What the fuck is wrong with Armageddon?

The echo of falling on your neck is a bit silly, to be fair. You're far more likely to break your legs or back.  I would include neither of those consequences in a one room fall.

What is wrong with ArmageddonMUD? 

well... human beings, mainly.

The game itself?  Yeah, the code is imperfect in lots of ways... people have written a lot about the shortcomings on the code, shortcomings of the premise of the game itself, like the structure of it codewise and playability wise just /as a game/.


Listen, for me, none of that shit has really mattered much at all.  Maybe I am just brain damaged to the point where I can entertain myself with flawed thing for seemingly literally weeks and months on end at times... but the game itself has never really been something I've been too critical of. Granted, I have not had the same experiences as others with being plot blocked or puppeted much while playing a leader role like others have discussed, but I have learned the hard way to avoid positions/roles where my entertainment is contingent on the staff; this is a quick road to frustration for players and staff alike because personal shortcomings, differences in perception, real life obligations or interfering will typically impede someone's Great Plot Idea save for in wonderful but rare happenings and explosions of creativity.

Unrealistic ends to characters by buggy aspects to the game have pissed me off: drinking cleaning fluid, medication causing player to fall asleep and the character to die (they've fixed this mostly), lag deaths.

OOC biases... that's one thing that has really made me pissed, but I would be lying if I said I was innocent of harboring them myself.  Judging, too, from an OOC perspective is something that is hard to circumvent, especially when people are judged wrongly or unfairly... arbitrarily, while others who act similarly are not "cracked down upon" as hard because X on staff likes them because they played with Y as a mortal and oh it was so much fun, so there are other people for X to bother besides Y.

The Karma system is a double edged sword for Armageddon... I feel it gives players, especially younger/new players, something to strive toward.  Karma perhaps has been a good incentive for people to actively try to improve their gameplay - especially when they're young.  I remember being in high school and writing page after page of Armageddon emotes... just thinking of what I would type once in the game again.  I'm not saying karma is the sole reason I did things like that, but having tangible rewards for improvement definitely motivates people; they like to be recognized for having put in the work.

The other side of the sword, especially in such a small game filled with big brains, big intellects... big egos... is that it is hard to objectively award/maintain karma, especially when the biases, preconceptions, prejudices, and all that come into play.  When those factors and countless others are taken into consideration, it seems really challenging to be able to administer a system like this without justifiably hurting the feelings and confidence of others, and it seems far too easy for mere spite against people to enter into this system.  Yes, the rules for karma have been changed, and that is at least an attempt to correct problems, some of which I've mentioned.  then there are certain aspects of that system that make me cringe:  you want to base staff communication as a part of earning karma when experience has taught MANY of us that "less is more" when communicating with the staff.

As long as I have to write something every week to a staff member in report form, I'll never play a sponsored clan role again....  I don't think I'm alone in this.  Many folks are probably actually excited to be able to do some shit like this, but I have played enough to know that it also can cause a lot of fussing or feelings of guilt when you don't respond or they don't respond... sigh. If money were involved, this aspect of clan leader/staff correspondence might be easier to do, but ultimately, one side or the other is going to be frustrated, pissed, outraged, disgusted, disappointed, or... maybe just bored.


What the fuck is wrong with Armageddon?  I don't know... it is what you make of it a lot, but outside of inane deaths, the worst part for me has been when I felt like I was having to walk on eggshells out of fear of "not doing something right" just because a staff members or staff members held grudges and were looking to penalize over frivolous bullshit - not because of someone being a total shitbag/bad player, but because they had disagreed/been told no and then argued about it/didn't see eye-to-eye/were viewed by others as a "problem"/the actions of a character had been interpreted incorrectly... and so on.  An almost complete lack of transparency between staff/players on certain issues along with concealing notes/published opinions about players like some McCarthyist blacklist shitshow, well... those tends to be invisible lines in the sand that players frequently aren't even aware about.

Right on, I plan on playing Armageddon again. Not immediately... but sometime.  I have never played another game even close to as much, and as a dude who grew up in a trailer in rural Mississippi, I likely never would have been able to develop an even half-assed mastery of language had I not been exposed to this language-based game for nearly two decades.  Really, it has been one of my most prized creative sharpening blocks, and even though I have spent entirely too much of my life on it, I would like to think that the good outweighs the bad.

This game should be about people having fun and pretending.  And the staff should be there to facilitate that in fair, reasonable, and creative ways that support people having fun even if it doesn't align with what "their" vision on fun/Armageddon should be.  If a lot of people join the Byn and other clans begin to suffer, don't just murder the entire fucking Byn... spend the time that could have been spent developing a Murder RPT on a way for that group to de-cluster, like the merchant house creation option that came about right after the entire Sefaj Byn group was obliterated 

Anyway, it sucks that popularity in the game has waned even after something like Minor Merchant House creation was implemented... I would go out on a limb and say that there were too many rules, guidelines, fine print, etc for those kind of groups to catch on like they might could have. The whole idea of having to work so closely with staff - overburdening volunteers - in order for self-started groups to come to fruition is daunting, too.


There are things wrong with Armageddon because it is a people game, and there's simply no getting around the fact that people will always, always, always have some shit wrong with them... especially after spending close to two decades involved with text based roleplaying, lol.  One thing we can do to alleviate this is to try to be nice to others, and that goes for players and staff alike.  Sirra wrote of extending an olive branch only to get insulted as a result... well, that's happened to me as well... and who knows how many others.

If you're the administrator of a game, you need to suck it up and be the bigger person, especially when someone is making an attempt at an apology or otherwise soothe tensions.

Come back and play for 3 months off and on, Kronibas, and I'm sure they'll unban your gdb account on appeal. You really burned out your toxicity, heh.

But you raise a point about McCarthyism. When I was an admin for a game, we kept reference notes on players. They could ask to see them, and we'd show them everything. If an admin put in a stupid or unjustified note, we cautioned that admin and deleted the note, and we did it where the player could see. I don't think anything like that has ever happened on Arm staff.

Show us all the notes, or else those of us who play for months as a clan leader and only get one note saying "this guy shouldn't be a leader ever again" from an incompetent staffer feel very bitter for months upon years.

jkarr it doesn't show any hypocrisy re:unarmed. Its mostly consistent with the damage model, stun Regens fast even while in combat, and it's trivial in the scope of things because unarmed combat nearly always happens in previous mentioned scenarios. If warriors and rangers with 20 days were getting knocked out fast by animals or NPCs then folks would bitch but unlike climb it's a non issue

I've advocated building skill_climb for a while now. It borders on having a super power, particularly if your combat goals start at "successfully run away".

i still love looking at that nyrbump: 184, nyr quits, in two weeks 231: that's almost 50, over a quarter of the playerbase that came back within two fucking weeks.

It's still too soon to tell one way or the other. I'm sure a lot of people are hesitant, thinking it's a trap of some kind. I don't believe the problem was solely due to Nyr by any means, but I don't think he was being part of the solution despite being in the position to do so. I have noticed a positive effort by staff. Yes, there was some flux in the numbers, though I'm sure if things continue in the direction they've been heading, that the numbers will reflect on the power of positive change.