slink
staff puppet account
Posts: 7
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Post by slink on Apr 7, 2016 21:43:52 GMT -5
Nah. Staff are just a convenient punching bag for people disappointed by the game. They don't need to take abuse and they shouldn't have to.
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Post by sirra on Apr 7, 2016 21:50:45 GMT -5
Nah. Staff are just a convenient punching bag for people disappointed by the game. They don't need to take abuse and they shouldn't have to. I know you only signed up to participate in this thread, but I think even a brief stroll around the rest of the forum has more than enough indisputable evidence of staff apathy and douchebaggery by now. Or it's because you had decent interactions with one staffer. Yes. Now and then, someone trundles through who is relatively on the ball. Then they trundle right out again. You're either a diehard who is here as part of some sad attempt at agitprop, or you're a relative newbie. That's fine. Whatever. But the reason we all laugh at you is because most of us have had extensive, personal expeience to the contrary. The staff are not the victims. Go back to the GDB. I honestly don't care if you believe me, since I know in time, you're either going to become staff yourself and see it all from the inside (it's pretty easy to become staff these days!) or you'll get your shit pushed in by some other staffer, and see the rest of them close ranks around your abuser. That or you'll get bored of the stagnated game and move on with your life. It is ludicrous though to fantasize about staff as wanting the best for us while the lowly players ruin anything. The players (those that app for Fale or templars, anyways) take their cues from staff.
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slink
staff puppet account
Posts: 7
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Post by slink on Apr 7, 2016 22:00:32 GMT -5
Vitriolic ranting is not indisputable evidence.
But I actually laughed. Okay buddy I'll go back to the GDB with my staff friends and future staff wife and child.
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Post by sirra on Apr 7, 2016 22:30:03 GMT -5
Vitriolic ranting is not indisputable evidence. But I actually laughed. Okay buddy I'll go back to the GDB with my staff friends and future staff wife and child. Typical over reach . Just remember this exchange. Because no matter what, I win. There is a stage in playing Armageddon where you're having fun and only interacting with one decent staffer. All of us here treasure that stretch of time in our Armageddon-playing careers. Some of us are fortunate enough to experience it twice. But you will realize that staff culture is the problem. That they have taken a great game and mismanaged it into the ground. That they set the very worst example. You will either come to that realization or you will simply get bored and leave. But I know that at some point before you go, you will realize that you were wrong, just as I did. The buck stops with staff. In my RL job, if a client is dissatisfied, my boss does not assume it is the client's fault. He assumes it is mine. And I would agree. That's how it works in the military, in the local McDonalds, and everywhere else in the world except apparently Armageddon and the European Union. Both have serious issues and their most crippling problem is not that their constituents aren't grateful enough. Here's a more prosaic example. If I was inviting people over to my house every week to host a D&D game, and my style of hosting and dungeonmastering was such that people decided they'd rather go anywhere else (even though I provided the 'hosting' services free of charge), most rational people would conclude that I was probably a shitty host and a worst dungeonmaster. Especially if they were all avid D&D players and the only other place to even talk about D&D was in a crack den in the worst part of town (here).
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jkarr
GDB Superstar
Posts: 2,027
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Post by jkarr on Apr 8, 2016 3:28:48 GMT -5
If I was inviting people over to my house every week to host a D&D game, and my style of hosting and dungeonmastering was such that people decided they'd rather go anywhere else (even though I provided the 'hosting' services free of charge), most rational people would conclude that I was probably a shitty host and a worst dungeonmaster. unless there was a chance that ud get a line or two of crack if u stuck ur tongue out enough to chance at grazing their dipping anus at just the right unannounced time to make them pucker and take note /grumble
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deadelf
staff puppet account
Posts: 41
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Post by deadelf on Apr 8, 2016 6:31:43 GMT -5
There are 2 takeaways from the OP. 1. PK in this game is a useless piece of shit. Your maxxed assassin might as well have been a 30 day ranger hunting tregils. There's no challenge, no strategy, nothing even remotely considered a game. The outcome wasn't in jeopardy. I'd be bored too.
2. You are half the plot. If you want to just charge out there and pk bad guy X then you have no one to blame for a poorly written, pathetic story than yourself.
Try, "Picking his fingernails with a sharp blade, the shadowy figure tells lord fancy pants 'You know, I've been paid a lot of sid for your liver. I'm going to take it, just not today.' Shadowy figure slips away." Add to the challenge. Give him a chance to exact revenge on whoever put a bounty on his head. Taunt him.
Or, betray the guild, "Lord Fancy Pants, there's a huge bounty on your head. How about you giving me more sid and I'll pretend I never heard it."
Years ago I was offered a reward for killing a merchant. A damn merchant. Wtf. So easy, why bother? So I turned instead. It made for a much more interesting tale than "Here's this head that was as easy to cut off as a tregil's tail.". Sure the merchant got killed anyway but I got some fun enemies in the process instead of a dead end tale.
Where's Grumble. He's the only damn person that makes sense on this board.
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Post by Prime Minister Sinister on Apr 8, 2016 7:26:32 GMT -5
Try, "Picking his fingernails with a sharp blade, the shadowy figure tells lord fancy pants 'You know, I've been paid a lot of sid for your liver. I'm going to take it, just not today.' Shadowy figure slips away." Add to the challenge. Give him a chance to exact revenge on whoever put a bounty on his head. Taunt him. Or, betray the guild, "Lord Fancy Pants, there's a huge bounty on your head. How about you giving me more sid and I'll pretend I never heard it." So this translates to, "Picking his fingernails with a sharp blade, the shadowy figure tells lord fancy pants 'Look at me, get my description, so you can spamwalk to your estate and hide while you put a warrant out for my arrest" Or, betray what should be one of the scariest organizations in the game, your employer, the guys who scratch your back, a totally in-character thing to do. I dunno boss, I don't know how you manage to muster enough faith in other players to think either of these alternatives would end in anything more than the most unfun and unsatisfying of mantis heads. I've been down that road myself more than a few times and I'll be damned if I let benefit of the doubt or "giving other players a chance" get another of my 30+ day investments get turned to dust. When everyone else started worrying about self-preservation over crafting a story or making good rp, it started shitting on everyone focused on the latter. It's either follow suit or get shat on.
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jesantu
Displaced Tuluki
Posts: 339
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Post by jesantu on Apr 8, 2016 7:35:35 GMT -5
Staff want you to have fun. Believe it or not. Do you have any supporting evidence? You seem suspiciously quick to defend staff while damning the entire playerbase (except the borsail that got pkilled). Some staff want you to have fun surely but there are still several who are in it solely for themselves. Talia frightened more than one imm into retirement and was renown for badmouthing players on immchat and the idb. She saw players as a nuisance. Then there's the overwhelming evidence against nyr here, which is even openly mentioned on the gdb these days. You said staff want us to have fun but if we look at these two imms alone I'd say your argument doesn't have a leg to stand on. I will however give you that some imms do want us to have fun. That's always been the case. Tragic that they remain the minority and are often too constrained to do anything meaningful such that they inevitably retire. Like the average templar, they're neutered and declawed without any real power. I don't know enough of the characters or events to add much feedback to the rest of the topic but whether this borsail guy was the very definition of boredom or one of the best rpers and plot generators, it should not preclude him from being pkilled. Besides, if he was a skilled rper who created both fun and conflict for others then he can always do it again in his next role. newtwink murdered his character, not his player! Conflict is the very heart of the game but it's absurd how outraged players get any time there's a pkill or a theft. There's never a pkill that's justified and there's never an item stolen from your inventory that isn't somehow deemed poor rp on the thief's part.
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OT
Displaced Tuluki
Posts: 257
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Post by OT on Apr 8, 2016 8:02:57 GMT -5
It's not merely the lack of any acknowledgement of this particular plot. It's the total absence of anything going on in Allanak. This plot was just the method by which I finally discovered exactly why this current state of affairs is how it is. I mean, I already halfway knew, I just wanted to confirm it one last time. A complete void of staff support and presence is what leaves Allanak without anything to do. The players have nothing to work with, there's no story to follow, there's no support for anyone's actions. If you want to do something more than the absolute most basic and expected thing, i.e. more than a Fale lord throwing a party or some Bynners killing whatever animals they encounter on one of their pointless outings, you get the run-around.
In the Guild, we wanted to change things up a little so that we could get more people into the clan. It's really impractical to recruit into the Guild because it means giving access to the backroom where everything is stored. Tens of thousands in cash, rare poisons, a fortune in spice, bags of lockpicks, it's all just sitting there in the backroom, so you can't give someone access until you trust them with all that. Plus it's where the Guilders rest and put down their guard. So, it's nearly impossible to keep the clan populated because almost nobody actually sticks around long enough to earn that kind of trust.
We wanted to change that by moving all the important shit into another office in the 'rinth which requires a key, and make the Folley backroom a hangout that we could more easily give people access to without needing to vet them for weeks and turn them into made men. In the rinth, getting access to a footlocker is an enormous boon and something we wanted to offer to more players in order to encourage playing in the area. The alternative has always been that 95% of players drop out after a week or two, leaving the Guild perpetually starved for players. We had a really cool and entirely doable idea for how to fix that problem and make the rinth way more playable with no more staff support than 'load o 43294.' That's all Ath had to do.
That other office is ICly the crew boss' office. The leader was meant to have a key. We tried for over a month to get that key, and the clan staff just couldn't be arsed to load it up. Week after week after week we asked for the key to the office so that we could put the valuable shit there and open the Folley backroom up a bit as a lounge for moderately trusted people so that we could codedly clan people faster instead of them invariably getting bored and storing/suiciding when it turned out that getting into the crew took a stupidly long time. This isn't a case of staff telling us we couldn't do that; one of the defining characteristic of the Guild is that each boss can run it more or less how they want. But there's just no support, so it fell apart.
We've heard similar stories from so many people who come to this forum complaining about the fact that you just can't do anything on Armageddon. The game has sixteen fucking staff members, but they're so suspiciously averse to supporting player efforts that people have just stopped trying to do anything that can't be done completely without any input from staff. And while it's possible to have fun without the aid of staff, a game run that way for years will eventually get stuck in a rut as nothing new happens and nobody can do anything outside of the tired, rehashed old crap that players have been doing year after year.
When I made this character, I set out to make one final effort to see if this still held true. I hadn't really played since last summer and I had to be open to the possibility that things had changed since Nyr's departure. I didn't have a plan from the start to PK a noble or anything, but when that turned up as an opportunity, I saw the plot potential in it. Quite a lot of roleplay preceded it, and the aftermath involved a number of players. It was by far the biggest thing that happened in Allanak in that time. Yet the complete absence of any sort of staff presence led to this pervasive feeling of "oh well, I guess that was it, back to normal." That was what I felt from pretty much everyone involved, and the sensation that I got myself as well.
At no point in this character's 33 days played was staff ever supportive of anything. At no point in those two months did staff do anything whatsoever in Allanak. It was two straight months of literally zero presence from staff. For all intents and purposes, the city of Allanak is unsupervised and completely without any form of staff guidance. There's no story, there's no encouragement, there's no result to anything you do. You can murder a nobleman in public and your own clan staff won't even react to it. The game exists in a limbo where it hasn't progressed for the better part of ten years. Outside of removing content bit by bit, fucking with the class structure and adding little token updates like hemote-look, in what way has Armageddon changed? How has it moved forward? How is this game making progress and staying fresh?
It isn't. The game is inert.
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punished ppurg
GDB Superstar
Why are we still here? Just to suffer?
Posts: 1,026
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Post by punished ppurg on Apr 8, 2016 8:05:21 GMT -5
2. You are half the plot. If you want to just charge out there and pk bad guy X then you have no one to blame for a poorly written, pathetic story than yourself. Try, "Picking his fingernails with a sharp blade, the shadowy figure tells lord fancy pants 'You know, I've been paid a lot of sid for your liver. I'm going to take it, just not today.' Shadowy figure slips away." Add to the challenge. Give him a chance to exact revenge on whoever put a bounty on his head. Taunt him. Valorisk looks at you. Valorisk runs east. Alveron arrives from the west. Welcome to Armageddon!
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jesantu
Displaced Tuluki
Posts: 339
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Post by jesantu on Apr 8, 2016 8:17:13 GMT -5
Try, "Picking his fingernails with a sharp blade, the shadowy figure tells lord fancy pants 'You know, I've been paid a lot of sid for your liver. I'm going to take it, just not today.' Shadowy figure slips away." Add to the challenge. Give him a chance to exact revenge on whoever put a bounty on his head. Taunt him. Or, betray the guild, "Lord Fancy Pants, there's a huge bounty on your head. How about you giving me more sid and I'll pretend I never heard it." Those are great ideas but they're your ideas, not newtwink's. Nothing more or less was added or detracted from the game by pkilling the way he did. Sometimes people are murdered in cold blood in the dead of night by some thug who's hiding in the shadows. Which is how the borsail guy was taken out. I seriously doubt there's a shortage of novels featuring high profile assassinations taking place in this way. Killing off a character is not killing off a plot. In fact it probably generated a good deal of intrigue as different clans scrambled to find out who the mystery killer was and who paid them for it, not to mention the revenge that did or will later follow. I repeat, even if the dead borsail was the pinnacle of rp and created conflict and activity better than any player in the history of the mud, that's no reason to avoid pkilling him. It's no reason to avoid pkilling him in the dead of night with a hidden assassin either. If these things happened every day it would be a different story and then maybe the imms should review the code to make sure there's a healthy power balance set in place. But on the contrary, these things are so rare and uncommon that an entire thread with 4 pages worth of discussion so far has cropped up. Death is so less frequent than it once was back in the days of halaster and bhagharva it's a wonder that anyone is complaining when it does happen. A noble or even a high ranking merchant being taken out gets front page attention in the news and still it's criticized as some sort of plot-killer or twinkish act.
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Post by jcarter on Apr 8, 2016 8:25:48 GMT -5
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OT
Displaced Tuluki
Posts: 257
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Post by OT on Apr 8, 2016 8:31:36 GMT -5
Nobody is playing in the 'rinth these days. If anyone here is considering applying, keep that in mind. There's simply no eastside playerbase at all, and the westside consists of one or two players (the leader and second in command of the Guild are now gone, hence the sponsored role call). The role is pure boredom. You get literally no staff support whatsoever, and nothing's going on in Allanak for you to react to and work with. Nobody does anything in the city, and there's no story or really anything to build upon. The southlands staff is useless and incompetent, and if anyone brings up this complete absence of anything going on, Seidhr will simply lie to you and say you're just not good enough at the game to find all the awesome plots and events that are rocking the city every day. It's a farce.
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deadelf
staff puppet account
Posts: 41
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Post by deadelf on Apr 8, 2016 8:31:38 GMT -5
What is the difference between storing and getting killed? Being a quitter or going down with a fight. Either way your 30 day pc is gone.
Any of you remember a guy, years ago, I think he was Kadian, rebelled then pk'd a Kadian inside the Kadian compound in Tuluk. Was the most wanted player in the known for awhile. I don't know what happened to him. He had bounties in the north, south, people taking their man-stud heroes out looking for him. His name was like "mufasa" sending shivers up everyone's spine. Whoever played that was ready for a challenge. I seriously doubt he had imm approval for that pk!
That was taking the game by the balls and running with it.
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OT
Displaced Tuluki
Posts: 257
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Post by OT on Apr 8, 2016 8:55:20 GMT -5
I get that you're incredibly keen on painting me a bad player or something, but I quit playing the game, and the game has no balls with which to run. That's why I quit.
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