Meteor In the Sky

They've repeatedly been inconsistent and negligent as hell with their in-game lore and the signals they send OOCly. You remember when Tuluk was closing, and we had Nyr repeatedly saying "No this won't affect anything ICly, it will be an OOC change"? And then we got the zombie parasites to explain it. Same thing here, you can dig up posts on the GDB from staff members saying that the elementalist change is an OOC change and there's nothing different about the IC world to explain it. They clearly don't know what they are collectively doing.

Here's what probably happened.

Some staffer came up with a "cool" storyline idea involving the meteor. Other staffers chimed in and did stuff that was a result of the meteor. Very minor public changes were made in said staffers' clans to reflect this new thread of massive background events. All of it was kept SUPER SECRET MI6 CIA-LEVEL CLASSIFIED so that players could only ever stumble on the edges of it, to forever wonder what the story was behind X.

Then the players ignored the subtle influences of the HOLY FUCK AWESOME SECRET LORE, chalking it up to either staffers fucking with them out of boredom or the typical "value adding" shitty executives do to look like they're needed. No one will ever know the ULTIMATE GREATNESS METEOR LORE unless they join the staff or there's another leak, because it will never fucking matter. This inevitably demoralized the unpaid volunteer who wrote it, embittering them further against the ungrateful bastards of the playerbase.

If you don't believe that, download the wiki.

I have no idea what happened with the meteor and even if I did, I would say find out IC.

With that being said I will chime in on the concept of there seemingly never being any positive outcome to staff animations in the game.

I have had SO MANY staff animations over the years. More than I can remember. In the dozens, easily. The number I can remember that resulted in a positive outcome for my character in some way beyond a neutral conversation?

One.

Talia once animated a Guild leader to break into my place and leave my PC children a bowl of candy and my character Markus a set of neat but not remarkable throwing knives as a reward for extorting The Byn on behalf of the The Guild for a lot of money.

Every other animation I can recall ever having was done specifically to force me to do something I didn't want to do, take something away from me, or block my advancement in some way. EVERY SINGLE ONE. (Or attack me with monsters, which doesn't bother me and is usually enjoyable. I'm talking about NPC animations as in other humans/NPC leaders/etc...)

(They also never opposed me with commoner NPC's. It was ALWAYS with untouchable level God-avatar NPC's, so it wasn't even a possibility for me to realistically fight it. Doing so would have resulted in failure every time. Military NPC officers, Red Robed Templars, etc...etc...Basically, they went Staff vs Player on me IC, instead of Player vs World.)

It had gotten to/has gotten to the point that I would just rather have no animations.

I had started to wonder and genuinely want to ask if there is an unspoken or perhaps even spoken rule that staffers aren't allowed to animate NPC's to help characters to prevent cries of favoritism/bias.

Either way, animations in my vast experience with them almost always result in negative outcomes and losses/unfavorable negotiations against your PC. The BEST outcome you can hope for is a neutral meaningless one, because at least you aren't getting fucked over in some way, yet again.

(I have had some animations over the years to promote my PC in a clan, or something similar to that. I do not count these outcomes though. The reason is that they are standard. They are the product of following a standard path a thousand PC's before you have followed. They aren't special or unusual in any way and in reality mean about as much as someone just sending you a request via the request tool letting you know you have had your coded rank changed. I consider these "neutral" outcomes. Everyday uneventful business through the form of an animation.)

Unfortunately, agreed.

I can think of two emotes that didnt end in summary pc execution.   I can think of at least eight that did, and one of them was pretty recent.

Rpts are one of the things I adore about Arm, but I have long since had the realization that you only go on rpts when you are ready for a new pc.   I am confident the stories others have are worse than mine, but I am pretty sure I still have the logs for some of my worst.    The 650+ hp ankheg comes to mind.

Sometimes I think that storytellers confuse low fantasy and gritty with a "crapsack" world.   tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CrapsackWorld  

Sometimes I think that some of the imms are primarily social, political or mudsexxers as players, and have no freakin clue how the Arm combat system works.  

and they should expect a karma dock, because only an extremely small percentage of the world (much less the pc population) would be positioned to notice, much less call out, such a difference - much less rule out all the other zalanthan potentials

ud only conclude that shit if u stupidly conflated the pc population of mages with the ig world pop which is vastly larger on all fronts - an even bigger sign that their approach to the world is flawed and dismissive of the gameworld beyond the pc pop

lol the same type of player who walks their char into bustling taverns and beelines to the one other random pc there to comment on how 'empty' the tavern is

Eh, that's not exactly the same.

There are realism parameters to keep in mind, but you also have to keep in mind playability parameters.

The same reason it makes sense for a character to pick your character out of a crowded tavern is the same reason anyone interacts with anyone in the game at all.

There are hundreds of thousands of people in Allanak alone.

By your logic, EVERYONE should spend all of their time ignoring EVERYONE in-lieu of interacting with the literally hundreds of thousands of other people swarming the streets constantly.

Soldiers should roleplay constantly tracking down and arresting VNPC's instead of PC criminals. Why? Because it makes IC sense. There are thousands upon thousands of VNPC criminals for them to go after regularly. So why are they picking on just your PC criminal?

Well, the answer is, playability.

If we didn't give PCs special considerations beyond those we give the virtual world, nobody would ever do anything for being such hardcore "good RPers".

Everyone would just spend every second of their playtime interacting with the always present and always bustling virtual world.

But, that wouldn't be a very fun game either.

Some characters absolutely try to be dicks IC. No argument there.