Armageddon MUD - Root Cause Diagnosis

STFU. I know Ness was there for years before, but he was always a disease, and for a long time, he was in the background and overshadowed by the others. He also took extended breaks from the game. He didn't become as influential as he did (nature abhors a vacuum) until many of the other staff left. At some point, Ness lurked his way into being some kind of elder statesman out of sheer longevity, despite being manifestly unsuitable for it. And I know for a goddamn fact his influence has waxed and waned on the game.

Trust me. I'm extremely familiar with Ness' tenure on the game. And if all you have to defend him is a mistaken belief that I didn't realize he was there before, then blow me. 

When I said 'took over', I meant they became more of the locus of decision making as internal staff politicking is concerned, as opposed to before. I think most people around here assumed I meant it that way. 

What does this translate to? Sure he got down and dirty with me by killing me over and over again in a contest that I could never win.

There are winners and losers in everything, and I was a loser in this regard, period. You were one of his winners apparently, that's fine, I'm happy you have fond memories of playing with his avatars or whatever the case amy be.

I will confidently claim that Halaster drove more players from the game than he led to it. That's a bad thing, in fact I would say one of the worst. I don't care how much good you do it doesn't cancel the bad.

I've already said that Halaster was a bad staffer. He could be brutally unfair. He used to kill people with some kind of dildo rape machine object.

However. I enjoyed Armageddon more when it had kanks and horrific humor, as opposed to what it became later on.

That doesn't make me pro-Halaster, so much as it makes me anti-Nyr. I preferred his juvenile sense of humor to indifferent contempt (Nyr, Adhira, Ness).

As for driving people away. I think Nyr and Nessalin have him beat there by an order of magnitude. I saw Nyra and Adhira pretty much singlehandedly kill off entire clans that were rocking before they were cycled in charge.

If my opinion of Halaster seems overly nostalgic to some, it's because he was more easily relatable than the Orwellian, North Korea-esque echo chamber the game became.

I thought about responding to this a few times over the last couple weeks. I'm hesitant to say that Armageddon Mud is failing or has failed. It failed me in some ways that make me not want to play for periods of time, then I come back. Why come back? Part of it is nostalgia, those simple days in college when I had class two days a week and could play from whenever to whenever. There's a little warm fuzzy you get when you log on and see the mantis head, I'm 19 again no kids, no husband, no responsibilities just a girl playing pretend. But then reality sets in. I'd consider myself a casual player and kind of a prototype gamer girl (born about 10-15 years too early), so I'm coming from a perspective that might be a little different, but not unique. So where does arm fail me?

1) The cult of Arm. This one cracks me up, but it also makes me a little sad. Ever been browsing the GDB and you read somebody's comment that's a little like WTH? A couple that stick out in my mind (I'm paraphrasing here): You shouldn't use the ooc command like ever! Or you must play during these times or else.
You know the cult, because they take the game very, very seriously. To the point where whatever their idea of the game is...literally is. You'd better not say anything about the game, they're all over it at worst, at best any dissension simply does not compute. This has gotten better, but there was a point this was scary, if you were in certain circles you got things maps, lists, you name it. If you aren't, the game is palpably different for you. That new thing you found you thought was so cool. Yeah everybody else knew about it, but you and the other plebs. But hey, keep at it and maybe you'll get accepted in a circle and you'll be included in "things". Except most people don't.

2) Characters unrealized. I don't mean branching advanced weapons or having a fort somewhere. I'm talking about having a concept you really think would be awesome. You excitedly write up a bg and description, you're ready to go. You get into the world and you get shitted on repeatedly by players and staff, until what was your awesome concept is a shadow of what you imagined and you're a walking extension of your score sheet. Because you've already been sniffed as X class, your concept s outside of that...nuh uh! Or the docs say X why would you be trying to do Y? The clan higher ups say NO! Gtfoh! Now you're bland ranger or craft machine merchant. You store, die or live a really long time. Nobody really cares, but you feel cheated. You might try again, you might not. You find yourself not really having a reason to care about certain things. I sometimes find myself thinking "why would my character even care about this?"

3) a world that doesn't make sense/lack of complexity. Ever rolled an assassin and said to yourself "why the fuck am I climbing up on rooftops killing snakes? Wtf does this have to do with my concept?" Not only that but you have to do things like that all the time. Ever joined a clan and said to yourself "so let me get this straight....we sell birds? That's it? Nobody cares about that" There it is, your character's very existence centers around something nobody cares about. If you made a list of things that don't make sense....you'd see hand waving isn't good enough.

I lumped complexity together but it goes with things not making sense. Somehow we've moved to a more social/political game. Cool! Sign me up! Except...except the game doesn't really have a social system. How do you measure who is the premier house in a city state? How do you measure how much of a reputation a character has? How trustworthy they are? The most fleshed out system is the fighting/crafting system. It needs social commands. The funniest thing is the "This isn't a MUSH" mantra...Mushes have social systems in place where social things are tangible. Your only recourse in many cases are "kill dude" or "ignore dude". There's no way to weaken somebody economically or socially. All it comes down to is whether you're willing to log on at 3am or...well you get the idea.

These are all things that are fixable. The easiest thing is a reboot. Same game, but rewrite the docs, smooth out some things, make things make sense again. Start over without starting over. We'll call this a soft reboot. A hard reboot, Arm 2.0. I'm not talking about the one with cat people. Set it 1000 years in the future, hell set it 1000 years in the past. Change everything around. A reboot probably has been a long time overdue, 25 years of crazy lore. Even comic books get rebooted after 20 years.

The second is make the game more episodic. Tell the players what the arc is going to be about, how long it will last. For example to use an old plot The fall of Tuluk. Open up the clans that will be relevant to the arc, what their situation is, etc so that players can base their character around the situation. You won't have players apping into dead clans, things have a context and players have an idea of what to do expect. I think this would be the best option to make the world more interesting and put a large number of staff together on one thing which would make the world more alive.

I still think the game is fixable and could be very captivating.

I'm not convinced. I'd have a hard time playing a post-apocalyptic game that didn't include rape. I understand that probably makes me sound like an edge lord, but I'd rather play a fast-food restaurant employee simulation than play a post-apocalyptic game where you can't rape the other characters.

Murder...Corruption...Betrayal....but no forced sex? I'd be okay with doing a MUD adaptation of the Office, or something. But a violent game should include rape.

I believe the banning of rape had more to do with how shit most people are at roleplaying around it, as opposed to some moral stance.

Far too many players were far too willing to take up their torches and pitchforks against anyone who was even -hinted- to have raped someone else. Hell, I've even had a character catch shit from a superior when shrugging and saying, "do we really give a shit?" when one of the newer runners tried accusing a trooper of some indecent act .