OT
Displaced Tuluki
Posts: 257 
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Post by OT on Mar 10, 2018 16:13:02 GMT -5
I always question what staff actually does. I see them posting messages for role-calls and such, but when it takes your clan storyteller a week to answer your report and there's only two people in your clan, I start to wonder how they're spending their time. I didn't see any animations or plots of quests over the past week. You busy RL? Maybe it takes a whole lot behind the scenes to keep the game running. Like a gortok won't load unless someone is pulling the levers.  The game has something like fifteen staff members. Clearly something is fundamentally broken. With that much staff, there should be non-stop gamewide plotlines and daily events. There's no excuse for the game feeling dead as shit 80% of the time. They've been systematically culling content, removing over half the game's tribes and an entire city-state, and somehow it hasn't resulted in more staff presence for the supposedly concentrated playerbase. And these new classes went into testing like five months ago, how is everything moving at such a glacial pace when the MUD has three or four times as much staff as other MUDs? |
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Post by legendary on Mar 10, 2018 16:13:48 GMT -5
No, you see, then staff wouldn't have total dominion over everything that happens in the game. That's the joke, though. They have always had total dominion over the game and everything in it, because they pay the bills, do the code, handle all the maintenance and are the ones everyone else looks to when something goes wrong. This has never not been the case and anyone who has had even a role-in-passing as a staff member will tell you it's a job, a miniature job you're working for free, a labor of love because you're supposed to love the game and take pride in seeing your ants running around in your hand-crafted ant farm and loving it. The problem is that in the last ten years, the progression of staff have had an increasing need to prove it by walking around with the cocks out. This need to keep the player down, death grip the politics, the plots, even character progression, stinks of inadequacy and compensation. The majority of them actively discourage and dislike their players, resent their jobs (but not the perks) and show up to every scene with a measuring stick in hand, ready to punish anyone who might shine too brightly for their liking. They roll up snowflake characters with their OOC friends and do soap-opera drama stuff in the middle of nowhere, or they play on other games. Or both. Usually they skill grind their snowflakes while playing on other games. It's a bit funny you say that, because the highest ranked staffer I talk to, I talk to on Haven of all places. Two of them used to play Esos, one of them moonlighting as one of their co-op staff. There was one who used to run a clan on SoI (new) for five or so hours a day, then logged to go play some MMO, all while being on staff with Arm. He didn't do much of anything, not even playing the game, but remained on staff until HE stepped down. Not fired, not asked to leave to make room for someone with more time, he told them he was done and quit, having never really done much of anything but keeping all of his perks. I think that's how most of them are now. They join for the karma, the perks, the access and the opportunity to pursue their grudges, be they against other players, clans or even broader concepts like play styles and popular themes. The job is just something that needs to be done, at minimal effort, to keep all of the above. If nothing else, it would explain a lot. |
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OT
Displaced Tuluki
Posts: 257
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Post by OT on Mar 10, 2018 16:30:49 GMT -5
There was a time when I respected staff. It is a job, and it's something that ought to be met with gratitude; but at a certain point, something changed up there. Like you, my general feeling is that it started about ten years ago. Whether it was embitterment over the failure of the Reborn project or the rot of Nyr's ascendancy (or a combination thereof), staff stopped being respectable. I would love for Armageddon to become a game I could play again, a game that I could enjoy in good faith, but even the departures of Nyr and his worst henchmen didn't fix the problems that they inflicted upon Armageddon.
On some level, I don't want to shit all over people who volunteer to work on a game for free, and I don't do that in other games; but these people took a game that hundreds of players had loved, that they didn't create, and they ruined it with arrogance, selfishness and complacency. They're not people who did their best but weren't up to the task, they're people who didn't respect the game and its community enough to do the job right. Volunteer work is only commendable if you make an acceptable effort. When you tarnish what you work on, you don't get to hide behind the shield of the Unpaid Volunteer.
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Post by shakes on Mar 10, 2018 17:07:02 GMT -5
Yeah, it's sort of like volunteering at the soup kitchen but shitting in the pot.
"Waaa, I'm a volunteer!" Yeah, but your presence isn't making life BETTER. It's making it worse.
The most frustrating thing was that I could see some of the storytellers really wanting to bust out and DO SOMETHING but it's like the glass ceiling is even more visible to them than it is to most players.
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Post by sirra on Mar 10, 2018 23:25:00 GMT -5
I always question what staff actually does. I see them posting messages for role-calls and such, but when it takes your clan storyteller a week to answer your report and there's only two people in your clan, I start to wonder how they're spending their time. I didn't see any animations or plots of quests over the past week. You busy RL? Maybe it takes a whole lot behind the scenes to keep the game running. Like a gortok won't load unless someone is pulling the levers. Staffers spend most of their time jerking each other off on immchat and making fun of players, IIRC. And probably shit like Adhira talking about her cats, or general passive-aggressiveness about how someone's life sucks. But they can also monitor all the emotes of a given Clan, and so some do that simultaneously, but rarely actually do anything with it. In fact, you're better off not solo emoting much of the time, cause 9 out of 10 times, a solo emote will only have them fuck with you or send a warning, or give a shitty account note. Because they're seeing you do something but without any of the context. I once spent like 3 hours and multiple game sessions, on my dwarf warrior being terrified of X-D's krathi. And after I'd been interacting with and going on jobs with him a lot, I had some dumbass staff dock my account for being too blase about magick. It's like a character isn't allowed to grow or adapt to the world around him. He had spent like three weeks watching X-D kill mantis with firey hammers and put up walls of flame everywhere. |
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Post by BitterFlashback on Mar 11, 2018 7:48:51 GMT -5
I can't believe what I'm reading. These people gave you ungrateful fucks reaslistic moon cycles. FOR FREE.
All kidding aside when does this bullshit go live?
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mehtastic
GDB Superstar
Armers Anonymous sponsor
Posts: 1,695
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Post by mehtastic on Mar 11, 2018 8:14:27 GMT -5
I can't believe what I'm reading. These people gave you ungrateful fucks reaslistic moon cycles. FOR FREE. All kidding aside when does this bullshit go live? They're going to time it with the release of Half-Life 3. |
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tedium
Clueless newb
Posts: 164 
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Post by tedium on Mar 19, 2018 13:56:35 GMT -5
They roll up snowflake characters with their OOC friends and do soap-opera drama stuff in the middle of nowhere, or they play on other games. Or both. Usually they skill grind their snowflakes while playing on other games. It's a bit funny you say that, because the highest ranked staffer I talk to, I talk to on Haven of all places. Two of them used to play Esos, one of them moonlighting as one of their co-op staff. There was one who used to run a clan on SoI (new) for five or so hours a day, then logged to go play some MMO, all while being on staff with Arm. He didn't do much of anything, not even playing the game, but remained on staff until HE stepped down. Not fired, not asked to leave to make room for someone with more time, he told them he was done and quit, having never really done much of anything but keeping all of his perks. I think that's how most of them are now. They join for the karma, the perks, the access and the opportunity to pursue their grudges, be they against other players, clans or even broader concepts like play styles and popular themes. The job is just something that needs to be done, at minimal effort, to keep all of the above. If nothing else, it would explain a lot. That wasn't a joke. Neither was the Viv-preserver thing. Both of those are straight from the horse's mouth. |
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Jeshin
GDB Superstar
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Post by Jeshin on Apr 9, 2018 14:06:05 GMT -5
OT said in another thread the new elemental subguilds and reduced full elemental classes (presumably reduce Sorc classes too) are a failure. Can anyone who has been playing or is playing kind of layout why? Is it lack of interest in gickers now? Is it a general abundance of them making them not special? Is it an ineffectiveness of being a gicker now reducing the impact of having it? Has it somehow killed RP or independents or changed the IC culture in a negative way?
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Post by shakes on Apr 9, 2018 15:57:26 GMT -5
I do recall when I was in the Guild, it seemed for about a week or two that everyone I killed was a secret gicker. And you wouldn't know it until after you'd locked the door and typed kill when suddenly they're bursting into flame or summoning things.
At one point I threw my hands in the air to all my lackeys and cried in anguish, "Is EVERYONE in Allanak a secret gick? Why are the Templars so fixated on ME when they got all these rogues running around?"
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tedium
Clueless newb
Posts: 164
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Post by tedium on Apr 9, 2018 19:26:31 GMT -5
OT said in another thread the new elemental subguilds and reduced full elemental classes (presumably reduce Sorc classes too) are a failure. Can anyone who has been playing or is playing kind of layout why? Is it lack of interest in gickers now? Is it a general abundance of them making them not special? Is it an ineffectiveness of being a gicker now reducing the impact of having it? Has it somehow killed RP or independents or changed the IC culture in a negative way? Haven't played one, but I can guess: By stripping the classes down to one or two useful spells they gave them the problem of being useless next to other guild/subguild combos. Unless they changed how casting works, you can't cast spells with your hands full (outside of magic weapons/shields), so spells are only useful out of combat. Mage spells were mostly combat boosts, though. Things like viv heal become bandage+, but you can get PKed if anyone sees you use it. Why risk the character? Before, mages could summon weapons that let them cast in combat and use offensive spells without unequipping a weapon. You had risk and reward. Staff wanted to make people RP them more like regular people, and they did -- by making them basically the same as regular subguilds. Now there's no reason to fear mages, and consequently no reason to play one. Power gamers can just go ranger, and character-driven players don't get the conflict they want. Templars don't really get anything from tapping mages to be their minions like they used to, because a good Ranger can probably do anything that a mage can. |
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OT
Displaced Tuluki
Posts: 257
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Post by OT on Apr 9, 2018 21:13:25 GMT -5
It's a failure in the sense of being a profound loss for the game.
When sorcerers were split up into a handful of categorized subclasses, they lost the ability to really play the game as sorcerers. However, since they're universally kill on sight, they needed the extensive arsenal that they used to have. Without that, they couldn't really be the Lex Luthors of Zalanthas. When reduced to a single category of spells, you just haven't got the power to serve as a main antagonist of the game. No matter which new denomination of sorcerer you choose, you'll be highly vulnerable to something and haven't got a chance if you try to make any waves. You'll simply get killed as soon as people find out what you are. Either that or you have to hide it so much that the fact that you're a sorcerer adds nothing to the game.
The new elementalist subguilds have a problem that leans toward the latter of the aforementioned issues. This change took away almost all their magick and made them normal people with a couple of tricks. They're now mundanes with +5 to whatever their class was already doing. You can have your warrior with Stoneskin or your assassin with Strength or whatever, and it's just not very different from rolling a character with unusually awesome stats. Elementalists are no longer mages, and while it might be said that they better represent "real people" now, the game lost an entire archetype of characters and gained nothing in return. The result is that magick is now a total bore, a non-factor to practically everybody.
Maybe the old elementalists were a bit Hack & Slash, but Armageddon embraces that in the first place with its rigid guild system where any given character is strictly limited in what they can do. There's no pretense of realism in character profiling. Does anyone really try to play off their warriors and burglars as individuals who can do anything they wish to pursue but simply chose the way of life that happens to match the skillsets of those characters? What I'm saying is that as long as the game has a rigid class-based system, it can't then expect players to transcend it and roleplay in defiance of what their characters were created to be. If a dude wants to play a firemage, he'll play a firemage. Until you take the option away.
Where magick used to be an intriguing and fear-inspiring feature of Zalanthas, it's now just a side note that people barely think about. Maybe that guy you want to kill is actually a Krathi on top of being a warrior, but you can't do anything with that possibility. You're not dealing with a firemage, you're dealing with a warrior who may or may not have four fire spells that may or may not matter when you fight him. It's just so tedious and uninspiring compared to what used to be a deep and intricate aspect of the game. It's one of those cases where one has to remember that it is a game, one where we play the most fun and impactful characters we can make, and elementalists were a key part of that.
It's just such a shame that magick has been reduced from a staple feature of the setting to an afterthought that few ever have any reason to care about. The original elementalists were powerful, but they were defined by that power. You had options against it. It wasn't just a ranger who could buff his strength to AI++, it was a mage with an array of powerful spells and weaknesses that both you and they needed to account for. It was interesting for all the same reasons that wizards in D&D are interesting, and the game has completely thrown that away in exchange for a perceived tidbit of extra realism. Realism has its place, but not at the expense of game enrichment.
To hold onto the D&D analogy: if a campaign consists mostly of fighters and thieves, what's more interesting in contrast -- a wizard, or yet another fighter who happens to also have two spell levels? Obviously the former is far more unique and intriguing while the latter is only marginally different from all the rest. And furthermore, whereas the wizard has weaknesses and limitations, the fighter with a few extra spells can't be dealt with in any way outside of what you'd already do to deal with a fighter, except this one's a bit tougher than the rest. So in trading wizards for fighters with a few spells on top, you've both gotten rid of an interesting feature of the campaign and also managed to make all those fighters without spells relatively weaker without any way to compensate for it. It's bad both for those who liked to play wizards and for those who play mundane fighters.
The magick subguilds would have been fine if the original elementalist guilds were kept. Instead we have this underwhelming snoozefest where magick is barely relevant. It's just such a fucking shame, such a loss for the game, and with no meaningful payoff. Keep in mind that on top of losing a whole archetype of characters, we also lost two entire schools of magick, Nilaz and Drov. It's this meaningless culling of content that epitomizes Armageddon's systematic impoverishment. What's the point? What's to be gained? It's just meddling for the sake of saying your tenure on staff left its mark on the game, inflicted by people who lacked the creativity to add anything of value.
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