So what was the point of the class change?

I don't believe that it will require a staffer to deduce the underlying details of the new classes/guilds. The truth is players are pretty smart and they can seen patterns. Now sometimes they see something and misunderstanding it because they lack the underlying system knowledge but it doesn't change the fact that once the patterns are seen and shared you'll eventually hit someone who has a friend on staff or is just clever enough to put 2 and 2 together.


Trying to mask system functions is kind of moot. Tabletop games don't need to mask system functions for things to be fun, why do MUDs? Even MMOs don't bother masking information on systems anymore.

That's a valid point, but I don't think that either identity or strength maximizing should be the focus of class system criticism. My first take on the new system agreed with players that didn't think that the new system encouraged enough flavor to the new individual classes. I soon concluded that this was a very 1970's view on classes, stemming from an era (e.g. Dungeons and Dragons) where initial editions of the game had only like five classes that were very very different.

Millenial era players will be much more familiar with adventure games like Fallout, where you have a much more flexible build system that encourages not only extensive customization, but both allows and encourages your character to develop in step with adventures as they unfold. Your character's skillset becomes a response to the challenges he faces, and comes to tell it's own story.

It seems that the remaining criticism stems from three very axis of analysis, reflecting three very different value systems that people are looking at the new classes with.

There is a type of player who places a high personal value on "class balance," not wishing to see any one class overpowered in relation to the abilities or playability of the various classes. I am not one of these players, and do not feel that their viewpoint is fully rational. Most Armageddon players will have years of experience under the old Karma system, accepting on it's face that there is nothing wrong with some character types (mul? sorcerer?) having vastly asymmetric abilities compared to others (pickpocket? merchant). But these people aren't completely crazy and so their viewpoint deserves consideration.

Of the two remaining perspectives that I've noticed, the common ground seems to be that both demographics of players want to choose a class that becomes competent quickly and fulfills what they would want to do with a story line. Where these two demographics diverge, I feel is their definition of "quickly" and how buff they need a character to be that they define as competent.

I happen myself to fall onto the casual side of that line, and so I don't really need to get most of my skills much above journeyman. I noticed that pretty much all of the classes hit at least journeyman for pretty much every skill they have. That's why several players have opined that many, if not most of the classes are fully playable. For they represent some core criminal, combat or survival skills, plus in most cases enough crafting that we can develop a side hustle or something to do in our spare time.

I think that the most vocal demographic of critics here are elite and so only enjoy the experience of the game on the higher end, notably and with some justification on the higher end of the combat abilities, particularly combat abilities that don't require karma or staff supervision.
To these players, only the two or three remaining classes with the most jacked combat potential have any appeal. This crowd has overall slammed the new system because the newer builds will have to be extensively retwinked before they'll be happy with them.

Your mileage may vary.

1746

I bring up the name of a class literally once in fifteen paragraphs

Then I got to thinking about the new classes in gameplay terms. I've tried a number of them by now and the same feeling arose each time (except for miscreant which clearly got pampered): almost all of them are functionally worse than their predecessors, or have some crucial design flaw that makes a seemingly better class work out worse. Almost every time I made a character since this change, I'd end up going "no, not this one, either."

I tried an infiltrator, but it's really just a poor man's assassin. On a class that clearly needs to use backstab, the addition of all four weapon skills is nearly meaningless aside from some fringe defensive purposes. And are you really going to train up chopping and slashing? Losing master sneak, hide, scan and poisoning is not a worthwhile exchange. It feels really bad to play this class after having played several skilled assassins in the past.

I tried a raider, but it struck me that it wasn't particularly different from ranger/protector or warrior with a wilderness subclass. Having to branch disarm from kick means it's pretty much a skill you don't get unless you sacrifice your subclass just to start with it, and that feels like shit. Sneak, hide and scan capped too low to be of any real value, so it's mostly just a warrior minus disarm plus the same advanced ride that you can get from a million subclasses. Master archery was cute but seems to cap at the lowest level of master, which makes a surprisingly big difference and isn't that much better than warrior archery was. I'd rather have played a ranger.

I tried a scout and stalker. Both are vastly inferior to ranger, obviously. They have no redeeming qualities over their old parent class. The same goes for all the crafting classes, because while they've been given a few utility skills that the merchant didn't have, you don't get any serious use out of them. What are you really supposed to do with one journeyman weapon skill, or middling steal and peek? You don't play these classes to use those skills, they cap too low to be safe and they have no synergy with the roles that crafting classes are meant for. Always felt way worse than merchant. There's no heavy crafting class that gets anything I would take over the merchant's master scan, listen, bandage and ride, plus every crafting skill in the game except pickmaking. If I really wanted advanced sneak and hide on a crafter, I'd take one of the several subclasses that give it. Moving custom crafting into a specialized subclass with an opportunity cost (i.e. it has no actual skills) really highlights how much worse it is to play a crafter now.

I wanted to try an enforcer, but the prospect of having to branch backstab/sap from mid-advanced weapon skills was a huge turn-off, as was the idea of sacrificing the subclass just to start with one of those skills. Enforcer has tons of potential, but branching that potential from a weapon skill is simply incorrect design. Like raiders, enforcers also branch disarm from a skill that's nearly impossible to raise high enough, in this case bash. Low advanced sneak and hide is in no way reliable on a class clearly meant to facilitate murder, because if you ever try to depend on stealth at that level in a situation where failure is a disaster, your character will not be a success. Backstab and sap are skills that go hand in hand with proper stealth, not subclass-level stealth.

Soldier is just a pointless class. It's basically fighter except your combat skills cap at advanced, and in exchange for this you get some worthless crafting skills. Fighter is pretty much the same as warrior except the special weapon skills are no longer available, and while those were difficult to make real use of, it was still something exciting and interesting to aim for. Look at fighter branching. They don't branch anything cool at all.

And then of course you have all these wishy-washy classes like laborer and adventurer that aren't good at anything that anybody ever cared about. 

Most of these new classes are perfectly playable. Only a few of them are truly bad. Miscreant is even a huge upgrade over its two parent classes. But time and time again, I'd think up a character concept, consider which class to pick, and come to the realization that one of the old classes would have been much better suited, or that fixing the new class I wanted to try meant playing a character that effectively had no subclass. It really wore away on my motivation. It made me feel like the game had lost something, even though it technically gained a lot with the new classes.

In the end, I lost the excitement of coming up with new character concepts. They just stopped appearing in my mind the way they always had all on their own. I'd lose a character and instead of having my next one already written up in advance and raring to go, I'd wait a week to see if I could come up with something. Then a week became two weeks and a month and so on. I wonder if that isn't what has been happening to others, too.

I think people expected more of the new classes. I did, too. I predicted something new and novel, not variations and splits of the old classes. Only a couple of them have something truly novel (master backstab/sap on enforcer, and the miscreant master smorgesbord of every utility skill in the game) while the rest are basically weaker and less focused versions of what we used to have. It may have made sense from a design perspective, and would if this were a new game coming out twenty years ago. But for a game whose players have been around for years, sometimes decades, with a very close bond with the old guilds, I think it's fair to have expected something more ambitious with this overhaul.

Many of the new classes feel like they have elements that stem either from developer ignorance or from a deliberate effort to make them look better than they are. I'm looking at this lineup and thinking that the people who designed them must either not have a clue how the code really works in practice, or they knew that so many skills are nearly worthless pre-master and still littered classes with advanced levels just to pad out the selection. I'm not seeing the result of someone's well-researched desire to create a robust and appealing pool of classes. They either didn't know enough to accomplish that or they meant not to. I mean, come on: sub-par sneak and hide on a class called infiltrator?

We're in 2019 and we're still looking at an old-fashioned rigid class system in a roleplaying-intensive game. How many other RPIs have done that? Did this practice not go out of fashion in the heydays of Harshlands and Shadows of Isildur? Is this truly the most realistic representation of an individual's skillset? I feel like Armageddon had this excellent opportunity to make a critically overdue change to character creation, and they missed the mark so much that they barely moved forwards. It's a sidegrade, one that's a little more expansive but ultimately not really better. Those of you who have played Harshlands, SoI, Atonement, Parallel, Haven etc., did you ever wish that those games had Armageddon's class system instead? Have you ever even heard anybody express that opinion?

I suspect that a lot of people felt that way, but couldn't say so on the GDB because it's dangerous to call out the emperor's lack of clothes, and now we're seeing the results of a playerbase that clung to hope of a new future for character design but found a half-arsed expansion of what was already there. I think a lot of players realized that if this is the best that two years of coder work can accomplish, after all the hype and hope, then it's just not good enough. It could have been so much more, and should have.