Don't open PMs from angrygortok

A patchwork game with a bizarre community run by paranoid staff.

Game Mechanics:



The nice thing about the game mechanics is their familiarity, for the most part. Beyond that, the game loses its uniqueness and luster. Armageddon is a heavily modified DIKU game and many of its features are familiar to a player that has played hack and slash MUDs derived from the DIKU code base. It's understandable that such an old game would be based on such an old code base, but it almost seems strange that a roleplaying-intensive game would use such a combat-heavy system. The age shows through in things like the crafting system and the guild and subguild system, which forces characters into a specific pre-defined role as opposed to something the players define themselves.



Feature Set:



The patchwork quality of add-ons to the DIKU code base is most visible in the attempt at creating a complex emote system which allows for targeting other characters through the use of different symbols. This is far too complex of a system for the minimal payoff of seeing emotes that target your character in the first person, when a simple third-person perspective would do the trick. If it's good enough for 99% of MUD and MUSHes why does Armageddon have to be different? It doesn't increase immersion at all, and comes off more like the result of a programming class exercise than something done with any forethought. The craft system is arbitrary and players who create recipes seem to try to make the recipe as obscure as possible to prevent anyone but themselves from creating it.



Game World:



Armageddon's selling point is its extensive documentation, perhaps the most extensive of any roleplaying MUD. But it falls short by making much of that documentation irrelevant through the removal of locations from the game. With Allanak as the only real center for roleplay, there are no true external threats and roleplay quickly becomes tiring across new characters ending up in the same city, over and over, hoping that something will be different. The fact that the playerbase and staff largely hate Tuluk suggest to me that this second city will never be opened or used again, even though it would provide a unique foil to Allanak.



Community:



A community is best judged by its active members, in which case it is, frankly, horrid. A quick peek into the game's Discord channel will show you an endless feed of spam about nothing in particular. Try to ask a question and you will often be told to "find out IC", even if there is no way to do so. Stay around Discord long enough and you will see that the community uses former players and staff as scapegoats to achieve their own popularity. Leave the game, on good terms or on bad, and you become persona non grata to anyone around Armageddon that matters. I don't need friends badly enough to facilitate this high school behavior by being a part of it, so instead I just watch as former staff and players are mocked by current staff and players, even though they are not around to defend themselves or explain their side of their story.



Head to the game's message board, the GDB, and you'll find players who think that revenge porn is the victim's fault, that racist ideologies are just fine, and that people who like Tuluk "must be homosexual". And that's just from the last month, although to the moderators' credit, posts have been edited and deleted since. Even so, if I wanted to hang out with these kinds of cretins, I'd buy a Tiki torch and shave my head.



Staff:



To make a long story short, I was banned erroneously by staff for having a similar IP address to someone who had stolen and leaked Armageddon's code. I was told in one curt message that I was being banned for participating on a forum responsible for stealing and distributing Armageddon's code, and before I could ask "what forum?" I was booted out of the game with no explanation beyond that. I only learned of this forum after I was banned, looking at Mud Connector to find that another Armageddon player had their IP address tracked on a different website not affiliated with Armageddon. Lacking any particular desire to appeal a ban for something that I hadn't done, lacking much of a desire to get involved in this drama, and given my experience of the above and below, I felt that now was as good a time as any to leave Armageddon, with the only thing previously holding me back being my character's connection with a few others and my friend's insistence that I keep trying the game.



Role Play:



Some players are good, and fun to play with, but the vast majority of roleplayers here are uninteresting at best, and incompetent at worst. From accidental and permanent killings, to overuse and over-reliance on one word socials, to inconsistent characterization, to ignoring the documentation on in-universe bigotry and racism, to an overabundance of players that think they're on a sex MUSH, you will quickly come to wonder why this game is designated as roleplaying intensive when it rarely gets more intense than the taste of a baked potato.