Feedback on playing and log-ins

[Nao]

The 'grind' and to a lesser degree, the waiting around, were also one of the main themes the last time we had one of these threads.

They're also one of the major gripes I have with the new poison system and the way cures work now. Both the poison and the brew skills now require So Much More of a grind, and waiting around.

All that time sitting around crafting, or waiting for some coded effect to disappear is time where I'm probably not interacting except for MAYBE waying one person at a time and cut off from the rest of the playerbase instead of available for roleplaying. My PC is online, but not really there. It's also not enjoyable. This happens every time you increase the effort involved in generating anything - even through such subtle things as increasing prices to improve the economy. Yes, someone will not have a pile of peraine or 50k in their bank account anymore, but the rest of us who never made excessive amounts of money are now collecting and selling scrab legs for a RL week in order to buy some climbing gear from Kurac. When we could be hanging with other players and having fun with them instead.

[Medena]

Too many clans that are outside cities, which makes the player base spread out, and therefore they only have a small group to play with. This eventually allows for stagnation in RP, and people are inclined to just log off as subjects run out, eventually.

.... snip ...

I also would like to see more open storylines, which don't play behind closed doors. Things where your average Zalanthian Joe can be part of. And it doesn't always have to involve murder.

Sometimes when playing roles where your PC is very, very busy, solo RP is a luxury and so a very enjoyable thing.  However when solo RP is all you've got day after day it sucks and I find it hard to even bother logging in

There have been a lot of great staff led plots in the last year which kept things interesting but they have seemed to dwindle (or maybe I just haven't seen them, dunno).  Perhaps staff are falling into the same malaise as the player base?

[Lotion]

The current implementation of Chargen Karma Points incentivizes players to play in specific risk averse ways
* You will not be able to create a character with a good mundane subguild for 30 days
* If you create a mundane character with subguild none you will need to exist without a subguild until you regenerate to one CKP
* After spending to 0 you will not be able to create a 2CKP character for 75 days which is about two and a half months.
* After spending to 0 you will not be able to create a 3CKP character for 120 days which is about four months

Because of how disproportionately players are penalized OOCly for dying on a character they spend CKP on they will make excessively risk averse decisions to avoid that harsh OOC penalty. There are various "tropes" about joining a sparring clan for two ingame years and then suddenly manifesting, but this is because after two ingame years the player will have regenerated their 2CKP.

Suggested fix: Allow players to generate above their maximum amount of CKP up to a cap of 2k+1 where k represents the maximum amount of CKP that player is allowed to spend at one time. Additonally, make it so that CKP points regenerate every 30 days without resetting the regeneration timer on CKP expenditure.

[Patuk]

It's all just so thoroughly slow.

I can and have, on every single one of my characters in the past year, spent hours in the local watering hole and met nobody. I've joined clans with them and seen the actual glacial pace with which things developed if anything was ongoing in the first place - often a no. And in those more interesting times, things are still really really slow if you're playing the actual MUD, rather than the request tool game. Plots so plain as 'build something mundane' or 'kill one particular megafauna' take literal weeks of rearing up for a three-hour payoff in the end.

Between that? Monotony. And not just monotony, but the monotony of a game where a stray arrow, a couple NPCs that bunched up, a rando templar, or a character with a grudge can end everything. As they do, often. Waiting for weeks for literally anything to happen is fine in a play-by-post forum thing or somesuch. In a game where new ways for you to die are devised constantly and where 'lmao harsh world' is a refrain, it just kills engagement. Eventually, the juice just really isn't worth the squeeze for some, and they wander off to other MUDs, play some D&D, or do anything else where a session of fun does not in fact require fifty hours of drudgery.

[HazelHomewrecker]

Personally, I don't really have a lot of issues staff-side currently, and haven't had any since the start of my play about a year ago. I think partially, I've got the symptoms of being a wide-eyed ingenue who's only trying to see the best in the game and its players/staff.

My biggest hang-up is trying to find a way to include as many players as I can into whatever subplot or plot I can get going, to give certain areas of the game some actual life again, but not being able to. So, while I spend hours, days and weeks of my time trying to make something fun, it gets stomped on because either no one wants to participate, it's 'too risky,' or the only people who are willing to come along are players with such a wildly different timezone to mine that I have no choice but to actively harm my sleeping schedule just to get a bit of interaction or plot progression. It is incredibly demoralizing, and exhausting.

I suppose it goes in-hand with other complaints, in a sense. They want less of a grind, and to feel as if they're not wasting their time playing a character just for it to die in some horrible unfair way. Fixing those issues would probably bring some people back, and make my (singular) issue less glaring.

[EDITED TO ADD:]

I think there should be a consistent world plot to give attention to and draw interest for the time being. We've had snippets here and there recently, concerning something pretty damn cool, and yet.. it's been what, two or three months since anything has been done with it to the global extent? It probably sounds like a huge ask, but reviving the current low population is probably a big enough task to warrant it. This goes, just as well, with the stagnation issue. It doesn't feel like anything is going on, like the plots have just sort of.. plateaued.

Fortunately, we have upcoming events that should hopefully see some player return for, but keeping that drive to play is what's really important I think.

[Night Queen]

I probably would rebound off an Armageddon 2.0 project and go look for the next MUD* that has a deep feeling of a living game world and cause and effect and consequences, because I think that is really what Armageddon's strength is, or in the awful event it happened hope that the game is split and there is an Armageddon Classic for people who prefer it:

I think it's a case of be careful what you wish for, because going down the path of making everything easy and fast to attain means.. Well... There's lots of games like that already, commercial online games do this because they are not interested in creating a meaningful experience as long as they are getting paid, and if people haven't experienced something better, they are trapped by the marketing and the treadmill of skinner-box rewards to never even get to experience something like Armageddon MUD.

The grind is completely optional/can be ignored/easier for city roles, and for outdoors there's a very low barrier to entry and people want to be "the best" fast instead of being "enough", but if everyone can be the best fast with no risk then no one has anything to look forward to anymore, and a lot of the same people would find themselves complaining that they are getting bored I really didn't like when the Tan Muarki returned because it seemed like they got skill boosts that didn't really fit their theme so it made it feel like these special characters are running over all the people that went through adventures and danger to get things the more exciting way - I think that everything is dangerous makes it better, you have to think about everything instead of it just being mindlessly grinding NPCs




* I say MUD because I've tried other RP formats and I think it really is the best because it reduces a lot of the boring parts, that traditional RP ends up filling RP logs with at least half OOC or numbers stuff (and I think that lower barrier to entry where you don't need to know a bunch of boring rules to figure out how your character is going to do something, and instead Armageddon background reading is learning about the stories of the world instead, is why this game has a better mix of people playing than most)

[TragicMagick]

It's really not hard to be discouraged when it feels like any plot other players can think of is fucking with someone else. It makes me want to solo-play. I feel like almost all of these plots are just frustrating and never reach a satisfying conclusion.

[Malken]

I have nothing against Armageddon, but there are billion other ways for me to entertain myself in 2022. The day that I would stare at my monitor for hours in the hope that /something, anything/ exciting would happen is long gone.

Armageddon was a huge part of my life but there's really nothing that would get me back to play. I like reading the GDB for nostalgia and to make sure that's some of my old Armageddon friends are still alive.

/maybe/ if Armageddon became a cyberpunk rp game I'd be tempted to come back! 

[Plazmegorrah]

I came back after a 12+ year hiatus to a game that has been consistently worked on enough, that it's now possible for me to explore once more without knowing every nook and cranny the world has to offer. The exact reason I departed was that I knew too much, there was no mystery left. It didn't help that I was staff at the time and there is a reddit forum dedicated to hating me for perceived notions (some correct, most false), but that was less relevant.

Text based gaming is suffering globally. Reading is hard. Fewer young players will join as the months tick by. Long gone are days when more than a few understand basic unix commands or even how DOS works. This form of gaming is going the way of the dinosaur, slowly but surely. That doesn't mean an occasional intrepid gamer won't discover the majesty of the world of Zalanthas, but that faucet has become more of an occasional drip than a trickle.

I still recall my first PC I made and how I died within a few short hours and how the brutality of it all hooked me. This was back in the day when it took a week or more to get approved. But I, and many of you vets grew up on games that expected us to appreciate hard mode.  The youth nowadays aren't in that mindset and are unlikely to be, again there will be the ultra rare exception.

The low player numbers isn't so alarming when you consider that even in the heyday, it wasn't THAT much higher on a regular basis. The ennui and the malaise are what kills the morale and Armageddon is not the only text based game suffering in this manner.  There have been experiments and decisions made in the past 10 years that while I wouldn't agree with them, I understand why the decisions were made. Closing Tuluk was something that happened while I was gone, but I am not convinced that helped much. Magick being relegated to subclasses seems to me to be a very watered down version of what they used to be, especially considering that it was a lot harder to play a magicker and survive. (now that everyone can be a fighter/magic user it can't be nearly as tough) That powerful magickers weren't nearly as unstoppable as they were thought to be. Sure, when a magicker is ready for you... it's a serious problem that is probably not the best idea to tackle. But if you can get the jump on any class, it's curtains. These would be the most glaring moves that made me personally wonder, but nothing is really out of reach if you set your mind to it. You can still apply for higher karma classes and with a well thought out concept and a presentation to staff, it's not nearly as difficult than many would imagine.

Tavern sitting is a focal point for RP. Long ago, in Allanak, you could guarantee you'd get RP if you sat in the Traders Inn long enough. Once the Gaj was added, it was split between higher class and low class. Which isn't a bad thing, and you could still hike to one or the other to see if someone was around, or maybe run into someone on the way. A third establishment was added and still it didn't kill the dynamic that much. It was a short journey to look around for interaction, and Allanak had a dynamic. That route for city rp, and the rinth rp which was at a much smaller scale, but still the same basic idea with the Folly being the focal point. The base was further divided by north and south, Tuluk had players and Allanak had it's players. Even with occasional player counts as low as we have now, it still worked somehow. Even further divided, there were the players in Luirs, the desert elves and even Red Storm had its few.

(my unpopular opinion) Want leadership roles to grind to a halt? Ask the player to send in regular reports. It's sad, I know, but its true. Giving players work to do is a surefire way to get them procrastinating, avoiding, deflecting and making every excuse under the sun why they got nothin'. It is easy to fill out a report, yep, but that doesn't make it any less like work. Keeping staff in the loop on plans is one thing, expecting players to fill out forms to meet staff expectations is quite another when the point in a game is to have fun. If staff is unable to figure out what's going on before a report is filed, that's more alarming. Some players are good at it, they will write the staff novels and diaries of what they've been up to, their hopes and dreams and reminders of past accomplishments, but its rare. It is my opinion that much less stress should be placed on players to update staff and players should focus mainly on playing.

Leaders need to lead. They need to keep their underlings busy doing (literally anything) something that is hopefully constructive and un-boring. I'm unsure how else to state this, because leading is not for everyone and its a skill that isn't so much learned as much as it is natural to some, and not to others. Move your pieces, have your underlings interact with group B and try to accomplish goal A. If all clan leaders were doing this, there would be more dynamic rp taking place. One templar can keep half of a city-state busy if that templar has any chutzpah whatsoever. I'm placing a lot of the blame of malaise on our PC leaders. If you are uninspired to make a dent in this world, or feel it is impossible, snap out of it. Create your legend. You do not need staff to make yourself a legend and that's what this game is lacking now. So again, snap out of it.

I've already rambled too long and never really got to the heart of why numbers are low, despite the hurricane and the general downturn of text gaming, but I want to close with this; all it takes is one intruiging story to boost morale across the board.

-Bhagharva
pof - White Rantarri, Ihsahn Kasix and Marius Tor

[downer]

I've already decided to go ahead and tap out on Arm so might as well be honest.  I've had some amazing times in Armageddon.  The only Mud I've experienced a legitimate sense of accomplishment after having done something insane/idiotic/particularly memorable.  It's an amazing environment, and there are some absolutely phenomenal players moving in and out of activity. 

Staff, would be my primary complaint.  Early on in my Arm experience during an impromptu and mandatory chit-chat with staff I was informed that I was not a customer and that there was no customer service.  This, seems to have been the pervasive mentality I have experienced.  One where I felt very much that I was allowed to play at someone else's enjoyment.  I've been harassed, lied to, invalidated regularly by staff to the point I just avoid interacting as much as possible where they may be concerned.  Which eventually led to a play experience where obtaining any real sense of accomplishment we negligible.  If I could ask one thing of staff that would be to approach more situations where interactions outside of the staff clique is necessary with Hanlon's Razor in mind.  Most of my interactions began in a way that automatically made me defensive, but more importantly left me confused as to what it was that was actually expected of me.  I understood I was in trouble, but not really why or how to improve, or alternate approaches which is a waste of everyone's time and does nothing but make us hate each other.  Lot's of clubs, no cookies guys.  Maybe consider improving an area to encourage people to be there instead of making everywhere else MORE shitty like one out of three times?

Role call selection has resulted so routinely in someone that doesn't do their role responsibilities/doesn't show up/disappears indefinitely that I tried it out myself and either everyone get's as frustrated with staff as I did or the majority of role applicants just don't do the role responsibilities/don't show up/disappear indefinitely.  I literally left the experience feeling like staff selected me to play the role, just so they could treat me so poorly I'd never apply for another role call again.  And, I even expressed this to a staffer.

FOIC:  Yo.  I cannot tell you how hilarious it is to get yelled at for sharing any kind of information while actively in a room with staffers you used to watch message your x all kinds of tips.  Shit, they used to give ME tips till I pissed them off.  You fella's know who you are.  FOIC only works if you have a community that believes in and encourages if not rewards sharing.  That....is not this community.  This is a horde everything so you can get one up on anyone for any reason territory not yes let me show you things fantasyland.  So you essentially just further the sensation that this is a game that I'm allowed to play just so others can have fun at my expense. 

Poor decision making.  Oh look at our brand new awesome poison yaaay.  Hey did you guys do anything to make getting not shitty cures easier?  No?  So you massively effected the lethality of one of the most traversed routes in the game but didn't make it any more reliable or affordable to not die?  Oh, oh you're actually going to randomize the cure locations and likely take even more steps to make this even shittier.  Well.  Fuck me eh?  You opened Tuluk...did that fix the player base?  Players too spread out and you feel like everywhere is dead?  Let's open up a fuck ton of delf tribes, that outta put more people in the cities.  Just a few examples.  Everything in arm is already designed to be divisive, do we gotta keep making it worse still?  Are TOO many people working together somewhere?  Yes, I know it's Armageddon and the whole point is that, it's a shitty experience.  Murder, Corruption, Betrayal.  But there's a balance, and for about two years I've felt the juice hasn't been worth the squeeze.  I feel like a lot more effort has been put into seeming like staff is communicating with the player base.  But it's repeatedly seemed like, opinions expressed by the players by and large are  ignored if not invalidated.  This is just how I felt about those situations, not that it was necessarily your intent.

I don't feel that staffers are actually held accountable when they're shitty, and that makes it a difficult place to feel safe to spend time.  Quite a few complaints about staff floating around out there if you know where to look, I've considered adding some of my own logs and screenshots.  At the end of the day I feel unwelcome, and you're right I'm not a customer you have no obligation to provide an enjoyable experience I want to return to, I just really wish you did.  But this is just how my involvement and interactions of have left me feeling.  Hope it improves for everyone.

[Derain]

I agree on the poison, it makes the already clunky cure system harder and the poison didn't need to be harder and more of a pain, not everyone has all day to devote to such. It's already hard enough with the new classes to pull off any kind of assassination and such without magick.

[Reiloth]

Opening a discussion here, for players to weigh in on, on why they aren't playing. Obviously, RL trumps everything and the entire team always tells people to focus on that before playing. The hurricane, the war, school time of year, continued transition for some from work at home to the office again, and so on. However, there will always be other issues at play that keep you all from logging in, and I would be rather remiss to not open this sort of discussion to hear what those are.

A present feeling of stagnation?
A feeling of not enough for your player to accomplish/glass ceiling?
Karma gating?
Shabago's a big jerk?

List your game related reasons if you could, please. Keep in mind the usual year time frame for recent events and aim to be vague enough to not cause issues for others/on-going stories, but otherwise have it.

I think Staff has gone out of their way to not be jerks in recent years, so I don't really think that's at issue here. As with most complex issues it's...Well...Complicated!

There's factors outside of anyone's control:
-Aging Playerbase with more responsibilities IRL
-Said Playerbase having less time to commit regularly/scheduled, particularly those with young children.
-The game working 'the best' when people can sink a lot of time into it, and in regular chunks (1-3 hours at the same time of day).
-Change being possible in the game, but only with a lot of time sunk into it, etc.

I think ArmageddonMUD certainly has a zeitgeist that it sticks to pretty consistently, and that's over at least the last 20 years or since it became the prima RPI permadeath MUD:

-Permadeath
-No take backs -- if you die, you die (except if there's a game breaking bug involved). If you lag and die, you die. If you store, you are stored.
-RP is required and intensive. There is no official OOC communication except to coordinate playtimes or ask for clarification, or ask consent for certain RP/scenes.
-It is not a MUSH, there is a code base and code makes up 100% of the game world. You cannot pause combat to write emotes, for instance. You can't stop an assassin from killing you by OOCing that you need a few minutes to write up a paragraph response to their backstab. IT's all in the game, the code, and that's part of what makes it an RPI MUD.
-Documentation must be adhered to. Your PC is rarely the special snowflake, often just the sum of its parts and history in the game world. An elf can't ride a mount, and a dwarf can't grow hair, and magic is supposed to be feared/reviled.

There's other parts that make ArmageddonMUD what it is, but the above are more 'fact' than opinion. As for opinions, i'll say below what I believe drives people to other hobbies or entertainment these days, and some opinions on things to change.

-Text based games are increasingly less popular as time marches forward. The rare execptional person (probably the person ArmageddonMUD or any RPI MU* would die to have) will be looking for an intense, permadeath, text-based RPI. Most are waiting for the next Halo or Battlefield game to drop on console.

-ArmageddonMUD is not for the faint of heart, or those without a modicum of time to regularly commit to it. Those who are now fathers and mothers, have intense careers that they started along, own businesses, or otherwise have less free time than when they were teenagers, can't engage with the game and have fun with it. The time commitment required from ArmageddonMUD to be fun is vastly different from other video games. You have to put in 1-3 hours, around the same time of day, 2-3 days a week minimum in my opinion to get any sort of enjoyment out of the game, unless you are playing a Solo PC. If you play less than that, most of your time logged in will be explaining why you aren't around.

-Leadership roles are exhausting. I think Staff and other Players expect too much from Leadership PCs. I would challenge Staff to shut down Nobles and Templars as available roles and have to animate those roles regularly to fill in for Leadership PCs to get a feel for how difficult it is to juggle. There's a reason that there is high turnover in roles like Byn Sergeant, Northern/Southern Templar, and particularly GMH Family. There needs to be more bang for the buck, more reward for sticking with those roles.

-More special/secret role calls. More 'roles' in general rather than playing another average joe and hoping for the best. With a shrinking cast of Players/PCs to choose from, I think those roles should be made more meaningful.

-More of a linear plot, or series of linear plots. Time to put away the sandbox.

-Less Karma Gating behind RL time, I think that is hurting player numbers. If anything just take away the option to make the same roles back to back. Or if someone is playing too many X's in a row, tell them to try something else, or take away that option from their account temporarily.

-Shut down desert elf tribes. No point in spreading out the game world further. The tribes are fun flavor, but rarely part of the main entree.

---

Ultimately, ArmageddonMUD isn't a game you can win. There are no experience points, and no achievements to unlock. So, you can't beat the game and say 'that was a great game' and put it down. It's as much a shared hallucination, a shared narrative experience, as it is a video game. So it stands apart in comparison to other video games for sure.

I think Staff could spend some time on player outreach. Send some emails to previous players and ask for feedback as to why they aren't playing anymore. Ask if they could come back to play, what role would they want to play?

Otherwise, I don't know that there's anything that can be fixed or done. I think Staff is doing admirably well in their transparency and community outreach compared to 10 years ago. But time marches forward, people are getting older, have less time to commit, and have other things to do. There's something to be said for hanging up the hat and going 'That was a great time' and moving on.

EDIT: I'm currently on indefinite hiatus, both for personal reasons and RL circumstances. If I had to boil it down, I don't have the time to commit to a hobby/game like ArmageddonMUD unless there is more juice to the squeeze. I'm taking a good long break for now!

[Wday]

I think we all need to dig down deep and flesh out stories and plots.  I say we cause myself is playing half ass lately and I notice it.  But to draw in longer play times and more log in, think we all need to try and build the game world more.  More love triangles more exploring and reasoned backstabs!  Outreach missions and so on that the feel of need to log on and get ready for such fun things is a drive to play.

As for staff I think they all pretty much got the game running nice and smooth.  We have new things in game and crafts such as poisons and cures.  They could maybe slack down on all the new addons and crafts and maybe push more world plot events a bit more.  Not that I know what staff do, Just maybe more time at plots and small events even if for each clan at times to keep the ball rolling.

[Ammut]

-More of a linear plot, or series of linear plots. Time to put away the sandbox.

I've struggled to find purpose in a sandbox game with player led plots.  They don't feel as real as a staff run plot and could fizzle out if a player gets bored or tired of how much time they are putting into things.  That's not to say that a staffer couldn't get burnt out too, but hopefully there would be several working the same plots so they could swap in and give others some time away from the game.

[Filthy_Grey_Rat]

I've played for a long time, on and off. I usually leave after
A) messed up stuff happens between staff and players, highlighting an imbalance, a system of favoritism, and sometimes legit abuse.
B) I end a long lived character that I've struggled to keep alive in a way that was really unsatisfying and made me question all the work I've put in. or ;
C) When I feel like I'll never reach or access portions of the game that are specifically appealing.


To elaborate, when A happens, it's most often power/control abuse, where staff takes advantage of a player because they have the power and a layer of secrecy to hide behind. This happens in every large organization where power is seen as a tool and an advantage, not a clear responsibility. For instance, because I own the game, it's my game, players are playing at my leisure and I don't /owe/ them anything. That's an easy position to take, and one with a lot of pitfalls. It's harder to acknowledge that there is an unspoken promise made to players that the goal of Arm is to entertain players while also keeping them oocly safe.

Within the replies to this post are former staff's responses, whom many feel benefited from favoritism and knowledge gleaned from being behind the DM screen, loosely claiming that it's players fault the game isn't more fun, all they have to do is /shake it up/, get creative. I can see many players, especially myself, cringing at the idea of the White Rantarri telling us we don't need staff to make us a Legend. While that's definitely true, we didn't necessarily want to be legends. We wanted the options for collaborative storytelling former staff and staff favorites happen to get more often than players. (Or rather, once got. There seems to be a new direction the game is taking, with safeguards put in place to help guide our journey, but as it's so close to the fork in the road, it's hard to tell from my own perspective if this new path doesn't merely lead to the same place)

While staff and player interaction has soured some on the game entirely, it's left even more in a middle ground of unsure footing and fear of further interaction while they try to maintain a presence in Arm, their favorite game.

Regarding feeling like I've lost time and effort for nothing tangible after a char death, or a plot death, I can only say I wish there was more. I wish Karma was more than (what I feel, and what I suspect others feel) just a way to pinpoint chars that have been marked as friends, or thoroughly under a thumb. I've rarely received karma on the different accounts I've played over the years. Usually, it's always halfway, or a third of the way to 'Staff Trusts You'. I wish I could have played magickers I'll never, ever be able to explore or tell stories with now. I wish the actions I took that impressed staff and players were noted, so I could repeat them. I wish Karma represented how much players thought I was adding to the game, or how /they/ thought I was illustrating the world well. I wish I could reach some of the seemingly unattainable heights of Arm without it feeling like so much work. I'm disgressing a bit, so I want to pull this back around to workloss and timeloss, but only after I mention that maybe my problems with karma are SOLELY my fault. After all, once I got soured by my limited interactions with a shadowy section of staff that may or may not still exist, I stopped reaching out to staff entirely. I don't ask for karma reviews or notes. I'm afraid to be incredibly offended. I'm afraid all of my thinks, feels, my solo-rp, my adherence to docs in the face of extreme disadvantage will all be summed up into "Not a good player, didn't emote enough while stealing that item, the one time I peeked in. I'm extrapolating the image of a bad player from a minute section of play. No Karma".

There are a few things I gain from my work in Arm. (it's not all work, but sometimes it is, and that's okay. I put in the extra work, so others can have more fun, and expect the same from the community.)

Things like seeing my actions affect the game world. Leaving a lasting impression. Coming away with great stories (that I cannot share with others who play or understand. Not for a year, maybe more). There /is/ karma, to be fair and honest. I gained a point somehow. That carries over from play. I get some IC secrets, sometimes. Some days, I struggle to see that as enough. Those are days I don't log in.

Then there is C), which isn't a reason I don't log in. It's a reason I consider quitting, entirely, forever. And often. What's the point of this game? Really? It's not profit. It's not an art project. Is it a social experiment run by the government?? If it's just a game for a community of people who love the medium, the setting, and the world.... are we playing /to/ that, or against it? It's not easy for me to tell.


When I picked this game off of the mud list in 2001, it was because it had magick, mandatory roleplay, and permadeath. Permadeath made the game more realistic, and allowed me to immerse myself in a narrative where dead people didn't suddenly pop back in because they were rezzed. It meant my char was a dynamic thing in a mostly static world, with other dynamic creatures. Me and other chars were capable to affect long-lasting change in the world, with realistic stakes. I don't know if that's still true. I just don't know. The fact that it had magick made it really stick out from other games I could try because it wasn't 'cast lightning at goblin' a hundred different times, it was seemingly better than that. Roleplayed out magic, something fantastic and more in line with the novels and stories I've really enjoyed, like the Sword of Truth or Neverending Story. (poor examples, I guess). And mandatory roleplay? That's something most of us can agree is just necessary to keep a serious, game-oriented and immersive environement.

Now, mandatory roleplay and permadeath sound like the tagline of Armageddon's real experience. 'Mandatory Roleplay! Permadeath! GDB Conflict!' Not a great tagline. 'Murder, Corruption, and Betrayal' seems a general OOC feeling of competition. I don't like any of the /feeling/ of those things, even I actually enjoy the IC, narrative reality of all that. I love IC murder, IC corruption. I love permadeath, mandatory roleplay. I just expected more.



Maybe some of you can glean some useful information out of the nonsense above. I don't communicate well, and have trouble with self-exposition. Give me a char, and black screen, and I'm /great/ at it. Make it about me, the real person, and in the context of 'How do you feel, what do you think?' and it all becomes a stream of consciousness babbling brook, winding and crazy.

To try and force some benefit for OP, I'll add this:


A present feeling of stagnation?
A feeling of not enough for your player to accomplish/glass ceiling?
Karma gating?
Shabago's a big jerk?

I feel like the vibrant, detailed world of Zalanthas is decaying into hard facts and items. There's nothing you or any players can do to get beyond X wall. In fact, there's nothing beyond it. Period. Stop looking.

I feel the stagnation is somewhere IC, and the stagnation is also related to Karma. This is what I get to play, and unless a mysterious, faceless force decides otherwise, will always be what I get to play.

The glass ceiling? I rarely ever reach it, so I can't comment much on how I feel penned in there. There is a very, very specific example of me seeing a goal of mine technically accomplished, but failing to actually live up to the spirit, not the letter. It hasn't been a year, and will out me to explain. msg me staff, if really interested. idk if it'd be helpful.

Karma gating? Yep. I got strong feelings. I think it should be entirely different than it is. If you're going to keep this same general system, I suggest doing this. First char on an account is the same, but after that, you get all the karma and it's /removed/ or lessened for failing to live up to standards. Not the other way around.

Shabago's a big jerk? Man, I don't effin' know. 'STAFF' has become a weird, effing term. It means everyone behind the DM screen. Does it still include everyone who fucked over or really messed with players? Idk. I really don't. I DO know that me playing the game doesn't enable staff to abuse or mistreat others. If I became Staff, and didn't leave or immediately call out wrongdoing, then I would be enabling. This means if one staff is a big jerk, and that fact is being kept hidden behind the DM screen, all staff is presumably responsible.


TL:DR Get a mission statement on the front page. 'This is what We, Staff, offer to you. This is Our goal.' Second, playing isn't always work, but when it is, I wish it felt more rewarding, or as if those rewards for my effort carried over or lasted. Third, Staff, we don't know who you are. Sorry if you get the backlash of past staff actions, but it's all really ambiguous to a casual player.

[Ol 55]

I've always enjoyed the survival aspect of this game, and treated it as that kind of game.  It is my favorite genre.  I recently had a fairly well branched character get roflstomped by a [redacted].  It was so enjoyable, I laughed so hard when it happened.  Because I never used to die to stuff like that when I was playing regularly.  I love it, don't change it.  Maybe some of the other grinds are a little oppressive, but not so much that I think it needs to be tweaked more than a little bit.  I mostly just don't want to feel like I'm mindlessly doing something (which I will do in order to grind a skill up sometimes).

I've quit a few times over the years, and once I did a little quiet quitting by just playing the most trollish character I could think of.  Not super proud of the latter, but it was entertaining for me at least.  My quitting most often involved personal burnout after a long lived character, of which there have been five that lived around a year (and weren't me trolling).  I'm not going to do what I perceive others are doing, which is using the game's poor standing to leverage how they think the game should be run.  I have my own thoughts on that, but they are ultimately not what kept me away from the game.  Those were usually burnouts and frankly RL, as I've begun traveling more and more and working in excess of eighty hours a week.

I'll say the reason I've returned, for however long I don't know, was to try some things I'd never done in detail before.  Magickers, desert elves, maybe dwarf or half-giant will get in the mix?  And other thoughts and concepts.  Looking forward to seeing what shakes out.

[Barsook]

This thought came to me and I feel like the staff have a hard time following through with things. One example is some of the "A small peek behind the curtain" thread (https://gdb.armageddon.org/index.php/topic,56309.0.html) and what the staff said that they are working on. Sure I think most are done but I would like to hear about new projects aside from the poison updates. So maybe more of keeping us updated on what is happening for transparentcy(SP).

I might be wrong here, sorry if I am!

[Doublepalli]

Give more power to storytellers.

[Barsook]

This thought came to me and I feel like the staff have a hard time following through with things. One example is some of the "A small peek behind the curtain" thread (https://gdb.armageddon.org/index.php/topic,56309.0.html) and what the staff said that they are working on. Sure I think most are done but I would like to hear about new projects aside from the poison updates. So maybe more of keeping us updated on what is happening for transparentcy(SP).

I might be wrong here, sorry if I am!

Quoting my own post here, but I wish to thank you for that update Brokkr! I think more detailed, maybe weekly posts, posts on what is being done could help. I think that seems to be a common thing in other text-based games and also other multiplayer games. Yes, I know the release notes is mostly weekly but they aren't the same as just updates. My two sids.

[cali]

I think if the Staff would allow player plots to happen it would go a long way. From my recent-ish experience, the staff have what they want to happen and it is going to happen. Even if the players opposing the staff position do everything right and the players supporting the staff narrative do everything wrong, the staff narrative goes through. Even if they just wait long enough for the opposing players to eventually die or give up. Also staff are obscenely biased to their own plots. They have no problem creating tons of new stuff for a whim but you spend months and months on something you get practically nothing.

[Brokkr]

This thought came to me and I feel like the staff have a hard time following through with things. One example is some of the "A small peek behind the curtain" thread (https://gdb.armageddon.org/index.php/topic,56309.0.html) and what the staff said that they are working on. Sure I think most are done but I would like to hear about new projects aside from the poison updates. So maybe more of keeping us updated on what is happening for transparentcy(SP).

I might be wrong here, sorry if I am!

Quoting my own post here, but I wish to thank you for that update Brokkr! I think more detailed, maybe weekly posts, posts on what is being done could help. I think that seems to be a common thing in other text-based games and also other multiplayer games. Yes, I know the release notes is mostly weekly but they aren't the same as just updates. My two sids.

Keep in mind the arcs on some stuff, like most of that stuff, is weeks to months long.

[Krath]

This thought came to me and I feel like the staff have a hard time following through with things. One example is some of the "A small peek behind the curtain" thread (https://gdb.armageddon.org/index.php/topic,56309.0.html) and what the staff said that they are working on. Sure I think most are done but I would like to hear about new projects aside from the poison updates. So maybe more of keeping us updated on what is happening for transparentcy(SP).

I might be wrong here, sorry if I am!

Quoting my own post here, but I wish to thank you for that update Brokkr! I think more detailed, maybe weekly posts, posts on what is being done could help. I think that seems to be a common thing in other text-based games and also other multiplayer games. Yes, I know the release notes is mostly weekly but they aren't the same as just updates. My two sids.

Keep in mind the arcs on some stuff, like most of that stuff, is weeks to months long.

Why though? Why does it need to be months? This, I believe and I could be wrong is the stagnation everyone is referring to. What is objective or problem are you solving by making it take more than a month?

I would challenge staff with this: Make things that take a month or more, happen in less than a month.

[Oleupata]

Why though? Why does it need to be months? This, I believe and I could be wrong is the stagnation everyone is referring to. What is objective or problem are you solving by making it take more than a month?

I would challenge staff with this: Make things that take a month or more, happen in less than a month.

For the same reason any volunteer project takes as long as it takes, and not shorter: people work on things when they have time, space, and motivation. Sometimes those are in short supply. Sometimes they aren't.

[Brokkr]

This thought came to me and I feel like the staff have a hard time following through with things. One example is some of the "A small peek behind the curtain" thread (https://gdb.armageddon.org/index.php/topic,56309.0.html) and what the staff said that they are working on. Sure I think most are done but I would like to hear about new projects aside from the poison updates. So maybe more of keeping us updated on what is happening for transparentcy(SP).

I might be wrong here, sorry if I am!

Quoting my own post here, but I wish to thank you for that update Brokkr! I think more detailed, maybe weekly posts, posts on what is being done could help. I think that seems to be a common thing in other text-based games and also other multiplayer games. Yes, I know the release notes is mostly weekly but they aren't the same as just updates. My two sids.

Keep in mind the arcs on some stuff, like most of that stuff, is weeks to months long.

Why though? Why does it need to be months? This, I believe and I could be wrong is the stagnation everyone is referring to. What is objective or problem are you solving by making it take more than a month?

I would challenge staff with this: Make things that take a month or more, happen in less than a month.

For the one thing it was a custom script I needed to make, the items and the crafts.  Which took longer than a month even before I posted.  Then, if I remember right, it took a month for a player that qualified.  Maybe not that long, but certainly weeks, and then the time to work in an animation that made sense to kick stuff off.  And the project was made to be long term and not stop once it started.  It isn't something with a discrete beginning and end.

Desert elves took some prep time for some of the stuff.  And the way the opening was done was designed for maximum impact, not maximum transparency.

The other one had a plot associated with it that was around for about a month, and again, isn't designed to end.

Given that two of these are also not public as far as details....that doesn't make for great weekly updates other than *yep still going on*

[najdorf]

I believe attrition is natural. Even video games spending tens of millions cannot keep up with changing times and shut down.
But it is very hard to win newcomers in this era, as many of you have pointed out.
Do we have numbers on this? I know monthly new player / account creations are a thing, but they might be extremely misleading.
Everyone can create a new account or login a few times.
I would very much love to see the number of -at least 300~ hours played accounts- on a timescale of years, perhaps from 2000 to 2022. (whether they are active or inactive as of this moment). It would show the game's actual player acquisition pattern.
I think we will see a very steep downwards trend there over the course of the last 15 years.