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There's a few things I will say about this and please note I have not played Armageddon in quite awhile, I am officially banned, and I'm not as up to date on stuff as I probably should be to comment. That being said lets layout some of the issues with this new move.

+ Incentivizing Plots

How many staff are there? How many SRs for 3 spheres (Allanak, Luirs, Tribal Lands)? What rank can a PC reach before being force stored for accumulating to much power/station to be around the plebs? What counts as a plot, like is changing a curtain to a solid door a PLOT or still impossible?

I ask these questions because plot can mean a lot of things. Plot can be progressing your personal story, the story of a small group of people, or providing content for multiple clans to interact in. Lets use an anecdotal list of "plots" from Elrum 'Banished' Irofel. Elrum was a Circle Bard and via animations and RP with Youko he learned that petitioning Chosen/Faithful for 'donations' to the Circle was something the Masters liked. So he often concocted situations or RP hooks to encourage donations to the circle (like offering to look into lore on a subject that Chosen didn't have a book about). That is a personal plot. Then you have something like the original Citizen's Call which was a plot developed by Elrum to get back into the good graces of the Circle after banishment #1. This 'plot' was about training Tuluki's on how to fight Kryl and thus lower the deathrate. It had multiple clans involved since someone could choose to sponsor it and hold contests after training and blah blah blah. That is a very rudimentary recurring plot that involves multiple organizations. It allows them to push their own plots, but doesn't have much substance itself. Finally you have "dramatic plot" wherein a bard was killed in Allanak, Elrum traveled there to learn what happened and possibly assassinate a noble. This was a plot/adventure in the more traditional sense that there was a clear goal, parties, and the outcome led to future conflict.

Now the majority of these were done with little to no staff help. If the staff are SUPPORTING a plot you can do stuff like organize a hunt for a spider/kryl nest with dynamic world/npc responses. Clear the land/desert near a location and change the room descs to progress some future agenda (like clearing away a portion of the Grey Forest to setup a well (or whatever). Investigate ruins for cool shit and get dynamic world responses and you know... artifacts/relics worth dragging a party of people out to search around for.

What kind of plots are the staff incentivizing with this reward program and why don't they just SUPPORT plots which is the real incentivization that player's want. They want to make a difference in the world, leave a little mark, do something different than hunt tembo #908471098741 and kill weird kryl #4129874190874. Incentivize by enabling not rewarding or you know do both.

+ The Rewards

Why is this shit in a raffle at all? Why aren't staff just giving out custom scars whenever a custom scar is warrented or a custom tattoo. Like it's not as if these aren't very easy to sdesc/ldesc on the fly. What's a vanity item? How about just providing unique items when appropriate to the plots being run? If I run some kind of Merchant House search for lost whatever... Do I need to win a raffle to get a mcguffin for my merchant house to find? If I don't win the raffle will I get called a failure? Not that failing is bad storywise, but it's worth asking.

+ Leadership Roles/Sponsor Roles

Isn't the carrot/stick method of promoting plots within the playerbase to grant cool and limited character roles within the templerate, merchant houses, and tribes to people trusted by staff to be a plot mover? The stick being if you suck at it eventually you get replaced or something?

Beginning a point with "You wouldn't run a D&D campaign where..." is normally fraught with regret. You would be shocked the kind of crazy homebrew rules D&D campaigns are run on. But cool I'm to unreasonable to talk to and thus can be ignored. Ignore the fact there were people that had 0 issue with the progression system (even less of an issue than me). Also ignore the fact no one else ever bothered to document or report their issues with it, just said oh no this is bad =(

Although it is shutting down the concept of XP per emote was pretty well discussed on the forums of that game. I even mathematically proved the variant between a padded emote and a regular emote was more or less nil. carrierrpi.mudhosting.net/forums/index.php?topic=40.0

They even took player feedback on the system and further tuned it overtime. The concept of providing universal XP for progression over the ARM system of rewarding spamming an individual skill is just as valid and it wasn't the only RPI to try a system similar to it. See Burning Post II and the Inquisition.

I don't even care about punishment content as I'm not part of the playerbase for the game anymore (haven't been for years). My point is solely in the false claim that metagaming "ruins" plots in the sense that they must be shutdown or ended for any real reason.

Real Conversation

Me: *copy paste my post from this thread*
Friend: I have information as a former staffer that could spoil a plotline or two. It could even spoil plots I'm unaware are being run.
Me: Okay give me an example of something you can spoil which cannot be changed so that the players you spoiled it for would no longer have the advantage of the metagame.
Friend: I know the ultimate origin of a core component of the gameworld (lore explanation and reason behind templars in Nak and who is running the joint now)
Me: Changeable. There is like... almost nothing (very very very nearly nothing) that you can reveal oocly to a player that cannot be changed by the staff/storytellers so that the metagame knowledge becomes useless/wrong.
Friend: But this is the basis of animations and actions of NPCs VNPCs and some character actions.
Me: If there is not widespread knowledge of the "truth" among PCs than changing it to something else which also accounts for the past actions/plots involved is 100% doable. Literally no one but the staff would know the difference.



Things which cannot be changed are like.... Rape doesn't occur in Zalanthas... Well you need it to have occured unless you retcon the normal source of half-breeds and blah blah blah. But even that can be changed if you go in and re-write enough and say this point forward this is the new history and new approach. It won't be popular, but it's totally doable and that's something everyone knows versus something no one knows or no one knows is 100% factual.

1. OOC discussion happens all the time by staff and leadership roles and people who don't even play. I personally have spoken with 3 Armageddon staffers, 5 leadership roles, and something like a dozen players during their ACTIVE PARTICIPATION IN THE GAME.

2. Discussion of IC events does not predetermine a "spoiler" result. I had a character killed once and the person who killed me was on AIM. All I said was oh I went to the laundry because the dryer beeped and set an afk roomtitle. They're like yeah sorry the other person was bloodthirsty, I would have waited otherwise. Despite communicating OOCly this player never told me of my impending death. Even if they had, I knew and they knew that their clan was looking to kill me. I didn't care and neither did they.

3. I think the shadowboard and even the GDB show that player mentality isn't unique. Players often come to the same conclusions. Even opposite sides of a situation often have several other people more or less on the same wavelength as them.

4. Why didn't Nergal indicate the actual collusion actions taken which provided an unfair advantage? Killing people off with the false assumption (if this is even true) that it will quell the truth is not collusion that's just a bad plan. His primary point in the story is that they sent in similar request tool notes. He did not indicate the # or even specific instance of them metagaming in the game itself.

5. As I have so often said. I have violated the Armageddonm policies as written. I was even banned years after I quit playing because of Nergal attacking me on TMC. If these players have so clearly violated the rules, ban them, adjust storyline elements to keep the metagame information from being viable, move on.

5b. I have said several times that OOC discussion if discovered to "spoil" a story or NPC can be easily overcome with minutes of effort. The staff so often like to point out PCs are not privy to all actions taken by other PCs or NPCs or VNPCs. This mean that players should rarely (if ever) have a full view of a storyline to such an extent that staff cannot retcon portions of it to protect it from perceived "spoiler" effects.

=( is Nergal really pof Raleris? We straightup discussed IC active plots once upon a time on AIM. How could such a rule violator and conspirator like pof Raleris who played MTG with me online and discussed IC THINGS (OMG) be staff nao? Surely there is favoritism in the Armageddon Justice Department.