Game Feedback Wanted

[Elzocone]

[triste]

ReturnOfTheKing -- thank you for your insight here.

I fully agree on respecting people's time and this also applies to low activity players and high activity players. I also love your point about how mob psychology poisons this game, but I don't see how that leads into an endorsement of banning players. I am sometimes curious about stats for how often players are banned here, and I know that some recently returned players who a lot of people love and respect have been banned in the past and I always cringed and hated seeing these good but maybe too dynamic people get banned. We need to become a game that accepts all sorts of players and personalities with different playtime commitments. Not an exclusive pack with mob psychology. That player who you may believe to be toxic OOCly might end up playing some of your favorite characters in game and you may have even kudosed them; so please if I can contradict one point in your post, do not endorse banning people more, it is like telling someone they should stab themselves in the kidney for the sake of the other organs. Kidneys aren't pleasant organs, they feed on toxins, yeah you might want to stab them. But you only have so many kidneys you can stab before the entire system fails.

[X-D]

With those posts...it brought to mind what is likely the greatest cause of attrition in players leaving.

That is the willingness of staff to close things over the years. Each thing that closed caused losses. Maybe only one person, sometimes more then 20. And At the time (not so much talking of current staff even if some were around at the time) What made it worse is the staff attitude and some even saying, "So what, if you don't like it, don't play."

I have never understood the reasons for these closings (other then mantis, with current docs they are impossible anyway).
Reason #1 and the most common, This clan/race is too popular and getting outside where we want things to be.
My thought on that has always been...So what, leave it be, it WILL rebalance itself if left alone and people will not quit because you iron fisted a clan.

#2 We do not have enough staff hours to support this clan/race.
This is really a pretty bad excuse. Simply make it known that if you play X clan/tribe/race You will have almost no support, you of course will still be watched for RP but most things you will be doing on your own.

And I know that over the years when something closed the attitude of "It is only a couple players" Might not have bothered many. But consider, If the game only lost 3 players per closing...other then the big one which I will put last.

Gith
Mantis
halfings
Every desert elf tribe but 2, virtual and coded.
Sand jakhal
ATV
SLK
Dune stalkers
Silt winds
Black wing
Player made or virtual tribes counting as one
At least 3 noble houses in each city state so there is another six.
4 human tribes AT least.
1 dwarf tribe
2-3 Rinth tribes
Black moon
Expansion division
Outriders.
3 GMH hunting/soldier divisions (yes this counts as a closing)
And Tuluk, worth at least 20 players that I know of.

That is 125 players and on the conservative side.

Not even including Cam, a certain spot on the salt flats and many other things over the years.

Then there was the entire arm 2.0 debacle. That cost at least 1/3 of the player base right there.

If I am to be honest and blunt, At least half of the attrition...likely more is from gross mismanagement.





I do not see a fix currently, Possible some heavy ad work might help. But currently I see the circle as getting very close to the drain. Like birthrates in dying cultures. And this is not the heyday of muds.

[creeper386]

I had this first paragraph at the bottom but wanted to move it to be easily noticed.

I know I like that current staff seems WAY more open to announcing and discussing changes, and so far seems to be acknowledging the player base and adjusting plans, in ways I'm not sure I've seen before, and perhaps goes a long way to addressing issues with respecting player investment.

In regards to closures, I do think there needs to be two sides to it. Maybe closures could be handled better, but also the idea of trying to manage where the player base is centered I think is a completely fair thing to do and needs to be done.

You have similar complaints about guild changes. Rebalances happen in all games, and may lose players, as much because the rebalance was done wrong as players being human refuse to consider any change for why it's being done and just in the light of how it's effecting them.

[X-D]

Actually, Staff being open to announcing and discussing changes has been something I am happier about.

But I do not agree with staff trying to change centers of play. It never works, they are always warned that it never works.

In fact, likely a majority of players will avoid it just because of the push...human nature.

If you ignore the loss off players from Tuluk closing. The only I guess "good" Thing that came from it is that numbers in Morin's, Luirs and Red storm went up. Although it felt like the numbers in Allanak went down and continued to drop the entire time.

But things will find whatever balance. EVEN if a clan, let us say, the Byn, was to get so popular that 80% of the PCs were Byn...How long would that last? I mean sure, if staff was to pour a bunch of energy into entertaining them it could be "made" to last a while. But let us just go with natural. For a while some people would enjoy the high social RP and the HUGE amount of sparring and training. But They would rapidly get bored since there would be almost no contracts and way too many Byn PCs to make any contract pay. And they would start leaving and filling out the other clans.

And I KNOW this to be true because at one time almost 50% of PCs could often be found in the Byn. Why, because EVERY house, Merchant, Noble, AOD, SENT them there. And all the players told newbs to go there because that is where vets and newbs alike were.

The same applies to every other clan...Every single one. Even if a single clan was to get 100% of the PCs, That would have no actual affect on the game world unless Staff wanted it to. And so, it would rebalance itself and in short order.

Open options, EVEN if nobody uses them NEVER costs you players. It never does. Closing options does.

I looked over the top 5 muds and they all have reduced player bases from say 10 years ago, so arm is not alone. But the few I actually have accounts on, I checked and all 3 had more then 100 people at 11pm cst.

And the thing all of them have in common is just a massive number of options to claim in their ads.

Now I am not saying to become like them and make 250 skills and 250 spells and 23 races and 75 classes (Which one claims to have).

Meanwhile, Arm has shown a steady reduction of choice over the years and that will show on here and any other site where people talk about muds. So if people do go look, EVEN if something opened after something closed, They will not see that, they will only see that something closed.

Now, as I said, I do not know how to fix things or if they can be fixed. What I do know is that historically, On this mud and every other, Closing options is bad, Staff trying to force player concentration always fails. Oh, it might force the people that STILL play to all play in say allanak, but the cost is less players over all.

[Malken]

On the other hand, Armageddon is shrinking. People here have thus far said it's because they have families to raise and careers to work on. And that's great - but everyone's getting older and everyone's going through life-changing events over time, across the MUD and MUSH community. So why are other games growing when Armageddon's shrinking?

I can't think of a single RPI that is "growing". They're either all dying or pretty much dead by now. What other games are you talking about besides Arx?

[Patuk]

On the other hand, Armageddon is shrinking. People here have thus far said it's because they have families to raise and careers to work on. And that's great - but everyone's getting older and everyone's going through life-changing events over time, across the MUD and MUSH community. So why are other games growing when Armageddon's shrinking?

I can't think of a single RPI that is "growing". They're either all dying or pretty much dead by now. What other games are you talking about besides Arx?

I was gonna make this post, too. Which MUDs are growing? I don't know of any but the extremely new.

[Night Queen]

But what's the excuse for the players that disregarded Tuluk as fluffy bunnies and hugging trees up until the very end?

They didn't know there was a years-long vendetta between two noble houses that drove plots related to subterfuge and intrigue as well as diplomacy and reconciliation

I'd say that indeed, they didn't know there was a years-long vendetta between two noble houses, because Tuluk is designed to deprive them of that knowledge. That's a point I've wanted to discuss a number of times throughout the years. I've always felt that Tuluk's secrecy-based design just didn't fit into a game of this type. The much-vaunted subtlety of the city is counterproductive to a game where everything is based on sharing and reacting to information. While Tuluk was never my main area of play, I have of course played there several times, and what always struck me was the way players were deprived of knowledge of anything they weren't directly involved with. It clearly hurt the roleplay there. Time and time again, something would happen and those who witnessed it were expressly instructed never to talk of it. It's built into the essence of the Tuluki setting. That'd be interesting in a novel or a movie, but not in an online roleplaying game where every player's enjoyment hinges on the extent to which they can learn about the interesting shit that's going on. Tuluk was a place where measures were actively taken to prevent people from learning what was happening.

It's one of those things that I had really hoped would change when the city was opened again.

There are some amazing Tuluk stories on armageddon.org/original

One of the newer staff has started a really good project about a month ago for people with good old stories to stop them being lost forever, I really encourage everyone who can to add to this:
Send us your stories, your logs, your inspired creations..

It looks like that is the first good step in this direction in what looks like a long time after that original submissions site was left for dead, but it looks like it's happening, if enough people support it I know I'd love to read a lot of these older stories, a lot!

I also saw people hiding plot information from almost everyone - hell, even hoarding it

This is supported by both lore and realism, and spying is part of the game, if it's too open then there's no secrets to find and half the fun goes away for a lot of people - BUT I think the real problem behind this is that the structure of the game does not currently support in-person spying, only magic spying, at the moment - there's too many NPC protections and PCs have too many ridiculously violent options to instantly deal with a simple listener, and all the good conversations happen in those places that are impossible to reach IC and they shouldn't be so hard/dangerous that the only option left is magic - I posted some suggestions on reducing usage of the Way for conversations (mainly heavily penalising the focus cost the more messages are sent) and opening up spying (mainly reducing magic powers and removing some of the more excessive guards and instant retaliation options)

On the subject of bad players: I do agree that I don't understand why some characters seem to have high karma or be in sponsored roles after having encountered certain behavior, but they do seem to listen to complaints, I don't know what it was like in the past, I'm not sure if there's anyone left that is so bad that they are chasing people off constantly or anything like that really?

And a good point about the whole "anti social" stuff is it's actually social stuff that feels more toxic to me as someone that doesn't know a lot of players that play the game, whereas you are coming from a position where you said most of your friends were people that played the game, and that you were staff while also close friends to whatever certain players that were your friends? It's a major turn off to many new people to know that a community is too strong, so I think it's actually beneficial that it seems like at least some effort is being made to try keep a culture of IC being IC which is actually not found many other places and a rare thing to encourage to preserve, like a language that could die out if not kept going. A lot of people have friends already and don't *want* it to replace social life, and encouraging that feels like it'd actually hurt the game a lot, there's already a lot of places that have basically no line to cross. I wouldn't really want to be part of those games because I don't find interacting with most roleplayers OOC as fun as interacting with the characters, and doing any villainous behavior tends to get seen as a problem OOCly (note: There's definitely some people that get too into it, but for some being naughty is part of the fun when actually tend to help a lot of people in real life) so they just end up as sedate "bar RP" games with either not many people or lots of not very interesting people very focused on chasing imaginary progress. Which again is the issue about replacing social life with games, it's NOT a good idea. Real nightclubs are way more fun, a lot of kinds of clubs are fun.

The narrative that the game is dying is something that seems comes up a lot but it feels like it's more about people feeling like the game doesn't attract them as much as it used to, rather than the actual population? Because it seems like accounting for spikes such as coronavirus and then the apocalyptic long-haul of everyone having to spend a lot of off time to recover civilization after, it's pretty stable:

I myself am waiting a bit before I fully commit to advertising as far as I could, so I'm actually sort of neutral, but I think there's a lot of hope

[Halcyon]

I agree with 99% of what you post, OP.   I might turn the conclusion a bit, and restate it as, the game staff and players say that this is a place you can come and pursue your own story.  In fact, you are at fault for any boredom or disconnection if you dont make your own story happen.  Then, players are ignored or not included when following the mantra.

I think Arm does a number of things very well.  The social cliquishness about who gets to be a real player detracts, in my opinion.

[Maso]

With staff's permission I'd be happy to write a small script that scrapes the weekly update data for the past 10 years, or however far it goes back, though I'm sure staff could just do this internally with their own tools. I would be willing to bet that you'd see a gradual decline in player count, week by week, with spikes around certain holidays in the United States.

You don't need to. It already exists somewhere (thanks to mansa) I remember seeing it on Discord. It's an average of 10 players per year. It also tends to go up in winter and down in summer I think? So we're on a down right now.

[Dresan]

What is the payoff when all of that work can easily be erased, and all of that time easily disregarded as "not enough"?

1. This has never been a game where you can easily create a 'legacy'. My personal impression of the legacies that have been create are a bit jarring because they are often created by players that are turning into staff or are suspiciously well liked by certain staff members. This is an RPI with perma death and the fun is experiencing that character life. Social RP grind is part of that excellent experience because we are here to RP with others, however, experiencing a character learning to ride 100th time should be minimized because its tedious after doing it so many time thanks to the permadeath setting of the game.

What has changed about the community to make it more like a healthy community that respects people's time?

2. I have mixed feeling with this statement.

I want to read your thought on the game but otherwise I don't know you and I don't want to know you. I come here to play a game with other strangers within the context of the set theme and rules set forth before I joined.  While there are some people that have met their spouses and life long friends here it is not why I am here, and i don't expected the game or the people to provide that. Coincidently it is probably why OOC unfairness is so irking to me.

No one here needs to put up with anything here much less with disrespect. Staff is here because they enjoy themselves. Similar I will play because I am enjoying myself. When we stop enjoying ourselves we leave. We cannot have a game without staff and they deserve respect for what they do. It feels like its has been easy to forget in the past with larger playerbase that this game is not fun without a certain amount players, they deserve that respect because we need them to stay around enjoy ouselves.

But we are just trying to enjoy a game here, not resolve world peace or make people like you on the internet. Not everyone will like or agree with your opinion, sypathize with your feelings or see the need to be nice to you in game or out. There are rules in game and out to handle when things get out of hand and move to the realm of harrassment or breaks outlined rules.   That said, perhaps the game should promote discord more as chatting there has given this place a greater sense of community with the people involved with this game that playing or posting on these forums never really have.

[Night Queen]

But there is no shrinking, just proved that... The average seems to be 30 online for lots of years... Accounts don't matter too much compared to the people that are actually around regularly (and it's a thing that many major game developers get mocked over when they say they have X amount of new accounts because it has no connection with how many actual players they have), it's surprising how actually stable it is so for so many years, from that graph...

I haven't seen a lack of

basic level of decency and respect

or

backbiting, veiled threats

but there's people like that everywhere as soon as you let yourself get too involved with anything (you said most of your friends were players, while in a position of authority as staff, in most real life organisations with that kind of authority it'd be considered an improper amount of fraternising) - and the competing games that tend to have less average players than Armageddon seem to be much more focused on OOC and OOC drama than here because there's too MUCH focus on community and the corrosive drama-encouraging environments using things like discord produces, and no separation of IC and OOC... The only winning game is not to play the OOC game but focus on the IC game instead

[Dresan]

not participate in backbiting, veiled threats, and other behavior commonly attributed to bullies and similar assholes. Literally the bare minimum of what a community should be.

Again you are mentioning the community. And specifically  the players not staff (which you were a part of). Because of that, I have no idea where you are experiencing veiled threats from another player. The only threat with in the game I heard come from staff threatening to store characters or dock karma for in game behaviors that are rightly or wrongly breaking the rules of the setting. 

Armageddon could not provide that when other games could, and now it's shrinking when other games aren't. That is the crux of my argument.

lol. The game has shrunk somewhat from the days of 60+ people during peak, and one of those reason may be the disconnect between players and staff (which again you were part of), including flippant attitudes on both sides, but I don't really agree with what you are saying in general especially that other games have done it better.

That said, I did enjoy reading your post, it clearly took time to write. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

[triste]

> The only winning game is not to play the OOC game but focus on the IC game instead

Really the best advice when it comes to enjoying Armageddon,  I fully disagree with Dresan that Discord is any better than the GDB, IMO it is worse WRT to all metrics of badness (DMs are unmonitored so rules are violated with abandon, it is more cliquish, more 'toxic' as much as I hate that term). If you care about this game and hate the drama and childishness extraneous to roleplay, this is the advice to take above.

I wish we could be a community that could have more harmonious OOC interactions and I wish that people would be personally accountable enough not to cheat, but until we get there, Night Queen knows what's up.

[X-D]

Ugh, you guys forced me to do a bunch of math. Not that I really have an issue with that since I was waiting on tool batteries to charge anyway.

By graph presented, I come up with 29.80 as the average for the 12 full years on it.

30.66 for the first 6 and 28.95 for the second.

The more interesting thing to me is that the average highs for the first 6 are 3 points higher then the second 6 and the average lows for the second 6 are 3 points lower then the first. Where this matters is that the game is cyclic during the year. I have said many many many times around this time of year for people to not panic, it will go back up. But it is still showing a slow but steady decline.

Still....things might not be nearly as dire as they seem...from pulling a bunch of other posted numbers...and though they show that numbers have dropped across the board over the last 20 years...even taken as a whole it is not too big to overcome.

Over all, I think staff has been doing a better then average job and things could tick up with that and getting even say 5-10% more new players then normal heading into the up season. Which, for the people who have time to try and get them, should not be all that hard.

[Halaster]

As a reminder this thread is not meant to debate someone's opinion.  It doesn't matter if you think they're wrong, or don't like their opinion or even if it's been arrived by way of erroneous information.  It is their opinion, and that's what we want to hear in this thread.

As others have already done, please absolutely feel free to start new threads to discuss the various topics.  I don't want to discourage discussion, but am trying to keep this one clean (ish) so we can collate answers later.

Thanks!

[creeper386]

Actually, Staff being open to announcing and discussing changes has been something I am happier about.

But I do not agree with staff trying to change centers of play. It never works, they are always warned that it never works.

In fact, likely a majority of players will avoid it just because of the push...human nature.

I think this really touches on my point though. Is people well look at ignore whys and how's sometimes for little to reason other then they don't like change. Or they want more options. I'm saying that staff seem to be getting better at communicating and discussion changes, and I'd hope that would apply to any closures that happen again, and we as players have to be open to changes as well.

And what I read about how some predominant Tuluk players felt over the closure and how the "southern" players made them feel about it, and I feel kind of sick about what I read.

So I think there could be a lot to learn from Tuluk closure, I'm not sold that it's don't close anything ever, but I think staff and playerbase could be better about discussing and processing the changes as they come.

So much about this game is better then when I put 12+ hour days into it. Even with some rocky parts since coming back, that's all been OOC stuff and part of that is on me too. So to me game changes aren't an important part of it so much as how we treat each other.

[X-D]

I actually agree on all points Creeper386.

If there would have been a case made BEFORE closing any number of things and if that case would have even been say 45% agreed on, staff and players combined.....Fine.

But the fact is..None..Not one single closing was. The closing of Tuluk was HEAVILY railed against player side...But it did not matter.

Now I know that producer side I think there is only one that is now and was then such, and he was and still is the owner. And though over the years I have been in that defense...at the same time, as the owner...all the blame goes there.

Now currently I see that staff is at least playing lip service..........Or this thread would not exist. Tuluk is open...kudos all staff involved. Crimson wind exist as staff supported raiders...YEE YEE!

Over all I see improvement staff side...I mean, Are they as good as Sanvean days...no. But it at least seems to be trying to go that direction.

Sadly...when you check sites that talk about muds..any of you who have done the research know what the most negative thing mentioned on this mud....and it is not the players or the community.

Arm staff has a HORRIBLE rep...I mean, I am actually amazed when I look around...I mean, over all, my experience has been positive (outside a certain 3 letter producer and 2 other admin(and ignoring certain people that were horrible but not ranked high enough to matter)).

Alright, I know that I am maybe not like many players...I am perfectly willing to remind staff that I do not play for them...I do not care if they enjoy my play. But, aside from 3-4 staffers...that has never been an issue so I would give player vs staff a B+.



But when you look at other sites...OH my.....


I do not want to dig in dirt...But I think that those of you who want or will work to advertise....you will need to lead off with how cool staff is..Oh sure, they are silly slow on requests because for some odd reason they are allowed to have PCs...but hey...cool people all the same.

[Delirium]

Respect the time and effort players put into this game. Consider playability and interaction and time sink when implementing things. If we're having fun, support that, rather than make us feel punished for trying to Do Things. We do not have the tools and resources you as staff have to push plots and make things happen, so when we try to make fun for other players, consider the impact of your involvement and whether it helps to support or whether it detracts from that fun. Stop trying to force people to have to rely on each other to accomplish anything when we have a small playerbase, as that means we will get frustrated trying to accomplish basic shit that should be, were the virtual world alive and accounted for, no issue whatsoever. Don't punishing people for FINALLY getting together a cross-clan RPT and then throwing some kind of wrench into it which effectively ends the RPT, destroys the purpose of it, or severely delays the RPT to the point it becomes an exhausting slog.

Prioritize playability over "omg gritty harsh", respect player's agency, and appreciate the time and effort we put in to this game.

[Harmless]

Staff could, instead of closing areas, just have people rotate character origins every new roll. The only benefit that closing Tuluk had for me personally was that it forced me to play in Allanak more for a while. The same goal could have been achieved by disallowing me from rolling Tuluki after Tuluki, I inevitably would have gotten more exposure. Many of these clans closed were very low player counts at a time, but if the staff were wanting less isolated pockets of the pbase they could have just had us keep rotating around more to prevent any one area from going dead too long.

Me being a hard-core D&D nerd and liking restrictions to my RP which this game constantly provides anyway, that forced rotation would be fine in my book. A Karmic reincarnation system also would not necessarily allow you to keep being well off merchant's daughters and so on anyway. You might be born a breed or rinthi sometimes. Come to think of it I will be randomizing origin from now on by choice.

But the real reason they close  areas is stagnation. Stagnation is however a tricky thing. Any plot or group can stagnate for utterly unpredictable reasons like a sudden change  in one person's availability or unforeseen consequences of another plots outcome. When the call to close Tuluk came I was really shocked because it was seeming more active to me than before and so maybe my theory is off,  but the general mood on the GDB is often some assertion that Tuluk was quiet or sleepy or monotonous. Maybe had there been no reliable way to be born with those inks that allow Tuluki citizenship, a more realistic appreciation or grief at being dropped in a city of thought policed primitives would have been more interesting for all involved.

Perhaps choosing a random origin may give a mild pay off of some kind to add incentive to the choice that would in time equalize the player base and keep each side of the conflict vibrant

[creeper386]

** wrong thread, Sorry **

[MeTekillot]

Not to be self-aggrandizing, but I had an idea a while back for training NPCs that will train your skills up to a certain level on a schedule similar to the paymaster NPCs, based on your clan rank.

I think this could be a pretty elegant solution to the problem a lot of our current player base has with not having the time-- or even the desire -- to put in for grinding the skill based part of the game.

[Hauwke]

Not to be self-aggrandizing, but I had an idea a while back for training NPCs that will train your skills up to a certain level on a schedule similar to the paymaster NPCs, based on your clan rank.

I think this could be a pretty elegant solution to the problem a lot of our current player base has with not having the time-- or even the desire -- to put in for grinding the skill based part of the game.

There is something like this for one Southern Combat Clan. It is restricted but it does provide training to a clan that otherwise really suffers.

[creeper386]

There is something like this for one Southern Combat Clan. It is restricted but it does provide training to a clan that otherwise really suffers.

I really like this solution. I'd like to see more of it. Sometimes being in a clan where everyone disappears for awhile can be really rough on trying to continue training. And this would be nice to see more often.


But I think it exists at least in the South where it's most needed.

[Veselka]

Not to be self-aggrandizing, but I had an idea a while back for training NPCs that will train your skills up to a certain level on a schedule similar to the paymaster NPCs, based on your clan rank.

I think this could be a pretty elegant solution to the problem a lot of our current player base has with not having the time-- or even the desire -- to put in for grinding the skill based part of the game.

There is something like this for one Southern Combat Clan. It is restricted but it does provide training to a clan that otherwise really suffers.

These training NPCs are in a few clans now, particularly ISO ones. I've experienced 3 so far with differing schedules.

Huge help.