Things on an Upturn?

The numbers are returning to something resembling normalcy, due to a combination of Nyr's departure and the upcoming HRPT. Things always pick up before an HRPT as people want to prepare and build up a character for it. It's a great time to return to the game provided you're willing to play in the Tablelands as a d-elf or tribal human (or possibly a gith if you're so privileged). Numbers-wise, the game is in pretty good shape right now.

However, Allanak is an absolute ghost town. Their decision to have the HRPT in the Tablelands, and their utter failure to do anything whatsoever in/with Allanak, has left the city mostly deserted. This is extremely bad in the long term. You've always been able to measure the health of the game by the state of the cities (now singular city) because that's the lifeblood of the game, and while the upcoming HRPT sort of papers over the cracks, that's not going to last.

If 50% of the playerbase has chosen to play d-elves and human tribals, most of those are going to want to return to civilization once the festivities are over. If they find an Allanak that feels like something out of 28 Days Later, those who returned to Arm for the HRPT are probably going to leave again. The current admin in charge of the southlands is woefully incompetent. They've somehow managed to prevent both the closure of Tuluk and a schism in the Templarate from affecting Allanak gameplay in the slightest, which is so crazy that it feels like they must have almost made an effort to accomplish that.

I don't know how they managed to fail so hard. They had the perfect circumstances under which to make Allanak lively: Tuluk closing, Atrium re-opened, Borsail back in the picture, and a new producer in place to bring fresh ideas to the table. Instead they did absolutely nothing with the whole thing, aside from a brief lightshow with some templars fighting in the sky and some animated rioters for a couple of weeks. What's left of that now? What ripples did it leave? Allanak is left 100% identical to how it was before that. Nothing has changed about the city PC experience, except for it becoming more boring.

They had the opportunity to consolidate the game around Allanak and really focus on this, it now being the only city in the game. No longer did players have to be diluted across two sets of templars, two collections of noble houses, two militias, two branches of merchant houses. They could concentrate their efforts on bringing this place to life again, run an awesome HRPT centered around Allanak that truly made it a new and attractive experience to play a city PC again. Instead they resoundingly failed to do anything whatsoever. Complete disaster, and the game will suffer for it as soon as the new HRPT smell wears off.

I mean, there are still some players in Allanak. Far fewer than normal, however, and the ones that remain don't do anything. I recently played for a couple of weeks and literally never saw one single player in any tavern besides the Gaj, not once, and the Gaj was also usually empty and rarely had more than maybe two people there even at peak. Nothing happened in those two weeks. Nothing whatsoever. Complete and utter absence of even the slightest sign of any sort of activity for two straight weeks. I never saw a templar. I never saw a noble. I never saw more than one Bynner in the same place. People didn't do anything. People walked mutely to and from the bazaar, the stables, etc. Nobody did anything, nobody was around, nobody was available for roleplay beyond half-AFK bar-sitting. It was depressing, yet simultaneously unsurprising.

With that being the state of the game's most important location, no amount of gith hijinks is going to keep things together in the long term. They need to replace the southlands staff with somebody who takes the job seriously and has a clue about what's important to the game. Running a Tablehands HRPT at this time is like pissing your pants to stay warm.

Disembodied voice here.  I think, yes, but also:

oldtwink could have maybe been... a little nicer... but he is right in part about the Gaj, at least, being a ghost town.

The Byn has gotten some love recently, but one thing is strange to me:

In a time when both city states were open... in a time when the logins were maybe half of what they are now at max..... the Byn had three sergeants.  Who even competed with each other.  I do not believe any of these sergeants were special apps, period.

How many sergeants are there now?  One who plays a lot, at least.  And I think they're a good one.  Still:

The guy who decided to make the Byn have three sergeants is the guy who "brought the Byn back."  The abas are still the same from then.  This is also the guy who made Red Storm what it is today:  one of the best written centres of civilization in the game.

So, maybe he was on to something.


If you want the Gaj to not be dead, maybe the original three Byn sergeants wouldn't be a bad idea.  

Maybe after the Tablelands loses some PCs?

playing a mundane human in the tablelands would not be impossible but playing a DElf would definitely be more fun. their skillset, move points, base locations, etc, are just way more conducive to it being a survivable experience than a human ranger or even outdoorsman.

not impossible to do a human in the tablelands, but probably not preferable either.

We've actually had several threads over time where kudos were thrown out along with optimism. There were a lot of positive remarks in the thread about the Tablelands announcement, a mostly positive thread on Rath taking over for Nyr, positive comments on the Tuluki families idea -- shit, you'll even find positive comments about the closing of Tuluk if you're willing to dig (I'm not, it was almost universally panned here), etc etc. There was even a staff review thread where IIRC people mostly talked up staffers they liked.

The thing is this board is not homogeneous. You're very unlikely to find a thread where we are all optimistic/giving praise at the same time. I know the GDB tries to lynch anyone who gets sand in the lotion for the circlejerk, but here discord isn't opposed for discord's sake. You could open a thread for giving staff kudos but it'd be more likely to turn into a free discussion of who really deserves kudos for what, with a sprinkle of contrarian vets, counter-contrarian arguments, and salty hate thrown in.

---

In all fairness, that shit was Nyr. He's gone. It doesn't look like Rath is planning to take things in whatever downward spiraling direction Nyr was planning, but he probably can't abruptly undo it without pissing off all the groveling staff worshipers who were defending the direction on the GDB.

I took the initial move of focus to the Tablelands as a sign the staff wanted to demonstrate the game management was changing to players who were driven off by heavy-handed staffing. I get that you see Allanak receiving less attention as a sign they've abandoned it. Allanak was admittedly where most people who weren't in Tuluk were. Nevermind that the only activity we were hearing about going on was coming from people saying "find out IC" because it was all staff-run rail building for the next train of NyrRPT.

I see this more as the game was bleeding to death from a gaping hole where player contribution was torn out. They could either pour more blood in by demonstrating there will now be a wide variety of plotlines you have no importance to or control over in Allanak, or they could actually try to fill the hole that's killing the game.

They set up an area of the game and made shit that happened mostly player-driven. They also did it with clans that neighbor and oppose Allanak, so they can easily transition into making Allanak more player-driven with what they've done so far. Allanak could finally have external threats that aren't NPCs that pop up on a schedule as part of a carefully crafted plan; they'd be random and unpredictable because players would be behind them.

I almost see the Tablelands thing as an attempt to deprogram the staff by reconditioning them.

If you really believe they could revitalize Allanak without creating a PC-based opposition, I cannot see how it would work. Staff abuse and the destruction of player contributions is what killed off the active population of the game. If you can't replace or recover those players, all you'd be doing is trying to get the tavern-sitters and f-mes to revitalize the game by giving them chances to be meaningless game pieces in a wider variety of plots that don't matter for a greater number of clans nobody can feel invested in.

maybe some people, myself included, thought that nyr going away would fix shit.

nyr going away only opens the doorway to fix shit, though.

if you choose not to walk through the doorway as a staff member... and if you choose to hold onto shit that nyr established/did...

then has anything really changed?



in terms of consequences, i feel more punished post nyr than pre nyr... lol, what fucking sense does that make?


the asshole is supposed to be gone and we all move on, so to do that worse punishment than nyr ever dished out is introduced.

pretty sad really.  not what i anticipated tbh.  

bitter said:

"[rath] probably can't abruptly undo [nyr's enormous amount of bullshit] without pissing off all the groveling staff worshipers who were defending the direction on the GDB."

if thats not you... my bad.

chaosisaladder

you are a new player... who never played pre-nyr... so, since you have come here and posed a good question, let me talk to you for a moment.


Right now in ArmageddonMUD... I feel like this is one of the BEST times that a new player could play.  There has been a turnover, and with it, openings... presenting a huge array of new possibilities for someone who is new to the game.

In that... I think there is the potential for a Golden Age of sorts.. especially for new players.  And really, the staff are wise to focus efforts on new players, especially new players who are young.


So, if you are a new player and reading this... you shouldn't be discouraged, really.  It is a New Thing right now, and those who don't have standing quibbles probably are going to have a great time.  Seriously.


One thing I will say..... is that I never, ever had any problems with Arm staff.  Until the imms changed.  Then shit got weird, and I felt like I was being treated basically just spitefully by people who had played a lot less than I had.  and really, they had not much room to judge.

i think there need to be safeguards in paradigm shifts that result in veterans being treated nasty by the "new" imms, at least to the extent that nyr did.  there need to be FIRM guidelines that say:

 when a staff member of ArmageddonMUD is abusive, they're GONE from staff... no matter what.

wouldnt you hate it if you had spent the better part of a decade doing good, only to have some spiteful asshat who started after you come along and fuck your shit up just because they didn't like you because of what your character did to their character, or what you said to them on the GDB that one time?


it happened to me.  i think it's something we should be concerned about.


we dont need any more nyrs, even if they do ALL of the busywork.  

it's not worth it.  seriously.  nice people should be on staff, not pseudointellectual hacks who get off on shitting on stuff other people do (see: nyr's "title" on the GDB... he thinks its funny to trash the Tan Muark, probably because he never came CLOSE to creating something as in-depth as them within Armageddon... not even close, except shartists).


I forget sometimes that there are actually new players who read this shit. I just sorta assume most people who read this are old salty bastards.  So yeah noobs and nooblars, this one is for you, courtesy of just a disembodied voice.