How would you...?

Just checking.


Nah. theyd have to blatantly retcon both fiascoes to use our ideas, which would be entirely in keeping with their rep.

Less of a specific IC event but I've always been put off how it seems like there's no carrot for players. The natural progression of a PC goes newb - > skilling up/making connections -> Badass/Important Person. To get to those end points, there's a lot of unfun timesinks that exist for unknown reasons. Seriously, why does it take 10 days worth of playing time to become a decent warrior? What's the justification for it? Who knows. But 10 days worth of repetitive sparring (the safest bet) isn't fun. 10 days of killing safe critters isn't fun either. Making contacts and connections is (to me) arguably more fun and takes less of a focused time commitment, but still involves a lot of downtime and inactivity to actually get to that point.

And then you get there, and it's become a level of 'what now'. What's the point? For combat-focused people, obtaining better arms and armor is a function of money and nothing else. Go out kill some easy critters and sell their shit for maximized profit. Why? Because high-risk animals like salt worms and dujat have very little return. After a while when you're all kitted out anyway, you're really just kind of hanging around for the sake of hanging around. There's nothing to conquer, you're just a highly skilled badass for the sake of being a badass. Using skills is pointless because whoopiee you killed some gith that will respawn right away. Maybe you get into a high position of esteem as a badass, but that's it. There's no carrot. You'll never really get to do cool things like start your own mercenary outfit. You aren't going to get to open your own school of combat. You don't do much except exist.

Same applies to social characters. Let's say you're the most popular guy in town and wheel and deal your way into being a sid millionaire. Big whoop. You're never going to get a cool house, or to open up your own shop, or put together any long term goals. You just exist for the sake of it and reacting to events as they occur.

Yeah, I get the whole 'living the character' thing but it's kind of a crock of shit. These things are fun for a while but the novelty wears off pretty quick. Sparring isn't fun. Living in a stagnant world isn't fun. I want to be a badass warrior who does adventures. What adventures are left? Explore an old area of filled with nothing but deadly monsters and no actual incentive to be there? Go to Mantis Valley for the sake of it? There's no carrot to entice me to play through the boring parts (10+ days of sparring, hell even 5+). Same with socializing. For a while, the fun is getting established. But when you're there, who cares.

How would I fix it? Add dynamic content. Gith raids are hurting Salarr's caravans (coded weapon prices everywhere go up) so the Byn and players have to step in. The sands wash away an old tomb with riches that a ballsy band of players can explore and find a Ring of Windwalking or whatever that they sell to a templar for tens of thousands of obsidian. Now they can buy a compound instead of a shitty apartment and hire NPC guards to protect their equipment while they set up for the next adventure. A merchant can open a stand up and sell their wares. When they get big enough they can get a shop. And so on. More things to actually strive for.

Of course this would require some work on staff side of things. But frankly I don't think it's really that crazy of a system and mentality to be supported when you literally have an active staff of around a dozen people for a pbase that peaks online of 50ish players.

this comes back to something i've been pointing out for years. The stakes are too high. The staff has made it impossible to do anything with their content because every clan is the most important group that does what they do. And because of that any player-driven change would be game-changing.

I am actually very interestd in what theyre doing in Tuluk with warrens families. it's the first positive new direction I've seen the game goign in. there's a real chance, assuming they do a disposable clan right, that it might be the first step towards getting arm into an upward spiral.

There's really only one way Arm can be run and that's DM style.

The thing is, most players would be happy as a pig in shit with some animations, echoes and occasional mindless plot. Like you said before and I said before J, "adventure time". That's all most people really want.

I think skill grinding would be a thing regardless of how the skill system worked. But I feel like whoever reviews apps should have the ability to set skills to higher levels. A 33 year old caravan guard background should have at least some of those skills to reflect being a caravan guard for the last thirteen years. Kind of a Mush-like concept, but doable.

B-b-but your character will naturally grow really strong if you just log in once a day and play normally!!!

The time to skill up is kind of necessary in order to preserve the value and relative scarcity of very dangerous PCs. The alternative would be a lot worse: twinks would have too easy access to griefing tools, and the low value of a skilled character would lead to a lot of unrealistic roleplay. The issue isn't really the time it takes (and it doesn't take *that* long if you know how) but the fact that there's absolutely fuck-all to do 90% of the time.

RPIs have often been a bit low on the time invested vs. action participated in, but in the last five or so years, Armageddon has really taken that to an absurd extreme. Certain people with low standards will bang on about how there's plenty going on, but they're the ones who think "Chosen Lord Bob hired me to find bimbal leaves (out of absolutely zero need for bimbal, but a sense of obligation to tell people to do *something*)" is a plot. To more critical players who can tell worthwhile roleplay apart from pointless busywork, Arm has been stone dead frankly since it became clear that Reborn was actually Stillborn.

You can spend such long periods of time in a clan without anything whatsoever happening outside of what you can create from the ground up yourself (which, as a lowly nobody with no staff support and an absurdly stifling schedule, can be almost nothing) that the idea of spending a couple of months training your skills is unbearable. You tend to unlock more opportunities for fun when you have high skills, which is half the reason people strive for it, since people simply care more and are more drawn to highly skilled characters. Until then, you have to make it all happen yourself without being given anything to work with.

It's not even a difficult problem to solve. How many of you haven't played a soldier in the militia for over a month without ever witnessing a crime or getting to leave the city for any meaningful reason? You're lucky if there's one uneventful routine patrol in that month, often there'll be none. It's statistically unlikely that you'll get to make an arrest every IG year as a soldier. Similar things can be said about most other roles, and the recurring issue is that staff does almost nothing to give substance to any role.

Some will then insist that it's entirely the players' responsibility to make things happen, but it isn't. They have a part to play, but if they're given nothing to work with, they can't be creative enough. The stagnation coincided with a steady decline in staff involvement and willingness to work. It's not as though the players, to whom the activity level of the game is all-important, collectively decided one day to stop trying and let the game die out so that they couldn't have fun playing it anymore. People didn't suddenly quit making an effort; the game changed and has lost everything *except* the effort that players make, increasingly often with strong opposition from the staff that should be accomodating them.

The game is so bereft of everything that makes almost every role work. You can go through all the archetypical roles categorically and point out why:

Soldiers - Practically no crime and very rarely any military conflict. The need for PC soldiers is so laughably contrived and non-existent that the role feels like a complete farce. Even when there is a bit of RPT conflict, it's almost always about mages. A lot of the same applies to templars, though they have the ability to force their way into involvement with other things.

Criminals - Poverty and wealth in this game is a joke, the economy is so far beyond broken that most of the things that pertain to criminal roleplay just aren't applicable to the actual gameplay. The crimcode and general code associated with criminal actions is also very primitive. If you do make an attempt to play a criminal, the city's militia is so starved for purpose that they'll drop on you like a ton of bricks the moment you emerge from obscurity.

Merchants - Almost no craftable goods are desirable, most gear can be bought from NPC merchants, and most sales are just loaded up by staff. Merchants are glorified UPS delivery men who just cart shit from the storehouse to the customer.

Hunters - Nobody needs meat. Staying fed is trivial in this game, and most clans just have an NPC cook with unlimited supplies of cooked food. Skins are also pretty useless for the most part and serve mainly as a means to skill up tanning for the stuff it branches into.

Nobles - The game's political scene, when anyone tries to keep up the pretense at all, is laughably shallow and meaningless as you can't ever change anything except complete the cookie-cutter quests that staff give you, which don't amount to anything entertaining or useful (uh... renovate that pointless building over there. How? Well, throw 50 logs of wood in the room and send a report.)

Mercenaries - Nobody ever hires them out of any actual *need.* You don't need an escort when you drive your wagon from Allanak to Tuluk because nothing whatsoever was going to happen anyway. Mercs live on the goodwill of other players to hire them out of a sense of obligation and/or a desire to seem relevant in some way, but it's all completely artificial. They don't need eachother, but the players feel like they ought to do it.

Tribals - Your territory is never really threatened by anyone, the lands cannot be depleted of their resources, your shitty goods aren't wanted by anyone, and you'll never have enough players to do anything significant. Anything you do end up involved in will be so steeped in magick that you can't affect (unless you're a mage yourself, which at least half of tribals do seem to be) that it feels like something out of WoW.

The list goes on and on like that, and it's so fucking OBVIOUS what the solutions are in each case. Also, the solutions mostly have to come from staff -- repair the economy; broaden the options for crime; maintain the presence of threats to the clans that are meant to deal with them; redesign the game's itemization so that most crafts are of actual use and the merchant houses serve a real purpose; implement periodic resource depletion so people give a shit what goes on in the world.

These are not things the players can do. The players have tried everything they could, but the extremely archaic and inexplicably unsupported game (considering the size of the staff roster) is such a constant hindrance that everyone just gives up. The above needs aren't even that big of an ask, this game has an absolutely insane number of staff members for an RPI and they've had years in which to do this. They just don't.