For context: I'm a former player and staff member, and I was made aware of this thread a few days ago by my only friend who still checks up on this community once a month or so. Forgot my old account password, unfortunately. In the interest of avoiding airing dirty laundry I'm not going to name names, and in that same vein it's probably for the best that I forgot my account credentials anyway.

I was not exactly thrilled when Tuluk closed, but I kept playing for a couple of years afterward. I can't say I'm excited now that it's reopening because, frankly, Tuluk's closure isn't the main reason why I left. The main reason I left is related to time, but not necessarily in the same way as everyone else. I left because, looking in retrospect at the long amount of time I spent playing Armageddon, I never once felt my time was respected in any way.

First, I would like to talk about game design and psychology. People who are generally familiar with operant conditioning chambers (the "Skinner box") understand that there's a psychological line to be drawn between an animal pressing a button in the hopes that food will drop down a hole, and a human repeating the same action over and over in a game for an extra skill point, some virtual money, or some other reward. This fact is used most often by game companies to make money off of "grind skippers": microtransactions that skip purposefully boring elements of a game.

But grinding in an RPI isn't just skill grinding. At least skill grinding has "grind skippers" in the form of special applications - or at least, it did when I was here last.

But there is also "social grinding", which takes far more time than skill grinding and can't be skipped. Being online at specific hours to meet up with specific characters, being a liaison between multiple IC groups to arrange RPTs, and being online more than other clan leaders to get the first pick of potential new recruits are all examples of social grinding.

When Tuluk closed, it was a show of disrespect to those that had poured so much time into pressing the button, so to speak. People who poured time into the social grind. At least some pragmatic intent can be assigned to that handful of staff members that made the decision to close Tuluk. 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. Or that half of the reconstruction plots after the damage done to Allanak and Tuluk were, of course, in Tuluk. Maybe they didn't know about the martial efforts against opponents like the halflings and the kryl. They probably didn't know that were bards pumping so much creative effort to document lore through song, poetry, and playwriting, most of which is now lost to time.

To say it was disrespectful when players OOCly cheered its closure on the grounds that Tuluk was the lesser of the two cities doesn't go far enough. It was a massive slap in the face to players who expected the playerbase to have some small sense of solidarity when the entirety of their social and creative effort was being archived for no other reason beyond the slim hope that it might improve the game somehow.

I won't go so far as to say that the vicious example of mob psychology on display was traumatizing. Nowadays, when I think back on it, I laugh about how short-sighted it was. But at the time, it was mortifying to feel like I had worked so hard to help give life to half of the game's setting, and here were my fellow players making fun of me and people in a similar position as me for caring so much - players who themselves care quite a lot about their own efforts, I'd imagine, and would take offense if their efforts weren't cared about by others. But Allanak was never even on the chopping block, so what do they have to worry about?

But, really, the player backlash against Tuluk players should not have surprised me as much as it did. Some players in this community have a long history of disrespecting other players' time. When I played, I often played eight hours a day or more with people who played eight hours a day or more, while juggling university studies, and eventually a full-time job, as well as providing care for my parents and minor siblings. Armageddon was a way for me to de-stress, or so I thought at the time. At the very least it was a way for me to escape reality.

In all this time I spent on the game, I saw all the quasi-IC ways characters try to downplay other characters, all the ways they tried to convince my character to leave out those other characters from plots and positions in clans, because those characters' players play less. He's "not dedicated enough to ride with the unit every week". She "barely gets through the crafting materials we collect". They "don't come up with unique designs as fast as me". These were reasons to pass over characters looking for promotions, to fire them, or outright kill them. As a player in a sponsored leadership role, I tried to push back against this bullshit as much as possible by giving casual players fun things to do, and that caused some of those full-timers to get annoyed at me for not kicking more stuff to them.

Under that incredibly thin veneer is a specific message, to reach back to the Skinner box comparison: "these filthy casuals don't press the button as much as I do, and yet they expect the same amount of food to drop out of their chute as I get from mine".

What got elements of the community to this point in the first place? I think it is the competition that staff have inadvertently created for their time. In an effort to maintain complete impartiality, the staff primarily focus their time in a way that benefits the maximum amount of people who have put the most time into an effort. This has the ultimate consequence of biasing staff towards the players who play the most, leaving casual players in the dust by comparison. Just like the toxicity and quasi-IC behavior of players throwing each other under the bus that I observed in a sponsored leadership role, I observed similar behavior as a staff member taking weekly reports, with leaders often justifying firings based on a combination of character inactivity and clan hiring caps, although "inactivity" in this case meant "playing less than the leader". Considering that sponsored roles are usually selected for high playtimes, this has the unfortunate consequence of ensuring that only people willing to give up large shares of time ever get ahead in the game.

Don't get me wrong: impartiality from the staff is a good thing and it should be the ultimate goal of any game's staff. But whereas modern online roleplaying games use a "first-in, first-out" queue for all non-urgent player requests to staff, Armageddon's staff assign higher priority to certain request types. Inevtiably, they help players more when they have more time to report, to write up items, and to place complaints about other players or staff. Everyone else falls through the cracks, to be gotten to "eventually", "when there's time".

The disrespect of time might not generate community toxicity by itself, but it certainly lends a big hand. Many players who decide to quit quietly slink away because departure announcements are often seen as a cry for attention. My departure announcement was more of a cry for help and the way I phrased it still embarrasses me when I think about it. I was at my wit's end with the game, with its community, with being on the verge of being laid off, and having a seriously ill family member. Yet when I announced my departure for the game, I received three messages that I can remember:
1) a private message simply saying "See you next week" or something along those lines, accompanied by a picture of a woman's butt covered in what appeared to be diarrhea.
2) a message saying that they hoped I stayed gone, because they thought my characters were the most boring ones they'd ever seen and that I should have stored my most long-lived character a few weeks into playing them.
3) a screenshot sent by a staff member of other staff members taking bets on when I would return. This was accompanied by a genuine message stating how annoyed they were at the staff involved and a genuine message of good luck with staying away from the game.

It's funny because while I remember the contents of all three messages, I only remember the sender for the third message. The scat enjoyer and the storage advisor were lost to time.

The maliciousness behind "see you next week" messages is founded in the assumption that the departing player has no social support beyond Armageddon, and will inevitably return. A common practice is to spam "CRACKAGEDDON" at someone who has returned to the game after a hiatus. The underlying joke here is that addicts to crack cocaine, and drugs in general, often fail to quit because all of their friends are also drug users, and so they return to drug use to fall back into that social net. That harmless joke was ruined for me forever when I thought of it that way, and I should state outright that while OP of the thread is to my knowledge, the originator of that joke (welcome back, by the way), I highly doubt he intended it in a cruel way. But it is usually fairly true that Armageddon players have little to no social support outside of the game. It was essentially true for me at the time I quit, with only a few online friends, most of whom were Armageddon players, and no real-life friends outside of work acquaintances.

The idea that departed players will eventually return is a major contributor to the game's declining playerbase because it breeds complacency. Online roleplaying is becoming more and more widely accessible to people, and at a lower time cost. For example, AresMUSH is a type of MUSH codebase that facilitates browser-based and play-by-post style play when two players can't be online at the same time or find it hard to coordinate times in general. Games made with the Arx codebase, which is a branch of the Evennia codebase, have an IC messenger system that allows characters to send messages to other players at any time, and offline characters will receive the message on logging in. Meanwhile, Armageddon does not even allow characters to send IC messages to offline characters, and every time the idea of it has been brought up, it is met with significant resistance on both IC grounds and development grounds.

Many players will also agree that the community is not inherently welcoming. Back when I played Armageddon, an oft-repeated phrase when Armageddon's players recommended the game to others in the MUD community is to just focus on the game itself, but to avoid the community. Yet no self-reflection seems to take place there. The player promoting Armageddon in this way does not acknolwedge why they're playing a game with a community they don't feel welcome in. It's not as if the characters in Armageddon are played by an AI. They are played by the very same players that new players are often told to avoid. Of course, what these promoters mean to say is to avoid places like the GDB and the Discord server. But even that charitable interpretation suggests that new players should give up having a voice in a community that distrusts them by default, until they can put in full-time job hours or join an in-group.

Armageddon is also not well-perceived by the MUD community at large. A lot of people lay the blame on trolls in places like Reddit's r/MUD or the "shadowboard", but the above style of 'recommending' Armageddon has been in vogue for over a decade at this point, if my memory serves me well, which it usually does. At some point while tracing the problem back to its root, your finger inevitably lands on the game's community itself. At least, if you're being honest with yourself.

And now for the constructive part of all this criticism.

The community needs to focus less on player numbers and focus more on player quality. From a purely pragmatic, mathematical perspective, it is better to ban one toxic player or staff member from the game, that spends their entire day playing the game and disrespecting other players' time, than it is to let them stay and drive away two or more players that would have contributed so much to the game with a relatively small amount of time on the grounds that "well, they might be toxic but at least they're [a good writer/fun to play with/etc.]".

The responsibility of picking and choosing who gets to play and staff here officially falls upon the staff, but players do not seem to be particularly choosy when it comes to who they associate with. Known toxic members of the community are usually tolerated for the same reasons staff tolerate them: they're good writers and fun to play with. Players have a lot of collective power when it comes to pushing for certain people to be removed, but it never gets used, and now you have a game that people actively avoid because the community has never been truly cleaned up under the surface.

The people who quietly left were given no assurances that their time is suddenly more valuable now. The people who announced their departure and were treated with jeers owe nothing to the people who jeered them, certainly not a time investment. And the people who left when Tuluk closed only know that Tuluk is open for now. When they return, they'll likely see the names of familiar people that they remember as being among their bullies. They'll never know when the Producers' opinion on keeping Tuluk open will change. And, socially speaking, they'll have to start all over because all of the emotional labor of becoming a member of the community has been undone.

When you're talking about pulling in former veterans, you're talking about effectively adding their free time back into the fold, letting them sink untold hours into the game to make it a more fun place for everyone, including the people that would likely prefer to have their own time recognized more highly than the people returning, if it came down to it.

What is the payoff when all of that work can easily be erased, and all of that time easily disregarded as "not enough"?

What has changed about the community to make it more like a healthy community that respects people's time?