What features do you wish were in Arm?

christ on a stick let city elves fucking ride mounts already

Arm needs sparring NPCs in the major combat clans so that being a soldier or guard isn't the worst fucking way to get good at fighting. This one single issue lies at the root of so many of the things that are wrong with this game. Almost every problem can be tracked back to the fact that the clans are severely underpopulated. The Byn is the exception but they can't carry the whole thing, they have no real purpose, and many won't play there because it's a newbie kindergarten that few can tolerate for longer periods of time.

If the militias and other major combat clans like House Tor actually had sufficient players, the roleplay would trickle down, up, sideways, and almost every thinkable role would get so much more meaningful. Criminal roleplay, templars, nobles, law enforcement, warfare, politics, all of this is dead because the clans that form the centerpiece of city-state culture don't have enough people in them for long enough to matter. The reason they don't is that if you join and it turns out you don't share playtimes with multiple other members, your skill progression is completely fucked and your character will never get anywhere.

Shadows of Isildur had sparring NPCs in the army clans and it wasn't a problem at all. It's easy to regulate, it's not as if they have to be accessible 24/7. You can already go out and fight shit at will without any restrictions if you're not in a clan with some idiotic schedule, which people then choose to do because it's so much more satisfying and effective. Giving the same training opportunities to soldiers would not be gamebreaking no matter how much the forum sycophants insist that it (and any other change ever proposed) will destroy the world. Characters are already able to get all the combat training they could possibly want, just... not if they're soldiers. Fail design.

Oh my god, I remember that one. I think the PC might still be around. It was a desc that was completely "square" and it was clear that getting it to be square was the only thing the player cared about, so the language was outrageously absurd. I saved it in a word file because it was so ridiculous but I don't seem to have it anymore. I think the guy was in the AotD. The description was the most retarded, contrived and trollish bullshit I've ever seen, and the fact that some staff member approved it - and that nobody has since made the guy change it - is a testament to how little of a shit they give about the game's standards.

It should have been rejected because the language was barely English, it contained a bunch of things that are against the commonly accepted rules for descriptions, and the whole thing was clearly written with the only goal being to have each line contain the exact same amount of characters so that the description looked like a big square. The actual content really was absolutely ridiculous, by far the worst description I have ever witnessed in 10+ years of playing RP MUDs. The description was literally nonsense and didn't really describe a person at all, just a bunch of random, linguistically bizarre sentences. I don't remember the specifics, but one of the sentences was something along the lines of "He has a symmetry that, if perceived as such, would ostensibly qualify him as a potential mate for those so inclined, and perhaps even those not." It was that level of idiocy.

As for sparring NPCs, it really doesn't even need to be that heavily regulated. Shadows of Isildur had them in the soldier clans and they were just there all day for people to use with no coded restrictions other than your skill timer. That would be the limiting factor, just as it is for people who hunt animals or fight alley-thugs as a means of raising their skills. It didn't have any significant impact on the game other than encouraging more people to join the clans that should have a lot of members, and making it more likely that a character's skills reflect their way of life. The latter can't really be ensured with any guarantee, but you can certainly guide the game towards it if you implement the necessary features, and that's where Armageddon has always been a gigantic, inexplicable failure. They just won't do certain things, even after other RPIs proved that it was fine and people pointed out the severe, game-changing problems caused by not doing it. A surprising amount of things on Armageddon depend on there being a good number of players in the soldier clans, and there rarely is.

I think, regarding fme descriptions, there should just be a disclaimer somewhere prominent in the docs stating

"Please be aware that that if your PC is a commoner, it would be appreciated if the fact could be reflected in their main description."

So then people can go ahead with their steroids, capped teeth and boob jobs but will be officially recognised as narcissistic fantasy twats.

Not to mention it would ruin the symmetry of tweedle dumb's mdesc and force him to put in a rediculous request to change it, rather than just spending another hour writing drivel.


I think the sparring NPC could be a good idea, but won't go into talking about potential mechanics of it because, frankly, anything that has support on these boards s probably even less likely to get implemented. I mean, I'm not saying some of the imms can be petty, but I bet if we made a thread named "Hey, he server's down. Think they should reset it?" they wouldn't...




Agreed. There seems to be a large, self-sabotaging opposition to change amongst the playerbase and it's very frustrating. If you even mentioned the possibility of a sparring NPC, you'd get whole-hearted opposition from at least 3 players who never play combat characters to begin with, and a bat-shit crazy "explanation" from Lizzie about how, if the Byn had a sparring NPC it would undoubtedly get abused by undead nilazi mul rangers from Red Storm.