How ArmageddonMUD could redeem itself

TBH, Deadelf, I am somewhat on the fence regarding the language change where calling someone a pussy, bitch or a dick is dissalowed. For a long time certain RL gender norms and perceptions regarding everything from sexual preference to character traits pertaining to gender have crept their way into IC despite the objections outlined in the quickstart guide. I think it would have been wise of them to DISCUSS the change with the playerbase BEFORE dropping it on them, and explored possible alternative measures, maybe with an opinion poll, but that's not how it was presented, and naturally there was some backlash from those who felt their perspectives count for something to. All this is connected to the big picture of behavior patterns that many find to be unhealthy. This has been the custom for some time now, and can't be pointed directly at Nergal, but needs to change.

So I'm not entirely against the removal of language that creates a sort of IC leaning toward anachronistic viewpoints.

I am, however, completely baffled by the removal of the slang word for elf.

The community is so toxic because staff drove away most of the players who just cared about the game. They're the ones who felt obligated to bring up the problems they saw and were consequently labeled dissenters and bullied out of the game by Nyr and his ilk. Nergal belongs to that ilk, and while I haven't played the game or really visited the GDB in over a year, his posts are quoted here often enough to conclude that much of the toxicity is still provoked by the staff.

The effect this has had on the game is pretty clear. You don't need to be playing to find out that the numbers are in the dumps, because the few people I know who still play can't stop mentioning it. The game isn't dead, but when it can barely break 30 at 8pm, things aren't going well. It's quite clear that there's more wrong with the game than just the attitudes of the players. While too many of the remaining ones are the type of self-serving gobshites who sat through the first waves of staff assholery because they saw the opportunity to earn brown-nose points by wilfully blind sycophancy, these players aren't the main cause of people leaving the game. They're a symptom of the cause.

Staff have painted themselves into a corner. They alienated so many of the people who simply loved Armageddon that they're now dealing with those who didn't love it enough to tell Nyr et al. to go fuck themselves; and that's not a pleasant bunch of people to deal with because they're not going to be frank and forthright with you, they're going to be the conniving cunts that they proved themselves to be. Even if staff's attitudes have been blunted somewhat, they're ultimately the reason the community has grown so toxic, and it's not as though people like Nergal have been paragons of leadership in any case. Some of the shit he has spewed in the last year has been downright vile, not to mention wildly dishonest (hence the somewhat cringy nameswap.)

Compounding this is the fact that they've been pushing some really controversial changes into the game without asking if anyone wants it. The magicker subguilds were particularly mindboggling, and while I appreciate that their karma revamp is phrased as a proposal, I wouldn't count on them changing their minds regardless of the feedback they receive. They've long had a policy of doing whatever they damn well please, and so they can't act too surprised if the playerbase is starting to get fed up with them, especially after they hounded so many of the game's caring veterans out of the community. They set themselves up for that.

It could be a good thing, but the way it's presented, I don't think the actual outcome will be what they profess to aim for. One of the main selling points is to allow more players to reach high karma, but with psionicists/sorcerers taken out of the karma system, muls/HGs generally undesirable to most, and elementalists reduced to subguilds that barely resemble their former selves, the actual purpose of high karma is now mostly for extended subguilds. And the good ones are now at the higher end of the karma scale. It's clear that the net result will be that the worthwhile extended subguilds will be more exclusive, creating an even more obvious gulf between characters.

To get something like Outdoorsman or Protector, you'll now have to have two out of a maximum three karma. Surely two karma will now be relatively higher than it was under the 1-8 scale. With criteria like "at least 1.5 year of regular play" to move from 1 to 2, making it an absolute bare minimum of two years of regular play to reach 2, and a new rule that seems to require karma review requests in order to be considered, I've no doubt that actually getting a point of karma will take much more time and effort than it did before. It's a strengthening of the haves vs. have-nots that was introduced with the special subguilds.

The regeneration timers are also incredibly steep. Upwards of six months to recover what you spent means yet more cause for players to consider quitting. If you roll up a Fire Agony dude and die after a month, you're at zero karma for another two fucking months, and won't be back at 3 for five months. Considering how worthless zero-karma characters are these days for anything beyond socialites, it's easy to see how a player might just choose to take a long break instead, and long breaks have a tendency to become departures, especially considering the increasingly aging playerbase. Does the game in its current state really need more things that'll compel people to abandon it?

I remember back in the day earning two karma in my first year, and that was such a big deal for my retention as a player because it meant I had access to most of what I had any real interest in. Now, you're looking at a minimum of two years of regular play to get access to the subguilds that let you create warriors and rangers that aren't second-rate specimen. And if you make one and die too quickly, you're back to basics for months. I don't see how that won't cost them players. Even many who approve of the new system will then experience this and feel discouraged. You cannot implement one change that makes zero-karma characters feel worthless and then another that forces people to play them often.

The karma change would probably be fine if it only concerned mages and races. The extended subguilds and their influence on the character economy creates a lot of problems that aren't acknowledged enough. When your mundane character's power and potential can be increased so much by taking the right ext-subguild, playing one without them feels like crap and people aren't very invested in these characters. This leads to disinterest and a lack of ambition which can be seen quite plainly in-game if you know what you're looking for.

The extended subguilds add so much power to combat characters that nothing else can compensate for it. This proverbial arrow to the neck is much less likely to befall you if your ranger has access to master shield use, for instance, or if your warrior has master hide. I don't really care about merchants, people don't play these with coded power in mind and merchant characters almost never matter in the grand scheme of things; at least not in any way that pertains to code and skillsets. Non-combat characters very rarely affect plots and conflict unless they're sponsored.

The fact of the matter is that extended subguilds play a huge part in a combat character's potential, and any change that takes the option away from people who had already earned it and forces them to play something less for long periods of time is a change that's almost guaranteed to lead to some loss of players. That's a really bad idea for Armageddon at this point in time. It's the opposite of what they need.

edit for tangent: The new sorcs are actually total garbage that aren't worth the cost. The only thing that made sorcs viable was the fact that they had access to nearly all spells and were thus able to get away with being sorcs. Characters that are universally kill-on-sight and can't really exist inside any society are basically unplayable when you have to pick one school of spells to use. The new sorcs turned out to be even weaker than the pre-revamp elementalists and virtually nobody played sorcs since the change, effectively removing the world's #1 antagonists from the game.

I don't think it'd help much, honestly, although it couldn't hurt. There's like, three versions of Hellmoo floating out around there and it still gets played, oh, and there's an RP version based off the codebase with a different setting in the works, still in pre-alpha. What people really want, as someone else has stated, is the NPCs, the setting, the rooms, descs, items, besically like a clone, or a split off shard. It's been tried before but it wasn't taken well, possibly because it was straight up stolen. It could help in that it could give people who've offended staff a place to play the game they enjoy, instead of getting way more pissed off than they should that they were wrongfully banned and making a big deal out of it. This could backfire, but I think the chances would be in their favor it wouldn't. Plus, code developments could be shared back and forth, if mixing and matching is possible with DIKU (unsure, not a coder). So all in all, I'd say, it could definitely benefit them.

Dwindling player numbers are players' fault. Sure, let's pretend that makes sense for a hot minute. How did staff wind up banning and driving off everyone else?


If you really don't want Arm's content, I will say you can probably create the handful of original features in Arm in a better codebase.