What made 2006 Tuluk so good?

Nyr was still just a player.

Also, loon had something to do with it because he was over Kadius, traditionally one of the more prominent clans in the North, and he had good players in it. Markua and Murk were great leader PCs at the time, and I was playing Sharlo - and had no clan caps.

What this allowed was for Kadius to be able to recruit people and set them to work hunting. It was a really fun time and there were lots of players in the clan at times. 

Two stable, solid templars (Ender and ourlas - barely recall the Q templar during this era) who were prominent helped keep folks around, too, and a couple or few nobles and their minions allowed for a decent breadth in clan types for players to choose from. 


It really ally was a good time to play in the North. And then... Something happened. 

2006 is the year that I did so many crazy things and got to experience so many things on Armageddon that I know there is no way in hell that I would ever get to experience all of that stuff again. I don't really want to go into too many IC details because I'm obviously playing again AND I'm not hiding under another name, so I have to be careful with what I say, but 2006 was an amazing year because MOST, if not all of the Tuluki noble Houses and GMHs were fully staffed (by players, that is) and everyone was at each others' throat both politically and militarily speaking. I met alien civilizations, I met GODLIKE figures, I was in the middle of a hundred political plots and I know that many were as well, you had the best role-players ever in every single spheres of the city, you had ambitious Faithful Lords and Faithful Ladies, you had Chosen Lords and Chosen Ladies a plenty.

I really liked your Chosen Lord, RRR, and I still think that both you and Raleris deserve the medal of Armageddon for sticking with it for soooooo long, but it was just the two of you FOREVER and no one else, that got very... Stale? (not your fault at all), but during 2006, you had tons of CLs and all of them were highly motivated. I mean, I played so much in Tuluk and each time I created a new character I knew that it'd be you and Raleris and that if I ever saw a new Chosen Lord or Chosen Lady, I knew that you wouldn't see them again after in a week or less.

To be honest with you? I think that what ruined Tuluk for a lot of players is that Faithful Lady Q. I'm not sure exactly when she appeared as a character, but I know so many people who tried to start so many things in Tuluk and were stopped by her for the smallest of reasons that it turned many away from ever attempting to play again, and she was around FOREVER. There's also the fact that Staff also started their policy of ... How to describe it.. Turn the RP and plot over to the players? So instead of having amazing RPT events like I've witnessed back then, you suddenly had 90% of the RPTs being either parties, auctions or bard shows.. Rinse repeat forever... It's when I started getting detached from Tuluk and went to my more.. Solo-playing habits. So I stuck around Tuluk but as an aside, as a place to go to after I was done hunting or whatever.. So until I met someone that I would really mesh it, Tuluk was just getting more stale (because of my previous reasons) and it was always the same ol' same ol.. (I think you wrote it best when you said that all there was left to do was hunting, mudsexing and playing prom-night Queen hahah)..

I -hope- that Staff is slowly returning to driving their own RPTs (heck, I'll take just being a puppet in their puppet show over the constant player party "rpts" - but again, not blaming the players, at least they are doing something instead of just bitching like I am).

I hope that answers your question a bit better?

Something else that I've noticed over the years as well with Tuluk is that you had very long lived characters that would tend to just "appear" during RPTs and then you'd never see them again until the next one. And no, not all of them were Staff avatars, but it was a very strange atmosphere.. As if even these Tuluki loyal players were starting to get bored of Tuluk but didn't want to just give up on it either, or they just had nothing to do/talk about unless they were needed for a bardic event or something. I can think of 3-4 characters just like that at the top of my head. Many people just had absolutely nothing to talk about in taverns so I slowly started giving up on the social aspect of it and became more "indie" oriented with my Tuluki characters.

Yes, that helps a lot, thanks.

So, I think that what made Tuluk in 2006 so great was a few things:
1. As you mention, there were openings for lots of leaders and in lots of spots in lots of clans.
2. As you mention, there were good leader players back then who were ambitious.
I would add:
3. Those ambitious leaders were allowed to do ambitious stuff by the staff. Those leaders could rise up to be senior nobles or high templars. They could start shit with other clans. They could change the world and the documentation. I wasn't involved in it, but I understand that the Qynar system was player driven or heavily player influenced?
4. Those ambitious leaders were even supported by the staff.

When I was playing Dragean, things were different:
1. Unlike in 2006, the staff kept a very tight leash on the open leader roles in Tuluk. If you think it was frustrating for you to play in Tuluk with only the same two lord PCs around, think about how frustrating it was for me, whose primarly RP was with other high born PCs. It was so bad that the short longevity of noble PCs in Tuluk became something of a bitter joke to me. This was a direct result of staff decisions, however. There was nothing stopping them from allowing more noble roles to be filled beyond Dragean, Raleris, and two others at most (and those two would inevitably last no longer than a few weeks or months at the very most). This stranglehold on PC noble roles in Tuluk is analogous to the clan caps that are now everywhere and I expect that their reasoning was the same.
2. Unlike in 2006, the players had learned the facts in #3 below. That led to a different pool of players playing leaders, and that led to less ambitious RP from those leader PCs. Well played leaders are tough to do OOC'ly, and the players that can do it for a long time are very rare IMO. During my tenure playing Dragean, only 3 noble PCs lasted a RL year or more: Dragean, Raleris, and Aristarche Tenneshi, who was Dragean's IC wife. I'm very very biased, but I thought that Aristarche was awesome. She stored for RL reasons and was told that she would be allowed to unstore later if she put in a request. A year(ish) later she requested to unstore but she was flatly told no, that it wasn't what the staff wanted anymore. She was disappointed, I was disappointed, and Tuluk continued to have only two long lived PC nobles with RP that was "stale" in your words, and now on April 27, 2015 Tuluk will be closed possibly for good.
3 and 4. Unlike in 2006, the players learned that there are OOC glass ceilings and tons of OOC red tape to get anything done as a leader in the game. They learned that regardless of whatever they did IC'ly, the relative position of the noble houses in Tuluk wouldn't change based on PC actions. They learned they were capped on hiring PCs into their clans. They learned that they were OOC'ly barred from hiring certain types of PCs by the staff (such as "military" PCs into Tenneshi). They learned that being ambitious often led to being hammered down, IC'ly or OOC'ly like the nail that sticks up taller than the others.

This all led to more staleness and stagnation that you and everybody else experienced. And it all could have been avoided because it all was the result of staff decisions that could have (and still could be) changed.

I disagree that Qoriya was the problem, in part because my (very biased) view is Leader-PC-centric. I never saw it, but if Qoriya was screwing PCs then it was low level PCs and not leader PCs. You cited the good leader PCs as a key to the success of 2006 Tuluk, and I certainly agree, but Qoriya wasn't screwing the leader PCs so I don't think she could have been the key to why modern Tuluk has failed and is now being closed.

Let's posit that Qoriya was horrible in all ways. Do you think that if she never existed that Tuluk would now be thriving and not about to be shut down maybe forever?

No. I posit in the absence of a Qoriya, a Qoriya-like figure would have inevitably arisen. Because that's what happens when you combine a shitty, boring city with shitty, boring people and give them a psionic templar as overlord.

For all I know, Qoriya isn't even at the extreme end of how badly that could have gone. She could have been perfectly average and we were spared something even worse.

Anyhow. No one can blame her for not enjoying herself. She certainly did.