Byn

You need to be sponsored to get in and they don't hire elves. It's basically just the vets in there now. Maybe one or two runners.

Yeah all my best Arm memories are from the crazy shit that happens with runners and how many would fall by the wayside, was always interesting, loved the elves in there too being so sharpy and hobbling along on rides. And getting eaten if something big was chasing us.

Not so I am told, also why would a Sarge want to bore themselves to death IRL?

Correct. If people want to join a really fun clan with decent leaders then let them. Who cares if they are PC heavy just poach them into other clans IC not a bizarre OOC thing that stops the Byn from getting paid all those delicious 3 small ic.

i'm told the current byn situation is extremely disappointing.

It actually makes sense to not hire elves. They really can't function together with people who operate exclusively mounted. So many memories of having to try and accomodate elves on patrols for no damn reason, usually by stopping every 15 rooms and pitching a fucking tent so they could rest, and it's not as though a "no elves" policy can't be justified IC. However, neckers aside, the Byn should hire everyone who can hold a shovel.

Usually, when the Byn is overcrowded it's because the rest of the game's codegaming clans are shit. People want to use their combat skills, and most want to use them in an environment where they're around others and can compare, brag, compete or otherwise share their skill-based progress with other players. They can't get this if there's three players in the Arm of the Dragon, for instance, or if Salarr's leadership fails at putting their hunters to work on a regular and meaningful basis.

It's not as though the Byn is amazing. Throughout my decade of playing Armageddon, it was consistently the very worst roleplay I could find in the game. However, it does let you grind your skills up shamelessly without breaking any actual rules and allows you to be lazy with your roleplay, which some people like as they prefer to not step fully into character until their skills are high enough that they feel like they match the character concept. The Byn has always been a newbie tutorial with a few veterans knocking about for whatever reasons, and although entertaining roleplay can happen in the Byn, it's diluted by sheer volume of newbie bumbling or lazy skill-twinking where people are barely in character.

If staff really wanted to do something about the situation, they should try to actually make the other combat-oriented clans attractive. They've always failed to do this. Clans like the Arm/Legion, Kurac, Tor Scorpions etc. have always had to make their own fun, with practically nothing given to them by staff, which is not realistically possible in the long term. They have nothing to work with, and while enterprising players can make things happen on their own, they can't single-handedly sustain clans whose reason to exist is purely in the documentation and not at all in the gameplay and in-game reality.

Armageddon has an unhealthy tendency to expect the players to make the game fun for themselves without giving them the means with which to do this. As such, it doesn't take much for a clan to go dead for a while as they go through phases with few proactive and creative players in them. I bet this Byn bloat coincides with heavy stagnation in the other military clans. I recall playing PCs who were in those clans for months without my ever feeling like any staff was paying the least bit of attention to anything that went on.

When you can be a soldier for a full RL month and have literally nothing to do but follow your schedule - often by yourself as there's almost nobody in the clan - it's no wonder people gravitate towards the one clan that at least has numbers. It's a failure in game design and management, and it really shouldn't be so difficult or time-consuming to give clans a reason to exist beyond what someone wrote into the docs in the 90s. But instead of addressing this, they just target the symptom of the problem and hope it fixes itself. That'll sure help. Armageddon's staff is so incompetent.