Don't Play in the Arm of the Dragon.

The staff member was twinking shamelessly, but I was equally complaining about how utterly shit the emotes are. Of all people involved in Armageddon, from new player to producer, only one role objectively requires that you're good at writing. You can be a coder and write like shit, you can be a builder or other utility admin and write like shit, you can be a player of any level of seniority and write like shit (most do, honestly), but those chosen for the role of storyteller can and should be expected to express themselves better than:



This is an absolute joke compared to the standard seen on the other RPIs. There, storytellers write excellent echoes and animations, and often make an effort to have it stand out by using special formats so that it's visible to players and helps them read and react to it. You'll see eloquent, interesting writing. You'll find people who really care about using language to channel the game. This doesn't necessarily mean a large volume of text (although please more than a single fucking sentence), but it does mean having the decency and respect to not be fucking lazy with your writing in a game that is exclusively text. SOI, ARPI and PRPI all had excellent storytellers.

This can at times be seen on Armageddon as well, but you'll just as often be served some lazy, grammatically nauseating rubbish written not by someone who belongs in a storytelling role but by someone who clearly sees writing as an undesireable chore. It's a text-based roleplaying game that in no way sufficiently encourages or acknowledges good writing, which is such a severe failure on behalf of the game and its custodians that it's difficult to express how badly they've run the game astray. This was not always the case; Sanvean, being an author, was good about promoting expressive roleplay. Since her departure, things have gone to shit.

There's this weird thing with Armageddon. Despite being the oldest RPI and the inspiration for all the other ones that have since entered the genre, Arm's community has developed this bizarre aversion to good roleplay. Like a culture of discouraging tryhards. People are so lazy, make so little of an effort, that it often barely qualifies as roleplay. Oh, they'll pretend to value 'good roleplay' in the form of adhering true to the game's ideals (the oft-touted and almost never realized "corruption, betrayal, murder" slogan), or being a dutiful clanlead. But emoting and good writing? Not only do people not encourage it, they'll routinely parrot that "good writing does not equal good roleplay," like they're justifying Arm's culture of bad, lazy writing and eager for a chance to express the notion that one shouldn't care about emoting. Good writing does not necessarily equal good roleplay, but very bad writing will rarely produce good roleplay.

It's almost like back in middle school when kids would declare it uncool to be good in class and look down on anyone who was. The quality of roleplay on Armageddon is atrocious, most people barely emote or otherwise make an effort to express themselves in text beyond the most primitive, sloppy token drivel that they feel is mandatory to justify their coded actions. And seeing shit like this from a storyteller means they have no reason to try better.