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« on: February 02, 2014, 07:06:13 PM »
I read this topic with great interest, because I was a very active player back from 2006-2008 or thereabouts. Those of you who played on Atamara around that time might remember me as Xuanye, general and later ruler of Abington before its demise. After around 2008 I stopped, partly for real life reasons, but partly because the game had changed for the worse. I've tried to restart an account since then, two or three times (I just created another one very recently) and the few times I joined, what I found was that the realms were very quiet - so quiet that I didn't know there were other players. My interest in those attempts ran out after a few weeks of basically silence in realms that sometimes had dozens of nobles. My messages were generally ignored, and there just wasn't much going on or much communication. Once you've hit a low critical mass of players like that, it's going to be problematic. My character is now over a day old and in a realm with only 15 people. So far, in the last day, there hasn't been a single message sent in game that isn't an auto-message, never mind the fact that there are undeads running around.
I think there were always some issues that were fundamental to the game's ability to attract and retain players, and it seems like those problems have not gone away at all in the interim, based on my relatively limited play the past few years. I'll try to write down what I think in the following.
1) The role of "powergaming"
When I was general I was accused by some as a power-gamer, mostly because I was relatively successful and I would bark out orders within the first hour of the turn. I would also demand scouting reports from people on the front lines, and I'd chew out players (IC) for failing to set their units on the right (rather unconventional, sometimes) settings. In those cases, I'd send the characters personal messages. I think I was within the rules, and I was never punished for it, but there were murmurs that I was borderline. Thing is though, I was having loads of fun, and I'm pretty sure that most of my realm-mates in Abington at the time also had loads of fun during those very tense months when the entire continent was bearing down on us. Winning those battles and surviving against the waves was, in and of itself, a great source of roleplay opportunities and also of movement - people rising in ranks, new players getting very interested and ended up in the game for years, so on. Since then, however, the military command structure was substantially changed. The red paper was taken away from the general, to the point where the general had very little to do and had to rely on the marshals, who may or may not have been active players. Since generals were not allowed (IIRC) to tell dukes who to appoint as marshals, the whole military command system broke down. My time after that when I played in other realms was basically that of intense frustration - nobody knew where they were supposed to go, what the settings should be, etc. It was all over the place, except in realms lucky enough to have the right people in the right job (not very common, it seemed).
I understood the rationale for the changes - Tom & Co wanted to decentralize the system so that it was not just one man barking out orders in a somewhat dictatorial manner, but the end result, as some previous posters have mentioned here, is that it crammed responsibility down to people who didn't necessary want/ready to perform. The result is disorganization - it's fine in so far as all realms were equally hit by this problem, but as a player, it's not very fun.
Moreover, there was always a group of people who didn't roleplay a whole lot but enjoyed the war part of the game, which has always been, by design, a pretty central part of the game for the average player without realm responsibilities. Abington had about 150 nobles, and I'd say only about 30-40 of them talked much, with the rest dutifully logging in and doing things, but rarely vocally participating outside of "yes, that was a great victory!" and so on. Taking away the clear command structure (especially for new players, who had to figure out the whole armies-marshals-settings-general isn't really in charge thing) was confusing, and that can easily lead people to just give up and play something else.
My point here is that powergaming at least in the form of a strong hand in the center did a lot to make the game meaningful for the average player with little time commitment. I'm not saying it should be strongly promoted as a part of the game, but you need it to make it interesting enough for the newer players to get involved. When I join a realm and I can't even figure out where I'm supposed to go (because I got no orders) for two weeks of real time, it's a frustrating experience and it's not going to get people to play this game
2) Inertia
Others have already mentioned this, but I think it's worth point out again. The game is very static. That's by design, of course, which is fine insofar as it provides some stability. However, like others have said, it also leads to very static alliances that have no real meaning aside from "well, we've been allies forever so we'll stay allied." It doesn't help that some realms are run by basically the same people forever - I noticed, for example, that Atamara's current alliance structure is relatively intact since about 2008/9, with the exception of Darka no longer being friends with CE. Some realms have disappeared, but they have been replaced, almost replicated, by realms in the same place and occupying similar positions. Now, I know the system was designed so that quick annihilation is all but impossible - that's only doable with a continent wide alliance, which is what usually ends up happening for people to want to effect change. With the nerf of military command, it's also the only real way for decisive results to happen - absent brilliant command (which is very difficult to do with the way it's structured in this game - with armies suffering heavy losses even when winning, and sieges being always bloody without the option of sitting there and just reducing the fortress - or has that been changed?), the only alternative is overwhelming force.
I think allowing characters a chance to die after a certain age (let's say, 65?) would make it more realistic and also push things along and move power to different players, who may have a different idea of how the realm should behave. Yes, you get attached to characters, but if they're real characters, they should and will die. Armitage III is still in the game, from way back when, and I'm guessing the character must be 100 years old by now. That's silly - if realism is so important in other somewhat trivial aspects of the game, I'm surprised death isn't properly done here. Let them die and let power be circulated and lords be appointed because PEOPLE DIE.
3) The role of GMs
I was always a bit confused as to the role of GMs in this game, because they straddle something between people who ran the game, and people who enforced rules. When I say ran the game, I mean things like orchestrating undead invasions. When I say enforcing rules, I mean bolts and storms. It seems like bolts haven't happened much recently, but it's still a threat that some people take seriously.
I think in general aside from obvious things like exploiting bugs to cheat (say, it gives you unlimited gold because of a bug) the GMs should probably stay out of enforcement. I remember as general people would tell me they couldn't log in to follow my orders. Of course I wasn't telling them they must, and certainly wasn't doing it OOC, but I think IC my character, as a general who issued orders and when these orders determined whether my army would win or lose, I'd of course care very much about whether they were followed. In fact, it would not be IC if my general just said "oh, it's fine, don't worry about following them." Can you imagine a general, in any period of history, saying that? No. Yet there was always that nagging worry that I would somehow push too hard, and that some GM would find my orders to be too much "powergaming". It becomes the arbitrary judgement of one or a few GMs, instead of clearly written rules that can be followed, worry free.
The classic example, and one that I know has been debated to death, is the moving capital business. Historically, capitals were moved all the time precisely because of strategic reasons - because the empire got bigger and needs a new capital (Constantinople, Mongol Empire's move to current day Beijing), because the old one was destroyed (Chang'an to Luoyang in China, Krakow to Warsaw in Poland), because climate changed and the old place was now no longer suitable, etc. These were all, relatively speaking, for strategic reasons. But somehow in this game it's the one reason you CANNOT use to move capitals. I know Tom has strong feelings about this, but it's a fine line between these reasons and the other "acceptable" reasons listed. At the end of the day, it's a judgement call based on the GM's views. That makes it unpredictable and hard to guess - if you do it, you might run the risk of being seen as abusing the rules. Why not, for example, just make it so costly that it would completely neutralize any benefit of moving the capital? In fact, I believe these are already part of the game, so why worry about realms moving it for strategic reasons? If lots of realms do it, then maybe it's not expensive enough. Change the rules and incentive structure, but don't police behaviour on a case by case basis (especially if you want people to roleplay all sorts of characters)
Tom seemed to have rejected the idea of GM intervention to make things happen earlier in this thread, but I'd like to point out that many large, realm-shaking historical events have been caused by outside forces. In Europe one needs to look no further than, say, Huns invasion, Vikings, Plague, Crusades, Mongols, Discovery of the New World, Climate stress in the 17th century and the collapse of the silver boom, etc etc. These were all world-historical events that changed things for multiple regions - and they were caused by factors that were outside of the actors within the theater. A gamemaster's role is to provide enough of these when the game becomes too static, I think, and some suirtable intervention - changing, for example, maximum populations in cities by meaningful events, will help to change the dynamic of the land and therefore diplomacy. Speaking of Atamara, which I know best, Ashrily has always been a food-suck and caused problems for realms that owned it. The food demand has been a source of friction for those realms - and the friction never goes away because the population is always the same (barring war and starvation). Once those things change, the diplomacy arrangements that might have worked earlier may no longer work. Why not do something with that? You can even make this an auto-process so the GMs don't have to get personally involved.
Here are just some of the things I've observed as a player. Meanwhile, I'm still waiting to figure out where I'm supposed to go with my new character, even though my realm is at war with a neighbour I get no sense that a war is going on. Well, we'll see.
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