Gems From The GDB

It's a pendulum swing from the way things were a while back, where the self-titled "fashionistas" were bitching on the GDB about other players not overcompensating-via-emote enough. You had a seemingly endless string of bad role players compensating for their poor characterization by constantly describing shit around them, things they were wearing, really anything other than giving you any idea about what was going on in their characters' heads or their recent experiences.

In other words: You still didn't learn anything about their characters, but it took 6 paragraphs of emoted text to not learn it.

The spam often broke immersion by drowning out shit you might have wanted to read. This was especially bad when you had 2 or 3 of them in a room where people were trying to talk. I don't think it helped anyone stay in the game when they keep losing track of a conversation at their table because the f-me at the bar's crimson leather coat kept shifting with the gusts of wind and sand blown in from the door, the faint howl of the sandstorm dying out as it closes and no longer able to rise above the din of the clamoring mercenaries...

The point being those claims you're bitching about were entirely valid, but the current state of taking it to another extreme and omitting detail where it's warranted is also a problem.

Maybe it's because I'm used to it, but I kind of like Arm's short and to the point emoting convention versus the long-winded stuff I see in other games. Yeah, seeing nothing but "the emoting man smiles" is boring, but the good RPers in Arm seem to find a happy medium between that and "the emoting man pauses for a moment, his narrow, clean-shaven face adopting the expression of one pondering the sheer gravity of the situation at hand. He drags the toe of his shiny snakeskin boot back and forth over the pavement -- once, twice, three times now -- before glancing up again with a quick flash of pale blue eyes, visible behind the wispy fringe of his vermillion hair. Slowly, almost painfully so, his thin lips spread into a rare smile."

Naw, it's just fucking staff and their half giants, Ruke, and his fucking boring Kuraci that don't emote - it gets in the way of winning. The rest of us find a nice balance.

I'd like to respond to gdb.armageddon.org/index.php/topic,50010.msg909253.html#msg909253, since I remain banned for daring to opine how the staff complaint system is fundamentally flawed.



This is just terribly incorrect.

First off, I reached out to Adhira. #1.

#2, Adhira didn't try to explain why a no was a no. She told me that Nyr had unreasonably denied my requests because he was angry at me, and she promised to take a look at the karma review that she felt Nyr had unreasonably denied. When I tried to make good on that promise, Nyr scrambled my password. She also told me that, due to the issues I raised, the team would be looking at the resurrection policy... in fact, they did. They changed some wording around in order to cover their asses, and to blatantly punish anyone who ever has the gall to call out an ignorant staff member for their universal failures and demand a retraction. This was an insincere warping of my goal, which is and remains to improve this game for the players. It has, instead, created a foundation towards making the game worse. It is the exact opposite of what I had hoped, what Adhira had misled me to believe.

#3, "a tale end of a long stream of abuse" is really good rhetoric. It is nowhere near the truth. Apparently, expecting the staff to follow their own rules along with refusing to settle for insincere answers is "a long stream of abuse." There is no point that was raised to me which was valid. None. Every single point raised to me was invalid. They were so invalid, that the people who raised them to me did not justify them. They did not wish to discuss them or even invest the effort to justify them -- they were parroted as truths without any substance or merit. I'm supposed to fall for this juvenile logic trap that since you don't respond to my retort, it's settled? 

OH but you can feeeeeel that a reason is invalid but that doesn't make it so!!!

It isn't a matter of feelings. Cavaticus made a stupid mistake, one that he should have immediately fixed -- one that he should have been intelligent enough to not make in the first place. However, the staff team is so petty that when a group of players reacts to their aneurysm of an event differently than they expected, their experience ceases to matter; this fact is self-evident in other completely different scenarios than this one, and it pervades Armageddon to the core. Do we all make mistakes? Of course we do, and I'm easy to forgive those who own up to them. Every reason given to me was an empty excuse to justify the continuing failure after failure to fix the underlying issue. This is why there was no investment or justification, and perhaps why it's considered abuse by their end... Trying to hold their feet to the floor instead of accepting their mental gymnastics must be terribly abusive and insulting. I was (and still am) demanding that the staff of this game offer something more than empty rhetoric.

I'll not even go into the "long stream of abuse" I happened to experience, what with the censoring of my posts and the force-storage and unjustified bans placed on me. I'll not go into it because Taven and others do not care about how badly I was treated by this excuse of a staff team; nor do they care how badly others are treated.

Let me raise a retort directly to Taven.

If there were a set of guidelines which were created (and I'll not beat around the bush) to stop the staff members from being assholes to the playerbase, what would be the punishment for breaking these guidelines? What would be the ramifications, and who would enforce them? The two undeniably biggest assholes on the staff team, Nyr and Nessalin? The ones that hold most of the justification for these guidelines to be created in the first place?

What would be the punishment for Nyr telling a ban appealing player to fuck off, snidely joking about threatening a restraining order for "burying" him under emails that he requested in the first place? What would be the punishment for Nessalin responding to a player's issue by diminishing it as "your own inability to let go of past issues and stop being a self-entitled, petulant troll"? What would be the punishment for a staff member (I forget who; the name is inconsequential to the bigger issue) saying towards a troubled player that their attempts to clarify a staff complaint were "getting a no from mommy and then running to daddy", writing off their issue as some juvenile whining? These examples go on for years.

I'll tell you what the punishment would be for breaking these guidelines. Nothing.

These guidelines would make absolutely no difference. There is no kernel of sincerity in the staff team to protect via these guidelines, so there would be no tangible change. It would only be an empty gesture in an attempt for a self-aware staffbase to placate a few disgruntled players. 

In fact, that's all that thread is. An empty gesture, where Jave (a newbie storyteller who has already shown needless hostility towards members of the playerbase) and others recognize how disgruntled the players are for having to suffer through the toxicity of the persons controlling their experience. 

Here's a suggestion! Talk to the players like they're people! That will solve a majority of the problems, and players will talk to you like a person in return.

But it stands in plain evidence that, at least for the past year I've had the misfortune of investing into this failed environment, the staff members have no respect for the playerbase they were once members of. If they did, the evident condescension, insincerity, and toxicity obviously visible in their interactions wouldn't exist. I'll hold that there has never been a better time for a parallel RPI to open in direct competition of Armageddon, so that all of the Arm players could finally get a dose of something they've sorely been missing -- a decent staff team that respects them, and their experience.

in·val·id

inˈvaləd/

adjective

adjective: invalid

not valid, in particular.

(especially of an official document or procedure) not legally recognized and therefore void because contravening a regulation or law.

"the vote was declared invalid due to a technicality"

synonyms: (legally) void, null and void, unenforceable, not binding, illegitimate, inapplicable

"the law was invalid"

antonyms: binding

(especially of an argument, statement, or theory) not true because based on erroneous information or unsound reasoning.

"a comparison is invalid if we are not comparing like with like"

synonyms: false, untrue, inaccurate, faulty, fallacious, spurious, unconvincing, unsound, weak, wrong, wide of the mark, off target;

antonyms: true


val·id

ˈvaləd/

adjective

(of an argument or point) having a sound basis in logic or fact; reasonable or cogent.

"a valid criticism"

synonyms: well founded, sound, reasonable, rational, logical, justifiable, defensible, viable, bona fide; More

Hmm. Having nothing but time and shit internet on the ship I've come to the realization that Lizzie has the equivalent IQ of a ham sandwich. I'd love to put some quotes and such but I don't know if I care enough. Just commenting.