Hey—I am a prior player that has been out of the game for a couple of years: I only very very rarely check up on things because I am the creator of the Moonlit Sky client. A lot of what I'd want to talk about the roleplay side has already been debated to death, so as a programmer and eleven-year hobbyist game developer I'd rather talk about what I know best:
Mechanically, what makes Armageddon suck?
Some mechanics are debated more than others, and a lot are up to opinion more than anything else. That said, I'm going to focus mainly on the obvious "bad" ones.
The first of which being that permadeath and instadeath don't mix. This is an outdated idea that I always hate seeing. The reason for permadeath (despite popular belief) is absolutely not to punish the players. Why would you ever want to punish someone during an experience that's meant to be fun? The reason permadeath can be so exciting and adrenaline-boosting is the same reason people love horror movies or cliff jumping: the thrill. There is no thrill in a character's death. The thrill comes from the struggle, the fear of death, your hit points being low and wondering if you're going to make it out of a tense situation with your character still intact, or die trying.
Armageddon makes it too easy to quit, because there are too many spider rooms, pits, and instadeath scripts. You don't get that adrenaline, you get "you're dead, sorry." And you're just left there wondering why you even play a game that just deletes your character every once in a while. Of course you have things like those death saving throws, but most of the time once you're left unconscious, it's over and there's no way to escape. I propose that one-shots to health just become codedly impossible, apart from falling. And for stun, make it so that only bludgeoning weapons can drain your stun in one hit: and that if you're hit while unconscious you actually have a small chance to wake back up with a token number of stun points. This would also serve to remove the massive meta behind bludgeoning weapons: where between their hit point and stun damages, they are undeniably the most powerful weapons in the game.
Then, take a look at your attributes. Strength is WILD. The carry weight increase is exponential, meaning that a single point of strength at a low level may give you some extra carry weight, whereas at a high level, that becomes some more. For a human especially, this is just crazy. And it led to me exploiting the additional strength you can get from character generation by doing things to get a high strength. The power difference was enough to let me steamroll anything right out the gate. Not to mention that since the strength bonus to attacks is applied before critical hit multipliers, every single neck hit on an enemy does the highest tier of damage, where other people might even still be nicking.
So (maybe) lower the exponent on carry weight, and (definitely) apply the strength bonus after the critical multiplier. I'm pretty sure that there's no way the insane strength critical hits were intentional, and I'd go so far as to call it a bug that nobody ever bothered to fix.
Next up: increasing combat skills is convoluted and ruins the fun. It's almost like it was designed so that only people with insider knowledge of the system could ever get above Journeyman combat skills. It leads to all of that twinkish behavior that skilling players go through just to score those sweet sweet misses. This is a problem that can be so easily solved: just make the most efficient way to skill also the most realistic. No more sitting with an inventory full of rocks in the dark, drunk, fighting stilt lizards. Instead, just cap your hit chance at 95% like every other game. Just so you don't have to try so hard to break the game if you ever want to be good at fighting.
Now I know Armageddon isn't about grinding your skills, and that behavior is looked down upon, but the game is built on a system that encourages it. And it makes realistic sense too: people train their skills, and it is a major part of life. If you want to lower the amount of time people spend grinding, then remember this is a coded game, and you should be putting mechanical rules on things, not asking "please don't do this." That's like including a rule in Dungeons and Dragons that's like: "if you hold up your pinky, you're invincible. Please don't use this, thanks."
And on we go! The request tool is intimidating. As a new player, interaction with admins is scary. I avoided the request tool at all costs for years. Going to a website out of the game, logging in, and making a formal request for something just to wait weeks for a response from someone who may tell you no? Sounds like nothing but trouble. I think there should be easier ways to get staff approval on things, and they should come from within the game. I'm unsure exactly what you could do, but I'm sure a few things could be moved over.
Those are the big ticket items. Let's get our noses out of these mechanics, and into the game's audience:
Everyone's getting older, and the game is getting outdated.
I'm young myself at twenty years old, and Armageddon wasn't too tough to figure out and enjoy because of a background in technology and previous experience with D&D. I'd invited genuinely over a dozen friends to play during my time in Armageddon, and all of them tried it. Nice big boost in server population for a couple days, but the reality was: nobody wanted to invest so much time into figuring out how to play.
Some MUDs have started getting graphical, and focusing on user-friendliness. This is absolutely the right way to go. After nobody I knew wanted to play Armageddon, I went ahead and put months into developing the Moonlit Sky client, gave it a minimap, an inventory screen, vital bars, and helpful hints and commands. After showing the same people my client, I was able to get five of them reinterested, and they played anywhere from a few months to multiple years afterwards.
The map is definitely a key point here, because stumbling around like crazy and getting hopelessly lost all the time was an experience ruiner. There are rules against map sharing, but it's mostly just a navigational gate that nobody experienced has to deal with because they can just quietly pass maps around. A map is not game-breaking: please please please just let people see where they're walking. I'm surprised that it has ever even been up for debate. I promise the game will be better for it.
I'll go ahead and end my rant here, because it's much longer than I wanted it to be, but: streamline the experience, fix the outdated mechanics.
That's all. Thank you for reading.
Halaster's edit's: I edited a couple of spots that had a bit more info about code that we'd like to see public. I noted it with bold, blue text.
