An Actual Open Discussion On The Culture Killing Armageddon

Yeah, honestly you should be banned like the rest of them you two-bit fuckwit.

yeah im a little surprised at this. even RGS purged his account from here.

Well, not pointing fingers (ok, I totally am and I'm a passive-aggressive bitch) but you did out him way back when... which altered his posting strategy tremendously, I doubt he's saying everything he WANTS to say because look at the time between posts, the man is obviously very, very carefully looking over everything, and considering very carefully what he wants to say. He can't just say well some bad shit happened but look at the bright side, or Kim Jong Nergal will deny him access to the game he loves. So he has to be extremely deliberate and careful with his posts. He's actually reading the thread and trying to comment on it. He clearly knows there is a problem and takes an interest in our discussion

But we're not going to go over the whole how fucked up it was you outed him thing, because that, is a topic in itself, one that cost us a valuable poster, who was it? It's been so long I forget but they were always willing to engage in constructive debate, even while being very contrary to the opinions posted here. I don't want to try and judge you, in fact I am nigh infinitly WORSE than you, so if I did try I would be picked at by vultures in a scorpion pit. Yeah, it's like when someone hits you over the head with a brick and your mind is not conscious enough to tell you to stop biting every moving object that comes in range.

Bleh, nobody gives a fuck, just don't do it again. it's just a thing to consider.

EDIT: Everybody agreed you fucked up by calling him out, and we lost a very valuable member. I wouldn't bring it up if I didn't realize humans have such short, feeble memories.

Your Byn Sarge though, I recall, on the one hand, Amos is PISSED, and I would be too if I found myself in that situation, on the other hand everything that happened makes perfect sense from my perspective, given that I got to see it from the inside and got ordered to stop a thin I was not meant to stop. I don't expect you comment on that, but I did want to say it was a wild time to be a bynner, and that I had fun, even if everyone did decide to murder yout Sarge PC, it was a plot, and yes I knew of it ICly, but my PC wasn't about to put herself in the way of it and she was still grumpy, but she did say very hesitantly to those going for it, are you entirely sure this is a good idea? I'm still unsure killing him was the right idea, although, Sly said this at his funeral when the others were offering heartfelt words:

"Well, look at the bright side, at least his beard will make good kindling."

Just skimming through the thread and thought I'd respond to this (without having read anything ahead of it, so excuse that.)

First things first, they announced Armageddon Reborn out of nowhere at a time when the game was actually doing pretty well. They tried to pass it off as an attempt at avoiding prosecution for using the Dark Sun IP, which somebody (Sanvean? Adhira? Some female admin) insinuated was coming because of some stupid post Delerak made on the Wizards of the Coast forum. Anyway, it wasn't very believable. I don't think anybody seriously bought the idea that Arm Reborn was a necessary evil. Whatever the case, it came suddenly out of the blue at a time when the game didn't need it particularly badly. The game had certainly begun the decline that we've witnessed for the past decade, but it was by no means in a dire state -- for instance, this was the time when the Guild was bustling under Gin. Hardly a dying game in desperate need of re-branding in order to stay alive. Things were going pretty well.

Regardless, staff dropped the Reborn bomb without warning. They hilariously projected a six month development time, and a lot of people were optimistic and looked forward to a whole new game with new ideas and (probably the main draw) modernized code. Players praised this idea as exciting and long overdue, which is fair enough, but some were also skeptical of both the motives behind the decision and the absurdly ambitious six months promise. However, since it sounded potentially cool, most were probably willing to look past the motives if it led to a whole new, modernized Armageddon, so it was generally embraced and met little to no opposition.

Since the Armageddon that we knew and loved was going away very soon (lol), staff promised to loosen restrictions on special apps and character demographics. In short, they approved pretty much all spec apps indiscriminately and disregarded the existing numbers of such characters. The result was an unbelievable tidal wave of spec-app characters. Mages, muls, mindbenders, you name it. I'm not joking when I say probably ten psionicists were operating within Allanak during this time; three of them concurrently in the same clan. I knew a one-karma player who got a psionicist. They'd started playing less than a year ago and was now behind the wheel of probably the most exclusive, unique and powerful type of character in the game. And so were probably over a dozen other players, not a single one of whom was normally considered experienced or trustworthy enough to play such a character. 

Needless to say, this basically destroyed the game. Plots would never get off the ground because there were so many mindbenders working for just about everybody that secrets were just no longer a thing. You had literally daily occurences of magic even as a regular nobody; it was an ordinary sight to see somebody pulled off their barstool with Hands of Wind, or watch people dashing around the desert with glowing orbs swirling around them. There were so many elementalists that people gradually stopped roleplaying the fear of magic. I wouldn't be surprised if the number of gemmed characters almost rivaled that of non-gemmed in Allanak. Everywhere you went, you encountered some non-mundane shit that made mundane characters feel completely pointless.

I played Hekro in the guild at the time, a quite powerful warrior tasked with handling southside business and brute-force stuff around the alleys. Despite being a plateaued warrior whose dealings were sufficient to compel Warlord Kharad Tor attempt to assassinate him in person in the middle of the Bard's Barrel, there was actually nothing for him to really do in the Guild because... the other members were three mindbenders, a Nilazi demon-vampire, two or three ghouls, and an unknown number of mages. There was simply no place for a human warrior in that setup, so he just trolled the bars and bullied citizens.

This phenomenon was present in all facets of the game. This was the birth of the Magick Lightshow RPTs that people still talk about from time to time. If you weren't either a supernatural character or in a sponsored role, your character was irrelevant outside of their social interactions. You had no place in any situation that had the potential for real conflict, because the guaranteed presence of numerous mages/benders/sorcs/undead meant that your existence was irrelevant. You were relegated to this token role of socializing and guiding the newbies around.

People became increasingly upset with this. Then one day, somebody posted a staff announcement reminding players to heed the documented attitude toward magick and other supernatural elements of the game because staff had noticed that people were growing more and more apathetic toward this. It opened the floodgates for the complaints that had been building up for several months, and people lined up to vent their frustrations with the state of the game. These frustrations were undoubtedly strengthened by the fact that we were something like halfway toward the initial six month projection for Reborn and had seen next to no signs of progress.

This particular debacle ended with the Great Karma-Off of 2007 or whenever that was. Somebody vowed to play only mundanes from now on and offered to relinquish their karma as proof, and some admin indulged them. In a beautiful and far too rare example of the GDB community coming together for something actually good, people piled in to offer their karma in a (largely symbolic) effort to get the game back on track. I think staff then promised to make things better and whatnot, but I quit for the first time around then.

When I came back like a year later, the magick mania seemed to have died down a little, but it had been replaced by this stifling blanket of palpable apathy. People had started to realize that Reborn was probably not actually happening in the foreseeable future. Many still insisted that it would come, though more and more had lost the belief, and what's worse: pretty much everybody in the game had already had the opportunity to play the most enigmatic, powerful, ambitious character they could think of. They'd all had their crack at muls, psionicists, Nilazi, undead, all that shit; and it had completely robbed the playerbase of their collective ambition. People just didn't care very much about their Fords and Mazdas after having driven a Ferrari for a year.

The rest is basically history. Reborn turned out to be a huge joke that died three steps past the threshold, and while the general comings and goings of players meant that the playerbase more or less moved on from the post-orgy slump of the aforementioned year of magick mayhem, it was now time for Nyr to have a go at ruining the game instead.


To continue responding to questions not aimed at me, I'd say that while the Reborn fiasco played some part in the game's decline, it was less a matter of what happened in-game and more the fact that it set the stage for a new type of staff. This period may have ruined the proverbial magic of the game for a number of players, but it was Nyr's generation of staff who did the real damage. I suppose the Reborn debacle may have caused the rise of the Nyrs and Noted Liar Noted Liar Noted Liar Nergals of the world in a roundabout way through the disillusionment and departures of better staff, but I think people got over the "no new things" policies and the ridiculous abundance of magick, and the game could have recovered and done well if it had been run properly instead of becoming a playground for megalomaniac fucktards.