Well I wasn't really commenting on a specific member of staff or group thereof but I mean, the game has been around for over two decades now right? That is an accomplishment in and of itself. I suppose I mean to give some credit for longevity. Most muds just kind of dwindle away and die out, for some reason, whatever it may be, Arm has managed to not do so thus far. So the staff, over the years, must have been doing something right. It also seems that there is some overarching plan, or idea that has, maybe not always, but for the most part been kept in line with? So staying the course might have been the wrong way to phrase that.
I understand what you mean now. I disagree that Arm's longetivity is due to the staff doing things right. imo it's only lasted this long for three main reasons:
1)Someone was willing to run the game (kind of a no duh thing)
2)Staff maintained the same formula. Harsh world, two opposing city states, permadeath, roleplaying intensive, magick is rare.
3)The most important - the playerbase is overall good at making the most of what they have.
That kept things alive but at the same time let the world grew stale. There's only so many times you can make a warrior and have them in a merchant/noble house/Byn and have it still be interesting because, in general, the experience isn't really going to change much. Still a list of "chores", the occasional mission or whatever, and some politicking. What makes it pop is what players you get surrounded by, and how they mix into the formula. Whether your boss is a dick and you want to backstab them, or you get into a rivalry with another person, whatever. It's the players that actually make the roles interesting because the codebase and setting have become stagnant that it's the only change you can ever expect to see.
The pbase has been vocal about a number of things. Some were receptive, some weren't. I can't speak for others but I personally haven't found Nyr to be receptive to feedback or criticism, especially once his mind is made up. Looking through a handful of GDB threads, you'll find his approach is to dig up a discussion from 2007 and huff out a "ugh, we've already discussed this before guys" and then lock the thread. I think it's silly to have to butt heads over a passing hobby at best, especially when there are other alternatives and more important things to worry about. As you can tell, I have very different opinions on how things should be. I think that the present way the game is run, requiring weekly updates and having constant supervision over clans, is just a waste of time and that the effort that's used to
send e-mails send requests back and forth about character updates could be better focused elsewhere.
Yeah I like Morgenes and he seems to be one of the few people that actually enjoys working on the game and having fun with it. Unfortunately, one person doesn't undue the massive amount of time wasting spent hemming and hawing over discussing trivial changes that could be added to the game; see the Shalooonsh example while above. I'm sure there's plenty more, and if bmj2 wants to chip in with their experiences I would be interested in hearing it.
I think it takes a certain kind of person to actually volunteer to staff a text-based game. The ones who actively seem to enjoy the game, the atmosphere, and interacting with the pbase and enhancing the experience (Vendyra, Shalooonsh, plenty of others I'm forgetting) seem to get burned out pretty quick and leave.
On the other hand, you have people that are absolutely powerless dweebs in real life. I think I brought over the post by Narlacc that described his first meeting with Nessalin - online he was abrasive and had no problem speaking his mind, at the Arm Imm Meeting in real life he's a soft-spoken dork. You also have Vanth, who is a fucking whackjob. I found her blog a while back and she considers herself a "sex worker activist". She had these long, rambling posts about white male patriarchy...one of them accused white men of being against street hookers and prostitution because of the stereotype of pimps being black and white men can't stand the idea of black men controlling white women. IIRC that blog post also started with something along the lines of "White men are the most frequent visitors of sex workers. I don't have the exact figures to back that up, but that's what anecdotal evidence has told me". And oh lord, Nyr. A broke, frail redhead that spends how many hours per week heavy-handedly moderating a small message board in addition to his other "duties" as producer of a text based game with an average of less than 50 people online at any given time.
People like that don't administer a game for nearly a decade because they're looking to create something cool and have fun playing with other people; they're doing it because it's the only place where they feel like they have actual power and control over their own lives and others. This is their corner of the world that they've carved out and said this is my castle and I am the king. It's kind of inevitable though with MUDs in general.
I don't have links off-hand and I suck at searching but everything I mentioned is official policy.
I personally don't have a problem at all with imms taking a hands-off approach towards the game and letting players be the main drivers of plots, as they have put down on the GDB. It's a really cool idea in concept, but here's where players get annoyed: if staff are going to have them be the movers and shakers, then they want support.
If I'm creating a clan from the ground up, then yeah I want support to take the money my clan made or had invested from outside parties and use it to rent out one of the many unused multi-room apartments in Allanak as our headquarters. I don't want to go back in forth for 10 months and jump through hoops just to get things done. As an example, the Guild bar in the 'Rinth had its door that led to the clan safehouse burn down and replaced with a "curtain". For at least 5 months the Guild boss tried to replace it with an actual door, including gathering up the raw wood and putting them by the door. Nothing ended up getting done. For a game that's supposed to be player driven, that sure is a whole lot of effort just to get an object called "curtain" renamed to "door". This kind of thing has been brought up on the GDB before, and it gets handwaved with canned answers like well you actually didn't jump through enough hoops or whatever.
Anyway that's a whole lot of words for things but it summarizes my views on the game and state of things pretty well. For what it's worth I enjoy these discussions and this board in general because it's like watching a 'behind the scenes' documentary or doing a post-mortem analysis.
