Irongron wrote: ↑Fri Jan 21, 2022 2:00 pm
The end result is that they can come away from their encounter with staff with a sizeable chip on their shoulder about the lack of fair treatment, with some going on to rage quit, vowing to tell everyone that will listen about the injustice, sometimes bluntly telling us that we will lose 'hundreds' of players because of this.
But here's the terrible irony - quite often? They don't (quit that is). Sure they announce that they are leaving, go out of their way to encourage others to leave or never try Arelith, but they soon quietly rejoin under another name, browse our forums, follow us on social media (I mean, if they're commenting, right?).
Relatively recently I saw it again- a player, unhappy with a ruling, publicly quitting the server and decrying its staff. Only to quietly rejoin under a new name a few days later. There has been discussions on staff as to whether this should be covered by the rules, as telling others not to play Arelith, while continuing to do so oneself, isn't particularly community minded.
Righto. I'm going to be controversial here, since we're airing dirty laundry. This is probably a bad idea but whatever, I'm down with the coof and have nothing better to do with my life. Let's put on a
good song and perhaps give a bit of perspective from a source that isn't likely going to come from anywhere else and might give some insight into this seedy underbelly, so to speak.
That post right there? Disgruntled and frankly irate players, raging against the dying of the light? That was me. Well, me and untold and uncounted numbers of other players. But in specific, I have been able to slot myself right into that descriptive category. And yes, I'm still playing Arelith. Now there's two questions that I'm going to bet immediately sprung in to your head as you're reading this.
- What happened that got you so mad at the DMs?
- Why did you come back?
In response to the first question, I'll do my best to be vague, for the sake of the DMs and to not start drama or scuttlebutt. A very long time ago, there was an awfully big conflict in Andunor. When I mean awfully big, I mean big enough that everyone even in the neighborhood of level 30 was taking a side. It was war, plain and simple, and the final confrontation came down to a fight in the hub with no fewer than 40 individual characters tossing hellballs and EDKs left and right (remember when EDK was godly?). The side I was backing won - we were the only ones left standing after the conflict. To say there was a lot of collateral damage was to put things to an understatement, and both sides had engaged in skirmishes for most of the day prior. It was a bloodbath, and so many PCs died that day. But still - we won.
In less than a week, our house won the election in the Devil's Table, solidifying our victory further. One week later, our faction leader was banned. Two days after that, his second, appointed in his place, was banned as well. From our perspectives, and what little screenshots were able to be salvaged from the event, the DMs made a clear statement: Our house was not welcome on Arelith.
I've had a long time to reflect, and I'm a very different person than I was all those years ago. But to say that I was mad in the moment was an utter understatement. We all were - Our victory, snatched from us and thrown into the jaws of defeat, from as far as we could tell. The entire group - the family I'd spent the better part of that year playing with, laughing with, scheming to bring Lolth's reckoning onto the surface world with - shattered in an instant. Of course, the only thing we had to go on were the screenshots provided by the people getting banned - hell of an authoritative source, I know. Statements that they were being banned for 'being a negative influence in the community' and violating the 'Be Nice rule' seemed like a tissue-thin defense for what we was as abject favoritism, the DMs picking a side in the most literal sense.
Sometimes I think that there are cases where a punishment is handed out because they know someone is violating a rule but cannot collect enough conclusive evidence. I know this is abjectly a case in the real world - Look at the history of tax evasion and the story of Al Capone. Without some increase in transparency - a point where I still disagree with the DM team, but at this point have put down my torch and pitchfork over - I'll never know. What I do know is that the house leader was, as I later found out in conversations after his ban, a serial ban evader himself, known for saying things like "An Arelith ban is just a $10 fine, $5 if there's a Beamdog sale". What the house's second was up to I don't know - but that's kind of the point. I don't know. Their lives and mine intersect only at a single point, on a 20 year old game, largely forgotten by the outside world. Even within that intersection, I had no idea what they were up to beyond my few interactions with them in that experience. Over time that anger cooled. Most of the people involved aren't even part of the DM team anymore. Some I've gotten to know 'in person' so to speak by traveling around other NWN servers - it was a shock that I had harbored that much hatred toward them at the time. And in a way it really was hatred. I hated them for destroying what I came to know as a family, for stealing our victory from us. But really... I just only had part of the picture.
Now to answer the second question: Why did I come back?
This is where I'm gonna have to disagree with Irongron here.
I do agree though, one one thing with our detractors - that there are so many other fantastic NwN servers out there, many with eager DMs that will bring new players in to carefully constructed, fantastic stories, something we just can't do on Arelith.
There are so many NWN servers floating around there. And there are
so many. I'd say more than you can count but really there's only a couple hundred. And each of them bring their own thing to the table - deep puzzling experiences, a gothic horror atmosphere, a complex roleplaying dynamic, and world upon world upon world to explore. In a way, though, that's exactly the point... Each of these experiences are deeply and fundamentally different.
Let me divert for a moment to talk about how I came to realize that NWN existed. No, I've not been playing this game for decades like a great many of you here - I think, on the scheme of things, I'm honestly a relatively new player, so to speak. So, there I was, talking about Pathfinder in the days before 5th edition with a friend of mine on a discord server when some guy I didn't know (One of my friend's friends) jumps into the call. "AskRyze, you like D&D right? Cool, I'm gonna give you a game, but you're gonna have to do something for me."
He proceeds to send me his GOG login and have me download NWN Diamond edition, hands me a fresh CD key, and instructs me on how to, unbeknownst to me, register for citizenship and vote in an election. I, knowing utterly nothing about the game at this point, closed the program and went about my life. Years later, I was going through and cleaning up my hard drive when I saw this same little icon, and I thought to myself "... You know, I never actually played that game. Let's give it a shot."
And here I am.
Fast forward a few years. Andunor's been flipped on its head. The family I've cultivated has had the rug pulled out from under them. We're left adrift. Many go to Albion Online to get their PVP fix. I do for a time, but MMOs have never really stuck to me. So I pick up my rucksack and start traveling to the different servers. It's really only then that I realize how much Arelith has shaped what I come to expect from the game.
Arelith strikes a strange balance when it comes to immersion, one that is very difficult to replicate. Back when I first really stared playing proper, writs hadn't even been implemented - by modern standards, leveling was a glacially slow process. You didn't just
get 30,000 XP handed to you every day (40,000 if you can sign up for the Radiant Heart). Other servers either go too far in one direction (Yes, I do actually like seeing my XP numbers go up; no, I don't like the game telling me to stop playing if I play for too long) or too far in the other (I'm looking at you, The Server That Rhymes With "Win Tar").
Arelith is also, surprisingly, incredibly accessible. A great majority of changes (barring recent - cleric paths fundamentally change how the class is played and I don't think they're exactly opt-in) either build upon what a class is already good at or are simple alterations to the balance of the game. Equipment is simple, and necessary, but not playstyle-alteringly so, with again a few exceptions (As mentioned elsewhere on the forums, UMD books all but completely undo Loremageddon). Compare that with other servers, who (shocking, I know) are even
more committed to FOIG culture and as a result are infuriatingly opaque to players who haven't been participating in them for decades. Furthermore, a point not so easily put aside (at the risk of sounding like a suckup) is that Arelith has some of the best designed systems in NWN. Its focus on medium immersion, consistent updates to keep the meta fresh, a charming variety of custom classes, and
absolutely nothing getting in the way of you just trying to play the damn game. And I mean that when I say it. You can, right now, make a wizard, take summon and a few spell focus feats, and stroll right out the deep gate and into the waiting arms of the bonefields - and nothing stops you. If that's all you want from the game, go right ahead. If all you want to do is cut the pants off your tunic, pull up your blouse and tabard, and serve drinks in Cordor? You can do that. And everything in-between is still accessible to you.
Finally, Arelith's player base is one of its greatest draws, and the reason I felt almost ashamed for dragging myself back here, again and again. On Arelith, you can and often will encounter players out in the wild. Go to Cordor, the Logging Camp, or Andunor, and you will see a bustling stream of players at nearly every moment of the day. I cannot count the number of servers I've wandered through, aimlessly, the streets little more than a ghost town, only to find out the singular other player online is part of a faction antagonistic to mine and will likely turn me into two crits and 25 XP if I so much as drop stealth in his line of sight. It's a simple fact that these Persistent Worlds are meant to be played, and they're meant to be played by a plurality of people.
All these factors combined (and, this may just be my sunk cost fallacy speaking very loudly and persuasively to me here) basically mean that Arelith presents one of the most genuinely well-designed and well-curated NWN experiences around. And, frankly, I doubt it'd still be around if it wasn't.
Well, that's about it. /rant over. I'm putting this up on the wayback machine just in case... But I hope what I've said hasn't crossed any lines. And I'd hoped that what I've said so far has brought some insight into a perspective you probably haven't heard from often.
Thank you all for your time. Lolth Tlu Malla.
AskRyze