Feedback on playing and log-ins

[Seeker]

I am probably known for terse, non-empathetic, and occasionally snarky communication.  The first two allow me to be efficient.  The last one is a personality trait I try to dial down to 1 here from 11 in RL.

How does being non-empathetic improve communication efficiency?  I argue being empathic allows far greater effectiveness.  Being aware and receptive to the other speaker's emotional states, motivations and desires allows even very terse communication to contain much more cogent information.  It is not only more efficient and effective, it is also more satisfying for the recipient.

Terse, non-empathic and occasionally snarky (even at "1") will get you fired as an employee or detested and passively sabotaged as a superior. 

The only place I can see it being appropriate is from a superior in a chain-of-command situation where the subordinate's opinion or self-interest are valueless and inherently counterproductive to the mission.

Please don't view this as an assault, but as a fundamental disagreement about the nature of cooperative communication and perhaps as a small insight into a few of the larger issues already raised in this thread.


Seeker

[Brokkr]

Are you discounting the time it gets to know the other person enough to be empathetic?  While if I get to know someone over time of course I am empathetic, if I am dealing with 30+ people in my clans as I did when a Storyteller, it is unlikely I know very much about most of the players.  While players are typically dealing with 1-2 Staff at a time and their emotional energy can be concentrated towards that, Staff's emotional energy is split over a much broader number of people.  Nevermind the emotional drain every time you end up embracing a scorpion and just keeping straight who is who.

So tone is often similar to what you direct to an internal colleague you have never met in a large multinational corporation. <sup>[snark](dry, to the point, soulless)[/snark]

Although admittedly dispassionate would probably have been a better word to use.</sup>

[Qzzrbl]

.... So what I'm picking up here is that Brokkr should probably be tasked with engaging with players that don't mind being spoken to like they're a faceless cog in the machine, while players that wish to be spoken to like people trying to have fun with their fun hobby should be seen to by other. no disrespect bb <3

Anything else to be added to the encompassing bullet points above?

Like... Man. Tone has been such an issue for so many people for such a long time now.

It's a pretty common, if not the most common complaint I ever hear about from players past and present, what's the roadmap on sorting that out? Is there even a plan?

[Armaddict]

Damn, the beauty of that silliness is that I can't even talk about how if you can't handle level 1 snark on the internet, you probably shouldn't be on the internet, without starting a train wreck.

Damn you strategists.

[Qzzrbl]

Damn, the beauty of that silliness is that I can't even talk about how if you can't handle level 1 snark on the internet, you probably shouldn't be on the internet, without starting a train wreck.

Damn you strategists.

On one hand, I agree with you wholeheartedly.

On the other though, this is by and large a discussion on player retention. Considering that the landscape of the interwebs just ain't what it used to be, there aren't very many good alternatives to adapting.

[Armaddict]

True.  But I'm a hard-to-retain player and most of the reason has to do with a player shift, not a staff shift, so I get to throw my peanuts too.

[Obeliskocism]

For me, the #1 game related reason I don't log in is that I am waiting on a staff response on an open request.
Usually for one of two reasons:

I need to know what the Clan's official position on something is, so I can address something with PCs that is currently ambiguous.  If it is something that ICly my character would know, or would be able to find out quickly, but I OOCly don't know, it becomes awkward avoiding those PCs in game or avoiding the mekillot in the room.

The other reason is needing to know if I have the green light to proceed with something, and not wanting to spend time or energy on a pursuit that is going to get the red light in a few days when the response arrives.

I say this fully aware that I am not always timely with my own reports and it's a selfish perspective, but it's the honest answer to the OP's question.  I do try to make such questions stand out so they aren't buried. I usually have a bit of momentum when I write the request, and as the weeks pass that momentum fades and plots move on in game to the point of sometimes making the original request questions moot.

[Kismetic]

I've been wanting to post in this thread for awhile now, but it was a matter of finding the time to collect my thoughts.  But as I lay here in my hotel room, drinking wine and the weight of it on my mind, I decided there's no better time than the present.  Some of the things I'll mention have been said before, and I think that's fine.  These are my personal reasons for not playing the game.  I will try not to make this about how I see the game best administrated, but I will, of course, add a few suggestions.  This is merely how I see it.  I will not be doing the typical white dude thing, and insisting that only I know the correct way to resolve these conflicts--  that is ultimately for the staff body to discuss and decide.  You are the caretakers of the game we all love.

So, I'll start off with this:  I had been playing the game.  I had a lull in my work, and I had grown bored of my other vices, and so, drawn by the temptation of Tuluk's re-opening, I made a new character.  I managed to put in the sort of hours typical to my old playtimes, something like three hours a day.  Sometimes more, sometimes less.  But about three hours a day, or 20 hours a week.  I will share my observations, they are my own, and I know that some will relate while others will not.  I lay them out to dissect as you please.

I will break them down into three categories:  Time, Bureaucracy and Transparency.

Time
---

For the better part of six years, I consistently played leader characters on this game.  I was never the best at writing reports and writing them regularly, but I'm gonna chalk that up to being more present in the game.  From 2010-2016, I played a Sergeant in the Legions (90 days played), a Kuraci Agent (50 days played) and a Byn Sergeant (35 days played).  I'd be lying if I said I wasn't having fun then--  I was!  I hope the people I played with were also having fun, too. But what ultimately wore me down, and turned me off of any serious role in this game was the fact that I felt I could never get a real plot off the ground.  There was always something else the staff was more interested to run.  Sometimes, you'd just get the flat "No."  I tried my ass off.  I think I was a good player, I didn't talk about the game OOC, and I handled it all with the severity one would with an evolving work of art.  And I don't honestly think anything ever came of it for me.  Top that off with the fact that I watched people around me running to their heart's content, and it became heavily demoralizing.  I realize some people will say boo hoo, but I'd also bet there are plenty of players who had a similar experience.  This began my road towards a perception of favoritism in the game.  I powered through for years, but at some point it felt like people were valuing their time greatly above my own.  I had given to the game, and I felt like I got nothing back from it, -other than the great times with the characters I met along the way-.  I decided that was enough for me, and tried other, less staff-reliant roles, but my playtime dropped off dramatically as my interest drifted towards other, non-MUD games.

When I finally did return more recently, my entire life was different.  I had a demanding career, teenage children, and always a love interest at hand who needed my time more than a game.  Family obligations, and other, more rewarding interests.  I certainly could not blame the game for that change in availability.  But what I noticed, and what I think many people with similar lives to my own will attest:  The game is too much of a grind to make any worthwhile impact unless you have a lot of time to sink into it.  And again, as described, I -did- have that time last summer, and I just dove into it.  I didn't tell a soul, not even my closest friends from Arm.  Based off of that experience, I will admit:  You've added a feature into a military clan that I found to be very solid.  It has risk, and it has reward, and they are fairly well balanced.  And it adds -motion to the game-.  What I'd like to suggest as a further to that, and I know it's been suggested before:  make an option for characters to come with skills mostly leveled.  You can drop the cap of the skills down a notch for balance.  A sort of area between low floor/high ceiling and high floor/low ceiling.  a) Raw Talent b) Developed Skill.  Raise the skills up to a notch below the undercut max, and leave branched skills as something they have to grind.  But you instantly inject characters into the game with the ability to contribute without having to fritter away their limited time into a braindead grind.  Some will love the grind, I do.  But I'm willing to bet a lot of people who just don't have the time to play regularly would love the option to enter the game ready to contribute.  Even if it came at a cost of high end skill.

Bureaucracy
---

It always irked me so much that staff could leave you hanging and just blip that request tool.  THIS MATTER IS CLOSED.  Lol, I've seen that used so dramatically as to appear like a cartoon.  If you're tired of dealing with a player, -ask someone else to do it-.  Or better yet, hire a fuckin' PR person who has the social intelligence to act with some savvy.  There is a point where communication breaks down, and that is usually where the relationship between any two people will die.  This is too small of a community for there to be a web of "well, this person .. " going around the entire game.  Double that for staff talking shit about players on their protected channels.  But to the meat of the point, if you're just ticking boxes by closing reports, you're not communicating effectively.  In fact, you're doing damage to the relationships with your players.  Which, by the way, if you hadn't noticed, it's actually fucking essential to the health and longevity of your game.

Another thing I noticed, and I won't touch on it in much detail because it is not a personal experience of mine, but it does seem this bloviated bureacracy that exists in the staff land often handcuffs the Storytellers from doing anything efficiently.  Open up the world a little bit.  Have a little trust.  It's a two way street, trust.  You give and you get.

Transparency
---

I'll start this off with a story.  I had city-based a Krathi who lived in the Rinth who couldn't find a single thing to do but solo RP.  For a lot of players, that's great, but it wasn't my bag.  I got bored, and I left Allanak, heading off for Luir's.  And even though it was obvious I had no business being out in the desert, I was making my way, like I'd done in the game a million times before.  Good weather, if I recall, else I wouldn't have even tried it.  I made it about halfway before I was the butt end of an animation.  I say butt end, and I'll explain why.  At first it was a lot of fun, and I can tell the person on the other end was skilled at storytelling.  They animated gith, they emoted them.  I started picking up my pace, but they showed up to fight.  And I ran.  Of course, I did!  And the animations continued, and I emoted hauling my ass out of there as I hauled my ass out of there.  And there was a good feeling that I'd gotten away.  A lesson was forming in my mind.  Hey, you felt in your gut you shouldn't have done that, and you did it anyway.  It was coalescing.  Then came the 40+ HP staff arrow.  Then came the mantis head.  To this day, I do not know who robbed me of that moment.  I didn't ask.  Instead, my trust with staff just withered.  An enjoyable scene rolled over and became a coded repercussion at the drop of a hat.  I'm aware that some players just love making new characters, and have hundreds of them.  That was never me, nor did I enjoy having to regenerate the karma.  I let it go with whoever that was, but my distrust of staff has not repaired, largely because I just didn't understand it, and was left to expect it.  If you want your game to be grimdark and tryhard to a comical extreme, that's fine.  I've been told it used to be a total clown show.  But I didn't sign up to play ShittyPants McStreetTaco.  I'm playing a player character, and you're inhabiting a staff avatar.  You can crush me between your fingers.  I crush you!  I think one suggestion worth entertaining is having staff visible at all times when logged into the game.  Their personal anonymity should be absolutely intact, for obvious safety reasons.  But they should never be allowed to use the anonymity of their staff persona to perform abusive actions.  I realize my case is not really that much of a deal.  I didn't care about that character the next day.  But there are far worse things that have happened to people in this game, and staff hiding and acting under the guise of Someone leaves very few with a comfortable feeling.  And the way I see it, any reasoning for not doing it is just a lazy excuse, and you'd have a tough time convincing me why.  This ain't my first rodeo.

The last thing I'll bring up is account notes.  I've been told my account notes are very neutral.  Nothing good or bad really.  In a way, I find that almost more embarrassing than people who have catsex notes on their accounts.  But more seriously, I think account notes are just a toxic feature.  I'm sure the rationale is well-intentioned, but there's just too much of an opportunity for people to weaponize these sort of tools to paint players they don't like in a bad light.  Tell me it's never been done, and I'll make a good faith effort to believe you and put it out of mind.  But I betcha I'm not wrong.  The best thing I think you can do is make account notes public to a player, even the shitty ones, so they can use this as a method for growth in their play.  And don't tell me you already do it.  Having them grovel for it on your bureaucratic merry go round is not an effective communication tool.  At best, it's Pavlovian.  Just make it a public tool, public in the sense that the player can see their own notes.  All of them.


And I'll cap all of this off with the admission that I'm not perfect, and I'm not expecting anyone from this game, player or staff, to be perfect.  If I reflect on my life now, there have been failures, but by and large, I have lived an enviable life with a great deal of success.  And all told, I consider Armageddon to be a fail.  At 41, I grow pale imagining what I could've done more productively with my time back then.  But there were those moments, and we played and endured for them.  And I just don't feel those moments exist for me here anymore.  I gave it a shot here recently, the ol' college try.  It wasn't there for me, and maybe it's me.  Maybe you fixed everything I thought was wrong with the game, and I still couldn't get back into it.  After awhile, the magick is gone.

[Barsook]

This is something that I noticed that no one really posted about but is in a in way tied to time invested and what is given back. Most of the characters that play tend to be crafters but I really dislike the crafting system. Sure, I do like the discovery of new crafts but that doesn't happen often. Maybe it's because I don't take the time in analyze most items because I know there is a ton with recipes either through the custom crafting system or via staff. I guess what I don't like about the custom crafting system is that most of the craftable items/recipes that I made don't surface up after my character first creates the item. I'm not sure how useful this feedback is but it's my two sids.

I guess a lot of things that I don't like about Arm goes in the whole "time invested vs. what you get out of it" group of feedback.

[Dar]

Then came the 40+ HP staff arrow.  Then came the mantis head.  To this day, I do not know who robbed me of that moment.  I didn't ask.  Instead, my trust with staff just withered. 

I was under impression staff could not do direct actions like these that result in a death of a character. Each time an animation results in death, they need to make a report about it.

At least that's how it was awhile ago.  When did this thing happen?  I would personally inquire about it, because im pretty surd that kill shot was against the rules.

[Kismetic]

It's something I probably should've reached out about, but at the time I didn't expect much.  That could be on me.  In the end, I used it as an example of something that happened to me.  Mostly a nothing burger.  But the point was meant to be, worse things have happened to others.

[Reiloth]

Then came the 40+ HP staff arrow.  Then came the mantis head.  To this day, I do not know who robbed me of that moment.  I didn't ask.  Instead, my trust with staff just withered. 

I was under impression staff could not do direct actions like these that result in a death of a character. Each time an animation results in death, they need to make a report about it.

At least that's how it was awhile ago.  When did this thing happen?  I would personally inquire about it, because im pretty surd that kill shot was against the rules.

Staff can absolutely gib your PC. They typically give warning (such as animating/echoing impending Gith doom) and typically give you a chance to GTFO if it's an obviously dangerous area, but if you stick around, they definitely have a green light to kill you (or at least not pull punches) when it makes game world sense to do so.

They also absolutely follow up with a PK report to their admin. That was true as of like 2013 when I was on Staff in 2012. But that Pk report isn't public to the player, and I don't recall Staff reaching out to a player to explain a death unless it was an accident.

I was responsible for one such mistake that lead to a whole kerfuffle and OOC bad blood with the player, I believe they turned to the dark side after this. There was a riot going on in Allanak, and soldiers were protecting one Templar or another, I believe it was the lead up to the Jade Massacre.

I was animating a NPC who had a throwing knife (at least I thought I was). I missed on my prompt that i was not in the NPC when I equipped a throwing knife and threw it at a PC. Obviously Staff strength is set to like 9 billion, so the PC instantly died. After a moment of WTF, I realized it was a mistake and pinged Adhira who was online. We immediately reached out to the player and apologized and wanted to rez them. They refused, believing it to be a Staff collusion plot to kill their PC. And from there they went over to the shadow boards and complained about it for years.

Conversely, I had a PC recently that was a leader in the North. Almost every time I took a patrol out I encountered a Big Bad PC. The Big Bad PC presumably felt our patrols were after them, and took it as a sign to engage us before we engaged him. In actuality, we were just patrolling, looking for like bandit NPCs and an attempt for me to provide fun for the PCs under me. That being said, if we were engaged, I would absolutely try (completely fruitlessly due to the power of this Big Bad) to engage/scare off/potentially harm this PC.

Fast forward to my Staff correspondence and my point about "false omnipotence" when it comes to Staffing. I asked for more tools and capability to combat threats like this Big Bad PC, who was thumbing their nose at a city state. I relied on that point on NPC animations to fill in skill gaps that helped deflate this PCs power against a virtually superior force. I was told it wasn't very smart to continually chase this PC and try to boop him on the nose and get the same result every time. As if I was the aggressor!

It just goes to show that "group think" is VERY easy for Staff to fall into. They hear the POV of one Staffer on a situation, and that's how all Staff begin to think about it. There is only a little skepticism in my experience between Staff sharing material and recaps. It has a personal bias and spin almost always.

I see Staff (like in Haldol's posts) that players don't have all the information and only one side of the story. The same is absolutely true of Staff — they are not omnipotent. Run Logs don't provide the context of game events happening in the moment. Time stamps don't always  provide the relevant experience of what went down and how. Couple this with Staff knowledge is reliant upon other Staff filling in details, or PC reports, both of which have implicit bias in what and how it is mentioned or recapped.

Again, I would urge both players and staff to give more benefit of the doubt and not assume they are more or less knowledgeable than each other. Take people At their word. If they are caught in a bold faced lie, call them on it. But otherwise, so much of what happens in Arm is grey at best, dependent on POV and if you were there or not to experience it fully.

[Nao]

- On the grind. We have taken steps to alleviate this for areas of the game that more rapid training would make sense. Beyond that, we continue talks on what other tweaks we can make that will both serve as respect to player time involvement and to do away with what some of you state as risk-aversion play due to not wanting to 'grind up again'.

I'd like to pick this point up for a bit. I know what you're talking about - the combat grind in certain clans has been reduced. But there's also the 'non-combat' grind. By that I mean the footwork that's required for non-combat coded tasks, usually on your own. That part has just been steadily increasing over the years with economy fixes that increase the time and effort required to get some coin together, the various decaying items and more complicated poison and brew recipes. This sort of ties into the complaint of 'the game feels slow', because it reduces the time you can spend interacting with other players and it just takes more time played to get these things done. Armageddon is meant to be a roleplaying game, not a simulation.

My suggestion is to take this 'other grind' into account for future code changes and not add any more of that.

[Kismetic]

I'm gonna throw out there that I was not fishing for an apology, nor did I think it was that egregious.  Did it piss me off?  Yeah, for a little bit.  But it was mostly deflating and left me with a feeling of distrust.  I had a feeling when I wrote it that there would be a litany of replies to the tune of "well, that's harsh desert world, fella."  Ultimately, I included it because it was my experience, it did contribute to my soured experience with the game, and that was the ask of this thread. 

[Reiloth]

I'm gonna throw out there that I was not fishing for an apology, nor did I think it was that egregious.  Did it piss me off?  Yeah, for a little bit.  But it was mostly deflating and left me with a feeling of distrust.  I had a feeling when I wrote it that there would be a litany of replies to the tune of "well, that's harsh desert world, fella."  Ultimately, I included it because it was my experience, it did contribute to my soured experience with the game, and that was the ask of this thread.

Oh I totally agree with you if that's what you got from my response. I think all of our experiences are our own — i can easily see why that situation created distrust. It takes time to come back from that if ever.

Your post resonates with me as well, particularly in time sink ratio and our age/kids/job. Just not the same as it was 20 years ago. I do really like your suggestion of "skilled new PC" that perhaps doesn't gain skill as easily. I would happily play that to avoid the grind, and the grind from nothing is probably what bums me out the most about starting a new PC.

[dumbstruck]

- On the grind....

...That part has just been steadily increasing over the years with economy fixes that increase the time and effort required to get some coin together, the various decaying items and more complicated poison and brew recipes. This sort of ties into the complaint of 'the game feels slow', because it reduces the time you can spend interacting with other players and it just takes more time played to get these things done. Armageddon is meant to be a roleplaying game, not a simulation.

My suggestion is to take this 'other grind' into account for future code changes and not add any more of that.

Quoted for truth, bolded for emphasis.

[Kismetic]

Your post resonates with me as well, particularly in time sink ratio and our age/kids/job. Just not the same as it was 20 years ago. I do really like your suggestion of "skilled new PC" that perhaps doesn't gain skill as easily. I would happily play that to avoid the grind, and the grind from nothing is probably what bums me out the most about starting a new PC.

Even if there are occasions when I do have time to play the game, those are few and far between.  I'd say this is the main reason I had not been playing.

[Dar]

Then came the 40+ HP staff arrow.  Then came the mantis head.  To this day, I do not know who robbed me of that moment.  I didn't ask.  Instead, my trust with staff just withered. 

I was under impression staff could not do direct actions like these that result in a death of a character. Each time an animation results in death, they need to make a report about it.

At least that's how it was awhile ago.  When did this thing happen?  I would personally inquire about it, because im pretty surd that kill shot was against the rules.

Staff can absolutely gib your PC. They typically give warning (such as animating/echoing impending Gith doom) and typically give you a chance to GTFO if it's an obviously dangerous area, but if you stick around, they definitely have a green light to kill you (or at least not pull punches) when it makes game world sense to do so.

They also absolutely follow up with a PK report to their admin. That was true as of like 2013 when I was on Staff in 2012. But that Pk report isn't public to the player, and I don't recall Staff reaching out to a player to explain a death unless it was an accident.

I was responsible for one such mistake that lead to a whole kerfuffle and OOC bad blood with the player, I believe they turned to the dark side after this. There was a riot going on in Allanak, and soldiers were protecting one Templar or another, I believe it was the lead up to the Jade Massacre.

I was animating a NPC who had a throwing knife (at least I thought I was). I missed on my prompt that i was not in the NPC when I equipped a throwing knife and threw it at a PC. Obviously Staff strength is set to like 9 billion, so the PC instantly died. After a moment of WTF, I realized it was a mistake and pinged Adhira who was online. We immediately reached out to the player and apologized and wanted to rez them. They refused, believing it to be a Staff collusion plot to kill their PC. And from there they went over to the shadow boards and complained about it for years.

Conversely, I had a PC recently that was a leader in the North. Almost every time I took a patrol out I encountered a Big Bad PC. The Big Bad PC presumably felt our patrols were after them, and took it as a sign to engage us before we engaged him. In actuality, we were just patrolling, looking for like bandit NPCs and an attempt for me to provide fun for the PCs under me. That being said, if we were engaged, I would absolutely try (completely fruitlessly due to the power of this Big Bad) to engage/scare off/potentially harm this PC.

Fast forward to my Staff correspondence and my point about "false omnipotence" when it comes to Staffing. I asked for more tools and capability to combat threats like this Big Bad PC, who was thumbing their nose at a city state. I relied on that point on NPC animations to fill in skill gaps that helped deflate this PCs power against a virtually superior force. I was told it wasn't very smart to continually chase this PC and try to boop him on the nose and get the same result every time. As if I was the aggressor!

It just goes to show that "group think" is VERY easy for Staff to fall into. They hear the POV of one Staffer on a situation, and that's how all Staff begin to think about it. There is only a little skepticism in my experience between Staff sharing material and recaps. It has a personal bias and spin almost always.

I see Staff (like in Haldol's posts) that players don't have all the information and only one side of the story. The same is absolutely true of Staff — they are not omnipotent. Run Logs don't provide the context of game events happening in the moment. Time stamps don't always  provide the relevant experience of what went down and how. Couple this with Staff knowledge is reliant upon other Staff filling in details, or PC reports, both of which have implicit bias in what and how it is mentioned or recapped.

Again, I would urge both players and staff to give more benefit of the doubt and not assume they are more or less knowledgeable than each other. Take people At their word. If they are caught in a bold faced lie, call them on it. But otherwise, so much of what happens in Arm is grey at best, dependent on POV and if you were there or not to experience it fully.

So that 40 hp arrow from another room after he escaped and was resting was legit?

[Reiloth]

I dunno. I don't think either of us were there or have enough information to make a judgement either way. Kismet it was there, and experienced it regardless, and it created a feeling of distrust. So it doesn't really matter if it was legitimate or not.

[Kismetic]

I wasn't resting, I was running to Luir's.  I was maybe a handful of rooms away, on that last stretch before you turn west for the gate.  This is a recollection from years past.  Not exactly sure when, but sometime in the last five years?

[Is Friday]

Don't get me started on 40-60hp arrows. Had my noble sniped out of a huge group of soldiers that way. Like... silliest thing ever that you can pick out one person during a massive battle. Made even sillier that this person allegedly had several strength buffing rings. Arm often is just a personal playground for some players.

[Nao]

- On the grind. We have taken steps to alleviate this for areas of the game that more rapid training would make sense. Beyond that, we continue talks on what other tweaks we can make that will both serve as respect to player time involvement and to do away with what some of you state as risk-aversion play due to not wanting to 'grind up again'.

I'd like to pick this point up for a bit. I know what you're talking about - the combat grind in certain clans has been reduced. But there's also the 'non-combat' grind. By that I mean the footwork that's required for non-combat coded tasks, usually on your own. That part has just been steadily increasing over the years with economy fixes that increase the time and effort required to get some coin together, the various decaying items and more complicated poison and brew recipes. This sort of ties into the complaint of 'the game feels slow', because it reduces the time you can spend interacting with other players and it just takes more time played to get these things done. Armageddon is meant to be a roleplaying game, not a simulation.

My suggestion is to take this 'other grind' into account for future code changes and not add any more of that.

Something I forgot: some of the changes that are intended to force players to cooperate also tie into this. I get the intention - you'd rather have people interacting than playing arm solo and just running around alone all day.
But with reduced player numbers (and offpeak play, though I also see this happening on peak) - if something requires two or three players to happen, that often means it's not happening at all, adding to the feeling of "nothing is happening". Because there simply is no other PC that can fill the exact niche that you need.
Most of us want to interact with other players, and will go out of our way to create that interaction. There wouldn't be so many complaints about low numbers if we didn't want to interact - I swear we do. The new classes were designed to not work well on their own, for the most part, but it feels counterproductive when you can't get anything done because you can't get a hold of the right PCs with the right combination of skills. I think that strategy of requiring two or three different PCs for coded tasks should be revisited to reduce that feeling of stagnation.

[Night Queen]

That Armageddon is still at the stage of relying on clunky old run logs seems like it's a big issue that has a knock-on effect on SO many other things that comes up that affect both players and staff - there's been situations where I've been told things that I know absolutely are not true and have had to say once or even twice please please look at the log argh

Like no one's ever really developed a set of proper human-readable filters for logs for staff, because it's not cool and gives headlines like other new features do I think this should be made a priority, so that there's no so much reliance on she-said he-said stuff. It should be immediately easy for pulling logs. It should be something that's easy to casually read for staff to catch up on RP they missed, instead of people wanting to avoid it because it's a nightmare of code spam?
Maybe something like this:
https://web.archive.org/web/20150827111847/http://spad.co.uk/cohlog.php

They shouldn't be deleted either but put into cold storage if there's a cost issue, stuff that seems not relevant at the time might be years later for new staff that want to expand on lore of characters that are present then but are then historical figures, etc



On the subject of grind... We have a case study for this already, if you think about it, it's the same issue as letting people make throwaway magickers/super strong giants/muls, since they are already leagues ahead of everyone else by their nature - doing the same with mundane skills seems like it's moving in the same direction - but maybe a wrong one, for the game?

It makes it feel like the time people invest in a character is not respected (it goes both ways!), because people can just make a throwaway they don't really care about and treating characters like that devalues the RP for the people who invest more time in fostering plots and RP between groups (imagine if you were in the war RPT and someone was able to just respawn throwaways on one side of the battle)

[Brokkr]

It's something I probably should've reached out about, but at the time I didn't expect much.  That could be on me.  In the end, I used it as an example of something that happened to me.  Mostly a nothing burger.  But the point was meant to be, worse things have happened to others.

It can take a bit to get used to animating in the heat of the moment.  In this case, it was a brand new Staff member that didn't notice the gith they loaded up had master archery.  And since you got dropped to -8, apparently not much time to figure out what to do afterwards before the mantis head.

[Orlau]

Related to the talk about grind above, I'm not a fan at all of the new poisons. I think the potency stuff is somewhat cool barring the decay, but the cures and the cure system is horrible and only gives crappy deaths.

Dying even after taking four cures should not be a thing, in my honest opinion!