Random thoughts and comments

POV: You're a young female Armageddon player who just joined staff.

From "The Allanak Problem" on the GDB:



I think it comes down to the matter of frequency of occurrence. I've seen magickers take the gem without death more recently than that, but not so often, and increasingly seldom in the last handful of years. It's a result of the way things have changed.

People roll in as templars. They're expected to do this and that, so on and so forth; but at the end of the day, they can only really react to the events that happen to them. If someone turning themselves in as a magicker has only happened once in the last three month, and the documentation says that most magickers are forced to take the gem in order to live, you're just at a crossroads. Do you do what the documentation says usually happens or do you go with the impulse that accomodates that player's concept?

It comes down to the fact that most roles are scrounging for reasons to exist. Same goes for when a law enforcer catches a thief, or when a Guild member meets someone unaffiliated but potentially competent in the alleys. When nothing has happened for so long, you tend to go with the reaction that most represents your role. It's often a reaction that, by rights, should not happen every time. Unfortunately, due to current circumstances, it does happen every time and locks players into certain patterns of play. The templar can't really be expected to react with leniency the first time they meet a magicker, even if the lore says that it's something that they might experience on a regular basis.

If we get right down to it, Armageddon doesn't really work with its current player count. The bulk of the documentation was written in a time when players were subjected to these aspects of the setting often enough that they could adjust their reactions to the circumstances of the event. Now that anything which is even slightly unusual is likely to be the biggest thing that happened to you for the last month, it no longer works.

About a year ago, player numbers reached a point where the sensible decision would have been to focus all play on Allanak and its immediate surroundings. Instead it was expanded, and this is now causing problems. Tuluk could have been reopened four years ago and it might have worked out, but now it's just making things worse. It was the wrong time to do it, and it reflects in all aspects of the game, but most notably Allanak.

Surely noone can deny that numbers have dipped below critical mass. It's a daily topic on Discord. The game struggles to reach 30 players during peak hours and sits at less than 15 throughout most of the day. One of the ways in which this comes to play most prominently is in people's reactions to maickers. Since it now happens so rarely that most characters experience it maybe once in their lives, their reaction to it will be skewed by that fact.

For years, people complained about the constant culling of content in the game. When player numbers were still healthy enough, it felt wrong to shut down this clan or that, or render this race or that area unavailable for play. Then, as a consequence of those actions, fewer and fewer players stuck with the game. Now we're at a point where there's not enough to fill out even the most basic roles, and then they choose to reopen Tuluk? Maybe there was the hope that this would bring a bunch of players back, but this hasn't happened. It had the adverse effect: players are now so spread out that everyone is starved for interaction, causing more players to quit, and thus leaving every location even more desolate.

Who can honestly say that anything meaningful goes on in the game anymore? Players are spread so thin that they can't make anything happen. Major world events are so rare that noone has anything to build upon. You log in, you look around, you can't find anyone to interact with, and then you log off. That's today's Armageddon.

On some level, I can see that current staff might have been in a lose-lose situation. If they didn't open Tuluk again, things would have continued to stagnate as they were. If they did, the playerbase would be stretched untenably thin. This is an issue that should have been addressed several years ago, during that vast span of time between the Reborn fiasco and recent times where almost nothing happened for years on end. But it wasn't, and now it just feels like too little, too late.

I don't have a solution handy that could fix everything overnight. Tuluk should not have been opened again, sure, that's easy to say; but now it's done. The game's story should not have spun its wheels for half a decade, but that happened. I can be an armchair developer and say that they should promptly shut down Tuluk, Luir's, and all but one desert elf tribe, and center all play around Allanak, but I wouldn't want to be in the shoes of whatever administrator had to make that call. Still, it's the only way I see a future for an ArmageddonMUD that peaks at 30ish players at most, and often struggles to reach that figure at all.

This game is actively in the process of dying, not because it has too few players to survive (although it has begun to head in that direction) but because the game's design cannot sustain these numbers. You can't have two dozen different clans in a game that barely has two dozen players at peak hours. You can't have four major centers of play (Allanak, Luir's, Tuluk and the Tablelands; hell, it could be five if you counted Red storm, and six if we consider the 'rinth a separate sphere) when the game sits at under 15 players throughout most of the day. But at this point in time, who's going to make the decisions that remedy this? It would be a very big decision, one that openly acknowledges past mistakes, and I can't see anyone doing that at this point.

Yeah, there's not much of an open dialogue. That has frankly always been the case. If anything, I'd say that staff is more receptive to feedback these days than they were before, but they still pretend that they aren't. Nevertheless, many of the talking points that began on this forum have eventually led to changes. Often they do it in a roundabout way: we talk about something, and then it becomes a topic in the non-shadowboard circles, and finally staff listens. It's just the natural course of events.

Without intending to toot my own horn, many of the topics I've raised here are now frequent subjects of discussion amongst the playerbase. It's clear that they all read this forum or listen to those who do; and while the game's popularity has diminished to such an extent that its current state can officially be called its twilight years, there are three distinct and frankly equal portions to the Armageddon community: the GDB and in-game discourse, the Discord channel where people are a little more forthright, and then this forum where there is no filter.

Before the shadowboard came about, and obviously before Discord, the only link was between the GDB/in-game stuff and staff's direct authority. People talked on AIM, but often it was just two or three friends sharing their wildly inaccurate interpretations of the code and things like that. For a time, this forum was a platform for all walks of life, from those who hated Armageddon and wanted to see it fail to those who cared about the game and wanted to use the shadowboard to influence positive change. Those who wanted to see Armageddon fail have... honestly probably got what they want, at this point, but probably not through any influence of their own. Many who loved the game have also left because it's just on its last legs. In some strange way, one might say that the ones who still visit - and play the game - are those who truly want the best for Armageddon.

I fully believe that everyone on staff belongs to that category, but some of them may have lost sight of the game's zeitgeist. That's not some new things. Parts of staff have been out of touch since... probably forever, if we get right down to it; it's known that the likes of Nessalin never play at all, nor did Adhira keep her finger on the pulse, and so on. I strongly suspect that Brokkr, while he clearly cares about the game, does not really grasp the zeitgeist of players and the topics that they care about. That's why the big class revamp didn't really hit the spot. He hasn't got the perspective to see any, well, perspective beyond his own, and staff perspectives rarely line up with those of the players in a game like this. That comes into play in decision like "well... we're bumping the hide skill of two classes by 5 points, so let's give 90 scan to everyone and their dog."

But they do have the right intentions. I think we've moved past the days of Nyr and his ilk, when some members of staff were truly irredeemable. One can say what they want about Shalooonsh and his controversail relationship with female players, but that doesn't change the fact that these people mean to do what's best for the game. They just don't get it right half the time. Opening Tuluk again, in an age where there already weren't enough players without it, is a sign of that. It's also a sign of their listening to the playerbase, but acting too slowly and without querying people for feedback first. I'm pretty sure that if they had publically asked people back in July, or whenever it happened, if opening Tuluk now was a good idea, they'd have had a lot of feedback that indicated that it wasn't.

But they didn't. Instead, a murky soup of years of messy feedback made its way back to staff through a long and winding road from here to various players to Discord to actual staff ears, and so a decision was made that may have made sense four years ago but no longer does. It's not that they don't listen, it's that they listen to the people who have to toe the party line and pretend that they don't visit here, and so can't give feedback right after they read it here, because then it'll look like they brought the message right back from the evil scoundrels of the dreaded shadowboard. But at the end of the day, anyone who has followed the game's general discourse can tell that that's what happens.

That's a very good point.

Just about every reason for people not playing is time.

Yet how much have we seen changed to the grind?

The new classes starting at higher levels doesn't really fix this, you still need to dedicate a load of time.

Here's 'Returnoftheking's message he made on Armageddon that got removed because he said something later on in the thread staff didn't like, so instead of removing only the messages they didn't like they told him he wasn't welcome, removed his messages entirely.

I was thinking 'Wow, this is real informative. I'm gonna save it incase staff deletes it'
And what do you know? They did.
Here it is, I copied and pasted it. I should have screenshot it instead but hindsight is 20/20.

pastebin.com/yVCR6Ee4

Kronibas, I'm happy for you. Housewives and hermits are Armageddon's target audience. From a utilitarian standpoint, I hope you derive as much enjoyment from the game that you possibly can before you inevitably get bit by the snakes in the grass.

Been getting awfully nostalgic for these games lately. Despite the real big toll it kinda took on my mental health to play. Part of me still wants to try again despite all the drama I went through when I quit Apocalypse. I don't even know if I'd be accepted back. And I'm definitely unsure if I should.

Still, that sense of wonder and desire to try a magical character who will inevitably devolve into a spice miner or drown in the sea of silt. Or just try an Elf or something. Elves were super fun.