The Era Circa The Announcement of Bride of Son of Armageddon

That's absolutely what happened.

I left Armageddon in ~2006 as a hard bitten dwarf merc (Drake). Came back to find everyone fucking whirans and that his friend, an elf Byn merc Sharak (?), (albeit a great player), had become a nilazi psionic or some shit. It really permanently altered the tone of the game. When I left the game, Fathi was on her first character as an adorable Byn runner. When I came back she was the eater of worlds. X-D had been my Byn boss Tarq, and when I came back, he was on a god-tier character too.

That was a great Byn crew. I wish they'd never announced Arm Reborn, cause I'd have never bowed out of it, then.

These are two of what I consider some of the greatest RPers I've ever interacted with on Armageddon, but the whole change in tone and theme from eking out a Zalanthan existence to one more surreal plot after another was very visible.

Imagine how I felt about it when I encountered people who I thought were shit RPers or shit players.
 
 

Ok, fine.

You'd like to return to 2005 Arm.  What concrete, constructive steps could be taken towards that goal?

Also, two of your characters I know about were in the top 10 hardest twinked characters I've ever seen in Arm.   Be the change.

He's complaining about god tier characters while being a frontrunner in the arms race.   Not relevant?

Incidentally, I precisely agree with you about the nature of power creep in the game.   What I am objecting to is trying to have it both ways.  

I think a real value of this board is the opportunity to discuss concrete solutions.   Several of the things we've discussed here have caused behavioral changes in the game, so why not make a social compact to make a specific change?

I liked how combat skills and balance worked on the original Shadows of Isildur.

Basically, you could become pretty good at fighting in about a month of frequent play, and then another two months or so would pretty much take you to your limits. You could accomplish most of this through training, and military clans had sparring NPCs around during training hours. I can't think of one problem that came from this model. People had skill caps that depended on their choice of stat ordering, they had their choice of fighting styles and weapon types and whatnot. There was plenty of room for characters to stand out and be renowned for their skill, even though you could cap out most of your shit over the course of a summer.

One of the arguments sometimes dragged out to defend Arm's stat/skill system is that they don't want all characters to feel the same, but I never found that characters feel the same in games with better systems. Even though you could cap most skills on SoI in a calendar season, the game wasn't filled with godlike heroes who couldn't lose, nor did all fighters perform the same. One guy's sword skill might be capped at 60 because he prioritized constitution and willpower while another guy could get to 75 because he went all in on dexterity and agility. He would, in turn, be nowhere near as tough; but he might have great stealth. There was, if anything, much more variation between characters on SoI than there is on Arm because you could pick your skills and essentially create your own class.

Instead, Armageddon has a model where it takes a frankly indefinite time to reach your peak. You're almost never done training, so the incentive to grind forever is there. Becoming even decent takes a serious amount of time, and becoming a noteworthy fighter takes so long that people widely embrace cheating in order to accomplish it before they die of old age IRL. Have you tried to master a weapon skill without playing loose and fast with the rules? Have you seen what some people, even clanleads, do to shave some months off that process? That's entirely unnecessary and completely avoidable with a better system.

In turn, when people don't have to feel like they're massively weakening their character whenever they spend time doing something else, they'll be more compelled to take part in other activities. On Arm, players feel so strongly compelled to grind for skills because it's always possible, always necessary in order to stay in the arms race, and because it takes such an absurd amount of time that you get to feeling that you can't afford not to maximize your gains. In such a system, it doesn't take very much disillusionment with the roleplaying environment before you give up on it entirely and start to play text-based Skyrim instead.

This could be a much healthier game if it didn't approach skillgains in this manner. There's no benefit to the way Arm does it, it simply leads people into bad habits and distracts from the things that make a roleplaying game interesting. What's worse, the code overwhelmingly incentivizes doing one thing and then the mores of the game aggressively chastise players for doing that. When you're on your first reasonably long-lived warrior and discover that mastering a weapon skill without twinking is likely to take you the better part of a RL year, is the player supposed to think "well, I guess I can just forget about that"? Or are they not more likely to think "let's find a way to make that process tolerable"? Next step is the discovery that doing so is largely mutually exclusive with roleplaying, because you don't get much interaction from sitting in dark gortok dens. When too many players resort to that, the game ends up feeling really empty.

Twinking is nobody's fault but the game itself, because it's designed in such a way that it's the only thing that makes sense. The wildly random stats, the absurdly wide skillgain scale, the activities required in order to improve past middling levels... this all has compelled generations of players to do something that the staff expressly doesn't want you to do. Don't blame players for that. Armageddon has always suffered from this bizarre conundrum where the code tells you "do this!" while the staff and the Lizzies tell you "never do this!" It's actually one of the most severe failures of game design that I've ever seen, and staff has never been willing to acknowledge that this problem exists. I don't know why.

My snap answer is "be willing to hurt pcs without killing them".   A big part of the arms race to me is that I know where a couple pkillers are.  Until those characters die, I have to avoid that section of the map, or be able to go head to head to have a character with any kind of story.   I'll admit I grind without story until I feel like I can risk contact with other pcs.

I suspect that a group of players could agree to have characters in the Byn without extended subguilds.   You'd get one or two outliers, but a group of characters without protectors, slipknives, and empowerment ruks would probably feel more level.  This in turn, would give more opportunity to let some people shine.

There was a period in the Byn with Russ and Ryatt as Sergeants was a good example of what pcs can do as flawed leaders.   There was corruption, graft, politic-ing, and enough pcs that there was always something going on.

I wont claim to know how to fix merchants.  I stopped playing them even though I like them, because I find them pointless outside of gearing up other pcs.