Didn't read all of it.
I feel what Lizzie is saying, though I think the phrasing is a little off. But first, for a direct response:
If the game doesn't change, it will die.
Sometimes...changes are what kill things, not lack of change. We have an entire political ideology based off this in real life, because whether you buy into it or not, there is such a thing as demanding too much change too quickly and giving too much credence to ideas that look good but in reality change a fundamental truth that something is dependent on.
I am -not- against ideas, though I will almost always play the skeptic against them. I think it's very important to do so. I think it's less about entitlement or keeping things the same and more about exercising a fair amount of caution to make sure that you, an expert in tweaking things in an engine, don't suddenly make a mistake with confidence and kill the thing when if you'd taken a few steps back to listen to concerns, you could have avoided breaking it. Because if it gets broken, it's not just players getting old and running out of time anymore. It's an exodus, it's something that -won't- be recovered from, and it -can- kill the game. So...people continually questioning your changes to the game can be frustrating, I realize, but that isn't some mentality that harms the game. It's people working hard to protect it. Insistence that times change, so Armageddon should too is an argument that will likely fall on deaf ears, because what you're really saying is 'move on, hardcore armers of yore! Make room for the new guys to have their way, it's their game now!' It isn't you saying Arm's platform needs to change to survive, it's you saying that the old platform has failed, which it definitely has not. It's still alive and kicking and every bit as relevant as it was, because it's been purposely kept intact through changes both good and bad.
Which leads to what Lizzie was saying, I think. You all interpret it as 'stop suggesting changes!', where that's not it at all. The community at large today, seems largely based on critique and arguments over the things that they feel differently about. This is not uncommon or irrational, but it's gotten people into the mentality that there is a dire need for <this> to change NOW, or everything will crumble and fall! Yet if I could explain to you just HOW MUCH THIS GAME HAS CHANGED, based off staff providence and player requests/feedback alike over my time here, you'd be appalled. There was recently a clone of the game that people fucked around on, and it demonstrated some shallow amount the pace of change of the game. So I think what Lizzie is referring to is not 'STOP CHANGING MY GAME MOTHERFUCKERS' but rather 'stop insinuating that everything is so terrible that changes are the only thing we're focused on!'. The GDB culture has shifted in itself so much in just the past couple years because of this false sense of desperation that the game is dying. But the culture of the GDB used to be much more of a forum about cultures, about histories, about small tweaks and about relationships and the role of this clan and that clan and whether or not this was possible or that. Today, when you read it, it often reads as a clamor for things to be personally tailored to each of however many hundreds of players we have. Where everyone is so intent on expressing their distaste for this or that, that we aren't even talking about the same game anymore, it's like a bunch of different empires in different minds that are constantly at war to assimilate the other ones. It gets tiresome. It gets more tiresome than ideas shutting down.
The game is clearly doing fine; we pick up new players, we have dedicated veterans, and we have people who have been around. Don't be so fooled by the more vocal few; changes -are- coming. Some of them, I'm going to hate, but you're going to love. Some of them, I'll be a big fan of, and you will not like. But making everything all about changes rather than appreciating what we -do- get to play in, which is the richest, most time-tested RPI in existence, can exhaust people who just want to keep playing in the same theme as the one that originally drew me here...but with bonus features!
And if I misrepresented things here, I apologize (particularly to Lizzie since I tried to swing in and vocalize a different way to say it), but c'mon. Claiming that we have it sooooo bad right now is only true if you -want- the game to fail. There's plenty of dissatisfaction in plenty of things, but the end point is...I'm still here because I enjoy the game. Change is occurring at a slow, but steady pace. It's evolving, rather than radicalizing. And if you realize that but still feel the OP was trying to shit on you, I don't really know what to say other than you're trying really hard to be rabid.
