fightclub
staff puppet account
In your base, killing your dudes.
Posts: 41
|
Post by fightclub on Nov 13, 2014 6:45:07 GMT -5
Man the bad thing is I remember so little about Nadhir and the expansion division, and I had so many great times. Names are gone, faces are gone, the experiences were fucking amazing though. Exile, was one of those surly dwarves on the road...
Exile. By far the most hardcore character I've ever played. This guy as a newbie joins Winrothol, gets kicked out of the city by a Faithful Lord, and sent on a quest to redeem himself. He has no food, water, weapons, or armor, and he's not allowed to enter the city, until he is redeemed. He tromps down to the tablelands, beats some fucking rocks together to make a knife, starts killing shit, sells the shit he kills, eventually gets all of the necessities, and continues to hunt from there. Eventually he encounters Nadhir from Salarr who reluctantly takes him in as a "shadow employee" confining his operations to the Redstorm base where no one could see him actually doing shit for Salarr. He wore nothing to represent himself as Salarr, and dropped off everything he gathered in Redstorm for pickup, it was fun. He was a warrior/weaponcrafter to the best of my memory, he had the epic struggle of being able to ride a mount worth a fuck with poor dwarf wisdom, the terrible sandstorms in redstorm fucked his world up, but he was generally an awesome character to play, eventually got ganked by spiders.
After Exile died I made a Nadhir clone, can't even tell you the fucking name. It was awesome actually being on the frontline of Salarr, and able to be visible in public. The whole expansion division 2.0 uniform was strictly set up to piss off Gypsy's, which was amazing at the time. We were wearing Gwoshi Berets, gwoshi mane's on our throats or shoulders, would ride gwoshi mounts around tuluk to engage Gypsys in conversation. Surprisingly they never said shit. I think the whole uniform thing, while mainly aimed at pissing off the gypsys, was also because we were brutally hunted by the Red Fang, thanks to our pal Nadhir. We didn't wear anything that showed we were representatives of Salarr, if you didn't know us by name, then you'd never know.
We would spent days upon days in the wilderness, hunting, claiming every form of wild beast, we'd bring bahamet to Allanak, and Mekillot to Tuluk, we single-handedly fueled Salarr north and South with a handful of highly trained hunters. We attempted to hunt a few Silt Horrors, but never got the animations for it.
Also there was the bandit encampment ordeal, but I'll let Nadhir tell you all about that one if he wants to, lol.
Anyway, when Nadhir died, Salarr 2.0 and the Expansion Division as a whole was done, my character, who I can't even remember the name for either suicided or retired, or died in some insignificant way, might've been before Nadhir, who knows -- but we had a good time, and he's right about the internal conflict. The only people who were capable of fucking with Salarr North, the Expansion Division 2.0 were us, and we did that quite well. Hats off to everyone that was there with us, it was a fucking ride.
|
|
|
Post by sirra on Nov 13, 2014 9:54:08 GMT -5
Good morning, fight! I remember Exile as this amazingly duplicitous yet bizarrely useful, Shakespearan Falstaff-like character. Right when you were ready to write Exile off as a fuckup and an acceptable loss, he would do something amazing to somehow win back your confidence. He survived some crazy massacres, and was pivotal in several situations, like dealing with the Salarri mindbender who had taken to terrorizing Exile for whatever reason. Exile had a way of getting people killed. I remember at one point, on the road, Nadhir basically watched - stunned - as an old ED 1.0 veteran (Dream), who was a prickly beast of a dwarf, turned on Exile with every attempt of killing him. Rarely has a situation escalated so quickly and violently. With some effort, I went and found the log...one of the most amazing encounters I ever witnessed in Arm, given the depth of pathos involved on each side. Dream's bizarre death happened extremely early in Nadhir's career, but in many ways, defined much of what was to follow. Nadhir's lame attempts at mediating the conflict are amusing - contrasted with his slowly dawning dismay at the unexpectedly homicidal pivot...and then the deeply pragmatic choice he had to make. Also, his attempt at dousing the area in darkness to make them stop fighting. Eventually, Dream won the fight, despite getting his ass handed to him at the start, by grazing Exile with a wezer-poison coated dagger...Then things kicked up. Nadhir and Dream's discussion over Exile's paralyzed body was especially intense. Also. Since Nadhir was speaking Bendune, Exile never knew what he said to Dream while he lay paralyzed...Sadly for Dream, instead of finishing Exile, he decided to get fancy about it. Although, a quirk of the code was also partly responsible for Dream's unfortunately elaborate method of execution. Which gave just enough time for the wezer sting to wear off... Log: armageddonmud.boards.net/thread/437/death-dream-requiem-ratlonEDIT: Also, we DID manage to get a few silt horrors once, but it was a pain in the fucking ass to get it animated, despite several requests. But eventually, Tzuraho(sp?) came through for us. I think it was him. One of the staffers whose name began with a T. All of them were nice. And who Nyr/Adhira removed from staffing Salarri.
|
|
|
Post by sirra on Nov 13, 2014 11:14:36 GMT -5
As for the bandit camp episode (long post warning):
This whole terribly mischaracterized and misunderstood episode really sums up the idiom 'No good staff attention but negative attention'.
So for three months, Salarr, with around 15+ PCs in it, was completely bereft of any staff direction, input or assistance. It didn't even have a family member except in the case of a terminally absent (and incompetent) Jalena. Mopatis did all the buying and selling, and he started out as just a newbie crafter.
During this period, the sole source of entertainment and direction came from Nadhir, Flora and Mopatis...each in different arenas of Salarr. Mopatis had the crafters, Nadhir had the hunters, Flora was something like a special agent. We worked together extraordinarily well. And Salarr was so successful and rocking, that our only staff interaction came when they said Salarr wasn't allowed to take more recruits.
Anyways, during this time, we were out on an expedition to the red waste. And I won't lie. After three months of having everything cool we tried to do, like silt horror hunting, or making a new outpost get ignored, we were a bit antsy. We came across a bandit camp, who were human, and whose NPCs attacked us. Now, countless times in my previous Arm career, even when lead by high karma characters, captains or templars - I'd seen NPC bandits, like the dune stalker guards in the tablelands, routinely slaughtered when they got in the way.
These particular, obscure bandits, jumped us when we moved in to trade and seek supplies. Well, it happens, that our main crime was not fleeing. Because we stood our ground and fought. More NPCs kept joining, to the extent that we thought an immortal WAS animating them. We RPed it out brilliantly, we fought nearly to the death, and eventually emerged triumphant.
Then when the assailants were dead, we moved further into the bandit camp, and in a scene straight out of Blood Meridian, with our passions up, we began slaughtering the elderly, children and women. Then we looted them, decapitated all their bodies, and impaled the corpses on spikes. It was a very Lord of the Flies moment. Mad Max, apocalyptic brutality...fueled by the PTSD of a near-death experience.
Then we left. I made a report of the incident to Tzu or whoever.
AND NOTHING MORE WAS HEARD. FOR MONTHS.
Finally, eventually, Nyr and Adhira took over control of the clan. Nyr learned about the episode, and predictably threw a shit fit about it. Even though everyone had moved on by then, and it was devoid of all context, I got another catty remark on my account notes. The second one with completely no context attached to it, and which was mistaken about the extent and nature of the incident.
To any imms reading this: Don't make a fucking account note on hearsay, or from coming into a scene towards the end instead of being there from the start. Those that do? Fuck you. It ruins characters and experiences to have an unfair and uninformed judgment on their permanent record. I put a ton of effort into keeping other people entertained and engaged as Nadhir, and my only note, from my entire time as him, was over that stupid bandit camp. I turned down the offer to play a Byn mul slave, because I didn't want to leave Salarr during a time when no one else was stepping up.
Anyways. Despite the fact that there had been no survivors, and as Fightclub noted above, we deliberately RP'd about concealing our identities and affiliations, Nyr decided that they all knew exactly who we were, and set about making the NPCs impossibly effective. So this little shithole bandit camp that no one knew about, was suddenly terrorizing all of Salarr in the South...House Salarr!
It was just the perfect example of his Junior High GM mentality, where he takes bitter offense at any PCs ever having it over the NPCs. The NPCs always had to be the best and all knowing, and the PCs are always shit.
So anyways, apparently this tribe of prophetic mindbenders who could pinpoint exactly who we were, based on hearsay months later and lacking context (beyond Nyr's gigantic ego at willing reality to be in accordance with his wishes), began going after us with alts rolled up by staff.
Needless to say, we KICKED THEIR ASSES. Every time the staff rolled up tribal NPCs/PCs to come fuck with us, we manhandled them. Then, for some bizarre reason, Nyr decided that d-elf allies had to come after us next, and so came after Nadhir specifically with what had to be a maxed d-elf warrior NPC.
Nadhir regularly dispatched twink warriors that had branched their weapon skills. He killed a 100 day+ HG warrior with a knife. This d-elf was a beast. I only got him by charging his ass and grazing him with a poisoned dagger. After that, they changed charge to not be allowable in combat and added 'trample'.
So that was that. Whatever we did, in getting carried away, when unexpectedly attacked by NPCs that no player had probably interacted with for RL years - and basically our crime amounted to standing our ground instead of fleeing and risking death by leaving others behind - was extraordinarily minor compared to Nyr and Adhira's meta abuse of the situation based on circumstances they did not bother to adequately investigate or clarify after taking over Salarr.
And what Nyr/Adhira don't seem to get is that...even if we did ask staff to animate something for us, staff never would have. I got chided the one time I wished up about a silt horror. My email requests never amounted to anything. And if staff did participate, it was only ever to fuck you up somehow or make a simple task more difficult.
Despite all of the above. I still gave them a mea culpa for it, and got nothing but shitty condescension from them ever afterwards. Needless to say, our Salarri outpost, which we invested a great deal of time and effort into collecting supplies for never happened. I'd say it was a punishment, but they spent like half a year dicking us around regarding it already. It just boggled me that they could completely ignore 12-18 really active people in a game with maybe 70 people on at prime time, and only start paying attention to us over one obscure accidental event that was treated entirely ICly.
|
|
|
Post by jcarter on Nov 13, 2014 11:56:38 GMT -5
for all the 'realism' in the game and attitudes about how everyone is so concerned about survival, the idea of a camp of bandits deciding that they're going to take on a greater merchant house and agitate it further is pretty stupid.
|
|
|
Post by sirra on Nov 13, 2014 12:07:16 GMT -5
for all the 'realism' in the game and attitudes about how everyone is so concerned about survival, the idea of a camp of bandits deciding that they're going to take on a greater merchant house and agitate it further is pretty stupid. It was pretty stupid that they even knew who we were. Setting aside the no survivors, and the fact we were deliberately concealed in our identities. I confronted them about it but was just brushed off with a mysterious handwaving. Obviously they hadn't considered that, but it didn't fit into Nyr's masturbatory ego-trip version of events. Again. Serious flashbacks to junior high dungeonmasters.
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Nov 13, 2014 12:44:11 GMT -5
I'd be all 'yikes' or 'damn' but... given that Niamh had just played a long lived mindbender AOD clerk (Darcy/Darselyn) and Nyr had played a mindbender who was not only a part of Poet's Circle but worked FOR a lirathan for MONTHS (Rissa/Terissa/"Cups"), and I've seen and heard of player run mindbenders being killed when they did nothing to give themselves away because it was 'unrealistic' that 'so many mindbenders wouldn't know' amidst the templarate in the south... it's not at all surprising. Disappointing. Irritating. Stupid. But not surprising.
|
|
|
Post by sirra on Nov 13, 2014 12:52:52 GMT -5
I somewhat remembered the fight with the super d-elf incorrectly. I found it while trawling 5 year old logs on my old computer. The death was actually much more amusing.
It was the 'sun-tattooed elf'. Right after killing him, the game crashed and he was alive again, which is how I knew he was an animated NPC and not a PC.
Does anyone remember who this d-elf was, and why he was in league with the Miloka/southern human bandits? He had been terrorizing our Salarri hunting party, and Nadhir had lead him away from the others so they could get to safety. The log doesn't bear it out without context, but it was incredible for anyone to land a hit on Nadhir at this stage in his career. Among PCs, only warriors with branched pikes/tridents could manage it.
Then they had a cat and mouse game on the salt flats, which while epic, is too long and spammy to include here. So here's just the ending:
I thought I was going to die, towards the end. But I wasn't going to flee. He'd just shoot me, and the beetle was spent. I was also on my fourth or fifth knife by then, from being repeatedly disarmed in prior forays.
But mostly I'm just curious as to what the sun-tattooed elf's deal ever really was.
|
|
punished ppurg
GDB Superstar
Why are we still here? Just to suffer?
Posts: 1,098
|
Post by punished ppurg on Nov 13, 2014 16:00:06 GMT -5
I wish there was more accountability so that events like that couldn't happen again.
Good to have it out for the record, anyhow.
|
|
dorksun
staff puppet account
Posts: 42
|
Post by dorksun on Nov 13, 2014 16:09:55 GMT -5
maybe you coulda tried questioning him before finishing him off, but i get that he was major dangerous and u wanted to be done with him. did the fight go differently after the game crashed and he was alive again? or was this log the second fight?
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Nov 13, 2014 16:12:38 GMT -5
Anyways, during this time, we were out on an expedition to the red waste. And I won't lie. After three months of having everything cool we tried to do, like silt horror hunting, or making a new outpost get ignored, we were a bit antsy. We came across a bandit camp, who were human, and whose NPCs attacked us. Now, countless times in my previous Arm career, even when lead by high karma characters, captains or templars - I'd seen NPC bandits, like the dune stalker guards in the tablelands, routinely slaughtered when they got in the way. These particular, obscure bandits, jumped us when we moved in to trade and seek supplies. Well, it happens, that our main crime was not fleeing. Because we stood our ground and fought. More NPCs kept joining, to the extent that we thought an immortal WAS animating them. We RPed it out brilliantly, we fought nearly to the death, and eventually emerged triumphant. IIRC those bandits were the "other gypsies." Though I forget their name, they are/were the ancient enemies of the Tan Muark from their days living in the Tableland.
|
|
|
Post by sirra on Nov 13, 2014 19:03:56 GMT -5
maybe you coulda tried questioning him before finishing him off, but i get that he was major dangerous and u wanted to be done with him. did the fight go differently after the game crashed and he was alive again? or was this log the second fight? By the time the game crashed, I was already back at Nak's gates, holding his head. I only knew he came back because I found his mind. The timing was SO suspicious, that I always thought he was some special NPC that was never intended to die or some such. Staff never answered questions about the encounter, though I did document and inform them of it, and what I found slightly odd. I still have no clue why any sun-tattooed NPC d'elf would be singling out Nadhir's crew. I am honestly hoping someone will recognize the sdesc. As for interrogation...It was simply impossible under the circumstances. I'd tried interrogating NPCs before, and it never went well. In fact, interrogating anyone in Arm was always a crapshoot. In both cases, they used the Way to fuck me over in some fashion. I've another log where I was dealing with a character named Atellus, who despite being someone that Nadhir did cruel things to, I actually really liked. I never heard of him involved in any of the OOC fuckery despite supposedly being friends with one of those involved. When Nadhir interrogated Atellus over some recent events, he made Atellus find his mind and not leave it on pain of death. Unfortunately, Nadhir had forgotten Mopatis was in his mind from before, so when Mopatis withdrew, Nadhir very nearly murder-death-killed Atellus on the spot. Then had a laugh at himself when a terribly insistant Atellus kept claiming he was still in Nadhir's mind. So yes, that's why the uber delf NPC wasn't woken back up. We were also all near the end of our rope in the flats, and in retrospect, I'm glad, since if he'd been captured, he'd have been free instead when the game rebooted. At least I had his head, after the crash still, as proof of his death. And for all we know, a defiler might have teleported in to save him at whatever cave we did the questioning. We couldn't have gotten him past the nakki gate guards without being fucked with. If somehow we had gotten him to the Southern Salarri compound, no doubt, some Salarri family member who we hadn't seen in a year would find the opportunity to log on RIGHT then, to 'take over'. Basically, I'd gotten the run around, in so many ways, that I just couldn't be certain a decent staffer was around to handle it. Not all my experiences with staff was negative. One time, while Nadhir was still working as a mage hunter for the Faithful, before Salarr, he tracked a breed gicker all through the night, and came across him just as he was approaching Tuluk's southern gates. He shot an arrow at him from a couple rooms away, which struck the gicker's shield, and made it reveal him as an abomination in front of the guards. They killed him - then immediately started shouting at Nadhir to come to them. It was an amusing encounter - and probably the only amusing encounter I ever had with an animated gate guard. I wish there'd been a place to post this stuff 5-6 years ago.
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Nov 13, 2014 23:05:22 GMT -5
The warlady was Marie. She used to sit at Trader's, hunched over and idle for hours. IIRC the person playing Marie had cancer or some other kind of lethal/degenerative disease and causing them frequently go afk because they werepucking their guts out (or something) and often she'd not make it back to the computer to log off and would frequently just be sitting idle or disconnected somewhere.
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Nov 14, 2014 0:21:59 GMT -5
sirra 'the sun-tattooed elf' sounds specifically like it'd be a sun runner. Not positive, but it sounds the most fitting.
|
|
fightclub
staff puppet account
In your base, killing your dudes.
Posts: 41
|
Post by fightclub on Nov 14, 2014 1:54:19 GMT -5
sirra 'the sun-tattooed elf' sounds specifically like it'd be a sun runner. Not positive, but it sounds the most fitting. I could be wrong, but I think our main rival at the time were the Red Fangs. This guy being a sun runner would make no sense to me, as I think he was like avatar of the Red Fang whatever god. It is possible that there was some cooperation going on between Red Fang and the sun runners, but I doubt it, as the Red Fangs were deeply associated with the dragon thralls, last I remember. Furthermore having sun-tattoos making you a sun runner is about the same as saying Exile, the dwarf, having a tattooed anakore visage on his face made him SLK.
|
|
|
Post by sirra on Nov 14, 2014 2:48:46 GMT -5
sirra 'the sun-tattooed elf' sounds specifically like it'd be a sun runner. Not positive, but it sounds the most fitting. I could be wrong, but I think our main rival at the time were the Red Fangs. This guy being a sun runner would make no sense to me, as I think he was like avatar of the Red Fang whatever god. It is possible that there was some cooperation going on between Red Fang and the sun runners, but I doubt it, as the Red Fangs were deeply associated with the dragon thralls, last I remember. Furthermore having sun-tattoos making you a sun runner is about the same as saying Exile, the dwarf, having a tattooed anakore visage on his face made him SLK. IIRC, the Red Fangs didn't really even get started until almost a year later. I might be misremembering. But I think the only RFs we encountered was the crew before it got turbocharged that everyone picked on. I think our main issue was with the Dune Stalkers/Dusk Runners...whatever they were. The guys with the little daggers around their throats. In any case, this was in the salt flats right outside Allanak, not in the tablelands. So it's always puzzled me. All I ever really got was that he was some ally of the miloka, which makes equally little sense given everything the miloka is supposedly about.
|
|