Posts made by Bronn

@arkandel Sorry. I'll bow out of this thread and move on. I've said my piece.

I don't really care about how many people you managed to rope into signing up for a forum account to jump in and defend Arm's honor. Once someone immerses themselves in Armageddon for a while it becomes blatantly obvious that players - especially the veterans - have formed an exclusive club.

It shows whenever staff apply rules differently to certain players. It shows whenever certain players are just utterly rude on the GDB and Discord and they get a pass because they have max karma or they're current or former staff. It shows whenever I get an e-mail from my crazed stalker saying the game is better off without me.

Armageddon has a lot of bad people, a lot of vindictive people, and a lot of haughty people associated with it and that is a huge barrier to entry for the game.

@fortydeuce said in Armageddon MUD:

From earlier:

if you are still having trouble, you can ooc that you're still getting your bearings as you're new.

Except people are free to ignore that as they wish, and screw you up anyway, per your own statement.

Not only that, but it happens on a regular enough basis that reviews have been written about it on places like mudconnect and mudlistings, even within the past few months.

The truth is in @ShaLeah 's latest statement. The game is an exclusive club, and survival of the fittest reigns. They want players who are willing to lose while they get to have fun.

In some games, that works just fine. In a roleplaying game it's hard to justify. The <1% new player retention rate should be a warning sign and instead it's a point of pride. Oh well.

@ganymede said in Armageddon MUD:

Your fellow player(s) (staff?) have by implication highlighted a common sentiment coming from existing players: what have you as a newbie done to earn anything? But the question a newbie is going to come in with is: what has the game done to warrant my time, attention, and interest?

As an aside, @oryx and @rahnevyn are staff, although if they identified themselves as such I've completely missed it.

I just wanted to highlight this part of your post because it brings up a really good point, and I think it's more of something to pose to someone involved in game design and administration. It seems like people who play Armageddon eventually forget what it is like to be a newbie. If other players are anything like how I was when I played, and I think they are, I sunk time and effort into Armageddon and got nothing for it. In fact, I got less than nothing: I was actually insulted and degraded in exchange for my contributions. That's after over 10 years being associated with the game in some capacity.

It's simple gambler's fallacy. You sink in time and effort and immediately get shat on, but you hope it doesn't happen again. That's how delusional you have to be to get through the introductory phase of playing Armageddon. And I mean that in the gentlest possible way: it's a sort of delusion where you hope that something will be mostly okay, because it is mostly okay. It's just a weird feeling here or there that tells you that this might not be healthy.

After that, it's smooth sailing until you wake up and realize how much you've sunk in and what you actually got out of it. For some people that takes over a decade and a sudden, bizarre attack on you as a person.

It's pretty easy to compare Armageddon to a cult. You enter, demands are made of you, and if you willingly accept those demands you are bilked and degraded until you are discarded, all under the illusion of "fun". Compare to just about any other game that wants players and is organized enough to actually help new players succeed and have fun.

I believe I said something earlier about the Arm community being unable to take criticism, so I won't touch on that again...

@d-bone said in Armageddon MUD:

Amusingly Armageddon is almost exactly the same in every aspect for newbies. By the defenders own admission the theme can't bend even slightly to put up with new players, you just kill them and punish them instead. If there was open ooc communication on game, this might be somewhat fixable with ooc informing new players to be more careful in their interactions... The current round about system relies on the player popping onto a discord- a system of communication outside of the game- and requires a player not to still share ooc information.

The veterans have a natural advantage when it comes to game meta-knowledge. And the game is driven hard by competition. The "Murder, Corruption, Betrayal" tagline is a point of pride. The natural result: competitive veterans hoard knowledge and retain their advantage, forcing newbies to struggle and do without. Then the revolving door begins, where 20-30% of unique weekly logins are new players, and >99% of those give up before 24 hours of play.

I have tried explaining this a bunch of times back when I was actually an Armer. Of course they didn't like the logic I was attempting to apply to the problem.

It's unfortunate that the inability to compromise and take criticism is slowly ruining something that could have been a masterpiece.

@evilcabbage

"i've mocked former players who were banned from the game. do i do it still? it depends on who we're talking about."

"you might still not like it, you might still have grievances, but if you don't give it another try you'll never know."

This is not a good representation of your game. If you need to be told why, I don't know what to tell you.

The main weakness of Armageddon is and always has been the complete inability of its community, from the top down, to take criticism. This is something that's on full display in this thread as they're put on the defensive trying to explain "fee-fees" and how Armageddon or any RPI might appeal to someone who likes MUSHes.

It's on display on the game's official Discord, which is often a gathering spot for people who are convinced that all the negative reviews are fake, all the negative comments are by disgruntled former players, and their game is the best MU* ever. Well, it isn't. As far as RPIs go, perhaps they're right, at least for now.

Guys, you did your best. People know about Armageddon now. It's easier to trick people into joining Armageddon if all they know about it is that a lot of people voted for it on Topmudsites and Mudconnect. God forbid they see what the players are actually like the moment they get a little flustered.