An Actual Open Discussion On The Culture Killing Armageddon

Maybe I missed what happened to Reiloth. Hopefully they didn't do to him what they did to me:

Ban in game account
Ban GDB account
Ban home ip address

This was all done before I posted any logs, request dumps, or started any forum posts. I essentially got the "fuck you dunebum, you're a piece of shit and we don't want you here anymore" treatment. All because of... I'm still not sure. Was it having an account on this board? My quality of roleplay? Or that I wouldn't submit to Nergal's request?

edit: it's almost like Nergal just made a "we're banning white privilege from the game" analogy

Getting sensitive in regards to a post made by BFB or Sirra is completly missing the humor and using it to lampshade what accents a completely valid perspective.

I'm not sure what catagory I fit in with, basically, I am a tavern-sitting mudsexer, depending on the character, that is... I am motivated by the social aspects. I find my fulfilment, however, in earning the respect of my fellow players, or making them laugh, or handholding a newb and giving them the this is what not to do spiel... but sometimes this involves your merchant having to smear blood on their face like warpaint and charge into a spider nest waving a lit torch and screaming "DIE, MONSTER!!!", which doesn't usually end well but sometimes, it does.

I don't know, at the same time as the general consensus is, play your character, not your skillsheet... as my perception is that doing this creates a lot more interaction than not. Case in point, roll warrior, race, half-elf, goal? Aquire expensive things from nobles. Now, you probably won't have steal in your skillset, and even if you do it will probably be useless... what do you do? You make allies, earn their trust, find out who has the competence and ability to accomplish said goal, and use whatever means at your disposal to get THEM to do it. There is risk here, you definitely could be reported, or discovered, but this doesn't mean you do NOTHING, it just means it's not something you're going to wake up tomorrow, or next week, or next month, and accomplish, it also means you will have to involve others and encourage plots. Bam, not focusing on your skill sheet when composing your to-do list has paid off, and will keep paying.

I do see some of the more OOCly cliquish people see payoffs in the game that are largely unfair. It's how some players get in on plots no one else knows about, or gets a discount on custom made goods, or gets a job straight out of chargen (though, you can do all these things without hitting up your AIM list).. but just as much as I do respect the movers and shakers of the rugged indivuals, I don't think it would be anymore advizable to level a machine gun at the cliquish retards crowd, as there would be many unintended casualties, because the very trigger events observable are perfectly reasonable to accomplish without OOC collaboration. This is an unnacceptable method of dealing with the issue, as Nergal has demonstrated by banning everyone HE considers a cliquish retard, when really, the problem is not as big as I think some people make it out to be. I think the best response is to just groan, facepalm, and remind yourself they're only cheating themselves, and try to keep track of who kills whose PC so if they are actually using this to ruin FUN, then they are discovered and punished accordingly.

The trouble with getting tough on crime, we are finding out more and more, is that it just doesn't work. Getting tough on crime just makes crime get tough right back, with the curious condition that crime is much laxer on rules and regulations that tie the establishment's hands. Dogs respond and develop better when you use the carrot instead of the stick. If you keep headbutting a brick wall, there is a very strong possibility the wall will win, don't use a hammer as a screwdriver. You'd think it would be common sense by now but as ever, humans are ever struggling to catch up with the times and ever burdened with their own egos and conviction of righteousness, as well as internal corruption, it's not an insurmountable obstacle but most people will look at it and come to the conclusion that it would be much easier to keep doing things the way things have always been done, when this is not the case, as many businesses and politicians keep failing to learn the hard way.

It comes down, in my opinion, to focusing on the principle of the thing, the perceived moral value of the act itself, and not the big-picture of the outcome and the actual priorities at hand. The mind will lazily dismiss approaches and solutions on the grounds that they are something they have always been told was morally wrong. I am of the opinion that this is wrong-thinking, and counter-productive not only to the end goal, but also to morality itself if one is attempting to achieve a greater good. We have been conditioned to think in such a systemized way that we often take for granted that perhaps the wrong thing is, in the end, the right thing. We've dismissed a possibly workable and effective solution by refusing to admit that maybe setting the guidelines to dictate: OOC sharing of information is something to be brutally and efficiently stamped out, instead of simply discouraged by discussing how it's bad form and hoping the offenders don't commit more serious acts of bad form, in that, policy dictates the response, and that policy has been building upon itself for years until it's nearing a very real point of crisis.

Whereas if they'd just heed the words of wisdom, "Don't be a dick." we might not have the mess on our hands we do today.

Who's the idiot who animated on a woman in a slit skirt in the Gaj? I'm sorry, is Allanak under Sharia Law now? You going to stone her to death, mate? The amount of double-think it takes to say "Armageddon is gender-blind", "Whoring and prostitution is an honorable profession"; and then for a staff member to have the audacity to slut-shame a character: for what purpose? Is the game world coming to life as a schizoid? That's ludicrous.

Yes, Reiloth, I'm a condescending douchebag who hates life, as such it is my policy to shit on EVERYONE equally, because that is the only way to be fair.

Gosh, if he treats newbies the same as he treats veterans, the game is worse off than I thought.

EDIT: Did he pick up Animal Farm and the takeaway from it was that, wow, now, THIS is how you run a community?

Are you certain it's because they played tavern sitters and had next to no interaction with the combat? Or could this merely be a coincedence, and it's because they're tavern sitters and pretentious pricks to boot? The first thing I made sure to do before ever playing a social type was to at least try to get a workable understanding of coded combat and the like. There's nothing saying you have to be a grunting, squinting loner to play combat types, although that seems to help longevity with the way things are currently set up. And they drop that line of crud about playing your character and not your skillset, it would seem, when you hit Trooper in the T'zai Byn, as they once said outright to Kronibas, and snidely hinted at in their account notes on my pants-wetting, agorophobic city-elf Trooper. Travelled the known, not appropriate for a city elf... even if his home city is trying, desperately, to kill him by any means necessary.

Given the number of people who, for whatever reason, keep thinking I was complaining about play-styles, I've decided to restate the point of my original post from a totally different angle. I'm not toning the language down. Cliquey retards are a bunch of pathetic, entitled shits whose lives mean less to me than my most recent bowel movement, and I refuse to afford them courtesy or respect they deny to others. That said, it doesn't seem like half the people reading this understood who I meant because they immediately jumped to interpretations of characters rather than players.

I'm also going to break it up a bit for reasons you should assume involves negative opinions of your attention spans. </3

---

Figuring Out If I Probably Hate You OOC Approaches to Gaming

There are a number of approaches to joining a role playing game, and these are reflections of what the players want to get out of having played. These things are the same whether you choose to play as a warrior or an explorer or some drunk looking to get sodomized with a torch handle (wtf Evil Cabbage). Your approach has nothing to do with the kinds of characters you play or the groups you join or the things you try to get to feel like you had a good time.

All approaches boil down to one question. Do you believe everyone in the game can do whatever they want within the rules and setting, or do you believe you can set additional rules on your own to determine how others can affect your experience?

If you believe the former, you're an individualist. If you believe in the latter, you're an entitled retard.

There are different kinds of individualists and different kinds of entitled retards, but this only changes how the core beliefs of each type of player wind up getting expressed. Individualists want to try things in a game and see if they can do them. They are mostly interested in having a character experience whatever happens. They want the game world to be as much like an actual other world as possible for them to improvise in. Entitled retards want other players to treat them a certain way, and they view IC interactions as an extension of OOC interaction. As such, they want to limit what can happen to their character beyond the scope of what is already limited by the rules and setting because they want a specific experience to be guaranteed. They want the game world to be a stage, where how you get to the parts that happen doesn't matter, as long as the important parts of the script (that frequently nobody else knew of or agreed to) get played out as they are supposed to.

Game Health

Since role playing games are unpaid voluntary gatherings, everyone is supposed to be equal. The people playing the game are supposed to be following the same rules and constraints. The people running the game are supposed to be enforcing the agreed upon rules the same way. Realistically, though, everyone is playing the game, and everyone is going to have expectations. How those expectations are met impacts everyone playing and the overall health of the game.

An individualist will typically won't have their experience ruined by unforeseen misfortune befalling their character, regardless of source, as long as it makes sense within the game. Conversely, individualists have their experience harmed by special treatment. As a result, the more individualists you have playing and running a game, the more that can happen and the less resistance there is to random or negative events. Individualists add to a game's health for these reasons.

Driven individualists are how I identify people who not only want to try something in a game, but try to make something lasting within the game. They usually want to do this with little to no special assistance from the people running the game. This is less a matter of pride and more because they have no sense of accomplishment from merely having an idea of theirs implemented from on high by someone who approved it, rather than seeing their idea to fruition. The possibility that they may fail is critical to finding meaning in success.

An entitled retard, by contrast, wants to have a specific experience, or something within a range of experiences. Whether or not those things happen affect if the entitled retard enjoys the game. Because other players (whether we're talking the ones running the game or participating in it) often determine if those things happen, entitled retards take succeeding or failing to get what they want personal. Role playing is a social club and achieving their ends is an indicator of status in that club. Likewise, they are terrible for a game in large numbers, because their conflicting desires for outcomes results in a very limited range of bland compromises.

By now you may be wondering why I primarily complain about "cliquey retards" even though I haven't mentioned them by name in a while. Entitled retards, due to their lack of individual power, aren't particularly dangerous on their own. If you threw one of them in with a group of individualists there's a hard limit to how much damage they can do. It's because of this that they form cliques with other like-unminded idiot shitbags. One person crying about how they don't get special treatment is an obvious douchebag. Several people crying about the same thing may make someone mistakenly think there's an actual problem rather than a failure in proper perspective that can be cured with yelling or violence.

Culture Clash Explanation Mk.II

Armageddon MUD was the site of a culture clash between a large group of driven individualists and cliquey retards. These two sides fought a culture war on the GDB and through the staff. Arm used to be a great game where things were possible due to the sheer number of driven individualists in both the playerbase and the staff. Unfortunately, the cliquey retards, who are a meanspirited bunch of bastards that take people not playing the game their way personal, eventually drove off individualists of all stripes through long-running OOC harassment campaigns. These became worse as they developed a stranglehold on the staff. After years up there, the cliquey retards have established a staff culture of dictating all role playing in a game that's unsuited to that level of bureaucratic management.

I'm not going to rehash my original post examples. Instead I have some lovely examples of cliquey retard logic handed down by Noted Liar Nergal.

I want you all, especially those of you believed I was calling socializers and underachievers cliquey retards, to take a hard look at that bold red sentence.

It's not okay for you to request someone create a hunter to play one with you in your clan. Why is that? Because only staff are allowed to ask people to create certain roles to join staff clans, you filthy peasant. You don't have the status to ask another player to create a character with the express purpose of playing with you in your group. How. Dare. You.

Let's take a look at desertman's treatment, given he's a fairly recent example.

He makes the Byn popular by making people feel like they are part of a living culture and keeping them active. This attracts more people to play in the Byn. Staff in other clans have a smaller pool to hire from, making the cliquey retard staff feel slighted players aren't equally interested in unequal game experiences. Staff then choke off the Byn and create artificial barriers to entry. desertman goes and makes his own thing. Staff have the Byn harass him ICly over it.

What was the perk? The special treatment? Getting to be successful by your own merits. You privileged fuck, desertman. Good riddance.

Remember how I said earlier that rules are agreed upon by everyone? By playing a game together, you're agreeing to follow/enforce the same rules the same way. Violations of this largely unspoken understanding result in people looking elsewhere.

Cliquey retards like this entitled asshole see no problem in essentially creating a fiat rule on a whim, not telling you about it, and enforcing it on you arbitrarily. Similarly they may not bother carrying through with a punishment. Everything is a matter of your standing with the clique that runs things, and your standing is a result of if you play along or selfishly try to follow the actual rules of the game.

Fuck You, You Fucking Fuckers EXACTLY How Cliquey Retards Are Killing Armageddon

So by now, the retards reading this are likely at least part of the way though a response about how if everyone agrees on how things should play out then it shouldn't matter that almost nothing else is possible. This is a failure to understand that the medium you role play in impacts what can be done in it.

As I've mentioned in the past, a MUD is not a tabletop game. When you play a tabletop game, the game only exists while everyone is there. If you cliquey retards want to have a circlejerk where you act out feats of heroism or orgies with no possibility of a random outcome, you can have that sad substitute for real role playing at a table. A MUD, however, is a 24/7 game where even people who are around at the same time might not even run into each other. That kind of system can only be sustained by having as many self-motivated people as possible entertaining themselves and others.

MUD staff cannot dictate what happens the way a tabletop GM does because of the simple fact the game mostly happens without them. Any involvement carries with it the risk of bringing most of the game activity to a halt in the process for the affected players. In a MUD, staff have to enable things to happen rather than plan them. They have to animate the world rather than using it as something to beat players into a single course of action with. They have to stop using the game as a place to practice amateur writing, adding to lore only a select few are allowed to read while shoehorning players into being minor actors in or victims of it; they need to start figuring out what players can do to add to the living history of the game and recording it.

What we have now is a staff culture created by years of cliquey retard dominance. Nothing can be allowed to happen at the player level because it would require staff to have to show deference to people beneath them in the role playing club hierarchy. Why else do you think players have to be suppressed and indies have to be reduced in influence (e.g. wealth)? Ironically, little can happen at the clan staff level for the same reason. It's only when you start climbing past the storyteller rung that anyone gets to dictate story, and how many players can one or two people keep from quitting while they wait to be handed their activity? Survey says: around 30.

Thanks for that clarification. By that logic I am almost an entitled retard, but mostly because I feel I frequently have to worry about cliquey retards, read, staff and sponsored roles (not all of them, some of these have been surprisingly cool, I played one once though, and staff seemed determined to screw with my playstyle so I can only guess that's a thing they do to most sponsored roles), seemingly senselessly wrecked for what seems like little reason other than, "We don't like you, deal with it."

I have no qualms calling bullshit or shenannigans on staff or other players who play the game in a manner I find destrucive, and reeking of favoritism, and I'm usually butthurt about it but unless it really reeks of fuck-dickery I tend to keep it to calling a turd a turd, trying to calm down, and get into some other sort of fun, far from the perceived source of unfun. One particularly atrocious kind of fuck-dickery is when the hero squad comes out when you do something mean to someone "popular" and suddenly everyone and their mother is out to get you and the first thing that comes to mind is wow, that escalated quickly, almost too quickly to have been communicated telepathicly and in-person across all these areas. I think Armaddict on the GDB said it well when he related, "I miss the days when all these groups who were supposed to be in competition had the good manners to say, so? Why should I care?", although that's not an exact quote. I may disagree with him on numerous things but few things are as shocking as suddenly being the target of the good 'ol boys... everywhere, across the known.

Another thing I have been known to take issue with is the number of death-drops, and sinkholes and chasms five rooms deep with climb checks that give maxed out skills cause for concern. I think a few people have brought them up already, but I hate them. Another thing is mega-fauna rampaging around right outside the gates. That makes zero sense unless it's some magic-eating hellbeast. I've had people I was depending on in my plots to achieve certain goals get just, blindsided and anhillated on a grebbing trip five moves out the gates, by... bahamets, metekillots, and spiders. That's a real problem. Staff's attitude, and I'm just speculating, seems to be, fuck you, that's why. Join our unfun clans where you're %50 likely to be killed by your boss before anything fun happens, whether intentionally or accidentally.

That's hardly a game, and more a twisted exercise in masochism.