Boundaries, RP, and Shitty head Meta-gamers THE THREAD

I guess a good question... What can fix it? Staff perhaps already walk on egg shells.

A player tries to break the mold, school some players on perhaps not racing to Weapon skills (advance) but they player is likely to get pk'ed faster cause LULZ get off my grind guy.

So you think it's been that way since Reborn? Be nice if there was a possible solution with out staff bringing down a hammer.

They can do a number of things:

1) Start acknowledging good roleplay as something meaningful instead of reinforcing the growing GDBer notion that "emotes do not equal roleplay," which has been warped into "emoting isn't part of roleplaying." It's not just about emoting specifically; it's about using the written word to portray your character, something that has oddly become a thing of the past. It was something that Sanvean valued, being an author, but subsequent admins have failed to reward it in any capacity.

Encouraging descriptive roleplay would in turn steer focus back onto the literary aspects of roleplaying, and by association a heightened consciousness of character actions and consistency. This is instrumental to fostering a roleplaying environment where people actually give a shit about how their actions are perceived, and whether or not things make sense for their characters. This is crucial to all aspects of roleplaying, and would diminish the current culture of unapologetic twinking.

It would take time, but just as the game was able to drift away from writing because nobody acknowledged its merits, writing culture can be restored. Unfortunately, I think much of today's staff is picked from amongst those same players who think writing is a necessary evil in an all-text roleplaying game, and best kept at a bare minimum because it takes effort.


2) Make it so that bringing a mundane character from shit to useful doesn't take a month of hardcore unemployed twinking, or several months of measured play. The beautiful thing about games using the SoI/RPI codebase was that you started out moderately useful, could become truly valuable to your clan in a couple of weeks, and weren't looking at 6+ months of largely open-ended progression that made you the bitch of anyone who had managed to survive that long. It makes people feel like they have to through extreme skillgrinding regimens in order to become anything with their characters, and they're not really wrong. It isn't healthy for any game, especially a competitive one, when it takes many months of heavy-duty grinding to get to the top. It means some people will do it, and anyone who doesn't do it is left in the dust.

It's really no wonder people twink as much as they do on Arm. You can continue to improve for such an absurd length of time that it's hard to resist the urge, but what this does is ensure that people are never really satisfied with their characters as long as there are these long-lived superheroes around with whom nobody can compete. Code changes need to take place so that you can't continue to improve your combat skills for months upon months, and so that it doesn't take like 20 days to just become a regularly competent fighter. Just the fact that it takes a minimum of 15 days to branch parry on a ranger is absurd. Armageddon is a game where your warrior or ranger doesn't become really powerful until like 30 days played, and doesn't peak until something like 60+ days, or even 100 if you took it slow. It's just too much.

Make no mistake, I will twink with the best of them when that's the lay of the land, but I wish it wasn't. The roleplay suffers immensely for it and makes playing Armageddon such a hollow feeling. I've enjoyed the other RPIs much more. Games like SoI and Atonement valued roleplay before competition and were a much more satisfying experience than the powergaming arms race and endless grindfest that is Arm. I hate that, but people will play the game that they're handed.


3) Fire the fucking useless staff that has utterly and completely failed to do anything whatsoever with Allanak despite it now being the only city in the game. That is a criminal failure, and it has turned what should be the game's center of activity and population into a scaled-up version of Red Storm where you can walk around even during peak hours and encounter nobody at all. Even with player numbers now more or less back to normal, the city is a goddamn ghost town because it languishes in total neglect. A deafening absence of any sort of activity, combined with their ruinously short-sighted decision to have the next HRPT in the Tablelands, is going to fuck this game up in the long term because Allanak is the lifeblood of Armageddon.

They incompetently missed a fantastic opportunity to have the next HRPT in Allanak now that it's the only city on the map, and could have really shaken things up in a refreshing way to make it an interesting place to play. Instead they've done absolutely nothing with the place, and playing in Allanak is 100% identical to how it was before Tuluk closed. Literally nothing has changed even the tiniest bit, barring the couple of weeks where someone was occasionally animating some rioting NPCs. An event that should have completely redefined the game managed to actually change nothing at all, which is indefensible.

@rgs Did you play in the 'Rinth when an elf named Nobody was around? Because I heard recalled events like a guy losing connection to his human Rinthi, and then reconnecting to see that Nobody was throwing knives at him, sneaking in, picking up the knives, and then sneaking back away to throw them again.

That's the sort of thing which may have grown commonplace in the game. The fact that someone would even consider doing that is a direct OOC insult to anyone who appreciates what an RPI is about.

There's no appreciation of the medium, of the community, and definitely no appreciation of the amount of love put into certain characters... because there are a great deal of characters that are not thought out or justifiably characters at all. Indeed, they're more like avatars out to become the buffest and strongest.

The community is just toxic and irresponsible. We give only as good as we've gotten, over here. The difference is that the pretend-assholes on the GDB can frame their vitriol in a way that they won't be banned, where our raised objections have been and will continue to be silenced.

You probably never ran into him because he was hidden all the time. :^)

XD lol Rinth is like a PK containment area of the game.

I would contest that, but you're an authority on shitposting, so nobody would believe me.