|
|
Post by BitterFlashback on Dec 16, 2014 10:47:30 GMT -5
Anyone who can look at the total apathy that staffing a game you don't actively play in on an RPI mud can see the stupidity and bullshit it starts and continues to make for players. Shartists? Nyr'd stopped playing before that. Nyr? Adhira and Nessalin don't play anymore. In fact, every single staff member you guys don't profess to hate... actively plays the game. So ask yourself if you want a game with staff that don't play, to a man. How many Adhira's and Nyr's and Nessalin's do you want to your Calavera's, folks? i would counter that my suggestion was temp-staffers had to briefly stop playing in order to staff, but would resume playing once their staffing expired. (And the temp-staffing run would be like a week or something, then theyd resume playing the character they put on hold to staff.) I don't trust most people to play both a staff avatar and a player account at the same time. it's also worth mentionng Nyr also pulled a lot of bullshit while he was still playing. And the main reason I believe he's stopped playing is he can now accomplish all of the same shit he used to push as an imm/playr combo as an imm/variety of uber NPCs combo. When i was on staff, nearly all of the most abusive bullshit was carried out by people who played and staffed (often logged into both accounts simultaneously). i am, of course, referring to Bhag and Hal. Personally i;d advise against banning full-staff from playing. Because it's unenforceable and nobody would believe it anyways. But if you can cut the number of full-staff down by mostly using temp-staff you'd be better off. Youd curb the likelihood of picking up abusive full-staff because you could afford to be chooser about who's in it
Thanks for the feedback, Bitter. I agreed with most every point you raised. In fact, my only real quibble is that while you're obviously right about some code that /should/ be off-limits - you are also enough of a vet to probably remember that the GDB adopting harsher policies on what could be discussed on their forums, way back when, was what ultimately began the march to obsessive levels of secrecy. i don't recall there being a time when there was open discussion on the gdb. It must have happened during the gap i didn't play. But i get what you're talking about. Im just saying you give people enough insight into the mechanics to play strategcally, but you don't show them the code or give them all of the formulas. Theres a difference between letting people compensate for the senses they lack in a game (e.g. IRL you could feel how sturdy and balanced a weapon was) and exposing an opportunity for someone to wreck the game for a lot of people. Armageddon is a game. It should be treated like any other game. I've played many RPGs with my friends, and I have DM'd and GM'd and ST'd in many different systems from WoD to D&D to whatever over the years. In all those games, anyone could at any time, open up a sourcebook and read whatever they wanted about the rules. It did not harm the game. Setting aside tabletops and looking at MMOs who are at the opposite end of the spectrum (a spectrum of which muds and mushes are largely in the middle of), MMOs aggressively push that information on you. That's not an accurate comparison. With tabletop games, if someone finds an exploit, everyone sees it happen. if they abuse it they can easily be thrown out for misbehavor and kept from returning. In computer-based games, cheating is often invisible to the point that you sometimes can only tell it apart from good fortune by guessing right. And then looking through shitloads of logs and code. Most multiplayer computer games regardless of genre and type wind up having to implement anti-cheatng software and then set up servers that only allow people running that software to play on them. The reason for this is players have access to the code. Yes it's been compiled into binary commands. But that only limits who can develop a cheat; it does not prevent cheating. And cheating can take the form of anything from Aimbots to automating reactings so characters chain actions faster than a human being could react. it's also worse than a tabletop situation because youre frequently playing with strangers. Or soemtimes people you want to avoid who are just on an account you dont know. Where MUDs come in to this picture is they are a rare form of multiplayr computer game where players have no access to the code you don't give to them. People tend to be much more invested in a MUD character, because of the immerson level, time invested, and permadeath. Being the victm of cheating in a MUD is far harder for a player to determine than in a tabletop game, and the consequences are more permanent than in an MMO. So to put what i originally said another way... Acceptable: telling people "Axes convert some of their chopping damage to bludgeoning damage vs. plate mail, but stabbing weapons don't" Ill advised: giving them the details of how you calculate force multipliers to the point that players aware of rounding errors stack so many Charms of Feather Damage they can one-shot kill gods You don't have to keep most of how the game works a secret. But you absolutely should not tell people the gritty details of how it processes information. |
|
deadelf
staff puppet account
Posts: 44
|
Post by deadelf on Dec 20, 2014 9:52:57 GMT -5
So you want to fix arm..warning, opions follow.
The karma system will always be unfair. A measure of how much staff trusts you? How can that not be a recipe for a kiss-ass system. Get rid of karma. Some races are too difficult for most people so get rid of HG and muls too. As someone suggested, add gith and mantis instead.
Make it tougher. Create water should be the most useful spell in the game. Most places outside the cities should not be soloable. Even a maxxed out sorc should not be walking through gith lands alone. Script mobs near bases to call for
reinforcements when under attack. Have different mobs come out at night, under certain moons, night of the anakore? Camping out in the open should be near suicide for a solo player.
No code secrets. What kind of game makes it so only a privileged few know how to level properly? It pushes people into AIM cliques.
No item secrets. Everyone should be able to tell something is high quality and special. Make a lot of them unique though - one or just a few in game. Not just swords of doom but art, artifacts, things only a rich collector would desire.
No map secrets. You know what's out there but you're not going to survive the trip so..don't go unless you are truly a badass group.
Mudmail. So people don't have to go ooc to communicate play times or spend days trying to catch so-and-so online.
The only secrets that are important are the IC plot secrets.
Imms should exist for coding and for storytelling. Social problems are easily fixed with wanted posters: "the butt ugly breed has been seen sucking gith dicks - kill on sight, reward 200 sid". Use code for social problems as much as possible too: don't let breeds, elves, or magick users (if you really care about that taboo) enter certain apartments or curtained off areas. Kill that taboo love at the source. When they try to do it in the open - rumor board lights up "the super model man has been seen playing with the butt ugly breed's breedy bits, ewww". Let a templar flag "super model" as free kill for pcs. Someone stab him to death in the streets, guards just sneer and turn away.
I could go on and on. I never liked grinding muds. The grind on arm is doubly pathetic since you are supposed to pretend you're not grinding when that is the only reason you're typing "kill useless animal". PvP combat on arm reminds me of pokemon - the rock/paper/scissors stuff only works if you are close in level. A level 100 Pikachu has no trouble with a set of level 50's even if some get 2x attacks against him. PvE reminds me of candyland. Once you learn where the safe places to grind a particular skill, you just do it over and over.
Only the RP is anything special.
|
|
|
|
Post by sirra on Dec 20, 2014 10:09:22 GMT -5
So you want to fix arm..warning, opinons follow... (opinions) I agree with much of that (absent the mantis). Too many people who have only or mostly played Armageddon, don't realize that there is so many better ways of running a mud. They don't realize that virtually every policy decision that Armageddon has made to combat one perceived evil (code knowledge, map knowledge, whatever) only leads to even greater abuses (OOC AIM cliques). Much like in the Prohibition Era, EVERYONE in Armageddon cheats to one degree or another. I don't think there's a single veteran player that can claim to have never been told something that wouldn't be allowed on the GDB. It doesn't have to be a free for all. You don't have to tell people the boolean values of shit. But much as Bitter posted above, anything written on THIS forum should definitely be fair game. And yes, karma is tricky. Something like karma is needed in an RPI as much for a player's own good as anything else. There are some roles that should not be the first roles you tackle. You should play mundanes before magickers. And you should play elementalists before sorcerers. Not just for those around you, but for your own understanding. But it's become a great tool for abuse in Armageddon. The karma whoring is sickening, and it's contributed to almost every corruption or abuse. In my opinion, the only way for karma to be handled, in the long term, is to tie into player voting. There are many ways to refine such a system, as to how often someone can vote, how many votes they need, or whatever. There are discussions to be had about quotas for classes/races, and say, making some classes like templar or sorcerer only applicable once a year (so even if someone had sorc karma, they couldn't keep making sorcs). |
|
|
|
Post by lulz on Dec 20, 2014 10:36:37 GMT -5
Some races are too difficult for most people so get rid of HG and muls too. As someone suggested, add gith and mantis instead. Get rid of half giants and muls and replace them with an insect race that doesn't have individual thoughts per se so much as a hive mentality. lol, okay. The rest of your post is fairly interesting. |
|
|
|
Post by sirra on Dec 20, 2014 10:39:16 GMT -5
Some races are too difficult for most people so get rid of HG and muls too. As someone suggested, add gith and mantis instead. Get rid of half giants and muls and replace them with an insect race that doesn't have individual thoughts per se so much as a hive mentality. lol, okay. The rest of your post is fairly interesting. Yeah, that's the one thing in his post I didn't much understand, re: mantis. Half-giants and muls are stupid for certain reasons, but not necessarily because of difficulty in portraying them. The GDB has settled on a version of half-giants that means they must be retarded comedy relief or else someone is doing it wrong. That's not how half-giants need to be. Muls are basically, 'I want a high karma class that isn't a magicker'...and that is a valid niche to fill. Mantis and halflings should probably never be playable. But I'd like gith to be, and I think, especially in a world without Tuluk, the gith dynamic would be a huge and interesting one. Mantis and halflings are too iso. Gith are alien, yes, but a vibrant and connected part of the political landscape and environmental dynamic across 3/4ths of the game world. Mantis and halflings are in two areas where no one would ever sanely go ICly, and mantis and halflings could never sanely leave those areas. If I handled half-giants, I would just suggest they were a bit slower mentally, as shown by their wisdom, but had the full range of personality and potential as any other race. I could even see a half-giant in an NCO-type leadership role, under the right circumstances. Hell, for ages, there's been a half-giant in the Byn with a lieutenant's stripes or something. But imagine trying to play an HG in Armageddon that anyone would ever trust as a lieutenant (or even a sergeant!), and you'd be lynched. Even half-giants that go against the grain and try to actually portray something besides a comic relief retard, get treated like comic relief retards. If a half-giant rolled extremely good or exceptional wisdom, there's no reason they couldn't be a good lieutenant-type, in a mercenary or guard company. But people would have to really divorce themselves from the GDB's expectations of such a role, which is to be as idiotic and boring as possible or else risk accusations of doing it wrong. |
|
|
|
Post by BitterFlashback on Dec 20, 2014 11:54:52 GMT -5
i'd say the problem with karma is Arm's implementation. The concept of having a measure of staff trust isnt inherently bad. But the way they did it is totally nonsenscal for how they use it. Karma is currently treated like olympic figure skating. Your score is entirely arbitrary, with a few less objective things you should get points taken off for you may get a pass on due to favoritism. where it stops making sense to do it this way is you can't demonstrate youre a perfect 10 (or 8 in this cas) in one go. People have to like you enough to give you a point over what youve already earned. canyou really tell me you can watch someone playng and decide that theyre a 6 karma player rather than a 5? What in the fuck do those numbers even mean to you? Do theymean the same thng to the other staffers who didnt feel the need to bump this person from the 5th point they got 2 years ago? i mean think of that from the standpoint of a new staffer. How karma shouldf be handled is a bit more complicated lookng. But it's actually far easier to understand. Throw out karma as being a single total. That's bullsht. Instead, break it out like this into booleans: Code Behavior (CB): - Doesnt abuse bugs/exploits/lag/unlinked players
- Keeps OOC and Ic separate
- Doesnt abuse authority over NPCs (walking around with guard armies, treating House resourcs like it's first come first serve)
Roleplaying (RP): - Doesn't put skillmaxing over RP
- Plays a character that fits their environmnt
- Can play a noble/GMH family member properly
and so on and so on. Some guilds/species could rquire a set number of points in a category. Or you could require specific things checked off. Or some combination of both, for something really powerful or easy to abuse. Something that you dont want to take out of the game because of its danger level but that is tricky to keep tellng people "no" to playng even though they technically have the staff trust total needed to play it (*cough*sorcs*cough*). Is it uglier to see a mul listed as (requires CB1, RP1, RP2, 2+ years playtime)? Yeah. definitely. But on the other hand, it tells playrs EXACTLY what they need in order to play a mul. Rather than some murky notion of being lucky enough to be seen demonstrating immersion (roleplaying taking a dump), a non-combative (tavern sitting), not treatng the world like its full of stats and loot (huntng less well than you could), and thnking a lot. None of which has anything to do with if you can handle roleplayng a sterile wrecking ball with legs without abusing the fuck out of the role. It's also a lot less subjective. yeah, you can argue that RP1 up there is subjective. But it's a lot less subjective than arguing if someone should be at 6 karma or 7. And it allows things to be broken out by what someone can be trusted to do rather than the notion of how much theyre trustd in general. |
|
|
|
Post by sirra on Dec 20, 2014 12:23:21 GMT -5
All in all, I'd be much more open to a system where you could acquire karma based on purely objective and easily checked criteria...i.e, no cheating, no OOC abuse, no weird things (like walking around with a dozen NPC guards and leaving them in the gaj when you log off), combined with game knowledge. Part of karma, before it became a bribery tool, was to ensure players had the knowledge to understand their roles.
If people could demonstrate the above, I'd be okay with anyone playing anything. A system of quotas (i.e, only so many gickers in the world at once), combined with mandatory wait times before re-apping the same high karma class (such as a year for sorcs, mindbenders and templars) would keep it going quite well.
If people are worried about mundanes, all that's really required is to make more attractive extended subguilds that are mundane only, but which also require high karma to unlock.
A warrior with some assassin skills (or vice versa) would be a neat alternative to say, using their karma 7 on a mul or nilazi/sorc. I'd rather play a warrior with assassin level backstab, than a sorc.
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Dec 20, 2014 13:09:21 GMT -5
I just don't think karma should exist. I think anyone should be able to play anything, and if they abuse the fuck out of it to grief the shit out of people using code exploits, etc, then they should have a temporary (let's say 6 month) ban on playing that thing. Then, I'm also of the mind that staff shouldn't be making grey area calls in any situation where such is avoidable. It's the easiest way to keep everyone equal. How can that be done? Really strong documentation on what the virtual world is, and isn't, in any given place, so that you as a player know what to expect there, and you as staff know what to animate/do there if you want to help bring the world alive for the players.
|
|
|
|
Post by BitterFlashback on Dec 20, 2014 16:11:15 GMT -5
well you really dont need a karma system for everything. You can use it solely to limit access to sponsored roles (if you're going to have them. Or for limitng access to character types that could easily be abused. Etc etc.
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Dec 20, 2014 16:33:46 GMT -5
Thing is, anyone can abuse anything. And the ones who will do it, will do it. Trying to curb it won't really stop it. It will just usually fuck over the people who aren't trying to abuse anything. The best thing I can think of for handling something like that would be the temp ban on rolling that sort of pc again, along with some sort of notification of why the ban was put there, so that when it's run out, their play at such roles can be reevaluated for abusiveness/griefing.
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Dec 20, 2014 16:41:10 GMT -5
In every well populated mud I've seen other than Armageddon, primarily social players get trampled. If other players have access to resources you dont have, can do things you can't do, and are admired for these things, social players get left out, get grumpy, and cause their own brand of problems or quit.
I think Arm's karma system is primarily intended to solve this problem by giving all of the imbalanced toys to the players who are inclined not to be able to them "effectively". Its an artificial leveling of the playing field for people who dont want to have to compete, because they enjoy doing other things in a game than running on the hamster wheel of advancement.
Because of this, its not surprising to me that socially inclined imms ended up ruling this system. I think its fairly likely that if "we" removed Adhira, Nyr and/or Nessalin, this system would over time recruit their like-minded replacements.
I think any staff or player vote system is going to cause an imbalance of some sort. The moment a player vote system is implemented, I'd recruit enough players ooc to guarantee a steady flow of karma or roles, and then rotate this resource through the group as a reward for membership.
|
|
|
|
Post by nyrsucks on Dec 20, 2014 16:56:05 GMT -5
I think there should be different scales of karma:
Power scale: Grebber.....Sorcerer
Social Scale: Grebber....Templar
Race Scale: Human.....Mul
Start everyone in the middle. Move up or down for good play.
|
|
delerak
GDB Superstar
PK'ed by jcarter
"When you want to fool the world, tell the truth." - Otto Von Bismarck
Posts: 1,670
|
Post by delerak on Dec 20, 2014 17:09:39 GMT -5
Meh. Fuck karma. First of all how do you even know someone is capable of playing something without them playing it? Karma is a guise of trust, it isn't true trust. What does that even mean? That I trust you to follow the docs? Trust you to play the way we feel you should play? Half the docs are Arm are garbage anyway why would I want to follow them.
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Dec 20, 2014 17:31:46 GMT -5
Meh. Fuck karma. First of all how do you even know someone is capable of playing something without them playing it? Karma is a guise of trust, it isn't true trust. What does that even mean? That I trust you to follow the docs? Trust you to play the way we feel you should play? Half the docs are Arm are garbage anyway why would I want to follow them. The bolded part is exactly why I think karma shouldn't exist. And if someone's not sure that's a good idea, I would point them to majority of veteran players who had a magicker or a half-giant, or a sorceror elf, etc, as their first pc, and went on to become the most solid part of the game as a result. |
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Dec 20, 2014 17:51:18 GMT -5
I agree that the way karma is implemented now is unfair. I would hate, hate, hate to see a newbie sorcerer who can barely emote, though.
|
|
