Random thoughts and comments

It's probably just me, but I find it reassuring that I can still find a "Because? Because... fuck 'em!" post here when I need cheering up.

To be fair, when Arm Reborn was announced Halaster was upset and left the game (preferring to play MMOs). It wasn't untilicj later he returned. Sorry to split hairs but accuracy is important to me. So just to be clear we're talking about cheaters -like- Halaster because Halaster had left at this point (only later to return shortly before Adhira and Co left.

Nyr really was uniquely awful. There have been other bad staffers, but he's by far the worst admin I have ever seen on any MUD, having played countless since the mid-90s. Just a thoroughly reprehensible, spiteful individual obsessed with power and constantly seeking to wield it against players. If he had no legitimate reason, he'd just make something up.

He was ruinous to the game and the relationship between players and staff. It's no coincidence that Armageddon's decline began with his tenure and somewhat stalled with his departure, but the damage is still done. Some of his influence still lingers in the game, and the rift he created between players and staff compelled some players to lay off the copium and speak up about their grievances instead of keeping silent.

While being open about a game's problems is generally a good thing, a game with as many problems as Armageddon will quickly develop a heavy element of negativity within its community when people stop censoring themselves and start saying what they really feel. Even if keeping quiet about those problems doesn't solve anything, open dissent is even worse if it still doesn't solve them.

In a MUD community (or any small, insular community of any kind), it's actually better for people to bite their tongue and huff copium than to voice their complaints about things and discover that it doesn't help. The best thing would be for people to voice their complaints and see change for the better as a result, but if that's not an option, it's better actually if those people are sufficiently content to just grin and bear it. Dissent without useful results doesn't help anybody, but Nyr's administrative style set Armageddon up for that very thing.

That's not to say that Armageddon hasn't seen changes, and some of them have been for the better--but many of the problems that Nyr made the order of the day are still present to one degree or another.

It's still an inert game where very little happens on a day-to-day basis and players face huge obstacles if they ever try to do anything that doesn't fit within the curated pockets of staff-sanctioned generic gameplay (hunt, spar, craft, fuck, gossip). When some larger event does happen once in a blue moon, it's usually way out of reach of ordinary players who end up being mostly spectators with no serious role to play in it all.

It's still a game where players who feel aggrieved by staff actions face impossible odds if they try to complain. They'll defend each other beyond the limits of reason, turn a blind eye to abuse, trash-talk players on the immortal channels, etc. There's a weirdly juvenile vengefulness from staff if they ever come to perceive you as a "problem player," and some of them will go out of their way to sabotage your character if they don't like you. Meanwhile, their old friends get away with anything, and woe to any who might complain about that. You can land on the list of problem players simply by being the victim of a twinky piece of shit who you sent in a complaint about and didn't know it was someone with friends in high places.

It's still a game whose staff choose the most baffling things to work on. You can have a year where the hottest topic is the fact that people don't play in cities anymore, and what does staff do? Add a new race with absolutely no connection to any cities, located in the middle of nowhere. Players long for a war like in the game's golden age, and what does staff do? Vaguely dangle the promise of war in front of everyone, but give a few sponsored non-combat players the opportunity to call it all off if they want to, which they then did.

These are the kinds of fork-tongued methods that Nyr represented, and while the staff culture is not as bad today as it was then, his influence is still there and still affects the way Armageddon is being run. Look at how they handled the big Shalooonsh scandal this year. First they fucking BANNED the asshole's victims. Then they hemmed and hawed when the whole playerbase revolted against them. Then when it was clear that they could not get away with subjugating people and browbeating them into acceptance, they discreetly allowed him to stroll out the back door and have ignored the whole ordeal ever since. That's the Nyr playbook, except when he was around, he would have been satisfied with baning everyone who complained and then silencing any further discussion of the event while calling people malcontents if they hinted further at it. Baby steps, I guess. Very slow and tiny baby steps.

Back in the days of Nyr's rule, I had a character in Tuluk while he was in charge of the city. My character was a bard but not a member of any of the circles. I sang some vaguely comedic songs in taverns a few times, nothing particularly ambitious, and did card tricks (using the pickpocket skills, mainly peek and sleight of hand) as one of the PC's roleplay gimmicks.

One day, someone animated an NPC master bard and told me I ought to join one of the circles. Totally unprompted, never instigated by me in any way, never heard of the NPC in question, never expressed any desire whatsoever to talk to them or anyone. Joining wasn't part of my plans, so I said I'd think it over but did some internal dialogue about not really intending to. Then over the course of the next two weeks, this NPC bard kept contacting me with increasingly threatening suggestions of joining a circle, until he finally said he'd have me killed if I didn't.

At that point, I re-checked the helpfile on bardic circles--and sure enough, as I had remembered, it said that "some bards choose to join a bardic circle." I wished up to point this out and expressed my displeasure with having an NPC animated to send me death threats for not joining. Nyr, revealing himself to be the one behind it, immediately responded in a highly confrontational manner. He deflected my actual complaint, ignoring my citing the documentation, and promptly accused me of "twinking my skills" by using peek and sleight of hand to do card tricks. He then swiftly railroaded the conversation into force-storing my character. There was no talking to him. He just felt like ruining a player. I had never communicated with him personally before then and was not, to my knowledge, in bad standing with staff. He simply picked me as someone to fuck over.

They don't go to those extremes anymore, but if you aren't one of the players they expressly like, you can still find yourself the target of an arbitrary fucking-over. Being set perma-wanted for minor things, refusal of any request they can possibly justify declining, exclusively punitive animations, all those little things that make you feel vaguely unwelcome. And in exchange for that, do you get a game that's brimming with activity and drowning in exciting everyday events? No, you get a stagnant nothingburger where approximately fifteen staff members manage to put together all the productive energy and creative spark of three depressed accountants hooked on ketamine.

just a thought

Maybe Armageddon is dying because its 2023 and it's a text-based game from the 1990s.

Weren't you comparing Armageddon to scientology and calling it a cult earlier this year?

But yeah bro - great post! You're a genius!

I think there's a market for good text-based role-playing games in a predominantly graphically-driven gaming world. People still read books while movies and television exist. They allow more space for your imagination to take hold.

A text-based role-playing game potentially allows you to join with others in creating your very own story, with a character that you created, in what should be a vibrant and fleshed-out world. That's a pretty compelling idea. The problem lies in creating a world that allows enough space for people to create these characters and gives them enough agency to tell their stories and have the kinds of impact on the pre-existing world that they'd like to see. There's also a balancing act between making sure that players can actually achieve their goals with a reasonable commitment of time, while also keeping it from being a one-day quest to transform yourself into a dragon. You also probably need to automate a lot of things on the player side so that they aren't constantly having to run to the staff for every little thing.. and staff and players both should have a lot more tools at their disposal on both sides. Then of course you need to staff the game with the right kinds of people who aren't going to constantly cut players legs off at the knees and constantly squash everything they ever try to do for no apparent reason. And if you DO happen to have that initial core group of staff who are doing all the right things and building and maintaining a great game, how do you ensure their legacy continues if/when they decide to call it quits? How do you prevent situations where bad staffers like Nyr rise to power, fill the ranks with like-minded toadies, and poison the well for the rest of time?

That's just the tip of the iceberg as far as the problems with making it all work, but I think there are plenty of people out there who would enjoy sinking some of their free time into what amounts to a living novel.

"The game would have died anyway" is a cowardly argument that fails to take into account the fact that many text-based roleplaying games grew while Armageddon shrunk. With the #1 biggest shrinkage occurring around the time Nyr decided to change Tuluk with one overcompensating change after another, trying to fix what prior changes broke and breaking more things in the process. And when just about everyone except the Tuluk lifers like Raleris and Tallis's players decided that Tuluk wasn't worth their time, he set in motion the closure of Tuluk in the ultimate take-my-ball-and-go-home move, and caused the steepest decline in the playerbase the game had ever seen as his last act before quitting staff entirely.

This was AFTER Shadows of Isildur had closed the Northlands sphere and caused its own exodus within the playerbase. This was AFTER being told internally by other staff that what happened to SoI would happen to Armageddon. Nyr knew precisely what would happen, and decided to set the game's ruin in motion as one last big fuck-you to its players.

Armageddon's decline is directly linked to the arrogance of its owners and the use of the game as a testing ground for half-assed ideas. You need only look to the popularity of MUSHes and the new RPIs to see that people want to play text-based roleplaying games in 2023. They increasingly just don't want to play Armageddon. And for good fucking reason.