Cast 'Dispel Stagnation'

Hello everyone.

It's a beautiful spring afternoon here. The sun is streaming in through the windows, a sweet breeze is blowing, and I am listening to Fleetwood Mac's Rumours. What better time possible to address some of the concerns which have been circulating?

The biggest one, clearly, has been the recent and almost total lack of activity in the game. Since early December, DR has just been slowing down, to the very sluggish state it's in right now. I think it's worth explaining what's been happening behind the scenes, both then and now: what led to this state, and what we're doing to fix it. Just a warning though: I ramble a lot in this post.

The way Dark Risings is designed, it is extremely dependent on having an active staff to keep things moving. For better or for worse, guild immortals are vital to their guilds, and not just as automatons guilding in whomever the players have vouched. Guild immortals are the ones responsible for following the stories of their guild members, for enhancing and building on them, for bringing to admin's attention the ones that require further support in the way of coding or building.

In many ways guild imms are the conduits of player story lines, because most players do not record their own stories or tell the admin staff about them. We have staff policies designed to enhance player privacy, and I think that's a good thing; the downside of that is that admin doesn't often know what's happening in the player world. We need people to keep us informed, and most of the time, those people are the guild immortals. Providing enhancement and support for character stories is also pretty time intensive, so having an active staff means that there is a team working towards a common goal. Without that team, running the mud is impossible.

So what happened?

It started with our decision to ask one imm to step down, followed shortly by having two imms quit. These are delicate situations where it's easy for players to make assumptions based on biased and incomplete information. Whenever an imm quits (or is asked to step down), or a player is penalized, or anything of that nature, that person tends to tell his or her side of the story. And certainly I understand that -- that's such a normal thing to do. The trouble is that our side of the story is almost never told. We hold back, and for several reasons. Part of it is that we understand that people need to save face, that people need to vent. Part of it is that we think the classy thing to do is not to sink to a level of he-said/she-said bickering in an environment where we hold the power (though dang, it's sometimes hard to stick to that high road). Part of it is to protect other people involved in the situation. Part of it is to protect the very person who is telling everyone what he or she sees as the truth.

How much to divulge about this type of decision is something I struggle with in all of these situations. Older players may remember one very infamous episode in DR history where Player X was in a pk with a character who was suspected to be one of Mark's alts (Mark being an implementor at the time, along with Andy and Dan). Player X had Mark's alt slept without poison, and out of nowhere, a "someone" (ie a wizi imm) cast Pinch on him, waking him up. Obviously, that looks horribly like Mark used his imm character to cheat, and Player X went on a huge smear campaign to try to have Mark discredited and thrown out of the game by the other imps. A lot of players heard Player X's story and concluded that Mark MUST have cheated, and it did a lot of damage to the game environment that lasted for years.

I was an imm when that happened and none of us were told anything about it, except that it wasn't what it looked like and that we should trust the imps to handle it. That was all the players got too. That didn't sit well with pretty much everyone. It wasn't until years later when I was an imp, when I had the ability to check the facts, that I got the real story. Pinch was at that time brand new -- I think it had gone in just a day or two before -- and one of the other imms was just being goofy and messing around with it. He didn't know that Mark's character was in a PK, and just to be funny, he cast it on that character. The timing couldn't have been worse, and it sparked this huge, huge, mess which was really devastating in a lot of ways. So everyone on the imp staff was silent about what really happened, to protect the imm who had screwed up with such a simple little thing, a harmless little thing (or at least it would have been, if Mark's character hadn't also been in a PK with probably the worst possible player for this to happen with), and a huge amount of distrust was fostered. And Mark's own personality made matters even worse, because he is the kind of person who, if misjudged, says 'You seriously think this bad thing could be true about me? Screw you, I'll show you bad," and then goads the hell out of the person who misjudged him to start with. And he was really insulted by this -- not so much the assertion that he would cheat, but the assertion that he would cheat in such an obvious, ridiculously blatant way. And so Mark, who has done so much for DR, is still reviled by a large number of old players, for many incidents very similar to this.

So what should we do? In that situation, should they just have thrown the imm who made the mistake under the bus? Were they wrong to expect the players to just accept that no wrongdoing actually took place, regardless of how it looked from Player X's perspective and his many theories about it?

As imps, should we go out of our way to explain our decisions about difficult topics, even if it means outting other people's alts or giving away game secrets that players have worked for months or years to develop, just so that we can clear our names? I guess for us, the answer is clearly 'No.' We would rather take the bullet. When we have asked staff to step down or change something they were doing, it wasn't done out of petty personal self-interest. We have done it because as implementors we see a full picture of the game that no one else has, with the benefit of having more experience running the game than any other implementors in DR's history, and, even more, the added benefit of being able to learn not only from our own mistakes, but the mistakes of everyone who came before us.

Maybe it was a mistake given how it all turned out not to be up-front in divulging what happened in the above situation, but I admire Mark for taking the heat and protecting his staff. I think that took a lot of grit. This is not to say that the staff member got a free pass -- he got a royal chewing out, and all subsequent imms got a big lecture about how immortal powers are NOT toys and shouldn't be used to dick around, because you never know when some innocent goofy prank can have drastic consequences.

In any case, I remain the optimist. I think we must ask staff to believe in us, to believe that our fundamental goal is to make a great game, and if they can't do that, then they probably should not be part of our team and leaving the staff is the right decision for them to make. We aren't looking for a team of yes-men -- the point is we want staff who will come to us when they see problems and work them out with us, not just passively seethe about it in silence or rant about it to players. To us, a team works together towards a common goal, and undercutting members of the team is not going to produce a win.

The point is, it isn't enough just to have bodies on staff. For this game to work, for it to be really great, we need people who have faith in us, and in whom we have faith. And we want DR to be great. We think it has achieved a level of greatness that makes us extremely proud to be a part of it, and we want to keep that going for as long as possible, whether it's us at the wheel or whoever takes over after us. And we will take quality staff members over a quantity of poor ones every day of the week.

So, back to the point: we lost three staff members. Inferno is mortal-run, so that leaves six guilds: doing the math, we lost half our staff within a few months. During that time we also hired one new imm and closed down one guild, leaving us with five guilds who needed immortals, and four people to fill the slots.

That's when things got really bad. Of the four people we had, all four had real life suddenly rear its ugly head, and their time and ability to play DR was suddenly non-existent. Obviously I'm not going to detail the private lives of the staff, but for each one of them, the reason was a very good one, unavoidable, and, while it was long-lasting, temporary. One of the four was me, and while my real-life issue was much shorter than the others, I came back to a mud with no staff support whatsoever.

I have said this before and I'll say it again: it is not possible to run Dark Risings without staff. Just completely not possible at all. For one person to try to do it is a fool's errand. I have heard people assert how easy it is to hire staff, and for other muds that may be true. But it isn't true for -this- mud, at least not at this stage of the game. Hiring a new staff member is a huge investment in time and effort for admin, because of the standards we ask staff to meet and the ways in which we do things. I have seen dozens of imms hired, back in the day, and thrown into a guild they had never even had a mortal in, and left to sink or swim. Most of them sank. It's done very differently now, because want to do everything we possibly can to help new imms prosper, and it takes time. It also helps to have an active staff when hiring new staff members, because we can be a team and work together to teach the new imms everything they need to know: how to make their equipment and token and poofs and room and rank and pretitle and all the other things new imms have to make; the transmission of almost 14 years of guild histories, policies on guilding and ranking and eq, not to mention the story lines; what imm commands they now have and the rules we have about using them -- and all of this is just the tip of the iceberg. It's a lot, both for the new imm and for the current staff.

So when I came back and the staff was still absent, I lost interest myself. Plus, not gonna lie: I had just gotten Skyrim and was totally addicted. It was easy to ignore Dark Risings, because nothing was happening and I didn't have much help to make things happen. The staff would be coming back, I knew, and so I didn't want to replace them. One guild, Covenance, was completely without an imm, but Parviane dragged out one of his old Covenance immortals and was covering there as best he could given how little time he had for DR. Life trumps the game, and that's how it should be, but dang. Tough times for DR.

I often just have to laugh when I hear people with little-to-no imming experience talk about what they think imms do or how easy it is to hire/be staff. I do understand it -- Parviane and I are the only implementors in DR history who started out as players first, and over the years I have been increasingly stunned to realize just how much immortals do that players don't realize, how much admins do that imms don't realize, how much imps do that admin don't realize. It's like an ant climbing to the top of an anthill about which he knows everything, only to have the camera draw back to reveal a whole field of anthills he never knew existed.

And that feeling has intensified over the years, as we have tried to refine the DR gaming experience from one that appealed to 14-year-old boys, to one suitable for our current 20-40 age group made up pretty equally of men and women. Imming at DR is a vastly different experience now from what it was when I was brought on as staff in the spring of 2002. (Holy crap. In two months I will have been a DR staff member for a solid decade.) The game is very different now, and while there are certainly people who will always mourn for the good old days when they played important characters and were known throughout the mud, I am proud of what we've built it into: a unique, original, and cohesive world built out of incongruent sources; a game based on the tenets of fair play, respect for players and their stories (past and present), and balanced mechanics. DR really is a magical place.

Anyway, I think the players saw the lack of staff and thought that since we weren't there to make the magic happen, they had no reason to be there either. And while it is possible to play DR and make magic happen without the presence of a staff, it's a lot less fun that it should be. And what is a game supposed to be, if not fun?

So we stagnated. We were in the position of having very few regular players logging, and possibly having to start from scratch with staff, and not even having much of a pool of players who had shown any interest in being staff to pick from.

I'll admit, I got disheartened. When we came back from our absence a few years ago, DR was in a similar state and we brought it back to life then, through a lot of hard work and constant effort. The thought of doing that again was, for a while, pretty overwhelming. I thought about possibly writing an ending for the DR story, having a set date on which the mud would close and staging a series of climactic events to culminate in one big bang, with the ending determined by player actions along the way. I would rather give the game closure and go out with a bang than just have it waste away to nothing. I even went to the extent of asking a few players if that's something they would like to see, and while they agreed it would be better than letting the game die quietly, they said both options were less desirable than having the game pick back up again.

And isn't that what I want too? It so is. DR can be a frustrating, exhausting creature sometimes. But I love it. I have loved it for ten years. And I want it to be awesome, to give it life, to make it soar.

So.

We are making changes. Of the three staff who had their time sucked away, two are back. We have also hired three new staff members, and the plotting has been fast and furious. I can't tell you how great it feels to have people to conspire with again. We have a ton of great stuff planned and I am really hoping that the resurgence in active staff is going to bring the players back. You have all been sorely missed.

Since it is going to take a few weeks for the new staff to get ready and go vis, I thought I would write this post to let you know that we're focused again, we're taking big steps to fix the horrible problem with stagnation, and we're very excited about the future of the game.

Come back, beloved players: it's about to get good :)

Taking a step back

Just a forewarning:  this post is long and rambling.  You might want to save it for bathroom reading.

There has been a lot more of a stir surrounding Sidonie's idea post about changing the way sleep/poison/pinch works than I expected, and an interesting discussion came up on OOC yesterday which was suggestive of an ongoing clash of perception.  For the sake of just delineating where I (and I think the other admins) are coming from, I think I'll ramble about it.

The issue that came up yesterday was centered around sleep's duration of 50 ticks at level 50.  There were essentially two camps here:

1. sleep's long duration is good way to force people to cool off; if a BR is pestering you, or if someone is freaking out and going kamikaze after getting KO'ed, the 37 minute timeout is very useful
2. sleep's long duration is unreasonable since it doesn't let a player actually play.

Oogon then mentioned something that really sheds light on this rift of perceptions that splits our current playerbase:

[OOC] Oogon: 'But really, how often is sleep used in that regard?'

[OOC] Oogon: 'To just let someone 'cool off'.'

And you know, it's the truth.  I've the benefit of remembering when sleeping pester characters (BRs, naked rogues, etc), was relatively normal, and during those days, slapping a player-mandated time-out was really the only recourse available.  However, something that a lot of older players seem not to realize is that Dark Risings really isn't the same game as it was five years ago; sure, it has the same name and the same backstory, but take a look around.  The areas are no longer static: Lilith has the power to corrupt the entire town of Three Firs, gypsy mobs remember their enemies, and the game is dotted with mini-quests that offer 5000-10000 experience for completing them.  The races are different:  avariels are no longer vuln to all fire, and ogre weres aren't vuln to all magic.  The classes are different: there are now templars, which offer a wildly different approach to PK.  Pick any aspect of the game, really.  I'll bet it's not the same now as it was five years ago.

More importantly, though, is that the whole process of implementation has wildly changed.  This point may not be as evident to players, but I think it's really the single largest change that separates "old Dark Risings" from "new Dark Risings."  Take, for example, the aforementioned avariel vuln to fire.

When avariels were made vuln to fire (this happened in around 2001), there was no discussion or player input.  There was a reboot and a terse note saying "avariels are now vuln to fire."  Since my main character was an avariel, this was a pretty devastating change; I went from having no vulnerabilities to being vulnerable to a spell that almost every class can cast (fireball).  I immediately protested since avariels really weren't very good to begin with, but my notes fell on deaf ears.  I wound up leaving the game a few months later, and while I was gone, flashfire was changed to no longer do fire damage since it was deemed to crippling against avariels.  This mitigated the problem to a degree, but it also left one of the "elemental" spells doing unintuitively and decidedly non-elemental damage.

I think these sorts of changes were very telling of the "old Dark Risings" approach to implementation; imps did what they thought was best for the game with a sort of players-be-damned attitude, and if the change proved to be unpopular or unbalancing, another change would be rolled out to mitigate.  This sort of implementation practice also meant a lot of decidedly reactionary changes went in; old players are rife with stories of how some skill got changed because an imp got beaten by someone gimping that skill in PK.  I'm not sure if these stories hold water, but it doesn't really matter now.

Fast forwarding to the "new Dark Risings," we really don't operate this way at all, and I think this is clearly evidenced by the fact that we solicited player input regarding this poison/sleep/pinch issue.  We also solicited (and continue to solicit) feedback on the brawler scoreboard idea.  The new spells that Arcaenum has are 100% player conceived and designed.  In fact, I don't think there's a single change that we've posted in the last year (except a few exploit fixes) that were done without player involvement.

So what has been the driving force behind this transition from "old Dark Risings" to "new Dark Risings?"

At the "old Dark Risings," the imps had always been people who were at Dark Risings from the very beginning.  All of them had always been imms or admins, and they all had a hand in creating Dark Risings out of nothing and making changes before there were even players to upset.  In many ways, they had every entitlement to do as they saw fit, because everything that Dark Risings had become was a result of their design.

However, this also created a rift between the players and the staff at times, and in many cases, set the stage for an "us against them" mentality at many levels.  The people making the decisions had always been the boss and never enjoyed the "player experience" of not being in control and having changes go in without their approval (or knowledge!).

The "new Dark Risings" really began when Sidonie and I took over the active implementation of the game.  When Mark relinquished his position as active imp, Dark Risings was, for the first time, being run by people who had started DR as regular old players.  We remember what it was like to be a nobody, and to be a player, and to be the victim of sometimes-heavy-handed changes forced down through the ranks.  We also weren't operating under the assumption that we always know what's best for the game, because much of the game was designed and played without us.  Dark Risings is "ours" in the sense that our names are on the paperwork, and we do have the benefit of being long-time players with some amount of wisdom, but I think the defining characteristic of the "new Dark Risings" is that its implementation is far more player-inclusive.

I'd like to think that Dark Risings is less dictatorial and more communal now.  Of course, that's not to say that us admins still aren't the boss.  We are the boss, and we make no bones about letting people know that from time to time.  But this new Dark Risings has become a product of player-driven efforts and RP, so we have nothing to gain by excluding players.

PK Poll

A lot of people have been vocal about the perceived imbalance in our current PK code, so in the interests of getting a lot of one-click feedback, I've opened a poll (should appear to the right) regarding the matter. Please leave comments below.

April 5, 2011: The results are in!

• 62% felt that spellcasters need a boost
• 34% don't PK
• 31% felt it seems pretty balanced
• 21% think fighters need to be toned down
• 18% feel fear is too powerful
• 12% think guild spells make fighters too strong

This was out of a total of 32 votes.

Although we have no immediate plans to change the fighter/spellcaster dynamic (we have a lot of other changes in the works that need to be finalized before then), we will revisit these results and the comments posted and see if we can adjust accordingly.

TMC Rankings Reset

This morning The Mud Connector reset its rankings, putting us back at an arbitrarily low ranking on the list. My guess is that they've started doing this every other month (or every quarter?) so that gigantic muds who have short-lived voting drives can't stay at the top forever without sustained voting. That can be good and that can be bad, but what's nice is that the playing field is even. As of this morning when I checked, we were already ranked at #7 with 15 total votes, but I'm sure we'll need to do better than that to maintain a solid lead.

Our officially stated ranking is updated only once a day, so today's rank of #1986 is really what we were ranked when we had zero votes (which is the same number of votes as every other mud) this morning. You can check the up-to-the-minute rankings here, and you can vote for us here.