What's your history with the game?

[Fredd]

There's been a lot of reaching out since seasons was announced. Normally I will just be as succinct as possible and move on from any such contacts. But this situation is different. I've been comforting my fellow players. And in one of these chats I realized that a lot of us have some fairly strong connections to this game for whatever reason. And I thought it would be nice to share them.

I got into arm because I was looking for an RPI. I was roleplaying a lot on second life with my RL wife at the time. I was suffering from severe wartime ptsd, and was more or less unable to feel any emotions besides fear/anxiety and anger. It was different when I was putting myself into my character though. Something about it let me step out of myself and feel things.

So I found Arm played for a bit, tried to get the wife to play, so I made  a new account. I named it after a good friend of mine in Highschool who was an AFAB trans man who introduced himself to me as "Fred, with double d's So Fredd" and gave my wife at the time my original account with a character i had made and gotten approved for her and got her into Salarr to try things out and learn.

Now you know why my name has 2 D's

Anyways, Severe untreated PTSD does not make for a good marriage. Doubly so when you have no idea what's going on. And I ended up homeless with a suitcase of clothes and a laptop. I legit don't think I'de be sitting here right now if it wasn't for the escape this game afforded me during this time of my life.

Anyways, I worked some shit out, moved states with help from an RP friend from another old chat game that doesn't exist anymore and pulled a half decent life together. This is around when I took my first long break from the game. I guess I didn't really need the escape anymore.

But I love the game, so I came back. And I always do.

Anyways, that's my History with Arm. What's yours?

[FantasyWriter]

So... I was going to school for English, and met this crazy ass fucker named Kronibas (to us here, at least) in a professional writing class. Around this same time, I ended you going through a divorce. My ex wife and I ended up parting ways, so I eneded renting a two-bedroom apartment in the college town and she moved back to the area she was from.

Kronibas asked if he could move into the other room and I was like cool, why not.

Probably a couple months in, I saw him playing arm on his laptop and asked him about it, and I I fell down the rabbit hole.

I was absolutely HORRIBLE. I remember I kept getting working for this same indie hunter in Nak (2005 ish, I think). Like, I went through like a half-dozen PCs in the first few weeks.

I've played almost consistently since then except for a few short breaks and a long one that ended last year. It's been an awesome experience overall. While I almost always end up spending way more time on it than I should when I am engaged in the game/community, it has always been there for me as a form of escapism in my lowest moments, and I hope it stays around for as long as I am able to play.

[WarriorPoet]

I loved to write. I like harsh, gritty settings. I loved the idea of permadeath. It was free and square and kept me on the couch with the wife and kids, so I steeped myself in the lore of this place for 20 years. All of the time I put into my favorite movies, books, games, etc could be combined and still only equal about 10% of the time I spent in Zalanthas. I am Nakki to my fucking bones. Or I was.

[Lizzie]

Started with Gemstone, when I was 30. It was available through the online services, I used Prodigy. I became a file librarian for their new-age chat area, and got a free P* account. So when P* started charging by the hour, I had free access. Got sucked into the whole mud experience. Left there with disgust because people were shoving each other (and myself) into RL situations that were really unhealthy. Also because it became a "trading card game" with people buying and selling characters.

Moved on to Inferno, which was a MOO, and not to be confused with InfernoMOO, which was a different game entirely. Became their head builder. Trained a bunch of people. Then they started charging to play, and lost a lot of their player base. It got pretty ridiculous, when another builder suggested they'd been playing in a place called Freil's Rest during the Rebellion in Armageddon, I took a peek.

Showed up in Allanak, got swooped up into the Guild, double-agented for Oash, and eventually assassinated by the Guild boss for pissing off Kurac, I think.  It was a trial by nuclear bombing first character experience in the game, and it hooked me immediately. Got permabanned for a misunderstanding back in I think 2004? Snuck in anyway with a friend's account and SSH tunnel since he didn't want to play anymore. Eventually made my own new account and continued sneaking in til Nyr outted me on the GDB. But since my original account was still permabanned and my current one wasn't, I never had to ask for amnesty. So I'm here, and I've been here, all along since 2002. Became a builder, became a staff member, stepped down from staff. Recently volunteered to return to building for the current version of Arm, and maybe I'd offer to staff for the upcoming versions. Haven't been selected for either but I'll play regardless.

There's no other game I've tried that's engaged me quite so well. I like the theme plus combination of mechanics and roleplay. I've tried MUSHes, and I've tried hack-n-slashes, and I've tried other RPIs. So I'm here til "here" ceases to exist.

I'm retired, I live in Florida so the weather sucks most of the year and most people spend most of their time indoors anyway. Gaming is a natural hobby match for that.

[Kaathe]

I'm a late 90s early 00s Dragonrealms refugee because among other things, it became play to win. I wanted permadeath because dragonrealms had these big names that just never rotated and it felt stale. I wanted RP required because why bother if it's just encoraged. And I needed a gritty setting because post-apoc-wasteland-western-lawless-stuff is my favorite regardless of tech level. There weren't many options for all that on TMC even in 2001 so here I am. 

I tend to take big breaks from Armageddon to do other creative/rp stuff like drama during university and  tabletop RPGs (much of it GMing) during the 20teens.  But never looked very hard for an alternative mud. A brief glance shows nothing stands out as a great match for what I want, so I'll probably try to get my tabletop going again.

[kahuna]

Complicated.

[zilcho]

Joined 2000 to fill the time while working remote from the family.

Made horrible characters, then I made a little dwarf merchant and I just started getting better at emoting and understanding the world.

Made a noble character, had a tumultuous time. Died due to a display bug and not knowing that scan was important. Fell into a pretty deep despair over losing that character but recovered.

Spent some time on staff, nothing notable other than animating some head Borsail noble during Ysania's trial. Left staff. Had a few characters that were only memorable to me. Played a decently high ranking Kuraci Nilazi who opened a portal that was used to kill probably as important and notable character as I've ever seen. Which sucks because that player got a shit tier ending. I can't remember if I wished up about it beforehand, I believe I did. How that went down still sits poorly with to me to this day but I guess it's just the deal with a game like this, that if you give someone time versus bum rushing them they spill the beans on you.

Ran afoul of Nessalin over my GDB posts being too stupid/goofy. Made a post in OOC about how you should eat more fiber and got my karma dropped from 8 to 1. Took a break because it was pointless to bother, I had a bad reputation now and that was that. I had ruined my standing with Sanvean due to one thing I cannot truly remember and the other which was literally a fat finger that caused me to copy/paste an entire private convo into a public area because I just had to use putty as a client.

Came back on a new account and just laid low. Sociopathic Human ranger who died due to lag to a mekillot. He was a psycho but he never killed anyone because using them was more beneficial. Dwarf ranger who learned about a certain area the hard way. Another long break. Started a new character, got really into him and found out he was going to be done in a month.

Bitched about it in a thread but acceptance has set in.

Really glad I spent the vast majority of the time I've played since whenever my karma got nuked for GDB posting to just avoiding interacting with players outside the game and avoiding interacting with staff as much as possible inside and outside of the game.

Always just loved Arm as a place to roll around trying to survive with rangers and explore. Lots of great memories, some painful mistakes made by the much younger man that I was, some frustrations.

Happy to just call it good, it's crazy as a gamer to be able to spend close to 23 years off and on playing.

[7dwarves]

I'm sad that my reckless way of playing and chronic restartitis have prevented me from enjoying the game while it lasted. From engaging in deeper, loner termed plots, from finding secrets (there are plenty of locations NPCs and lore I have deep desire to find about and I never will, I fear). I have about 200 corpse PCs on my hands and some of them had plenty of potential, sadly wasted.

[Roon]

Started playing in 2005 or 2006 because my GF at the time was playing and drew me into the game. I went all in on it for a time and embraced the Armageddon experience in full. Then Reborn was announced, which was weird to me when I had only played for about a year by then and couldn't see a very good reason for such an undertaking. Still, maybe there was a good plan behind it, so I stuck around.

For a while after the announcement, the game was dead. Player numbers dropped by half or more. We were told that it would take six months to make the new version of Armageddon, so nobody had any motivation to do anything that would just end before it could go anywhere. Some weeks went by where the playing port might as well have been closed because hardly anybody was on and nobody did anything. A lot like now, in fact.

Then staff decided to let everyone play whatever they wanted. All special applications were approved by default and people started coming back to try that thing they had always wanted to try. Numbers returned to something almost close to normal, although since everyone was playing a karma option (and this was before extended subclasses, so non-mundanes were pretty much D&D wizards), the game went haywire with crazy amounts of magic and mayhem. There were big plots for the End of the World, but they were too high up on the shelf to be reached by anyone with their feet on the ground.

A year and a half went by like that, and then people had enough of it. There was the Great Karma-Off, and then the cancellation of Armageddon Reborn. Things began to return to some semblance of normalcy, but in the process, someone called Nyr had taken over the running of the game. And he was... an acquired taste, let's say.

I'll gloss over the many strange deeds of Nyr and simply say that after a few run-ins with him, I thought to myself, "fuck this game and the guy running it. If I ever play again, I'll just make another account and fly under the radar. I'll have as little to do with staff as possible and just do my own thing, hoping to avoid the wholesale madhouse that Nyr has introduced."

And so, for years, I did that. Once in a while, when I got so pissed off at the way Armageddon was being run, I told staff to go fuck themselves and quit for a year or so, and then I'd eventually make a new account when boredom, FOMO, morbid curiosity or periodic unemployment came calling again. I had resigned myself to the role of a rogue player who wanted nothing to do with staff, because even though Nyr's departure brought a noticeable reduction in the utter bullshit that marked his tenure, I didn't find that this was gone altogether.

And more importantly, I noticed that the game had become really dull. Not much went on wherever I tried to play, and any efforts I made myself seemed to fall on deaf ears. Two or three cases of mounting frustration brought me to tell staff that they had their heads in places that might limit their field of view, after which I quit playing for another year, only to make another new account at some point to see if things were better. My tone wasn't always level-headed, but it reflected the frustration and dejection that I had with the way this game had gone.

I never had more than one active account at any time, but I've gone through quite a few. It's against the rules, but I figured that since I never had two concurrent characters, nobody would truly care. I don't even know if it was ever noticed. I didn't take steps to mask it with VPNs and whatnot, I just left old accounts behind. It went either unnoticed or ignored.

One of the things that really ruined the illusion of Armageddon as a game with integrity was some four or five years ago when I had a character I really cared about and had played for several months. One day while I was sitting in the Gaj, some dwarf in newbie clothes walked in with a club and just attacked me, knocking my character out (a fully branched ranger with exceptional endurance) in two consecutive blows that happened faster than I could type anything- very balanced game mechanics- and then finishing me off while I was unconscious. When I asked staff to retcon the actions of this obvious troll, one just callously copy-pasted me the text from 'help newbie' (I'm not joking) and another said nope, what's done is done, sorry it happened. Better luck next time.

Similar incidents in more recent times have shown me that this "philosophy" has not changed, and the same sort of indifference towards the core player experience still appears to reside with staff. It feels a lot like it has been deemed easier to let that kind of thing be an occasional part of the Armageddon experience than it would be to take simple measures to protect the game from it. After all, if people trolling the game see that their actions are allowed to stand, they aren't exactly discouraged from doing it again. It has often felt like staff's decisionmaking in such matters happened to align with whatever stance required no action to be taken by them. They just do what's easiest for them, even if it ruins the game for a good-faith player and rewards a bad-faith player.

That has been my experience too often for me to feel like I could really embrace the game again. Sometimes it has led me to do things with a sense of "fuck it, they don't care anyway" in the back of my mind, and while I've never employed that mindset in situations where it would hurt another player, I have definitely done some twinky shit with regards to skill-grinding and NPCs because I felt like nobody would notice or care. And for the most part, that seems to have been true. If other players get to use fire, I want to fight fire with fire. I'm not gonna be the chump who loses another character to some shithead troll, so I'll grind my skills on NPCs to defend myself against it if staff won't do anything to protect the game from that bullshit. And nobody ever tells me to stop it, so...

For the past three years or so, Armageddon has been an odd spectacle to me. I've played here and there with long breaks, largely disillusioned with the game's direction and disappointed in how lifeless it has become. This new initiative has me torn, because on one hand, I can see that something has to be done; but on the other, it's being done by the same people who let Armageddon slip into this quagmire in the first place. It's hard to believe that they can suddenly find the inspiration that they seemingly lacked for years, but it's also clear that things couldn't just go on like this. Maybe they do really have it in them, and if they do, the only ways this game can go anymore are up or out.

[RunnerScrab]

I spent my late teens and early adulthood playing Armageddon MUD, roughly from 2003-2011, then sporadically afterward. My first two accounts were throwaways, since I just plain forgot their login credentials and didn't want to bother recovering them. On my third and most used account, I have 7842 hours and 27 minutes of playtime total, or around 326.77 days played. Below is a bar graph that shows, approximately, how that playtime is distributed:



I don't expect to ever really play again, though I probably will check back in from time to time while the game is still around. As would be supported by the playtime data I scraped from my account, I've steadily lost interest over the course of the last 20 years. And it's not because of anything bad that's happened or because of any drama either past or recent -- I think I'm just done with the setting.

To contrast my own experiences with those of other players, I rarely had any serious problems with the immortals while I was here, even though I have often played in the clans of some of the most notorious. I think I mostly managed to escape trouble because I was pretty boring and lacked strong opinions about the way the game should be run. Arm imms are like Greek gods: the risk averse should avoid getting their attention, whether by foolishness or excellence.

I had my moments like everyone else, but I was never a great player or even a particularly good one. I think I was solid. My PCs would usually be a welcome addition to a crew or clan, but couldn't be heavily relied upon to drive plots if they had the misfortune of being burdened by leadership.

It was widely accepted in this community that good players should start plots, or at least attempt to participate in plots, and that doing so was in fact the main point of the game. Maybe so, but honestly, I never liked them and always found myself coming up with IC reasons to avoid them. That murder, corruption, betrayal intrigue stuff was never my vibe. Mostly, I enjoyed exploring, hunting, crafting, and trading (with NPCs).

[zilcho]

That murder, corruption, betrayal intrigue stuff was never my vibe. Mostly, I enjoyed exploring, hunting, crafting, and trading (with NPCs).

Exactly this. After like 2005 I just wanted to fade into the background and live in the world, maybe make some friends, but just play however and whenever I wanted.

[DesertT]

I started MUD'ing back in 1994.  I was attending Colorado School of Mines in Golden, CO and a friend introduced me to one MUD, Illusions of the Mind, and after the frustrations with nobody really dying and having real repercussions for their actions, I sought out perma-death and came to Armageddon.

Having come from a hack & slash MUD, I often treated Arm the same.  There were less than a handful of characters in my first 20 years that I got past 10 days played.

I recall breaking into an argosy in Allanak and piloting it all the way up to Tuluk, parking it, then wishing up to turn myself in.

Another time, I broke into the Ivory Pyramid and robbed all the apartments within.  Rode back to Nak and turned most of the booty over to my Borsail noble.  I was stored the next day.

Then Tariq happened after a four-year break.  My Laborer/Linguist who made Sergeant in the Byn, Foreman in House Jal, and was eventually executed in the Allanaki Cells by a pair of templars.

From Tariq on, my characters averaged well over 20 days played each unless I had to store them for sponsored roles or my deployment to Africa.

I departed the game earlier this year after numerous frustrations, then asked myself why I allowed my entertainment to be managed by those who were frustrating me.

It's sad to leave something behind that has had such a long history and I feel like there's input I could offer, but I'm not in with the right crowd it seems, as has been apparent for a long, long time.

[perfecto]

Some of you may have heard me tell this tale before but there's a poetic twist to the ending this time.

Back in 96' there was this young cool computer teacher that actually connected with those showing a desire to become tech savvy.  It was through this fine fellow that a handful of us were shown this cool new Perma-Death MUD game, which we inhaled deeply like a fine pinch of spice and were instantly hooked.  We all played pretty much religiously in the Rinth, back then it was in it's hay day, the Gan-zian Market Bustling with scum and all sorts of 'don't get caught walking around with these' items.  The Saturday shut-downs were the bane of our existence.. (shudders)

I could go on and on however..
 
That poetic twist I mentioned earlier.. Well as the game slowly winds its way down to a close.. wouldn't you know it?  I find myself and that young cool teacher who showed us the way.. Standing side by side in the same clan together.  Heh

[Olafson]

We just need Mansa to join us.

[mansa]

No.

I've already rebuilt the Gan Zein market, I'm still working on my current projects.

[perfecto]

We just need Mansa to join us.

You work on Mansa, I'll work on hailing Zalanthas Nomad

[Feco]

Started playing in 2010, in college. I had been playing roguelikes and "Graphical MUDs" (e.g., Wyvern) for a few years and wanted something new.  Arm is my one and only true MUD -- never tried another, and don't plan to.

Played a lot in college, but really hit my stride--with a string of cool characters--years later when I quit continuously typing "forage salt."

Met some really great friends through the GDB in the 10's, and we started a Pathfinder/Starfinder group that played continuously for years. Really wish we kept in touch better, but I moved to a different country, started a more demanding job, had kids, and drifted apart.

Hope Arm hangs in there. I plan to come back and play with Season 1.

[zalanthasNomad]

We just need Mansa to join us.

You work on Mansa, I'll work on hailing Zalanthas Nomad

there's no time ... .. . Get in!