Deleted
Deleted Member
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Post by Deleted on Jul 26, 2017 16:20:38 GMT -5
Right or wrong, what do you perceive karma has been awarded for in the past?
Short-run intense characters do not seem to draw karma to me. I see a line in the sand at a minimum of six months of play on one character to get attention.
My perception is that unclanned characters get less staff attention. Does this mean that city elves are inherently less valuable karma vehicles?
Clanned characters are subject to semi-regular staff-led purges. Tzai Byn, I'm looking at you. I think this makes it much more difficult to have a clanned character live long enough without hiding from rpts.
I think mudsex, tavern sitting, and family rp is far more valued by staff than other pursuits.
I think pkilling is risky. I'm not the only one who has killed a pc and suddenly had negative staff attention or a wall of silence. To be fair, it has been over a year since I had this experience. Lets keep discussion of that perception to another thread, please.
Any ideas what karma for racial rp looks like? I've received more than twenty kudos for half giant play, and lost a point of karma for it.
Any ideas what karma for magical play looks like?
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Post by lyse on Jul 29, 2017 14:54:02 GMT -5
Let me help you light that.
When it was first started it was a gate to keep griefers from ruining storylines by rolling something powerful and being a general nuisance. The intentions were good, but it ended up being a favoritism tool.
I'm a high karma player and I never sucked anybody off, was a staff members girlfriend or know anybody outside of the game. Still don't and I like it that way. It's not a perfect system by no stretch. In fact, I think they're doing the right thing by breaking the ladder down to three steps. It started as a reward for roleplay instead of hack n slash, which was a problem in the early days.
When it first rolled out all you had to do was play an "interesting" character. Nebulous as that sounds, that's all it took. Be funny, scary, crazy....play your character...be entertaining to those watching you. Over time that started to change and it became about purple prose: billowing cloaks, golden flecked eyes staring intently at you. On its own, not a bad thing especially to add color to a scene, but Arm is a copycat's game...pretty soon everybody was doing it all the time and soon enough...backlash.
The backlash came because people started to brag that they don't "do" anything just write purple prose and the karma flows, not ever having to use a skill (lies). So karma changed to a wacky concrete list. Longevity, communication, etc, etc. Purple prose fell out of fashion and so came the rise of the "nod and grunt" and the behind the scenes communicators. Heavy bombardment of emails and later the request tool to get "shit done". It became less about roleplay and whether your staff liked you or not and most importantly whether you asked for karma or not. Which led to players having played the game for multiple years never having received a single karma point.
Lifespan: most players don't last very long, even a lot of gdb pubstars. I think it has more to do with the impact you have on others. Staff seem to notice when you make an impact on other players. That's why a lot of times you have characters that are kind of out there. It's for attention.
Racial roleplay: For a dwarf, you understand you have a focus and you're consumed with it. For a c-elf, you're a shifty bastard or bitch that's always trying to get over and possibly black (what up my 'neckas?) For a tribal you sell birds and fuck a lot. For a half-giant, you're on the spectrum. You get the idea...you're following the docs. If you try to color outside of those lines...we'll heads will be scratched, because the docs are clear as day.
Magical roleplay: see above. You're following the docs. Except.....it's kind of hard to play a person when everybody hates you, except they really don't, except they do. So now they're people...so they still hate you, except they don't, except they do. But you'll never know until you cast a spell in front of them or you walk into the tavern with glowing eyes by accident. Then they might hate you or they might want you to make them magical rings.
It started out as an incentive to roleplay, then it turned into a listed mess, that you may or may not get...but only if you asked for it. What I've noticed is people seem to be role playing better without it, now that it's off the table temporarily.
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A Girl
staff puppet account
"And what do you say to Staff?" "Not today."
Posts: 35 
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Post by A Girl on Jul 29, 2017 21:26:39 GMT -5
Ask for karma.
99% of the karma I saw awarded during my time on staff, was granted as the result of requesting it directly.
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grumble
GDB Superstar
toxic shithead
Destroyer of Worlds
Posts: 1,619
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Post by grumble on Jul 29, 2017 21:58:53 GMT -5
I got one karma once.
EDIT: I'll put it like this... Extended subguilds are a great boon to the game, but karma becomes a barrier for entry now even on a mundane level. You can submit a special app but... if they don't like you, it might not go through.
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OT
Displaced Tuluki
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Post by OT on Jul 30, 2017 8:16:31 GMT -5
Like 80% of karma is taking a sponsored leadership role and sticking with it for a long time. You'll also help it along a lot if you submit regular requests for karma review, but staff also do (or at least used to do) a sort of unofficial review whenever you finished playing a sponsored/leadership character. That review would be a lot less favorable if you stored out of boredom instead of dying in some meaningful fashion. Honestly, the karma system almost entirely boils down to time served as clanlead. The quality of your roleplay is relatively immaterial, but your actions can get in the way if you do shit that staff disapprove of.
Going by the old scale, you could get the first one or two points for playing just about any normal Zalanthan individual for a lengthy period of time. Six months spent in a clan without negative incidents should get you the first karma if your RP isn't noticeably shitty. Basically if you emote at all and you're not visibly a moron, you'll get the "familiar with the game" point. Another year of that and you'll get the second point if you had any real communication with staff, even if it's just bland reports. If your clan staffer knows who you are and you've had the same character for over a year without fucking up, two points should be easy. Two 6-month characters will also do the trick.
Beyond that, it's just clanlead shit and occasionally being lucky with some generous admin who notices your plots. You can get 3+ without leading a clan, but then you basically have to have some admin fall in love with your RP. The more dead Armageddon's roleplaying environment became, the more unlikely this became as staff increasingly ignored player activities.
Simply being a good roleplayer doesn't usually get you very far. Being a resoundingly average and mindnumbingly boring player who's willing to spend two years taking orders for House Kadius will get you much further than being a fantastic roleplayer whose writing resembles professional literature but you play indies.
Beyond 4ish karma, you pretty much just have to do the same shit for longer and longer periods of time while occasionally playing something out of the ordinary to get your "can play mages" badge and stuff like that. You don't have to be running the game's main plotlines to get high karma. Some of the 6-8 karma players I've known have never really done anything particularly vaunted, they just stay alive forever and avoid controversy.
Emoting is a minor part of it, but people notice if you don't do it at all. There's also two sides to "good emoting": writing correctly and writing interesting shit. The former counts for a lot more, because if your emotes are full of basic mistakes, people will subconsciously perceive your roleplay as bad no matter what you wrote. If you write beautiful, eloquent and situationally appropriate emotes, some will notice and appreciate it a little while most just won't really care.
If you can write cleanly, don't cause a stir and are willing to clanlead on at least some of your characters, the rest is just a matter of sticking around for enough years.
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Post by Prime Minister Sinister on Jul 30, 2017 11:26:33 GMT -5
OT nicely summed up my experience with karma.
For me it was mostly just a matter of getting yourself under staff's radar (clans, yo) and not sucking at RP.
That said, all of that has probably changed since the last time I made a serious long-lived character.
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ibusoe
Clueless newb
Posts: 176
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Post by ibusoe on Jul 30, 2017 12:10:55 GMT -5
You can get 3+ (karma) without leading a clan, but then you basically have to have some admin fall in love with your RP. The more dead Armageddon's roleplaying environment became, the more unlikely this became as staff increasingly ignored player activities.Isn't it funny that this was a thing. Or is a thing, for those still playing. Like I actually spent hundreds of hours playing a game where the staff were largely contemptuous of what I was trying to do in their game, rather than do something more reasonable like play Nintendo. The staff were asleep at the wheel. And people argue against my theory that Arm is a video game. Arm in the actual experience of playing has almost nothing in common with tabletop. |
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Deleted
Deleted Member
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Post by Deleted on Jul 30, 2017 14:45:03 GMT -5
Like 80% of karma is taking a sponsored leadership role and sticking with it for a long time. You'll also help it along a lot if you submit regular requests for karma review, but staff also do (or at least used to do) a sort of unofficial review whenever you finished playing a sponsored/leadership character. That review would be a lot less favorable if you stored out of boredom instead of dying in some meaningful fashion. Honestly, the karma system almost entirely boils down to time served as clanlead. The quality of your roleplay is relatively immaterial, but your actions can get in the way if you do shit that staff disapprove of. I almost 100% agree with you. I think this system tends to have a secondary effect of making Byn sergeants and GMH merchants pretty important roles to attain and keep. I think they serve as qualifications for getting those sponsored roles you mentioned. I do not think survival as a sponsored leadership role proves anything other than the ability to get along with staff, and to possibly offload player service/entertainment tasks from the lower ranked staff. |
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Post by BitterFlashback on Jul 31, 2017 16:13:21 GMT -5
Right or wrong, what do you perceive karma has been awarded for in the past? Karma used to be highly rewarded for doing well in challenging sponsored roles. It was well known that playing a slave well was a shortcut to karma because of the attention received combined with the difficulty of the role. |
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OT
Displaced Tuluki
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Post by OT on Aug 1, 2017 7:34:37 GMT -5
That's also because 98% of slaves stored/suicided inside three months, so the exceptions were really noticeable.
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Post by jcarter on Aug 1, 2017 8:30:04 GMT -5
That's also because 98% of slaves stored/suicided inside three months, so the exceptions were really noticeable. Ironic that new staff seem to follow similar patterns... |
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OT
Displaced Tuluki
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Post by OT on Aug 1, 2017 14:49:00 GMT -5
Do you mean the White House staff?
Sorry, couldn't help myself.
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ibusoe
Clueless newb
Posts: 176
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Post by ibusoe on Aug 2, 2017 17:46:34 GMT -5
That's also because 98% of slaves stored/suicided inside three months, so the exceptions were really noticeable. I agree that this line of reasoning was frequently used as a policy basis to deny applications, but the underlying motive really seemed murky to me. I'm about to write a somewhat lengthy article for this board about this very sort of decision making. My disagreement is that if a player wants to app a slave in one of the larger families, this application should typically be rubber-stamped. If the player chooses to store five weeks later, that should be their prerogative. What's the problem? Are staff too busy to process applications? Too busy doing what? Staff busyness is a myth. |
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jkarr
GDB Superstar
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Post by jkarr on Aug 2, 2017 21:07:50 GMT -5
That's also because 98% of slaves stored/suicided inside three months, so the exceptions were really noticeable. I agree that this line of reasoning was frequently used as a policy basis to deny applications, but the underlying motive really seemed murky to me. I'm about to write a somewhat lengthy article for this board about this very sort of decision making. My disagreement is that if a player wants to app a slave in one of the larger families, this application should typically be rubber-stamped. If the player chooses to store five weeks later, that should be their prerogative. What's the problem? Are staff too busy to process applications? Too busy doing what? Staff busyness is a myth. yeah something about hurrr we dont want to have to worry about making the game fun for the slaves in iso idiot their fun isnt and never has been ur responsibility and just like any other char they can always store if they dont like wtf happened to them let their pc owners worry abt keeping their slaves occupied enough to want to log in |
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OT
Displaced Tuluki
Posts: 257
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Post by OT on Aug 3, 2017 8:01:28 GMT -5
That's also because 98% of slaves stored/suicided inside three months, so the exceptions were really noticeable. I agree that this line of reasoning was frequently used as a policy basis to deny applications, but the underlying motive really seemed murky to me. I'm about to write a somewhat lengthy article for this board about this very sort of decision making. My disagreement is that if a player wants to app a slave in one of the larger families, this application should typically be rubber-stamped. If the player chooses to store five weeks later, that should be their prerogative. What's the problem? Are staff too busy to process applications? Too busy doing what? Staff busyness is a myth. Armageddon has always had a slightly unhealthy level of expectations for players when it comes to sticking with their characters, one that doesn't really match the way the actual game works. In short, the people in charge have traditionally felt that keeping your character for as long as humanly possible is the #1 metric of your worth as a player. This has led to severe administrative neglect of character archetypes that are typically short-lived. Look how absolutely pitiful the support for criminal roleplay and raiding has always been, for instance. These should be fundamental features of the game but have historically been almost non-existent because keeping such a character alive for an extended period of time is quite improbable without any support because you can't fashion a meaningful hideout or camp, can't really conceal your identity, and so on. The same largely goes for slaves. Since the role of a slave depends absolutely on the owner's player and their activity levels, slave characters are so prone to shortlivedness. With most other character types, only the one player behind that character can really affect the validity of the character (I really couldn't find a less clunky way to express that). With a slave, both the player behind the slave and the player behind the slave's owner are needed in order for the slave character to "work." If either player becomes inactive, the character is rendered inert. So anytime the player of the slave or the slave-owner gets bored with their character, the player of the slave is likely to store; and since staff places an unreasonable amount of emphasis on keeping a character for as long as possible, they lack appreciation for character types that aren't usually long-lived. It's no secret that Armageddon's administration has always failed to really encourage players to make meaningful shit happen while disproportionately rewarding persistent but boring bureaucracy. If you play Steve Kadius for two RL years and meticulously document your sales, staff will heap praise on you for being an immense contribution to the game even if you were little more than a glorified shopkeeper. If you play an intense character for four months with plots and conflict swirling everywhere you go, and therefore haven't got a snowball's chance in hell of being really long-lived, staff will completely ignore you if you weren't already friends with them. That's why Armageddon usually feels like a game where nothing really happens, and the weak support for slave characters is just a byproduct of that problem. It's why storing has always been slightly taboo and there's frequently a hint of acrimony when staff discuss storage with players. It's also why staff members are almost always recruited from amongst players who played long-lived nobles who were long-lived because they never really did anything, instead of ground-level characters of consequence who usually don't live for years. |
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