Why are you here?

there's nothing professional about how the MUD is run. it's a dolled up presentation that's about as accurate representation of 'professional' as a five year old playing dress up in daddy's closet. for example, code changes are largely devoted to bug fixing aspects of the game that have been complained about for over a decade. and not small things either -- entire skills and subguilds were absolutely useless but it just got pushed aside.

on almost all aspects of the game there's little to no justification and it looks like staff have no idea what they're doing outside of coding. example of lore/game design: why would giant spiders that are near the top of the food chain nest together? this would make sense if they were smaller, say the size of your hand, to cooperate together to capture prey but it's just there for being there w/r/t tarantulas. code-wise: i doubt there's been any statistical analysis on the interaction between the multiple stats for combat. i'd be more than willing to bet it's still a simple linear relationship and no one has any clue how to evaluate it besides taking averages. agility is still a dump stat, for instance.

arm has had 25 years of time to develop and grow its code as a mud, yet it's still more primitive than every RPI I can think of that has sprung up in the last 5-10 years and had smaller staffs and less development time. it's nice that things are getting around to being fixed, like that useless crafting subguild being removed or folded into another subguild, but let's be realistic here. how much work is involved with that?

anyone with a clue would have set up metrics to capture character metadata: guild, subguild, stats, clans joined, lifespan, time spent in different zones, etc and then gone over them. how long are certain guilds living for? what are the least/most played guilds and subguilds, and what can we infer from this? where are players spending the most time? we know they don't do this though -- that's why justification for things like 'tuluk is still active' is from nyr doing a random who check as opposed to looking at metrics.

instead, effort is spent doing things like watching private forums and trying to draw connections between poster pseudonyms and player accounts or wasted time like loading up orders because in 15+ years no one has ever bothered to automate the process. then the blame for lack of effort and progress gets shifted onto 'those players', and gee golly staff would totally have gotten more things done if we hadn't forced them to spend so much time watching player activity on an unaffiliated forum! and the rest of the playerbase eats it up because having a nuanced opinion that some staff can be cool people but also not good at running the game is too difficult to have -- better to demonize that ambiguous group of other people that have no impact on the game.

to browse dank memes.

People were mean to me on the other forum.

People are nice to me here.

I like to watch the mentally ill ramble.

Also I like to see the freakouts people make when they get PKed/yelled at by staff.

He doesn't have time. He's too busy being swept up in all those plots we keep hearing about in Arm. He probably had to hire someone to watch this forum and give him the highlights because Arm is so busy these day.

Got to get that shopping done early, you know, fake gravestones, jack-o-lanterns, goblins for the manger scene, and a zombie-jesus.

grumble I've been saying that the HRPT has been an excuse from the beginning to kill your character and reinstall someone more complacent to staff's will made manifest. It's been very clear that was the intention ever since your character moved up in the ranks.