To preface this, please know that this piece was not made with malicious intent. All of the authors have been a part of and helped the development of the Living World for at least a year, some even longer. And as the Living World has grown, problems have arisen. These growing pains have been addressed from time to time and smaller problems have been fixed, however there are some key issues with the system of how the Living World works that have been either overlooked or dismissed as not a problem. We have tried to highlight some of these big issues and put examples of it to show these are not one-off accidents and are constant, repeated problems.

Please note this was made out of a position of respect. The Living World is what gave us passion and gave us a place to be creative with other like-minded individuals. All we want to do is make this place better. With that said...

The problem with the Living World is that the good things rarely come when promised and the bad things never stop.  

• Bubbles and Bottleneck

• Common examples are research and factional agenda rewards. Oftentimes these take constant reminders to the liasons in charge of this content to get resolved on reasonable timescales for the players. They often have been stuck behind work to be done by Arcadum to dictate how they should be done and if they are to be delegated for others to be done in the first place.
• These bottlenecks often drag out processes that have been taking long times to march to completion to begin with. (I.E adding several more months to a research/agenda that already took RL months to complete in character.)
• The bottlenecks/delays are often felt the most when they are delayed to irrelevance. (See Hkari/Dark Pact War, Great Bazaar Dsangir Boon, VINPC Prestige missions, Ara’s Prestige 4 mission)
• Additionally, even DMs and Staff feel the bottleneck, especially when it comes to lore. As a DM, we are told to ask a Gatekeeper first regarding questions about lore, but if they don't have answers, we submit a lore request that will be gone over during the meeting. However, if Arcadum doesn't show up to a meeting, little can be done. The lack of information can delay a mission for weeks on end.
• If Arcadum is the common bottleneck, he needs to be available when he says he is and if he is not going to make the time he needs to let the parties know well in advance (day in advance minimum), especially when it comes to scheduled meetings. Everyone’s time needs to be respected, not just Arcadum’s.

• Scheduled meeting on 1/4 canceled the morning of to stream Lost Odyssey despite outstanding work to be done.
• Dilating One Fight and other possible meetings/work shoved to the wayside for a Rust server release of some sort.

• This is a clear dereliction of duty. People of all walks of life took time out of their schedule and planned for this fight at the scheduled time. To suddenly drop a schedule change on their heads with very little notice is quite frankly an insult to those players in the mission, especially those who have strict or unusual schedules.

• Additionally Arcadum needs to increase his availability for those who need it most like the admins, who are all if not most are based in NA. 2am availability is not available for most in charge of running the server.

• Related: If Arcadum has time to randomly spend time in VC with everyone, he has time to address requests and issues that need his attention. To be in a public space makes it appear he doesn’t wish to address the problems of the server, especially to those who are aware of the laundry list of things that he actually needs to work on.

• Inconsistencies

• There have been many times where Arcadum would tell different things to staff and then to stream. And while it's fine to keep viewers in the dark about things, oftentimes this information presented is outright contradictory to what DMs are told.

• Saying "The LW don't have refracted souls" to staff VS saying to subs in VC "It's better the violet blast hit Ara instead of Gsg's new character because if it hit the new character Ara would've died anyways because of refraction."

• Previously stated/promised rewards that were made on record do not always match up with the resulting rewards if they even materialize in the first place. (VINPC Prestige Missions being turned into prestige rp events which were then turned into regular events that do not reward prestige.)

• Decisions like this have knock on effects. Players may defer current opportunities for the newest promised content. But if the content does not arrive in a timely manner or in the promised form, players may feel burned by the outcome, and the content simply becomes another broken promise to go complain about in public spaces.

• Backlog and Time Investment

• The time scales required for players to get relevant are often on the 6 month level at bare minimum, and that assumes best case scenarios including availability to play in games, quality loot drops and RP. In more likely and common scenarios it will take a year if not more to get caught up to speed.

• These timescales consequently mean that losing a character is a monumental setback unlike most experienced on the server. This is why random violet death, especially when the affected player has no possible response due to real life obligations or needs, is so ardently despised.
• To put some of the problems in context, a 50 day crafted item or dl agenda/research under current bloated averages of 6 days per week, will take 8-9 weeks. That is roughly two months or a whole 1/6 of a year and $10 in sub money. To tell players to wait around for so long for their rewards is frankly too much especially with prospects of dying out of the blue on the table. And that is without mentioning the likely wait times after or before the player working on paying down that downtime/crafting day figure.
• Using a real life example, Nitro lost a shield he had never used before costing 120 crafting days to make, in a single moment. Using the more reasonable 4.5 day average to estimate the crafting time, it took around 27 weeks to make the item, excluding material acquisition. That is half a year dedicated to a single item. $30 of sub money. 2/3rds of the current pandemic.

• What is ultimately frustrating about this sort of situation is that crafting is in essence just waiting on one of the slowest timers in the world to tick up. There is no gameplay tied to it. It is just waiting and doing nothing of real relevance. Nitro waited around 27 weeks for his item and then had it stolen from him in a microscopic fraction of the time it took for him to make it

• Staff often bear the brunt of the work loads of the server at the cost of their time and availability. In addition effectively every week Arcadum stacks more work on the pile without regard for the glut of backlog of their work to begin with and he prioritizes his own stuff over long awaited content.

• (To state more clearly: violet actions/events being prioritized over long outstanding promised content such as VINPC missions or factional boons.)

• Finally when work streams do occur, they add a mess of content to the backs of already overworked DMs and staff to get done which leads to slower content creation as staff scrambles to organize a game plan with how to deal with all the new work to be done.

• Content Prioritization

• Promised and rewarded content is often put on the back burner for Arcadum’s things. This increases wait times and decreases the quality of the resulting content.
• This failure of prioritization has led to some content becoming completely irrelevant as the possible rewards fail to be given to the players in time to help with the problems they were designed to solve or in some cases to be used by the people who earned the content in the first place.

• Great Bazaar and Ara are examples of this content being pushed into oblivion by Arcadum’s own actions and choices.

• The resulting feeling is that players are not allowed to grow and develop, and instead are punished at every turn for the inactions and priorities of those in charge of the content creation prioritization.

• How could players even take control of the situation if we are always reacting to the violet and the DMs/Staff are preoccupied with working on stuff generated by the violet’s actions?

• Streamers vs LW

• Honestly, the major problem with this is that the way Arcadum handles the stream games highlights the inefficiencies with the Living World. Arcadum can handle things immediately with them, while it takes months to work on Living World things. And while this is understandable as the LW is much larger, this is why we believe more knowledge given to the DMs and staff lore-wise could speed up processes.
• LW players are often affected disproportionately by stream game players’ actions. While LW players can make impacts they are often held back by delays in content creation/executions and also the effects created by stream players which in turn can delay that content creation further, leading to a sense of inequality between the players and leading to LW players to voice their discontent at the status quo.

• Related: Inquisition was promised a dream related Campaign related to the Silent Knights, however due to the streamer group’s choices, that campaign was canceled. The Inquisition is still waiting on the promised replacement campaign or some sort of compensation for missed opportunities due to the campaign being promised and players forgoing other opportunities so they may reap the rewards of the promised content.

• Meanwhile the streamers feel entitled to their stories and characters despite their supposed equality with LW players. So when LW players do make occasional ripples felt by the stream groups, sometimes the streamers lash out, resulting in more tension between the two groups.

• See MoonMoon having to be told not to be an asshole to the server players by an admin, and the various fights between Sean and others.

• Additionally players have been pretty quick to spot inequalities between the two groups which further fuels this discontent at the state of things further.

• Morc's nat 1 on a violet blast did not instantly kill him like it did LW characters

• Probably done to prevent a failstate, but why dont LW people get the chance to be that impactful or not get screwed over?

• The Tops faction was made in record time while other long promised factions such as the Dragon Knights (a faction earned by players) have been promised for longer and delayed for no clear reasons. Even if it was delayed for legitimate reasons, no one in the Living World was really aware of what they were. There needs to be a level of transparency with why some things get delayed, otherwise people will believe it to be just another broken promise.

• "The violet doesn't fight fair"

• It's becoming less of the violet doesn't fight fair and more of Arcadum doesn't fight fair due to the fact that some good things cannot get resolved until Arcadum finds time. Meanwhile all the violet actions get resolved as soon as possible.

• Oftentimes it is felt that the players are being punished for the inefficiencies of the DM Team and Arcadum as a direct result. The Dsangir research and the related DM delayed missions are good examples of this in action.
• Additionally in the social contract we enter as we play D&D we the participants including the DM are expected to play by the rules and expected norms. How are we as players supposed to react and play the game when the rules of the game are obscured so thoroughly and our rewards doled out so infrequently?
  

• "I am the storyteller"

• Yes, at the end of the day there's an inherent difference between the storyteller and the characters that play in the world. But this violet problem isn't something that only a few select people have. Honestly, at this point most people with active LW characters have some grievance with the violet. And it's not that people inherently hate the violet because it's the big bad. It's because the violet is done in such a manner that completely isolates the players and gives them a sense of hopelessness. And initially that can be seen as a good thing- as good pieces of media like video games and movies that move people emotionally are seen as good things.
  
  DnD differs in that regard. The difference between a DnD character and a generic video game protagonist is that a DnD character is truly made. It's not just a bunch of different sliders on a customization menu inserted into a pre scripted story. There's a lot more freedom and ability to truly choose how to react. You're not limited by three hard options.
  
  So when something you love and have watched grow is instantly killed while you were asleep and couldn't do anything, yes, people are going to feel bad. And then when you see a stream character get a nat 1 on something that killed your character and the stream character gets to live, you get angry.
  
• To act as if player feelings are mere opinion and should have no impact on the game’s design is simply put as ignorant. Games are dependent on the players. If the player feels that their time is wasted and the emotions negatively manipulated you will drive players away and is a sure sign of bad game design. We have seen it with others before already. The expedition/campaign situation in phase 2 was a perfect example of this in action before where players felt punished by the systems in place and drove some away. Good game design should not do this and as it stands we are more likely to keep bleeding veteran players as the situation worsens. While that may not be felt since there is often a new player to replace them, these players will get wise to the situation unfolding as they learn more and more about the server and its systems and possibly leave as their situations worsen.

• Criticism

• Criticism is not handled in a professional manner. His first instinct when seeing criticism is to complain about it in public and nitpick every failing of the criticism so as to shame the people complaining and curry favor to his side to best discard the feedback despite any genuine criticisms that fuel the complaint in the first place.

• The Reddit Post VC incident of 12/29 comes to mind
• Phase 2’s organization around campaigns and the multiple times he attacked criticism of it until he folded and admitted its failures.
• Prior criticisms of nerfing items despite the heavy time commitments put into the items.

• Addressing criticism in public isolates the audience. People will either agree with what is being said or disagree, although in public it will look like it is being disagreed with heavily. However, addressing such complaints in public often brings up an issue much of your audience probably not hearing about such a problem before, but criticizing in public practically puts a spotlight on it.

• “Arcadum’s Goals”

• Overall, these goals being set up are rather large, and can be lauded for being ambitious, but when the fundamentals of the server and stream are being ignored it becomes laughable and painfully ignorant to the situation unfolding.

• Things like the Campaign Setting Book can feel incredibly frustrating. considering Arcadum’s hesitancy actually share lore to DMs as necessary to run the server he currently has

• If there is going to be less focus on D&D for the future, then responsibilities and knowledge needs to be handed off so others can do the work that needs to be done for the server. Overall, it's fine to explore different avenues and different passions, but as the founder of the Living World, Arcadum has a responsibility to it. If that is something he wants to slowly be hands off of, the system must be changed to support this.