Idle Speculation: Lazy Role Call Edition

Thankfully, they're dead. And if they ever resurface, they're going to be a lot more different and hopefully more awesome. Doesnt really make much difference at this point. Let the dead mary sue lay in pieces. .

Back when I played a couple of years ago, you could tell who the staff alts and staff pets were by looking at who was having the most success building their own merchant house or raider group, or building up a solo raider PC. It didn't hurt that I had a staff friend who was willing to tell me who plays whom, and how certain staff would see who is online and where they were before logging into their mortal PC to raid them. Something that is explicitly against staff's rules. I can't imagine that behavior has changed much now that the Producers are even more detached from the social and roleplaying aspects of the game and focused more singularly on code.

*massaging temples*

What I really want to do right now is call you a liar, but, obviously, someone on staff gave you the code of the entire game.  So, it's hard for me to easily dismiss that this happened.


I mean, historically, we had Bhag who would use his own PCs - while controling multiple PCs within multiple clans simultaneously - to influence things in his favor, things that negatively impacted me as a player and maybe even, in a way, contributed to the second pieces of karma I received:

A sympathic imm or imms saw how Bhag had just PK'd my Rebellion spy (2000-2001) with his PC Red Robe Templar avatar, and that's probably how I received desert elf/Blackwing karma after the death of that character.  A separate imm probably saw how this was just the result of Bhag abusing OOC information and decided to give me a cookie after that long-lived PC died to imm abuse of OOC info.  Just a theory, but, in retrospect, it makes sense

I'm digressing some, but everyone kinda knew that Bhag was playing that templar, just like how everyone kinda knew he was playing a Tor noble and a gypsy at the same time.  But, you know, I was probably only 15-16 at the time, so, while I knew these facts, it didn't really push me to the point of saying or complaining about it.

When I was a kid, I viewed staff as kinda like coaches or teachers, you know, people in positions of authority that you respected and that you trusted.  I was a pretty good kid and always had a drive to perform well for teachers and coaches, and this definitely extended to ArmageddonMUD.  In a similar vein, well, I was raised in the Deep South where religiously, socially, politically, and in terms of interacting with authority figures, you aren't supposed really question people who are in charge of you.

When Bhag killed that Rebellion PC of mine despite knowing he did it with OOC info, I was just kinda like "Oh well, that sucked!"  I didn't become indignant or get mad or lash out or start throwing around accusations on the GDB or via emails about the rules of the game being broken.  But should I have?

Had I made a scene about it, well, maybe it's possible that I never would have been granted karma or offered the roles that I was.  Calling bullshit was entirely justified, but, because I really wasn't to type of person to rock the boat, I didn't.  It wasn't until years later that Bhag left staff, probably shitting on others aong the way.


I'm digressing a lot here as I think back on staff abusing OOC info.  I didn't really believe that the game, in the recent past, was capable of having imms who would do shit like tell a *player* who plays what PC or go so far as to coordinate raids, especially if those raids resulted in PKs or were for gain as opposed to giving a chance to RP.  It's a discouraging thing to think about.

Some questions, mehtastic :


Was Nyr the face of the producers when this happened?

Were you friends with this imm before they became an imm?

Do you know how long they had played the game before becoming staff?

What do you think caused that staff member to share OOC info with players or otherwise form an agenda against the game?

Since these boards were active around the time you were communicating with that staff member, do you think there were any specific topics brought up here that spurred them to just kinda say Fuck It to being a serious member of the game's staff, resulting in what was shared with you, such as the code of the fucking game itself?


And look, if you want to answers those questions, try to do so as objectively as you can.  You're a good writer but lose me when your hate boner gets in the way of valid critiques.

Hate to tell you, but Armageddon staff have been infamously promiscuous, for at least the last, oh...20 years? In sharing staff only information with their friends. It is a tradition as old as time, for them to not only take advantage of the +where, but even tell people who was TSing who, and other weird little Real Housewives of the Atrium drama bullshit, that mostly nobles, aides and Allanaki gemmers seem to bring on themselves.

That said. The vast majority of staff (90%ish?) are as ignorant of the game's fundamental mechanics, even as to simple stuff like how learning combat skills work, as most players are. There have been repeated cases of staff claiming things worked a certain way, only to be dead wrong, or for former staff, with no love for the game, to still not know for sure how things worked. Most staffers tend to be chosen from the ranks of those who mostly stick to social PCs and gickers. Those rare few old school staff selected from combat twinks were the source for most of what we thought we knew about how the game worked, for most of the game's existence.

But even the most ignorant fuckhole time server could easily see who was playing what, when, and where, and they were quite free in sharing that information, and making alts to go squirm themselves into whatever looked fun on the grid. And as I experienced personally, they were perfectly happy to use that information to arrange PKs as well. I witnessed several extremely unethical PKs in my time in Arm, such as would get most people banned, but which went entirely unpunished. 

Typically, it worked in the fashion of one staffer being extra nice and supportive of another staffer's alts plus friends, and that staffer returning the favor. It was rarely as blatant as them puffing up the same clan that they were in, but sometimes it was (gypsies).

There is probably not a day that goes by, without someone on staff, sharing privileged information with a non-staff or former staff friend. Most of it's in the vein of who's doing what to whom on the grid.

Meh, hasn’t said anything that you didn’t know already deep down. He’s pretty much confirmed the things that have been said over the years. I’ll summarize in bullet points

*staff doesn’t give a shit about most players.
*staff favors certain players over others and that can change like the wind does
*staff does cheat
*staff uses knowledge to benefit their players and/or friends.

The reason it’s so hard to believe is because that absolutely isn’t what staff should be doing at any point. When it’s discovered that staff member should be rolled out of the game on a razor blade slide.

It’s also hard to believe because they keep saying “...but it’s different now, we don’t do anything like that.”

The reason it’s so hard to believe is because you’ve been lied to, taking your personal time to do something that in essence was meaningless in a bad way, not really for your enjoyment but for someone else’s.

That’s a tough pill to swallow. But looking at the history of the board here that’s what it amounts to. A lot of people refuse to see that and continue playing.