This State of Neglect

[Yam]

I will never forgive Sanvean for disallowing the use of "breed", "boy", and "girl" as sDesc words.

Everyone else is cool though. Good job.

[Rindan]

I have only played sporadically due to RL issues taking higher priority (anyone need want to hire a chemical engineer in Boston or California?).  That said, when I was playing heavier my real complaint really wasn't in the code.  There are bugs in the game and there always have been.  The code is best it has ever been in my opinion.

What really bothers me when I play is the quality of RP and the coherence of the world.  I really am not pointing fingers because I don't know where to point.  I don't know if it is just that many old players have left and taken their b00t of justice with them, if there is a n00b influx, or if it is because the staff isn't handing out spankings as liberally as it used to.  My complaint is that the atmosphere has taken a sharp turn for the worst in the places I have played in.  Where there used to be strong culture and biases, everyone and their dog is an exception.  I feel like a total freak playing your average Amos biggot Allanaki at times.

I think what really struck it home for me was when I was pissing around the Gaj and a southern Byner started talking shit about northies.  The conversation was something to the extent of "yeah, maybe they are allies now, but they will backstab the first chance they get, they are barbarians, their nobles are low blooded scum who are not bowed to, etc".  Two things struck me about the scene.  First, I didn't realize how utterly rare such a scene was until I saw it.  I realized that I had not seen a fellow openly average Allanaki is ages.  Second, I was really annoyed that everyone else in the room seemed to find these statements somehow abhorrent.  I was waiting for someone to suggest that maybe Allanak needs a bill of rights and elections.

It isn't just this one scene, it is much of the game in general.  Hell, you see it on the boards when you have newer players saying they don't see it as odd or wrong that the game might be crawling with magikers.  There are a dozen little things I could point out from how nobles and templars are treated and treat others, to how other races are treated, to how magikers and foreigners are dealt with.  One their own, each of these little things wouldn't bother me.  The occasional 'mold break' has never been unusual in Armageddon.  What bothers me is when I see all these things together, and the people 'breaking the mold' are not rare, but the majority.  You see people occasionally fighting the tide trying to instill more "normal" behavior, but it is an uphill struggle being performed by too few people with apparently no results.

I don't know who to point the finger at, be it staff for not spanking more often or elder players getting slack and failing to set an example, but I personally find this the most disheartening part of the game.  I always loved the strong anti-D&D and anti-western liberalism themes of game.  Zalanthas was a place where you could experience cruel injustice, racism, violence, unreasoning bigotry, low fantasy, and nasty Templars looking to make you miserable for misery's sake.  I miss the socially brutal and harsh aspect of the game.  My two greatest fears is that this trend will continue in the current game and be dragged over into the second game.

I don't mean to knock the current game.  I love it, I have fun, and the staff has done some awesome stuff in the past couple of years in terms of coded improvements and acting like decent and fair humans.  That said, I think the game has lost a fair amount of its shine (or is it grim?) in the past year or so, and I really don't think it is just irrational nostalgia on my part.

[Dresan]

As i read these posts what i find sad is how the Arm community focus has shifted towards being more code centric and has become even more so since the Arm2 announcement. Its also because of that more and more  newer players are popping up who are more focused on what was always considered the weakest part of Armageddon MUD. 

Sparring is boring, killing NPC  or 'hunting' the is boring, sitting around craft then selling to npc is boring. All these are generally code centic activities and they are generally boring/tedious, other Muds will always do it better and yet its boring there too, no amount of code will change this and it won't change with Arm 2. 

Why, because Arm has never been about the code and never will...

Character development is interesting
Relationships are interesting/enjoyable
Reading room and character descriptions is wonderful
Watching your PC panick as you threaten to kill them is fun
Looting your corpse is real fun
Mudsexxing is fun
Chatting/interacting before and after a plot/death is fun
Plotting itself is alot of fun.

The best parts of the game require almost no code other then the diku basics. It doesn't matter if in Arm2  you'll be able to be a hunter/mage and kill  carru v.2 2X quicker but how your character feels,deals with it, how it effect how other look at him/her etc etc. Yes code sometimes benifits/encourages the RP and good code is always a plus but lets not forget that 80% of the time with exception to speaking and emoting we are rarely using the rest of the code, its just never been that important for this game and never really will.

That said, thank you staff for keeping the most important aspect of the game going as strong if not stronger then ever, esspecially now with all thats going on. I never thought i would see the day when kanks would die off, for those that don't understand, skill-wise it would be like warriors/rangers losing the ability to use swords, to me at least. And thank you Sanvean, for fixing that echo, not only does it reaffirm that kanks, a much loved theme/creature in the game, have truely become rare/extinct but as a player who enjoys walking around and taking a few minutes of to read room descs in what should be familar places to him by now, fixng something like that is just as important if not more so then fixing a piece of code i would probably ICly just shrug off as a failure.

--------------------

Now since the above is more of a derail/rant to the original topic, let me just say this, (esspecialy since everyone thinking in terms of code as opposed to RP) code wise if the poison+throw code were really working and effective then you can pretty much bet everyone and their mothers would be loaded with cures. Therefore wouldn't be the best method to kill a PC, NPC wise persistance will eventually bring it down in anyways. Nothing major is broken and if you think about it all the code needs upgrading and the best solution is to rebuild from scratch.

Personally i think the overall code is fine and think the new Arm2 world could just be built on top of it and thereby being able to play it quicker but true benifit of rebuilding the code is that i hopefully have the time to explore ever inch of the old world. 

[Fathi]

Gotta jump on the "awesome staff" bandwagon. If you'd have posted this six or eight months ago, I would have agreed. At this point, though? I'm seeing some of the best staff interaction I've ever had, special thanks to my clan imms (you know who you are <3).

Kudos all around.

Concurrence.

At least where I'm playing, the game is more special and dynamic and interesting than it has been since I started. I'd like to extend this thank-you to also include the PLAYERS that I play with on a regular basis (and even some I don't) who put so much effort into making things happen and keeping the game from getting stagnant.

I will agree that there have been sometimes I've been more than frustrated when, for a while, seemingly every proposal I made to my clan and every complaint I filed was met with "this is not a priority for Arm 1, but thanks for your concern." But since the new staff was indoctrinated, I've seen a lot less of it.

I do feel that some areas of the game have suffered, and I'll even say that some seem damn near irrevocably BROKEN, since the announcement. However, working our way past that is just as much the players' responsibility as it is the staff's. Administrators could run out and fix every bug, smooth over every problem, grant every request, accept every application... but as players, if we want things to get better, we should meet them halfway.

Granted, that doesn't apply to situations like bash/poison bugs or the code, but there are many instances (I wish I could offer examples, but I can't think of any that aren't quite current and revealing) where the things we see as "staff letting the world get stagnant" could be shaped and reshaped by us, the players. Sure, we can't make permanent changes to the game world's rooms and descs and we can't make new objects or NPCs, but that's the beautiful thing about Armageddon: if you're bound and determined to shake shit up, it's possible WITHOUT all of those resources.

And hell, this is something I've come to realise personally in the last month or so of the game: one of the best ways to draw staff attention (however unwelcome) is to just cause conflict with your character rather than emailing or requesting that they initiate things.

[Vanth]

But to be honest, I see things like fixing the echos to areas to remove kank and I cannot help but wonder why time was spent on that rather then fixing Bash....or poison/throw what have you.

[snip]

How can fixing an environmental echo be more important then fixing a PC/NPC skill?

It's not more important.  The difference is, fixing a room echo can be done by a ST with 1 day experience as a staff member, by typing about 3 commands. 

Fixing the code requires a coder with machine access who knows the right language (i.e. is it a scripting issue or is in in the hard code?).  This is a much smaller group of people who are (rightly, IMO) focused on bringing 2.0 to you in a timely fashion.

[Edit: Note To Self: Read Entire Thread Before Posting, Vanth.]

[Vanth]

What really bothers me when I play is the quality of RP and the coherence of the world.  I really am not pointing fingers because I don't know where to point.  I don't know if it is just that many old players have left and taken their b00t of justice with them, if there is a n00b influx, or if it is because the staff isn't handing out spankings as liberally as it used to.  My complaint is that the atmosphere has taken a sharp turn for the worst in the places I have played in.  Where there used to be strong culture and biases, everyone and their dog is an exception.  I feel like a total freak playing your average Amos biggot Allanaki at times.

In response to this and the other mentions of gaps in staff presence:

Yes, we had a lapse.  In the months following the announcement that we'd be creating Arm 2, we had a number of staff leave, some related to the announcement, others for the usual RL stuff that crops up.  It took some time for us to get back up to speed, and we thank you for being patient with us during that time.

But our presence is only a part of the situation you describe.  I think that staff are actually much more involved in the gameworld now than they were when I started playing this game.

I think the "everyone plays the exception, not the rule" situation is due in large part to the "omgz teh sky is falling" mentality of people wanting to play those far-out concepts that they always wanted to play -someday- and with the announcement that the game would be coming down, they decided that someday was today.

[Kalden]

I agree with those that say we need to step back and look at the long-term changes in the game. When I first started playing here there were more bugs and pretty much no code innovations. In recent times we've gotten the watch skill, hide/sneak has been strengthened greatly, and numerous code bugs and flaws have been fixed. I've just gotta say I love and appreciate the work that the current staff are doing.

I also agree with Rindan that some of the problems are not with code. They're with the RP environment, and the blame lies partly on players. But I also get the feeling that the staff isn't really thinking with the virtual world in mind, and instead they're distracted by uber hugeworld magick plots that don't make a ton of sense. Why did the gith invade Allanak, for example? Why did these silt giants take over Red Storm East? Sometimes it seems like it's just stuff happening for no reason, but if all these things could be tied together (and maybe they are), it would be much more interesting. And the virtual, macro effects of these events should be played up. As I mentioned in a thread earlier, if there's a famine and bread is in really tight supply, then people are either starving or not. I shouldn't have to waste valuable staff time coordinating an IC investigation into something that should be obvious. The staff also seem to be overly reluctant to animate avatars from key clans. Hopefully when they're less distracted building the new game we can have some staffers who just enjoy animating important and sometimes unimportant NPCs, sometimes to do stuff or to remind characters of certain facts.

Players grow up, graduate from school, and get full-time jobs and kids. Some of these players were outstanding roleplayers, and the loss of even a few great dedicated players can have a major impact. However, I'd still say that the RP quality is fairly solid. I've had a great time lately. Sometimes when you remember things, you remember them better than they actually were. I don't think Rindan is right: northerners and elves are still treated as harshly as I've ever seen in my years in Armageddon. I shouldn't point fingers maybe but there's always a certain sector of players who are worse than others in prejudice.

A lot of people talk about the magicker problem. Offhand, I agree that we should do something to tip the balance so that people play less magickers, although I'm not really seeing enough magickers right now to justify a ton of complaints. I took a year off so I probably missed the huge magicker population that was driving this anger.

[Barzalene]

I will never forgive Sanvean for disallowing the use of "breed", "boy", and "girl" as sDesc words.

Everyone else is cool though. Good job.

But allowing maiden! Ugh! I hate maiden!

[Folker]

What are you talking about? I recall seeing 'breeds' in game. And Sanvean's a twink, she stole all those chests while being eatherial. Muhahah! .

As for the original post. I dont know what the author's talking about. I know muds that you have to pay to play that got less attention then 1.Arm does from staff. Perhaps I'm simply not unaware of something, but if 'all' code development stopped for Arm.1, it would still be enough to last for a long time. Minus the bugs that affectively 'crush' the game.

[brytta.leofa]

But allowing maiden! Ugh! I hate maiden!

Yes!  How can you tell whether someone is a maiden just by looking(*) at her?

(*) Please, no helpful suggestions, Angela Christine.

[Silverfaune]

I will never forgive Sanvean for disallowing the use of "breed", "boy", and "girl" as sDesc words.

Everyone else is cool though. Good job.

But allowing maiden! Ugh! I hate maiden!

Why is boy and girl not allowed in sdesc anyways?  I was wondering that.  I tend to shy away from "maiden" since it doesn't, to me, seem a very oft-used (or appropriate) word in this world

[Marauder Moe]

Because boy and girl refer to children, and in Zalanthas a child is someone younger than ~13 years old (or racial equivalent), and we're not allowed to make characters less than 13 years old.

[Silverfaune]

Because boy and girl refer to children, and in Zalanthas a child is someone younger than ~13 years old (or racial equivalent), and we're not allowed to make characters less than 13 years old.

Thanks.. I suppose that makes sense.  To me it seems like it can describe the feminine form of "youth" just as much as "child". 

And I hated the sway towards "politically" correct rp on my previous muds and sadly I have been guilty of it here.. primarily because it seems that everyone I come across so far is pretty tolerant of magickers, foreigners or lower-class people.  I will strive to be far more provincial and ignorant and intolerant in my future rp   It's more fun that way anyways.  If we all get along where will we get the foils for our characters?  We can't always have a gith wander in to focus our conflicts on.

[Marauder Moe]

Well it's not so much about political correctness as it is there was a trend for characters described as "boy" or "girl" to act like spoiled Earth children/tweens.

[Sanvean]

What Moe said. We were having too many problems with people running impish moppets and the like -- tried to rein it in with feedback and board discussions about it, and finally just had to say okay, no more.

[Akaramu]

I'd guess the reason why some things, like the brew code, never got fixed is that they would require a much bigger code overhaul (like the crimcode) than many other fixes. With entirely new code in 2.0, it will be easier to adress those points. It could also be that bigger fixes depend on the motivation of some staff members who one day decide they really want to adress (insert problem here), knowing it will be very time consuming. Who was it again that invested so much effort into wagoncrafting? 

Also, listen to Moe, he's the man. 

[Yam]

What Moe said. We were having too many problems with people running impish moppets and the like -- tried to rein it in with feedback and board discussions about it, and finally just had to say okay, no more.

Will you reallow use of those keywords if I promise to kill any unrealistic teenager with extreme prejudice and lack of emoting?

[Sanvean]

It's tempting to let you become my personal Angel of Death, particularly because the thought of an Angel of Death named "Yam" is kinda awesome, but I must refrain.

The problem, to be fair, wasn't only the players running the adorable, tousle-haired cherubims, but other players interacting with them in the same manner.

[The7DeadlyVenomz]

You mean like:
The crusty old, greyed man touchs the lithe gold-haired boy indecently?

Yeh, I can understand erradicating those words.

[brytta.leofa]

Gesturing furtively towards the adorable, tousle-haired cherubim, you whisper to the dirty, scar-faced female, in rinthi-accented sirihish,
  "How long 's it been since we et stew, eh?"
Shaking her head slightly, the dirty, scar-faced female whispers to you, in rinthi-accented sirihish,
  "Make too much squawk.  Better we get us a rat an' two, ain't it."
Hissing vigorously, you whisper to the dirty, scar-faced female, in rinthi-accented sirihish,
  "En't he weigh more'n four tenners!  How much he *cain* squawk?"

[Lizzie]

Some thoughts:

1) The silt giants taking over RSE didn't happen "for no reason." Stuff happened, and the giants ended up on that end of the sea as a direct result of stuff happening.

2) I can't speak for other people, but I can speak for myself, having read documents about the city governments...my character is likely to keep his mouth shut about any complaints about northerners in the south, because the Templars have decreed that northerners are welcome in the south. Personally, in my character's humble opinion, it's probably not a good idea to question the judgement of a templar out loud, in public. Much healthier to either pretend you don't hear someone else complaining, or pretend to disagree and say "But the Templars say they're A-OK therefore they MUST be A-OK and you should just shut up about it you big meanie-head!"

3) Almost any instance of "going against the grain" when it comes to political situations is probably the result of "Fear of Templars." If you want to treat a gemmer badly while you're in Allanak, go ahead. But my character will probably not risk the ire of the Templarate - which in its collective wisdom not only allows them to exist, but has built them a damned good looking quarter for them to live in.

4) The gith didn't invade Allanak for no good reason. There was a pretty significant story behind all that. Or rather, a couple of stories that I know of, that seemed to overlap each other at times.

As for the primary thing in this thread, I can't complain too loudly because I just haven't been here long enough to see what it was like "before." I've played games with MUCH worse staff response, and I've played games with better. I've played games where there was more response, but the response usually ended up being "real soon now" which would result in uproarious laughter from the peanut gallery and the sound of heads pounding on brick walls in frustration.

In all, I don't think the Armageddon staff is doing bad at all with v-1, though I would like to see a couple of things addressed that I've noticed, and I've noticed no change on, since I started playing over a year ago.

[Simple]

What Moe said. We were having too many problems with people running impish moppets and the like -- tried to rein it in with feedback and board discussions about it, and finally just had to say okay, no more.

Will you reallow use of those keywords if I promise to kill any unrealistic teenager with extreme prejudice and lack of emoting?

You could play that new executioner guild.

[Cerelum]

Are you kidding me, there is a guild called executioner?  I need to read on the wiki

J-rod

[Simple]

Are you kidding me, there is a guild called executioner?  I need to read on the wiki

J-rod

http://www.zalanthas.org/gdb/index.php/topic,29335.0.html

[Southie]

Is it clear in some ways that the staff's attention is divided? Yes. But the game has also been more interesting to me, and more dynamic, than I have seen it in a long while. It certainly is not as if the staff is ignoring the game and leaving the players free to pervert it away from what it was. Instead, I see this as a transition into a new chapter (perhaps the last chapter) of Zalanthas, and that transition brings with it changes in some of the things we knew and took for granted. I'm glad the game can evolve and I embrace many of the culture changes and their consequences for what they are. As rosy as old memories are, keeping things static for too long gets old.