An Actual Open Discussion On The Culture Killing Armageddon
Mar 5, 2017 6:20:58 GMT -5
jcarter, jkarr, and 7 more like this
Post by BitterFlashback on Mar 5, 2017 6:20:58 GMT -5
Alternate Title: Yo Dawg, I heard you liked futility, so I put staff in your MUD so you could linger while you linger.
I've decided to breach a subject that, to the best of my knowledge, has not been brought up in regards to Armageddon MUD. Namely the game culture fight that's rather quietly taken place at the staff-level and how that has impacted the game. I was inspired by Asche's misguided attempt to have an open dialog (a.k.a. a public discussion) on the GDB only to be met with the waterheads and apologists claiming a private chat via the request tool was public. Asche tried bringing up the subject of dwindling player numbers and essentially got zero answers, so I'll give him/her a discussion of that over here. I'm going to highlight why Asche (whose identity I suspect I know but who I won't out for obvious reasons) could not get answers on the GDB. I'd also invite anyone from the GDB who'd like to discuss it over here, but please read the bottom of my long-winded, tl;dr post before making or logging into your account, assuming you have the stones to come here.
Armageddon MUD used to average around 80 or 90 active players on back in the early 2000's managed by slightly less staff than now. It currently has 30 players on average with a little more more than one staff member for every three active players. This is the result of Arm's massive, inexcusable churn rate, which I mathematically proved back in 2014 using data publicly released by Nyr and made charts that even them dimmest of contrarians could follow. 99.22% of people who play Arm don't stay. That's what 4.5 years of hard, irrefutable data provided by the Armageddon staff prove.
The question is "Why?" Why is it this game had roughly 3 times as many active members with less active staff at the turn of the millennia, which over a 4.5 year period had just under 10,000 new player accounts, has an average of 30 players active now?
Imbeciles will tell you Arm is competing with video games, because apparently they're too young or stupid to realize Arm was competing with video games back when Arm was more popular. Bullshit artists will blame this forum, because somehow not having to die repeatedly trying to figure out how to hunt makes playing Arm pointless. Contrarians will tell you Arm has a stable group of people and history doesn't exist before it was 30 people then say some stupid nonsense about seasonal activity levels. Apologists will spend most of their post talking in circles after complementing how good the staffs' abs look up on that cross they're dying for our sins on.
What these people can't tell you, because they've never been on staff and because many of them have crippling learning defects, is that there has been a long-running trend on staff against individualism. Back in the late 1990's and early 2000's, the playerbase was a mix of driven individualists and a variety of cliquey retards. At present it is predominantly cliquey retards at both the staff and player levels. What is the difference between these two groups?
Driven individualists want to play their character to the best of their ability within the confines of the game. I'm not referring to minmaxing (though I'm not excluding it), I'm referring to the desire to pursue what they envisioned as their character and have it play out in the world. They seek leadership positions if it serves the accomplishment of their goals. As leaders, they use their subordinates to achieve their ambitions. Driven individualists create a great deal of activity because they mostly have to find things players can accomplish in game in order to pursue their goals.
Cliquey retards want to be in a group and socialize and exercise social power. For many of them, the game is a substitute for self-esteem they do not receive in real life, and for others they just want to socialize in a game setting. They seek leadership as an acknowledgment of their worthiness and don't really care how they get it. As leaders, they view their position as a source of external validation and expect some degree of pomp and respect. Cliquey retards have a natural hatred of driven individualists for not caring about social rules, which said retards believe are being broken by doing things without seeking permission from them or having earned the social status to do such a thing.
The staff, as many of you needlessly feel the need to remind us, come from the playerbase. Likewise, the staff at the time was a mix of driven individualists and cliquey retards. During this time there were also no clan caps. Kurac had an extremely hands-off staffer named Arkon (glory to his name) who let the player-leaders drive activity and run their divisions on their own but, at the same time, required they kept him apprised of goings-on and gave them little in-game support. To give you an example of what I mean, Kuraci player-leaders were given access to the promote/demote command (a first for any clan in the game) but the turnaround time on getting things like custom items was incredibly long. Arkon mainly enabled the players by staying out of the way of leaders carrying out the duties they were supposed to do as reflected by the docs. I can't honestly say if he did this solely because of his extremely limited availability, but my impression was he was a driven individualist himself because he behaved the same way on those rare instances his schedule seemed to lighten up.
As a result of Arkon's policies, most of the driven individualists wound up in Kurac, and Kurac was perpetually active. Even people who weren't particularly individualist still wound up in Kurac because it always had people online because, as bears repeating, it was perpetually active. Kurac ballooned to take up roughly 1/3 of the entire playerbase. Take a moment to really think about that. A clan with extremely limited staffer support, that could only do things with what was available in the game, consumed 1/3 of the players. I'm aware some of the waterheads who weren't around back then will be factlessly claiming Kurac's numbers would enable combat advantages, so allow me to add that Kurac had a very large number of merchants and agents out making things happen in the game. It wasn't all hunting and killing, or even mostly that, as Kurac was a merchant house and most of its leadership was non-military pursuing political and financial ambitions within their own power in the game. Indies benefited greatly from this as Kuraci reps were almost constantly available and interested in getting supplies, rumors, and so forth, even in places like Red Storm and Ruined Tuluk.
All-in-all Kurac was the engine for at least half of the game's activity.
Naturally, the cliquey retards on the staff had a huge problem with this. Rather than looking at how they ran their clans to figure out why people didn't want to play there, they whined about unfairness and imbalance and many other crocks of shit that ignored the fact players were choosing a name brand over their bland generic. Like all angry, stupid whiners they picked things to complain about solely to have something new to slap on their emotional reaction to pass it off as rational. (This is comparable to people on the GDB crying about things like the wiki leak to bitch about these boards, while ignoring what a giant nothingburger the leak was, given that the primary thing the staff wiki revealed was how much time and effort staff waste writing secret history to the game that players never get to see.) I think my favorite bit of bullshit was the complaint about how Kurac had "too many magickers" when mages made up something like 15% of the clan compared to the 33% average of other clans at the time.
Kurac was far from the only game in town. Don't misunderstand me. There were other movers and shakers in other clans who were pursuing their ambitions as well. It would be wrong to ignore the benefit they drew from having one clan that was constantly active and omnipresent to use as an in-game answering service / information network / rival / ally / Wal*Mart, but it'd also be myopic to pretend they wouldn't have been doing the same things without Kurac. Some of these people were individualists like Iakovitzes Tor, and some were staff-propped up cliquey retards like Pearl, but for the most part the staff wasn't as awful with bureaucracy as the are now and they didn't stand in the way of players trying something that could fail. My point is even though Kurac was huge, it wasn't overstepping and trying to be a substitute for being a noble or a templar.
The problem these cliquey retard staffers really had was that being on staff was supposed to mean they made it. Staffhood was an acknowledgment they were the hot shit role players and they deserved respect and high regard. Players choosing not to be in their clans was an insult to them. Obviously the stupid peasants were just playing somewhere else because the perks were better or the rules were laxer and somebody needed to do something about that. Somehow it hurt the game for people to enjoy themselves somewhere else. (An attitude you can see reflected in the staff's current witch hunt against people who speak their minds anonymously on another forum, making it harder to secretly punish them for it.) The notion that players might go where they can do things without a multi-day approval process was inconceivable.
A fucking jackass admin named Naephet came up with a mind-blowingly stupid plot to destroy Kurac. Like the rest of the cliquey retards who came up to the staff through the cliquey retard Tan Muark, Naephet viewed the popularity of one clan over the others as being the result of perks. So he came up with a story line where Kurac lost Luir's Outpost to some bullshit sorcerer called the Lord Of Storms. Publicly, he lied and claimed whether or not Luir's was overtaken would be the result of player actions, but informed Mekeda off the record (Kurac's imm and storyteller at the time, glory to her name) that he was just going to keep throwing mantis at the players until they died if she didn't have them retreat. He also publicly lied that the Muark would suffer as greatly as Kurac did, since the gypsy hugbox was a block away from Luir's Outpost. Instead, the gypsies turned over a wagon totally blocking passage to the valley, and neither the mantises with their superior climbing ability nor the sorcerer who could presumably set fire to the wooden wagon could get by it. Muarki PCs were driving their wagons around the crashed wagon that totally blocked said valley while passing through it for weeks before Mekeda noticed it and manually changed the room on Naephet's behalf... but I'm getting side-tracked...
Naephet's overall "plan" was that Luir's would turn into the "Mos Eisley of Arm" and the gates would be open to the dregs of the game and Kurac could send spies in, etc. His plan explicitly called for Luir's to be occupied for no less than 6 months. Then, about a week or two after invading Luir's, he dropped everything on Mekeda and vanished for several months. So basically the jackass started plot (as you call it today) with the hopes of killing player characters and driving others off, then couldn't even be bothered to see it through. Regardless, his plan backfired. How it went wrong would have been obvious to him and his fellow cliquey retards on staff if they weren't cliquey retards.
I don't call this plan mind-blowingly stupid because it's ridiculous to have an unchallenged sorcerer and a mantis queen controlled by Luir Fucking Dragonsthrall camped out a stone's throw from Allanak. I call it that because of the complete absense of reason evident in someone trying to kill a a huge group of driven individualists by giving them crisis to react to. IIRC, Kurac grew in number after that, as now every single member of the clan had the importance of what they were doing cranked up to eleven. Player-leaders came up with countless things to do as a result of role playing scrambling to build a temporary outpost to keep business moving, researching options for retaking Luir's, trying to juggle political alliances, etc. It bolstered Kurac in pretty much every conceivable channel for player activity.
The aftermath of Naephet shitting the cliquey retards' bed was they eventually got the clan caps they cried for. This was some time after harassing Mekeda on the IDB for not doing a good enough job documenting Naephet's ridiculous plot for him. The caps did not immediately hurt the game, but they were the beginning of the culture shift that has resulted in the now. The cliquey retards continued to slowly drive up their numbers on the staff and drive off the driven individualists. Cliquey retards don't create activity. They create opportunities for you to let them know how much you revere them. Anything else is disinteresting.
So at the same time Kurac was busy being successful, the clans run by cliquey retard staffers were busy sewing the seeds of what would become the current dominant staff culture. Namely a mixture of wannabe writers adding to the mostly-secret lore and bureaucrats trying to avoid having to do anything requested of them by some filthy peasant lesser. If you told them what you were planning, and there was a good chance it'd interfere with another retard's goings-on, you'd be "detected" by the templarate or guards or whatever and get your shit ruined (or as it's known today, a "world response"). These staffers simultaneously made themselves more and more the dictators of activity while becoming more and more frustrated by being bothered to do anything. Of course, if you were an immpet (the slur for people receiving staff favoritism) or part of the immpet clan (Tan Muark), you could do things like murder a Tuluki noble on your wagon while in Tuluk and not ever suffer consequences for it. You know, because it pays to be in the clique with your fellow retards.
Before I move on, let's say you're unconvinced Kurac's population was a good thing. You know what? That's not an unreasonable opinion and I am glad to address it. What should have happened to resolve the issue? The staff should have done the following. First, study Kurac to understand why it worked, instead of putting their egos on the line and leaving the only possible conclusion that players were just a bunch of stupid assholes chasing perks. Second, either implement what was working right in Kurac themselves -or- offering Kuraci leader PCs an opportunity to fix the staffs' mismanaged clans by playing a rival to Kurac there. The thing about being a driven individualist in a game is you love having competent rivals to compete against. The most attractive "perk" you could offer competent leader PCs is getting to have each other to plot against on an even playing field (meaning as players, without staff picking who "wins"). Naturally, this was beyond them, as being on staff was proof of their worth and the authority to punish detractors rather than a responsibility to equals who serve a lesser role in a fucking game.
Let's fast-forward to the present.
Armageddon MUD, in its current state, is the end game of the cliquey retards overtaking the staff after a two decade culture war. It's a game where a player is incapable of making almost anything happen unless the staff is around to approve it. People who don't know what the fuck they're talking about would disagree with me, because as cliquey retards their ambitions amount to getting in-game oral sex with 200-word flower emotes from someone fawning over how important they must be. Why wouldn't the thousands of people who've tried Arm in recent years leave? It's yet another game where they can't really do anything despite being lied to that they could. They stayed only long enough to find that out. This forum probably sped up the process. That's a good thing; people shouldn't have to find out IC they don't matter and will be punished if they try to matter. Almost all of its glory is the remnant of better players who were driven off.
Even when someone makes it onto staff with their head on their shoulders instead of up their own ass, they can't overcome the drag factor of the current state of the game. All the policies are built around a massive bureaucracy where the staff has to coordinate everything, with the request tool serving as as a black box for banning player-driven activity while preventing any public discussion of why. Beyond this problem is a much more troubling one. Changing things at the top won't unlock activity like it might have 3 or 4 years ago. The driven individualist players aren't there anymore to create activity. The most you can hope to do is change policies and hope the old ones come back or new ones can be found, at the risk of driving off the cliquey retards who make up the bulk of what's left.
Everything is full retard 24/7 to the delight of nobody, because cliquey retards are terrible at creating activity that doesn't center around socializing with them. Arm isn't competing with video games, it's competing with free porn. Unsurprisingly it is losing.
In a sense, Armageddon MUD has become an OOC extension of its IC world: a blasted, barren place populated by people surviving on the remnants of a greater time. Nearly all of the stories worth mentioning are echoes from of a time before the current culture set in, when a driven person could play their character as they wanted to regardless of if they would "win" some in-game reward for it. Even the few recent stories now are from driven individualists who managed to accomplish something for a while before the staff began passive-aggressively destroying them for the crime of success as a player. You're not allowed to succeed, you degenerate peasant fucks. You're supposed to ask staff for that.
Edit: Oh, to be clear, this is not all I have to say on the matter. It's the opening volley. I'll get into some of the other stuff relating to the subject of the state of the game if anyone still gives enough of a shit about Arm to seriously discuss it.
Edit 2: If you think I've been talking about people who play social characters when I refer to cliquey retards, direct your attention to this clarification post. Apparently a lot of people read this post in the framework of more common arguments amongst players about which play styles a game should support, and play style preferences have NOTHING to do with what I was talking about.
Now, a warning for those of you who still play who'd like to respond. The cliquey retards currently running Arm have openly begun banning people for participating here.
How do they figure out who you are? They are most likely doing it by comparing what times you post on the GDB or are logged into the game versus what time you're posting here. If they're really going overboard they may be comparing IP hits on the site to hits on the GDB/game with things you're saying over here to see if there's a correlation. Space out doing things over there and doing things over here. It's not the end of the world if you sometimes post here the same time you do things there, as that will make it harder to guess you're intentionally throwing them off, but constantly interacting both places at the same times is a dead giveaway.
They are also comparing your writing styles and common things you say over here with over there. You're a role player (or, more likely, pretend to be one) after all. Treat your account here as being a new character. Create distinct manners of speaking for them. Give them mistakes or a tone you do not normally use on the GDB. If that's too much work, run your posts through a couple language filters on Google Translate, turn them back to English, and make them semi-readable.
On the other hand, you could always just imitate the style of someone on staff or just someone you hate and post whenever you see them online on the GDB. If the mentally-challenged crybabies are going to commit to a witch hunt to keep criticism on the GDB, where they can delete it and punish the authors, the least you can do is give them more people to burn at the stake. Help them realize they are grinding the ruins of Arm into dust even faster with this behavior. It's the least you can do to help. They are unpaid volunteers, after all.
I've decided to breach a subject that, to the best of my knowledge, has not been brought up in regards to Armageddon MUD. Namely the game culture fight that's rather quietly taken place at the staff-level and how that has impacted the game. I was inspired by Asche's misguided attempt to have an open dialog (a.k.a. a public discussion) on the GDB only to be met with the waterheads and apologists claiming a private chat via the request tool was public. Asche tried bringing up the subject of dwindling player numbers and essentially got zero answers, so I'll give him/her a discussion of that over here. I'm going to highlight why Asche (whose identity I suspect I know but who I won't out for obvious reasons) could not get answers on the GDB. I'd also invite anyone from the GDB who'd like to discuss it over here, but please read the bottom of my long-winded, tl;dr post before making or logging into your account, assuming you have the stones to come here.
Armageddon MUD used to average around 80 or 90 active players on back in the early 2000's managed by slightly less staff than now. It currently has 30 players on average with a little more more than one staff member for every three active players. This is the result of Arm's massive, inexcusable churn rate, which I mathematically proved back in 2014 using data publicly released by Nyr and made charts that even them dimmest of contrarians could follow. 99.22% of people who play Arm don't stay. That's what 4.5 years of hard, irrefutable data provided by the Armageddon staff prove.
The question is "Why?" Why is it this game had roughly 3 times as many active members with less active staff at the turn of the millennia, which over a 4.5 year period had just under 10,000 new player accounts, has an average of 30 players active now?
Imbeciles will tell you Arm is competing with video games, because apparently they're too young or stupid to realize Arm was competing with video games back when Arm was more popular. Bullshit artists will blame this forum, because somehow not having to die repeatedly trying to figure out how to hunt makes playing Arm pointless. Contrarians will tell you Arm has a stable group of people and history doesn't exist before it was 30 people then say some stupid nonsense about seasonal activity levels. Apologists will spend most of their post talking in circles after complementing how good the staffs' abs look up on that cross they're dying for our sins on.
What these people can't tell you, because they've never been on staff and because many of them have crippling learning defects, is that there has been a long-running trend on staff against individualism. Back in the late 1990's and early 2000's, the playerbase was a mix of driven individualists and a variety of cliquey retards. At present it is predominantly cliquey retards at both the staff and player levels. What is the difference between these two groups?
Driven individualists want to play their character to the best of their ability within the confines of the game. I'm not referring to minmaxing (though I'm not excluding it), I'm referring to the desire to pursue what they envisioned as their character and have it play out in the world. They seek leadership positions if it serves the accomplishment of their goals. As leaders, they use their subordinates to achieve their ambitions. Driven individualists create a great deal of activity because they mostly have to find things players can accomplish in game in order to pursue their goals.
Cliquey retards want to be in a group and socialize and exercise social power. For many of them, the game is a substitute for self-esteem they do not receive in real life, and for others they just want to socialize in a game setting. They seek leadership as an acknowledgment of their worthiness and don't really care how they get it. As leaders, they view their position as a source of external validation and expect some degree of pomp and respect. Cliquey retards have a natural hatred of driven individualists for not caring about social rules, which said retards believe are being broken by doing things without seeking permission from them or having earned the social status to do such a thing.
The staff, as many of you needlessly feel the need to remind us, come from the playerbase. Likewise, the staff at the time was a mix of driven individualists and cliquey retards. During this time there were also no clan caps. Kurac had an extremely hands-off staffer named Arkon (glory to his name) who let the player-leaders drive activity and run their divisions on their own but, at the same time, required they kept him apprised of goings-on and gave them little in-game support. To give you an example of what I mean, Kuraci player-leaders were given access to the promote/demote command (a first for any clan in the game) but the turnaround time on getting things like custom items was incredibly long. Arkon mainly enabled the players by staying out of the way of leaders carrying out the duties they were supposed to do as reflected by the docs. I can't honestly say if he did this solely because of his extremely limited availability, but my impression was he was a driven individualist himself because he behaved the same way on those rare instances his schedule seemed to lighten up.
As a result of Arkon's policies, most of the driven individualists wound up in Kurac, and Kurac was perpetually active. Even people who weren't particularly individualist still wound up in Kurac because it always had people online because, as bears repeating, it was perpetually active. Kurac ballooned to take up roughly 1/3 of the entire playerbase. Take a moment to really think about that. A clan with extremely limited staffer support, that could only do things with what was available in the game, consumed 1/3 of the players. I'm aware some of the waterheads who weren't around back then will be factlessly claiming Kurac's numbers would enable combat advantages, so allow me to add that Kurac had a very large number of merchants and agents out making things happen in the game. It wasn't all hunting and killing, or even mostly that, as Kurac was a merchant house and most of its leadership was non-military pursuing political and financial ambitions within their own power in the game. Indies benefited greatly from this as Kuraci reps were almost constantly available and interested in getting supplies, rumors, and so forth, even in places like Red Storm and Ruined Tuluk.
All-in-all Kurac was the engine for at least half of the game's activity.
Naturally, the cliquey retards on the staff had a huge problem with this. Rather than looking at how they ran their clans to figure out why people didn't want to play there, they whined about unfairness and imbalance and many other crocks of shit that ignored the fact players were choosing a name brand over their bland generic. Like all angry, stupid whiners they picked things to complain about solely to have something new to slap on their emotional reaction to pass it off as rational. (This is comparable to people on the GDB crying about things like the wiki leak to bitch about these boards, while ignoring what a giant nothingburger the leak was, given that the primary thing the staff wiki revealed was how much time and effort staff waste writing secret history to the game that players never get to see.) I think my favorite bit of bullshit was the complaint about how Kurac had "too many magickers" when mages made up something like 15% of the clan compared to the 33% average of other clans at the time.
Kurac was far from the only game in town. Don't misunderstand me. There were other movers and shakers in other clans who were pursuing their ambitions as well. It would be wrong to ignore the benefit they drew from having one clan that was constantly active and omnipresent to use as an in-game answering service / information network / rival / ally / Wal*Mart, but it'd also be myopic to pretend they wouldn't have been doing the same things without Kurac. Some of these people were individualists like Iakovitzes Tor, and some were staff-propped up cliquey retards like Pearl, but for the most part the staff wasn't as awful with bureaucracy as the are now and they didn't stand in the way of players trying something that could fail. My point is even though Kurac was huge, it wasn't overstepping and trying to be a substitute for being a noble or a templar.
The problem these cliquey retard staffers really had was that being on staff was supposed to mean they made it. Staffhood was an acknowledgment they were the hot shit role players and they deserved respect and high regard. Players choosing not to be in their clans was an insult to them. Obviously the stupid peasants were just playing somewhere else because the perks were better or the rules were laxer and somebody needed to do something about that. Somehow it hurt the game for people to enjoy themselves somewhere else. (An attitude you can see reflected in the staff's current witch hunt against people who speak their minds anonymously on another forum, making it harder to secretly punish them for it.) The notion that players might go where they can do things without a multi-day approval process was inconceivable.
A fucking jackass admin named Naephet came up with a mind-blowingly stupid plot to destroy Kurac. Like the rest of the cliquey retards who came up to the staff through the cliquey retard Tan Muark, Naephet viewed the popularity of one clan over the others as being the result of perks. So he came up with a story line where Kurac lost Luir's Outpost to some bullshit sorcerer called the Lord Of Storms. Publicly, he lied and claimed whether or not Luir's was overtaken would be the result of player actions, but informed Mekeda off the record (Kurac's imm and storyteller at the time, glory to her name) that he was just going to keep throwing mantis at the players until they died if she didn't have them retreat. He also publicly lied that the Muark would suffer as greatly as Kurac did, since the gypsy hugbox was a block away from Luir's Outpost. Instead, the gypsies turned over a wagon totally blocking passage to the valley, and neither the mantises with their superior climbing ability nor the sorcerer who could presumably set fire to the wooden wagon could get by it. Muarki PCs were driving their wagons around the crashed wagon that totally blocked said valley while passing through it for weeks before Mekeda noticed it and manually changed the room on Naephet's behalf... but I'm getting side-tracked...
Naephet's overall "plan" was that Luir's would turn into the "Mos Eisley of Arm" and the gates would be open to the dregs of the game and Kurac could send spies in, etc. His plan explicitly called for Luir's to be occupied for no less than 6 months. Then, about a week or two after invading Luir's, he dropped everything on Mekeda and vanished for several months. So basically the jackass started plot (as you call it today) with the hopes of killing player characters and driving others off, then couldn't even be bothered to see it through. Regardless, his plan backfired. How it went wrong would have been obvious to him and his fellow cliquey retards on staff if they weren't cliquey retards.
I don't call this plan mind-blowingly stupid because it's ridiculous to have an unchallenged sorcerer and a mantis queen controlled by Luir Fucking Dragonsthrall camped out a stone's throw from Allanak. I call it that because of the complete absense of reason evident in someone trying to kill a a huge group of driven individualists by giving them crisis to react to. IIRC, Kurac grew in number after that, as now every single member of the clan had the importance of what they were doing cranked up to eleven. Player-leaders came up with countless things to do as a result of role playing scrambling to build a temporary outpost to keep business moving, researching options for retaking Luir's, trying to juggle political alliances, etc. It bolstered Kurac in pretty much every conceivable channel for player activity.
The aftermath of Naephet shitting the cliquey retards' bed was they eventually got the clan caps they cried for. This was some time after harassing Mekeda on the IDB for not doing a good enough job documenting Naephet's ridiculous plot for him. The caps did not immediately hurt the game, but they were the beginning of the culture shift that has resulted in the now. The cliquey retards continued to slowly drive up their numbers on the staff and drive off the driven individualists. Cliquey retards don't create activity. They create opportunities for you to let them know how much you revere them. Anything else is disinteresting.
So at the same time Kurac was busy being successful, the clans run by cliquey retard staffers were busy sewing the seeds of what would become the current dominant staff culture. Namely a mixture of wannabe writers adding to the mostly-secret lore and bureaucrats trying to avoid having to do anything requested of them by some filthy peasant lesser. If you told them what you were planning, and there was a good chance it'd interfere with another retard's goings-on, you'd be "detected" by the templarate or guards or whatever and get your shit ruined (or as it's known today, a "world response"). These staffers simultaneously made themselves more and more the dictators of activity while becoming more and more frustrated by being bothered to do anything. Of course, if you were an immpet (the slur for people receiving staff favoritism) or part of the immpet clan (Tan Muark), you could do things like murder a Tuluki noble on your wagon while in Tuluk and not ever suffer consequences for it. You know, because it pays to be in the clique with your fellow retards.
Before I move on, let's say you're unconvinced Kurac's population was a good thing. You know what? That's not an unreasonable opinion and I am glad to address it. What should have happened to resolve the issue? The staff should have done the following. First, study Kurac to understand why it worked, instead of putting their egos on the line and leaving the only possible conclusion that players were just a bunch of stupid assholes chasing perks. Second, either implement what was working right in Kurac themselves -or- offering Kuraci leader PCs an opportunity to fix the staffs' mismanaged clans by playing a rival to Kurac there. The thing about being a driven individualist in a game is you love having competent rivals to compete against. The most attractive "perk" you could offer competent leader PCs is getting to have each other to plot against on an even playing field (meaning as players, without staff picking who "wins"). Naturally, this was beyond them, as being on staff was proof of their worth and the authority to punish detractors rather than a responsibility to equals who serve a lesser role in a fucking game.
Let's fast-forward to the present.
Armageddon MUD, in its current state, is the end game of the cliquey retards overtaking the staff after a two decade culture war. It's a game where a player is incapable of making almost anything happen unless the staff is around to approve it. People who don't know what the fuck they're talking about would disagree with me, because as cliquey retards their ambitions amount to getting in-game oral sex with 200-word flower emotes from someone fawning over how important they must be. Why wouldn't the thousands of people who've tried Arm in recent years leave? It's yet another game where they can't really do anything despite being lied to that they could. They stayed only long enough to find that out. This forum probably sped up the process. That's a good thing; people shouldn't have to find out IC they don't matter and will be punished if they try to matter. Almost all of its glory is the remnant of better players who were driven off.
Even when someone makes it onto staff with their head on their shoulders instead of up their own ass, they can't overcome the drag factor of the current state of the game. All the policies are built around a massive bureaucracy where the staff has to coordinate everything, with the request tool serving as as a black box for banning player-driven activity while preventing any public discussion of why. Beyond this problem is a much more troubling one. Changing things at the top won't unlock activity like it might have 3 or 4 years ago. The driven individualist players aren't there anymore to create activity. The most you can hope to do is change policies and hope the old ones come back or new ones can be found, at the risk of driving off the cliquey retards who make up the bulk of what's left.
Everything is full retard 24/7 to the delight of nobody, because cliquey retards are terrible at creating activity that doesn't center around socializing with them. Arm isn't competing with video games, it's competing with free porn. Unsurprisingly it is losing.
In a sense, Armageddon MUD has become an OOC extension of its IC world: a blasted, barren place populated by people surviving on the remnants of a greater time. Nearly all of the stories worth mentioning are echoes from of a time before the current culture set in, when a driven person could play their character as they wanted to regardless of if they would "win" some in-game reward for it. Even the few recent stories now are from driven individualists who managed to accomplish something for a while before the staff began passive-aggressively destroying them for the crime of success as a player. You're not allowed to succeed, you degenerate peasant fucks. You're supposed to ask staff for that.
Edit: Oh, to be clear, this is not all I have to say on the matter. It's the opening volley. I'll get into some of the other stuff relating to the subject of the state of the game if anyone still gives enough of a shit about Arm to seriously discuss it.
Edit 2: If you think I've been talking about people who play social characters when I refer to cliquey retards, direct your attention to this clarification post. Apparently a lot of people read this post in the framework of more common arguments amongst players about which play styles a game should support, and play style preferences have NOTHING to do with what I was talking about.
Now, a warning for those of you who still play who'd like to respond. The cliquey retards currently running Arm have openly begun banning people for participating here.
How do they figure out who you are? They are most likely doing it by comparing what times you post on the GDB or are logged into the game versus what time you're posting here. If they're really going overboard they may be comparing IP hits on the site to hits on the GDB/game with things you're saying over here to see if there's a correlation. Space out doing things over there and doing things over here. It's not the end of the world if you sometimes post here the same time you do things there, as that will make it harder to guess you're intentionally throwing them off, but constantly interacting both places at the same times is a dead giveaway.
They are also comparing your writing styles and common things you say over here with over there. You're a role player (or, more likely, pretend to be one) after all. Treat your account here as being a new character. Create distinct manners of speaking for them. Give them mistakes or a tone you do not normally use on the GDB. If that's too much work, run your posts through a couple language filters on Google Translate, turn them back to English, and make them semi-readable.
On the other hand, you could always just imitate the style of someone on staff or just someone you hate and post whenever you see them online on the GDB. If the mentally-challenged crybabies are going to commit to a witch hunt to keep criticism on the GDB, where they can delete it and punish the authors, the least you can do is give them more people to burn at the stake. Help them realize they are grinding the ruins of Arm into dust even faster with this behavior. It's the least you can do to help. They are unpaid volunteers, after all.
.
