What almost turned you off the game WHEN YOU WERE NEW

[lordcooper]

A crippling sense of inferiority when it comes to roleplay.

Still.

Yup

[ShaLeah]

A crippling sense of inferiority when it comes to roleplay.

Still.

Yup

Warlord Iakovitez (sp) Tor. Jesus.

There are just people who command a room when they enter it and it seems like the whole place is suspended in time for a bit. That's actually one of the things that made me love this game.

The things that were a turn off for me as a player back are much less (maybe even gone) now and had nothing to do with the game now. I like the forward progress.

[Norcal]

I had played Muds before, some real old school ones. I was excited to find Arm, because it resembled them in many ways. I read the docs and drafted my first PC.

And things went quickly downhill.  Right off the shield wall in fact, while running from gith. In spite of reading the docs I still had NO CLUE what to do. I felt like someone had thrown red paint on me and hung a neon sign around my neck flashing: "newb" "newb" "newb" "newb" "newb".
I tried the chat and while most responses were a -bit- longer than one syllable, I still felt like I was talking to someone at the DMV counter.

Those things were turn offs.  But even so, the game was so well done and so cool that I had to try again. Obsesive Armageddon Disorder  followed soon after.

HOWEVER,  they system for new players is much better now, all around. Kudos to the staff and players that made this happen.

Oh..yes. Now when I see someone who is obviously new, I remember how I felt and have a rush of empathy. Right before I have my PC take their boots.

[Caiden]

I had played Muds before, some real old school ones. I was excited to find Arm, because it resembled them in many ways. I read the docs and drafted my first PC.

And things went quickly downhill.  Right off the shield wall in fact, while running from gith. In spite of reading the docs I still had NO CLUE what to do. I felt like someone had thrown red paint on me and hung a neon sign around my neck flashing: "newb" "newb" "newb" "newb" "newb".
I tried the chat and while most responses were a -bit- longer than one syllable, I still felt like I was talking to someone at the DMV counter.

Those things were turn offs.  But even so, the game was so well done and so cool that I had to try again. Obsesive Armageddon Disorder  followed soon after.

HOWEVER,  they system for new players is much better now, all around. Kudos to the staff and players that made this happen.

Oh..yes. Now when I see someone who is obviously new, I remember how I felt and have a rush of empathy. Right before I have my PC take their boots.

i felt the exact same way a month ago when I started, still do a bit. What really helped me was the Helpers. Shoutout to bcw and laura!

[LauraMars]

i felt the exact same way a month ago when I started, still do a bit. What really helped me was the Helpers. Shoutout to bcw and laura!

KEEP PLAYING

DIE SOME MORE

PLAY SOME MORE!!!!1

[Caiden]

i felt the exact same way a month ago when I started, still do a bit. What really helped me was the Helpers. Shoutout to bcw and laura!

KEEP PLAYING

DIE SOME MORE

PLAY SOME MORE!!!!1

You know it

[Zerero]

The color, for sure.

[Lutagar]

A foriegn presence contacts your mind

An absurdly important person sends you a telepathic message:

"Blah, blah, blah."

you yell, waving your arms around wildly,

"HELP IM BEING MINDBENDED"

When I actually took the time to read the way helpfile I felt so stupid.

[hyzhenhok]

Repeatedly knocking self unconscious trying to use The Way.

But that's something that was corrected a while ago.

[Fredd]

Repeatedly knocking self unconscious trying to use The Way.

But that's something that was corrected a while ago.

Speak for yourself, i still do that shit 5 years later. LOL

[Delusion]

Clan schedules.

I had spent several years playing other RPIs before I first really checked out Armageddon. The GDB indicated that the Byn was a good place for a new player to go. Something similar held true with other RPIs: military clans were full of PCs who would help teach new players the ropes.

My character got recruited, then spent four weeks doing nothing interesting. No Sergeant (can't help real life), two or three other Runners with playtimes that didn't quite match up, and it was only after a month or so that a Sergeant from the other city rescued that stranded crew. Things were pretty cool, then. Even then, my playtimes didn't mesh very well with the rest of the clan, and those quiet periods were really very dull.

I drifted away for a while, then stored and gave it another go with a new character, largely at the insistence of a former Armageddon player that I knew that it was worth giving the game a second chance. I took the independent route, and things went far better.

I've since learned to pick out whether a clan has an enforced schedule or not. They simply don't suit me at all.

[RogueGunslinger]

Clans with enforced schedules are worth giving a third shot. They can be amazing.

[Delirium]

You really have to hit the sweet spot of players + leadership + plotz for clan schedules to get awesome, I think.

Coming from someone who led a clan for approx 1 RL year, coming up with a way to keep all your underlings trained and entertained is challenging at best, but when everyone's got a goal to strive for, that makes it so much better - and a hell of a lot of fun.

[Fredd]

Clans with enforced schedules are worth giving a third shot. They can be amazing.

Agreed. But I typically only go to them when they are active. But I still love the Byn, and Kurac and militia/legions/ect.

[Furien]

The biggest deal was probably the mechanical opacity of it all. I started playing Arm because a friend from an IRE MUD was telling me amazing stories about what his characters had been doing. I knew IRE MUDs like the back of my hand, so I figured learning another MUD must be easy in comparison, right?

Wrong.

During the life of one PC, her clan was taking a trip up to Luir's for reasons I can't recall. The idea was to stay up there for a RL day or two until some business sorted out. That was fine, she'd been up there before, and had been raised there as part of her background. The problem? I had no idea how the water seller in Luir's worked. I scanned the helpfiles, tried random commands - nothing. So rather than risk sounding like a retard and asking others (and getting the dreaded 'find out ic' response leading to even more IC retardation), whenever she got thirsty she'd jack a mount from the clan's argosy and sprint back down to Allanak for some refills at the clan compound, ideally making it back before the day was over.

During one of these trips she'd gone up to Tuluk instead, and on the way back was attacked by a tembo (maybe it was something else). She outran it with her mount since she knew she'd die fighting it. The tembo followed her halfway across the world, back to Luir's, resulting in someone from Kurac threatening to butcher her if she tried to draw angry animals to the gate again. Between that PC's horrid stats making me feeling like she was 'trapped' as a character, and not knowing what the fuck happened with that tembo, it was one of the most stressful interactions I had on that character.

That, and the seeming need to tavern-sit/posture to get hired by anyone. That produces crazy RP anxiety for me. Still does.

[RogueGunslinger]

Dear lord man, use the OOC command, or ask a helper. Things like syntax, or weird code quirks are never a "find out ic" problem. 

[Zoltan]

Furien's tale brings me back...

My first character managed to become a sergeant in the Byn without ever having to buy water from the Temple of the Dragon in Allanak. On the very first outing I was bringing my minions on, we stopped there to refill. Queue me asking oocly how to get that water. I'm not a mindbender IRL, but I swear I heard every player in the room think "we're all gonna die" at that instant.  Such is Byn leadership: herp till you derp.

On topic? I acclimated to Arm really easily and loved it from the start. I guess the hardest part was learning the code, but the Byn was great for that. I'm probably one of those few players that really likes clan schedules, so that was no problem. I will say that the RP was intimidating at first as well, especially without knowing the code well.

[Ktavialt]

I made my first account/character I believe sometime in 1995, but never really gave it an honest go until around 2000.

I started off powergamey, coming from Carrionfields which is all about PK tactics and less about RP.  I did not initially understand the concept of roleplaying nor could I really enjoy it.  The game was too basic to me, e.g. I'm a warrior and I got bash. kick and disarm to use in combat and that's it?  That said, I still loved the general setting and I loved that it reminded me of my tabletop Darksun days, so I stuck with it.  Eventually I got karma just from playing for so long that I played a slew of desert elves, which are perfect for dying while exploring Zalanthas.

Around 2000-2002 I spec app'd a wind elementalist.  Why the Imms trusted powergamey me I do not know, but they did.  It satisfied my need for having "loads of skills/spells" and the magick system here is just really unique.  I dig it.  Saw a bunch of higher end magicker stuff which shall remain [redacted] and realized just how deep the mysterious things get.  Armageddon looks fairly basic, code-wise (not RP) at the get go, but really is very complex underneath the surface.  With that wind elementalist I got into boatloads of trouble, and there was a particular player whose RP was very inspiring, and it got me swinging and focusing on RP.

So, long story short, what almost turned me off when I was new is that I had not appreciated the RP angle of the game and so it was dry to me.  I think it takes having an inspiring character RP with you, fluid emoting and hooking a player emotionally (to the extent a game can), to hook a person into Arm.

So, be awesome emoters and RPers, especially to all of "the tall, muscular man" newbies out there.  You may sink Arm's teeth into them just yet.

[Wastrel]

Do not like at all how cryptic the staff is about the code, especially the hoops you have to jump through to learn it.
Do not like how laggy the game can be, combat in particular, in a permadeath game there shouldn't be these cryptic iffy wiffy what-ifs highly random lags in combat. It should be more transparent.
Do not like how cryptic the code can be in general, some of the syntaxes are just silly.


But for everything I dislike there a hundred things I do like.

[Harmless]

+1 to Ktavialt's post.

[Ouroboros]

In a word, permadeath.

It can be daunting at first, especially before you pop your cherry. But once it's done and over with, and Ginka rolls off you to grab a smoke, there's a sense of freedom that comes over you. Knowing that no matter how much blood, sweat and tears you pour into a character, one day it'll inevitably end. They'll shed the mortal coil and you'll be able to ruin another brilliant concept in your mind.

My first character, back in 2002, lasted exactly 14 hours played and I'm fairly sure died the moment he stepped outside 'nak. It was crushing. But in those 14 hours I had gotten a glimpse of something special in the distance. Sadly, no, it wasn't the desert tarantula approaching my character when he left the gates, but something else. Something ethereal, something in the air, something unique to Zalanthas. I couldn't really describe it, but I got the sense this world was special. So I rolled again, the very next day...

My next character lasted 14 days played, and would change my gaming life forever. In the two months I played him, that character not only met some incredible people, characters that remain household names, but managed to leave his mark in the world (a mark that still stands today). And man, that was worth every death that would follow.

I've been chasing the dragon ever since, and every now and then, when I least expect it, I'll get a glimmer of what I felt then; that sense of wonder and fear, like electricity in air before a big storm. And it keeps making every death that follows, worth it.

[Wastrel]

i felt the exact same way a month ago when I started, still do a bit. What really helped me was the Helpers. Shoutout to bcw and laura!

KEEP PLAYING

DIE SOME MORE

PLAY SOME MORE!!!!1

this

ive put bc and laura through hell

[bcw81]

i felt the exact same way a month ago when I started, still do a bit. What really helped me was the Helpers. Shoutout to bcw and laura!

KEEP PLAYING

DIE SOME MORE

PLAY SOME MORE!!!!1

this

ive put bc and laura through hell

<3 your boots.

[Maso]

I don't think I've contributed to this one yet....

Seriously...nothing. I was hooked the second I started reading the docs and it took a good 2-3 years before I took a break. Bad stuff happened to my characters, but it was all part of the fun. Helpers were great and the staff were incredibly supportive and patient (and still are, but from my newb perspective it was really lovely).

[hatchets]

The biggest thing that turns me off, is the difference of knowledgable power between the newer players and the older players. I have always told anyone I suggest the mud to, it has a harsh learning curve. You know nothing, until one day, you know more then you ever could have thought and even when that day comes, you still know nothing.

Don't get me wrong, while it turns me off, it also turns me on (heh heh heh) I enjoy finding new things to learn, but it is soo frustratiing when you keep failing.