Think we need to close some stuff.

[Windstorm]

I'm trying to be vague enough not to break any rules, but I meant a lot of the stuff that happened after that.

[Triskelion]

Fair enough. Never heard of it. It didn't enter my radar. Even so, it was what, 8+ months ago? That's a long time.

[Pariah]

I love that people are actually articulating why the game is too big and that staff should compress it.

[Lizzie]

I'm not in favor of consolidation by destroying playable areas.  I'm fine with having limited clans in different clan types being open at any given moment, on a rotation. 2-3 nobles in Allanak, 2-3 in Tuluk, 2-3 templars total in each, and all of them requiring at least /some/ overlap in login time. Even if it's just 2 hours every Thursday that they're all logged in at the same time, and the rest of the week they never get to interact at all.

Any 3-4 tribes total open, whether desert elf, human, or combination of the two, at any given moment.

And when one dies out due to lack of interest, that tribe becomes close to play - and perhaps a couple weeks later, another one opens with a roll call.

The idea of destroying both cities is intriguing. But the entire thing would be done by staff, which everyone HATES because they call it pointless light shows, or it'd have to wait til there's enough of a player base in both cities logged in at the same time for a long-term HRPT. Neither is preferable given the current state of the game.

In addition, gemmed mages would cease to be gemmed mages if Tektolnes is gone.  So you can just remove that paragraph entirely.

[Pariah]

I'm not in favor of consolidation by destroying playable areas.  I'm fine with having limited clans in different clan types being open at any given moment, on a rotation. 2-3 nobles in Allanak, 2-3 in Tuluk, 2-3 templars total in each, and all of them requiring at least /some/ overlap in login time. Even if it's just 2 hours every Thursday that they're all logged in at the same time, and the rest of the week they never get to interact at all.

Any 3-4 tribes total open, whether desert elf, human, or combination of the two, at any given moment.

So using your numbers here, "worst case".  3+3+3=9 just in Templars and Nobles. (That's a whole lot of tavern sitting IMO)

Let's assume that tribes have 2 players minimum, so 9+8(4 tribes open)= 17 players.

Most non-rpt primetimes 2-5pm EST (Euros) is about 20ish people, most nights are 20-30.

So you're saying that anywhere from half to most of the players should be in these positions and the few stragglers as indies in the current setup?  You don't see a problem in that?

Plus you're missing the GMH folks, so lets add +3 to your number cause there should always be a Kuraci, Salarri and Kadius player.

At least with some of the ideas present, you won't have to take an across the world trek to run into someone like you would in this scenario.

[Triskelion]

I'm not in favor of consolidation by destroying playable areas.  I'm fine with having limited clans in different clan types being open at any given moment, on a rotation. 2-3 nobles in Allanak, 2-3 in Tuluk, 2-3 templars total in each, [snip] Any 3-4 tribes total open, whether desert elf, human, or combination of the two, at any given moment.

That's what we already have, isn't it? It isn't a goal, it's a descripton of the current situation. As I understand it, the current quota is 2 nobles and 2 templars in each city, 3 d-elf tribes, and then I have no idea about human tribes because apparently nobody plays in them at all.

I believe destroying both cities is kind of a pipe dream, but Tuluk could go. The problem with its closure was that it happened prematurely and abruptly at the whims of Nyr, whose motives were questionable at best. It wasn't necessary to shut it down at that point in time. There was a promise of increased story material in Allanak that never materialized, and when that became clear, people started to quit. Others asked for Tuluk to be opened back up after a while, but it didn't happen for years. Then, once the playerbase had shrunk to such a point where it could no longer sustain two cities, Tuluk was then reopened and left adrift with no real staff presence, and while I haven't played there since the first six months of its return, I can't say that there are signs of a strong resurgence for the city lately.

There's a lot of talk about how the loss of Tuluk cost the game a lot of players who didn't return when the city opened back up, but it's not as black and white as that. It was shut down at an unnecessary time and in an inconsiderate way, and it didn't lead to better storytelling elsewhere. That's what cost the game some number of players. Then the calls for Tuluk's return were ignored for years, only to finally be answered when it was too late. Any players who might have quit Arm because Tuluk closed down were unlikely to leap back in like six years later, and the diminished playerbase could no longer support two cities.

This does not automatically equate to "less content = bad." It's more like "don't cull content when it isn't necessary, and don't add more when it isn't sustainable." There's a time and a place for everything, but it was both the wrong time to close Tuluk and the wrong time to bring it back again.

I do think that we can definitely consolidate some of the pocket-spheres that basically serve the same purpose. Do we need the Crimson Wind and the Masterless? We don't need three d-elf tribes, either--I know at least one of them had zero players in it as recently as last month. Next time that happens, close it for a while. Do we need two branches of the Byn? Do we even need more than one noble house per city? While they might in theory have interesting political friction, I can't say I've seen the faintest trace of that in recent years. Instead, we could just have one open at a time and rotate whenever the last one invariably stores.

Or - *ducks rotten fruit* - try a few months without PC nobles, but assign a storyteller to the job of representing that aspect of the game. If that turns out to be better (which I admittedly suspect it will), keep it that way. If people miss PC nobles, bring them back.

[kahuna]

You don't need to consolidate anything in Arm, the metaplot needs to advance. The game has for the most part had the same metaplot since the 2000s. If your goal is to keep it static so new players can experience a single player type metaplot over and over, that's fine. But your current/past players typically won't be interested in just replaying the same stuff over and over. I could be wrong though.

[Pariah]

I also agree the "WAY" Tuluk was closed before was fucking horrible.  That is why I think we lost so many people because they were just shit on by staff at the time.

Then to make the problem worse, they gave us Tuluk-lite which was Morin's and you'd get a few people off in the far flung north and it would still create that separation of the whole world between players in Luirs and Allanak.  So you closed a city to consolidate the playerbase, but then opened a new area right next door.  WHAT?

But again, I know this is a major change we are discussing here and I know it would have growing pains and be needed to be handled with care and compassion for the players OOCly who love whatever areas get nuked.  I get it, change is hard.

But to keep going, "Because change is hard and people won't like it, the game is fine." is just putting on blinders.

[Boggis]

The idea of destroying both cities is intriguing. But the entire thing would be done by staff, which everyone HATES because they call it pointless light shows, or it'd have to wait til there's enough of a player base in both cities logged in at the same time for a long-term HRPT. Neither is preferable given the current state of the game.

If we went that route I wouldn't even do it as a HRPT precisely for that reason. I'd let the current world roll for as long it takes to get the new thing ready, get all the docs out there so people can prep and then flip the switch and we all fast forward a 100 years or whatever and start playing the aftermath. The current problem is that even if we have a setup like you propose they're still split right down the middle with basically zero interaction between them. Why not find try to find a way to bring them together and have all those numbers in the same place? It'll get far more interesting play going on.

In addition, gemmed mages would cease to be gemmed mages if Tektolnes is gone.  So you can just remove that paragraph entirely.

I'm quite sure we can easily come up with a concept to keep them around if we wanted to. It's not exactly a tricky problem. The idea of leashed elementalists is a good one and if we wanted peoples' attitudes towards magickers to change it's easier to implement that if people can see they're leashed in some manner.

[Triskelion]

and then flip the switch and we all fast forward a 100 years or whatever and start playing the aftermath.

You know, plenty of MUDs have had good results from periodic player wipes. It used to be standard practice back in the nineties. I think many of the hangups over consolidation stem from the issue of "but what about the players who are already there?" and a p-wipe would be a clean answer to that. The only question is how loud the backlash might be. Personally, I think it would be worth trying, so long as the preparation and plan was good enough, not just sprung upon us Reborn-style.

Arx, the biggest success story of the RPI-esque genre in recent years, is doing just this sometime soon. Maybe it's a bit modern for Armageddon's ancient bones, but I do think that it's an idea worth talking about, at least--even if I know deep down that everyone'll be like, "fuck no!!"

[Pariah]

and then flip the switch and we all fast forward a 100 years or whatever and start playing the aftermath.

You know, plenty of MUDs have had good results from periodic player wipes. It used to be standard practice back in the nineties. I think many of the hangups over consolidation stem from the issue of "but what about the players who are already there?" and a p-wipe would be a clean answer to that. The only question is how loud the backlash might be. Personally, I think it would be worth trying, so long as the preparation and plan was good enough.

Don't even need to get so crazy, if we go forward 100 years, make it some world altering magick that drags all the PCs with it, hand waving the whole thing.

I think wiping the playerbase would be more jarring to people than destroying Allanak and Tuluk, because some players have had people alive for decades.

[Triskelion]

Maybe like three PCs alive today are more than two RL years old. If that alone was the thing holding it back, I would prepare to say that they can go the way of the kank. There are, of course, many more considerations that have to be made, but it's worth discussing.

[Lizzie]

I'm not in favor of consolidation by destroying playable areas.  I'm fine with having limited clans in different clan types being open at any given moment, on a rotation. 2-3 nobles in Allanak, 2-3 in Tuluk, 2-3 templars total in each, and all of them requiring at least /some/ overlap in login time. Even if it's just 2 hours every Thursday that they're all logged in at the same time, and the rest of the week they never get to interact at all.

Any 3-4 tribes total open, whether desert elf, human, or combination of the two, at any given moment.

So using your numbers here, "worst case".  3+3+3=9 just in Templars and Nobles. (That's a whole lot of tavern sitting IMO)

Let's assume that tribes have 2 players minimum, so 9+8(4 tribes open)= 17 players.

Most non-rpt primetimes 2-5pm EST (Euros) is about 20ish people, most nights are 20-30.

So you're saying that anywhere from half to most of the players should be in these positions and the few stragglers as indies in the current setup?  You don't see a problem in that?

Plus you're missing the GMH folks, so lets add +3 to your number cause there should always be a Kuraci, Salarri and Kadius player.

At least with some of the ideas present, you won't have to take an across the world trek to run into someone like you would in this scenario.

Where are you getting half the players? There are typically well over 100 unique logins every week. A maximum of 17-20 players taking up sponsored roles in scattered playtimes is less than 20% of the playerbase. The other 80% of the playerbase would be - the people all those sponsored folks interact with, hire, conspire to kill, befriend, take as concubines, manipulate, fall victim to, or don't interact with at all.

You've been told by multiple members of this community and forum that - the people who show up on your who list when you type "who" does NOT equal the entirety of the playerbase.  Comparing "number of sponsored roles in the game" with "number of people on your hourly WHO check" is a bad-faith comparison. Please stop doing that.

[Pariah]

Unique logins means nothing if there isn't a metric of time spent on game to go with it.

5000 people could log into the game for one minute and not make a difference in the game.

If I log in for ten minutes, walk around check the bars in Allanak and log off, what -good- am I doing?  Nothing but adding 1 to the unique logins.

Now if unique logins takes into effect logging on for say an hour or more and then ticks that number, great and good that argument works.

If a business has 500 people visit it a week but they don't buy anything, they still go bankrupt.

And that's why the Unique Logins comment always seems to fall on deaf ears, it's not a good metric to show anything of value.

[Kavrick]

You could have a billion logins per day but it doesn't make a speck of different if I never see a single Templar or spend an entire day in a portion of the game that's completely empty. Unique logins have always been such a cope when we get peak of 30 players online. I've bashed the drum of players being split between too many areas of play since I started playing, but staff don't care or seem to desire to fix it, no matter how dead portions of the game are and how bad it is for the experience in general.

[CirclelessBard]

https://iberia.jdai.pt/mudstats/mud/armageddon_mud

This site collects MSSP statistics and tells us, among other things, the average player count. I could be wrong but I'm 90% sure MSSP counts people who are logged in invisibly (aka staff accounts).

If you want to use averages, feel free to use averages, but at least consider that "what it seems like the average is when I'm logged in" is not an average. The data is there, so we may as well use it!

If the average number of logged in players over the past 30 days is indeed 22 players, then you'd have to consider how many of these players are leaders on average. Using the total leader count and comparing it to the average is a faulty comparison. Unfortunately, this is not something MSSP data can tell us. We have to rely on staff to tell us how many leaders are logged in on average. This is not a cope - this is just asking for the use of statistical accuracy, rather than vibes, to justify massive game changes. If the game is going to radically change, it should be done based on actual empirical data. And I think whether staff are concerned or not about the playerbase being too top-heavy in leadership roles, it's still good info to have since it can help inform the need for future role calls as well as general changes to the game.

In any event, the best idea I have read so far is Boggis's just because it would be a breath of fresh air for the game while preserving the lore that makes Armageddon's world interesting. I'm deeply opposed to just closing play areas willy nilly because in any game I've played that does that, it always feels like a botched amputation - done as a last resort to try to save the body, only to end up making things worse. But I think an organized shift to a new paradigm for the game would actually give us something different to play with. Whether that comes from a complete restructuring of the accessible game world, or a renewed focus on the game's metaplot, doesn't really make a difference as long as it makes the game more efficient at telling stories collaboratively.

[najdorf]

If you make the game small, nothing is stopping you from making it big again later.

If you close Tuluk, nothing is stopping you from opening it again.
1 month later: 15 players quit game.

[Pariah]

To be fair, I don't know of closing Tuluk is the solve either.

Maybe it's more of a management thing or allocation thing.

Maybe we put Tuluk or Allanak on autopilot (Staff enforcing realism when they need to, say I run around throwing fireballs at people in the streets cause RAWR and the Templars blow me up.)

Maybe we make nobles staff controlled?  Maybe we make GMHs more automated to not -need- that merchant as much?

Maybe make being a citizen of Allanak or Tuluk have some coded benefits ala handstamp barricades (But better) in Tuluk.

Open Roles
There are open roles that aren't being filled already.

Now we have them trying to put more nobles into play in Tuluk and beyond with yet another new band of misfits being created.
Tuluk Noobles
Oash Nooble
Brokkr's Murderhobo Role Call

I mean, I -think- maybe the justification is "If we make more leader roles, players will get excited and want to work with said new Leaders?"

But only staff could tell you, it just feels like we are going about it backwards is my feeling.

I think creating leaders should be based on interest of players.  If you get a shitload of gemmed who wanna play in House Oash, open up House Oash, but that's because you got a handful of Gemmed that are begging for it.  Not open House Oash and then beg for gemmers.

[Dracul]

Be the change you want to see in the world! Kill those nobles!

Okay, but seriously, this could be solved with just more 'meta involving' rather than 'keeping those secret plots' because a lot of what is going on seems to be behind doors.

Another would be be a pullback of the veil and OOC. Such as: Yes, there were 10 players in [redacted bar] last week around 8pm, but the area is a little dead at 7am....at 7am [redacted] are gathering [here].

I think it might be reasonable to have player announcements of "There is a player looking for other players in this area at this time for [accepted category]" accepted category could be 'a hunting buddy' or 'a drinking buddy' or a 'mining buddy'  ...we could even set up a pseudo ooc/ic npc or pc whose job it is to get those grebbers and hunters to stick together so they stop dying off and actually bring in some materials for said entity.

[roughneck]

If I'm going to interact with one person from a clan, I'd way rather meet the 'leader', even if they're a leader of one.

To me, leader means trusted representation of the clan more than it does having lackies.

[Riev]

Anecdote:

I recently played in a GMH. It did a thing to bring hunters and grebbers together with people who might need their services.

I think in total, 4 hunters showed up and one of them "got a job" out of it. Something small, insignificant. There were even door prizes and kits for people who wanted to TRY their hand at all this.

We even set up one for peak-ish, and one for european.

Sometimes its just not in the cards, consolidation doesn't matter. Its timing and interest.

[mansa]

Anecdote:

...

Sometimes its just not in the cards, consolidation doesn't matter. Its timing and interest.

This is probably the most important statement on the forums.



Every single time a "recommended playing time" was posted in the Staff Announcements, we would have large influx of players log into the game.   If you want more things to happen in game, you need to tell others that something is happening, and when it is happening, and where it is happening.

[Pariah]

This is probably the most important statement on the forums.

Every single time a "recommended playing time" was posted in the Staff Announcements, we would have large influx of players log into the game.   If you want more things to happen in game, you need to tell others that something is happening, and when it is happening, and where it is happening.

Already a post about it.

[Triskelion]

The game can't run on pre-scheduled RPTs. Those are all well and good, but it's not right to say that if you want anything to happen in the game, the onus is on you to launch an RPT, and otherwise you don't deserve for anything to be happening. The game has failed if that becomes the minimum standard. Not everyone is playing a character who has any real way to run an RPT, not everyone is playing in an area where that's realistically possible, and not everyone lives in a timezone where it's an option. It cannot be a requisite for worthwhile roleplay. It's an occasional bonus.

[Pariah]

The game can't run on pre-scheduled RPTs. Those are all well and good, but it's not right to say that if you want anything to happen in the game, the onus is on you to launch an RPT, and otherwise you don't deserve for anything to be happening. The game has failed if that becomes the minimum standard. Not everyone is playing a character who has any real way to run an RPT, not everyone is playing in an area where that's realistically possible, and not everyone lives in a timezone where it's an option. It cannot be a requisite for worthwhile roleplay. It's an occasional bonus.

This.