantage of the player migration failed though. Tor got opened for a little while, then shut down. I don't know what went wrong there, but it's disappointing. Four noble houses in game allows more opportunity. Noble houses should have been able to employ more, that didn't happen. 2 aides per noble still seems to be the cap, unless you just employ privately, but if I wasn't just a spy/assassin, I'd tend to prefer to be an official servant of the House. 3 nobles per family should be the minimum. 3 opens up way more competition, not just against other houses, but within your own house then. Instead of it potentially end up being just you vs your cousin, you can make deals and have other opportunities within your own manor for intrigue. I think the same should apply with the GMH clans as well. Same reasons. More nobles, more fun for nobles, less chance of them being bored and storing. They are severely restricted in what they can do, especially considering the freedom that had available some years ago.

While I like involving as many people as possible in RPT's, like one that happened not too long ago, which involved 20+PC's, it was just way too many people, and becomes way too hard for staff to determine the difficulty in monsters for it to be challenging and dangerous to the party. Sometimes you don't need to involve 3-4 clans. Especially when one of those clans barely gets any action and it just becomes a backdoor in the event. The problem is people are starved for adventures, and everyone wants to get involved in anything, no matter wether they should be there or not.

The Rinth and the Guild... well... I haven't played there much at all, but what I have didn't seem to interest me much. I could have just been unlucky with play times and playing during a dull period, but it needs more. Is the Guild HQ like 2 buildings? That's all they have? The backroom and some other 'officer' room you need a key for? I honestly find that ridiculous if so. On HL in the Lia-Kavair we had a recruit safehouse, senior safehouse, sewer safehouse, shop safehouse, and even another safehouse in a village to the east, and that wasn't what was in Coronan and elsewhere we could access as well. The world's are obviously a bit different but I'd expect the Guild to have a safehouse in Red Storm, Luir's, and even Tuluk. The Guild is obviously more powerful than the PC playerbase can represent, so that needs to be backed up by staff, especially if Guild leaders are targeted by Templars. Killing nobles shouldn't be unheard of. Rare though. Killing Guild leaders shouldn't be unheard of either. Both shouldn't be without consequences. Are the Templar PC's in game currently dull? Inactive?

The subguild changes were great, fantastic actually. The game seemed to have a little positive glow. Then the removal of the full elementalists. No point going over that. I hope staff have realised what a stupid mistake that was and reverse it, and it happens ASAP, or at least the new Guild changes need to be done ASAP. You can't let that Rend tick too many times if your going to make a change like that. It needs to be followed up quickly, and we need NEW features without removals.

Players will always overreact to plots that should be insignificant because they are bored shitless. That's why I assume some players are kill hungry.

I've rambled badly, sorry folks. It's very late, or very early haha.

didn't you just kill a plot-driving pc and disappear through the nifty storage tool? And like I told you about Valorisk, Balthazar logs in several times weekly. Either your playtimes weren't meshing or you had an unrealistic expectation for Templars and nobles to stand idly by in the streets and act like Fales with the populace.

Seeing as how master assassin over here was waiting in the shadows to type backstab, I'm not sure what they were doing was wrong.

Staff and most of the playerbase is probably glad to see you gone.

I figured it was because the Guild serves as what security professionals call a "honeypot". 

If you can get even a percentage of the criminals to gather in a specific place, it is easy to track, control or take action on them.

He's laughably hypocritical at times, puts players and characters on full blast that he evidently knows very little about, and when things don't go his way, decides to whine on these forums for the fiftieth time in a long-winded post aimed at the sometimes corrupt, creatively-bankrupt establishment and its mindless customer.

So when he comes back again, gets bored, then needs somewhere to vent his pent-up frustrations, he'll go off on a tangent about the game being dead and issue a formal declaration stating he won't return. Unfortunately, he'll be back, just like he shockingly came back to these boards.

Despite what you may believe (and believe it or not, I think JCarter's probably one of the most level-headed people on both boards), you wouldn't be able to sustain a serious community around the parameters of these forums, which mostly allow people to randomly spiel into vitriolic ranting.

Do you honestly think grown adults on the GDB, playerbase and staff alike, want people like new/oldtwink in their midsts? It's a headache they don't /have/ to deal with on a game they make free to the public.

King, I've had those same thoughts before, but I actually RPed with his character and saw what was going on, I believe he was justified in doing what he did. I think storing was a litte, eh, on his part, but still... that doesn't invalidate his point. I think it's a detriment to the game that events caused Newtwink to quit. They've been running people off for a while, and killing off characters that drive plots. There comes a point where one really has to weigh their priorities, Arm staff missed that point, in my opinion, a long time ago. They've banned and punished so many good players that they've driven them from the game. Sometimes something as simple as letting a key character in a plot die is enough to make all the characters get bored, banning the player is much more damaging. If they know that player is utterly incapable or unwilling to play another character, they, too, may just say, fuck it, why am I wasting time and effort with this shit?

It's the opposite of productive, what Arm staff have done. They've encouraged a stagnant environment by rewarding shitty characters while in the meantime shitting on good characters and players, and they fail to see anything wrong with that. They top this off by repeatedly removing content that people like, all while dangling the magic karma carrot in front of people's faces, but never, ever giving it out except in very special circumstances. To be honest, the only reason Arm survives is because there's no viable alternative. There's EoE, but good luck with that once staff gets a stick up their butt. I mean, EoE is a very good and well-made game with staff that respond immediately to player concerns and actions, but I still consider it pretty shitty in that there's no checks and balances so that, when a staff member picks up a grudge against you, there's no hand holding them back. Don't get me wrong, the staff there are decent folks, but us indecent folks need an outlet too, and the staff expects players to know certain things without being told.

I'm currently very excited about Athas mud. Vintrius and Moranus have so far been very level-headed and mature in responding to issues. It's still early in the process, so it's hard to tell, things can honestly always go sour in any situation... but the more I read their thoughtfully worded replies, the more assured I become. But there's a lot of work that needs to be done before it goes live. I need to get back to helping with that task but RL issues have me working on something far more important to me than any game could be.

Tor came back as a gelded pony, and the four Tor noble PCs that I know of were signalling to me that they got absolutely lackluster staff support for all of their endeavors. This was while Talia was the Allanaki admin, and we all know how terrible she was.

To give you an example, the longest active Tor noble was Kitt Borsail, who was married into Tor as a punishment / prank. I give Frifri credit for killing the clan again, because he set the bar so high for the Tor PCs that nobody else could meet it. Kitt established these Academy classes, gathering together the upper crust of the GMH, nobility, Templarate & militia to educate them on the arts of warfare (which Frifri could do really well, being a drunk Marine IRL while he was doing the lessons). Things were looking alright at the time, and we were actually enjoying it.

However, when Talia got this degenerate fetish in her loins to make Kitt get pregnant and fuck her with her NPC husband, Frifri refused. Apparently the rape / consent rules don't apply when it's the staff doing the raping. Through all that commotion, Kitt was killed and Talia cemented herself as a deviant pervert incapable of being trusted with holding any power over an RP setting.

Following that, the Tor PCs got so little staff support they basically stored within a week after recognizing the disparity between what they ought to be able to do virtually with what they sadly could do codedly.

Friday scraped what little utility could be strangled out of the neutered Tor House without the Red Scorpions, and Talia came along, with autistic degeneracy, to ruin it. That's the reason Tor died, and I laughed when I saw it had closed because it was one more nail in the coffin for the Armageddon staff.