The Armageddon Staff / Player Divide

I empathize with you Asan, and I'm right there with you in solidarity as regards the original screwjob. But you did hijack the thread and you have constantly brought it up. They didn't care when you brought it over here and made a 20 page thread about it. But they did continually warn you against bringing it up on their turf.

Do I think you got a rough deal? Yes. Do I think the whole problem would've been avoided if staff had never set a precedent by giving you a resurrection in the first place, and thus inoculating in your mind that it was a reasonable thing to request for others and not incredibly extraordinary? Yes.

If you had any desire to keep playing Armageddon (and apparently you did, owing to the karma request review, which FYI, I haven't bothered doing in like six years despite wiffling around now and then) then you should have let it go and moved on. It would have been perfectly reasonable to stop playing Armageddon as well. I've stopped playing in the past for years at a time when I felt mistreated.

Coming back to Armageddon after getting burned is a bit like agreeing to fight in the Allanaki arena. Whatever happens, you knew what you were getting into.

But you did hijack the thread. You knew you were hijacking the thread, and you even posted a picture of a Samurai committing seppuku. You knew what you were doing. Bringing up personal stuff unique to your situation has never been fine on the GDB. Love it or hate it, that's been established for like 15 years at this point.

If that's the way you chose to go out - so be it. We all choose to go out in different ways. If you were still enjoying Armageddon and still wanting to play it or get more karma, then I think it was self-defeating at best, and leaves me with less sympathy for you. Do I still have a lot of empathy for you? Yes. Sympathy? Not as much.

Carry with you this thought-artifact you have made here battling with the nerds who run an obscure text game into the real world. Hold it tight. You have garnered an insight into what it means to walk the righteous path; you have learned what it is fight an overwhelming force; you have learned the eager willingness most attach themselves to that force. Stop searching for validation in the infinite feedback of human reaction, instead focus that this stupid little debacle here in our remote corner of the internet will be apart of your life story, forever. Let that sink in for a brief moment. A few years from now, or months, you can revisit what it was to be yourself right now. Oh...I was that way. I was being that guy. Haha. Nice. Oh me. When you're an old man, dying on your death bed, recounting your entire life, you can and will remember this. Yeah...I owned those mud admins...With that, you will close your eyes...and die. Good job, my friend. Good job.

I still see what he did as appropriate to the thread. The guy who started the thread basically said, "Hey. There's a divide between players and staff because of a handful of admitted staff mistakes and PLAYERS BEING INGRATEFUL, PARANOID SHITS." I can't think of a more appropriate thread to unearth a fairly freshly buried hatchet and crack it into the skull of one of the lying shit staffers mid-dishonesty.

I WILL KILL YOU AND EAT YOU. Seriously, though, if you see no value in occasionally beating the smug out of people, it's because you never hurt someone's feelings enough who deserved it. Some people only learn the same way that particularly stupid animals do: punishment and negative reinforcement. The medium used to deliver them is surprisingly unimportant.

>Sponsored Role player posts how there's no divide
>Force-stored player posts there is
>Gets banned for it

lmao

Feh. Bluff someone with a soul.


Anyhow, decided to cross-post two real gems from the thread:

Translation: "Accept mediocrity, give nothing, take nothing, until it's like you're playing an MMO minus even the meagerest false accomplishment. Then keep playing for some reason." The despair is palpable.


This pretty much speaks for itself. All-in-all, a good post.

Yeah that's what she's referencing. She was told over e-mail "here's your list of options for sorc subguilds as we scalp your PC's skillset with no warning".

It's just such an incredible situation to me. I've played dozens of MUDs and other games of the same general structure (e.g. private WoW servers), and never have I seen one administrated with this level of all-out dictatorship and unchecked abuse against the playerbase. A large part how they get away with it is of course the fact that RPIs are fairly unique in the way that staff whims determine your privileges in the game, but even looking beyond that point, Armageddon just has such an extreme degree of totalitarian directorship that it boggles the mind.

The government-like levels of unapologetic propaganda, the entire community springing from their abuse, the categorical failures in game design, it's just such an immense clusterfuck. I've never seen anything like it. Most staff rosters will have its bad apples, but to have the whole structure so completely fucked is something I've only ever seen in this one game. It's almost like a warning example of how not to run a game. And yet you'll find this totally absurd community voice that basically insists on what's self-evidently the complete opposite of the truth. A divide between staff and players is literally what defines Armageddon as a game, but staff will deny it, and staff has total power over the players so many of those will support the staff narrative because they'll otherwise suffer.

If you look at Shadows of Isildur, it's currently undergoing heated debates about staff trust. There, the head admin made a thread for everyone to freely speak their mind and gave all points due consideration. He disagreed with some things, argued his case, admitted to some mistakes and so on. For all the many things wrong with SoI, this is an example of how to correctly administrate a game. On Armageddon, anyone saying anything other than "staff is right and good" would suffer some consequence, Nyr would delete any post that borders on controversial, and a large portion of the playerbase would form a line of defense in front of the staff members not because they genuinely agree with them but because they know they can ingratiate themselves with them and possibly earn better privileges by doing so.

It's just such a massive, embarrassing failure of an entire community. It's so short-sighted and profoundly stupid, and it's a genuine threat to the entire RPI genre because so many players have left it entirely as a consequence of what Armageddon is doing to the community that these games largely share. Over the course of some four or five years, beginning long after the rise of modern gaming can be blamed for any decline, the whole RPI community has shrunk and suffered so much. There's a few reasons for this, but one of them is the number of people who have sworn of roleplaying because of the abuse they've suffered on Armageddon.