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/originalOne 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
