Announcements List

[Thomas]

Since posts get periodically deleted from the game, here are the announcements so far:

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Area: Announcements – Note # 1
From: Nova
To: all
Cc:
Subj: New Haven
Time: Thu May 29 08:54:18 2025

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614 git commits later, welcome to New Haven.

There will obviously be bugs and jankiness, our testers did a great job but often they’d test something, I’d fix it and then I make some other change that breaks it again, or some things just can’t really be tested without using them for reals. Please have patience and understand a lot of smaller issues or suggetions etc likely won’t get dealt with for a few weeks.

I didn’t get everything done I wanted to, relics and dreamworlds aren’t done yet, also you may notice there’s no character page on the website, that will come.

Small things people might not notice are the pain special for getting more mob aggro, the ability to do walk car to go to your car and the map level command in properties.

You’ll all start with a bonus 10k karma, this will go down at a rate of 100 a day.

I’ve disabled the community credit requirement for the OOC channel for the first week.

Have fun, The Artist Formerly Known as Tyr.

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Area: Announcements – Note # 78
From: Nova
To: all
Cc:
Subj: Updates
Time: Fri Jun 6 17:45:18 2025

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To clarify a few things about content warnings.

With regards to self-harm/addiction. The warning is for addiction not drugs or drug use. In other words you can do drug RP, you just can’t do junkie RP without the warning active.

For content on grid, like shops etc. As per help content warnings you can only put potentially restricted content on the grid if it’s behind a locked door and not publicly advertised. That means no naked NPCs/PCs/graphic pornography in publicaly accessible areas. Sexual themes aren’t content controlled so you could have a sex shop if you wanted, it just couldn’t have explicit nudity/pornography. If you want to make a sex club or what have you it needs to be a secret underground sex club.

I’ve been getting a lot of petitions, up to like almost a hundred some days. If I spend just 5 minutes on each that’s over 8 hours of work without breaks which isn’t super doable so a few things.

You can cancel your own petitions if you don’t need them anymore with petition cancel (number) Try to write good petitions please, I typed exactly this and saw exactly that is great, and if it’s room based doing it from the room it occured in. Saying just like X doesn’t work or is broken is not great.

Understand that when I’ve marked something as resolved it probably won’t be at least until there’s a copyover and then sometimes not for up to a day after that. Please don’t re-petition something as still not fixed unless you’ve waited a day or so since the petition was resolved.

I’m going to ignore most everything that isn’t easy or important. So ideas or maybe-bugs are all very unlikely to be dealt with until everything else is sorted.

Some code updates: Custom melee and custom defensive disciplines are now also options.

If you put the word see-through, see-through or transparent in the name of an item it won’t cover anything below it.

If a shopkeeper sells drug objects they will now only be purchasable by the owner of the shop. I think it’s both more realistic and more interesting that people have to have a PC hookup for your drugs. You can now contribute items in your base for any borough but you only get 80% of what you would if you contributed it in a vault in that borough. Use contribute (item) borough name while in your faction armory to do this.

The NPCs in the faction bases are now animated, as in you can RP with them. They can also be moved around, by doing faction summon (name) you can summon an NPC into another location of the base with a max of two in one room. If you are SRing you can also summon them onto plots as long as you’re in the same faction. Additionally SRs can use the ‘instruct’ command to give an NPC an instruction for their next emote.

This is mostly designed to help with smaller factions, there’s always been a problem where if there aren’t many people in a group it gets more boring and more people leave and it snowballs etc. So the idea is that you can backfill with NPCs when you need more people to make the scene or plot work, and instruct also means they can help SRs. There’s no mechanical benefit to RPing with them or anything, so you can just not do it if you don’t want to.

It’s worth noting that all LLM driven stuff is very reflective of the people using it, it’s very easy if you want to to make the LLM do something silly, but even beyond that they tend to give back what they’re given since statistically what follows good writing is more good writing and what follows bad writing is more bad writing.

I’ve added the ‘market’ command which is how you buy charms, faecloth, tattoos etc with favor. This has market forces applied so when other people buy something it gets more expensive, but everything gets cheaper over time.

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Area: Announcements – Note #120
From: Nova
To: all
Cc:
Subj: Minor Updates
Time: Wed Jun 11 14:04:43 2025

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You can use customize (weapon) (discipline) to set the discipline for a particular weapon, you need to be in a shop you could customize the weapon in.

You will get RPXP every day, sometimes you won’t get it one day and will get it the next etc, that’s normal. There will also be a larger award at the end of the week.

Just a reminder that New Haven hasn’t existed for very long, so while you can RP thinking you’ve lived here your whole life you actually have not.

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Area: Announcements – Note #129
From: Nova
To: all
Cc:
Subj: Updates
Time: Thu Jun 12 11:57:15 2025

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When someone contributes an item from a raid, everyone who was alive and allied with them at the time the raid concluded will get some of the credit.

The host/SR can set specific content warnings for plots and events. These will take priority over character based ones if set.

Characters can use order survey to get a list of people online and whoinvis with possible opportunities/incitements.

Characters can use order spy to quicklook at a target remotely.

[Thomas]

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Area: Announcements – Note #159
From: Nova
To: all
Cc:
Subj: Stores/Windermere/Politics guide
Time: Mon Jun 16 13:17:07 2025

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Stores will now also provide influence to people who hang out in them, just not as much as shops.

All issues with Windermere staff/students being kicked out should be resolved.

I’ve written help politics guide

Your black iPhone 15 vibrates.

[Thomas]

Area: Announcements – Note #219
From: Nova
To: all
Cc:
Subj: Status
Time: Sat Jun 21 08:44:16 2025

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New command ‘Status’ in combat will show the combat effects you are under.

[Pingpongspiders]

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Area: Announcements – Note #232
From: Nova
To: all
Cc:
Subj: Updates
Time: Tue Jun 24 13:53:58 2025

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You now use notell to turn off your tells or notell strangers to turn off tells just from people who aren’t on your friends list. ‘

There’s a new codemonkey channel which has the same reqs as the regular OOC channel and is a dedicated channel for discussing mechanics and other thhings like that.

Doing an ‘untie’ bargain will now also allow you to escape from being captured by mist monsters.

Since it’s come up, the stance of factions on dual membership isn’t differnet to what it was previously, it’s generally considered pointless and counter productive to kick people out of a group because of another group they’re in or for any other similar, non practical and ideological reason.

[Eudaimonia]

Area: Announcements – Note #263
From: Nova
To: all
Cc:
Subj: Albums/Racials/Webclient
Time: Sun Jun 29 11:06:03 2025

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Created a new album command you can use to save and forward any the photos your character has been sent.

Updated wish so it now goes to every elligible target in the same borough.

Updated coinflip/luck so they now will go to the closest elligible target if none are in the room with you.

Added new commands sensedesire and sensedread, these prompt the target to remind them that you have those traits or if used with the ‘probing’ argument cost 1%LF and will let you see their next internal emote.

Activated an automoderator for the forums.

[Pingpongspiders]

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Area: Announcements – Note #270
From: Nova
To: all
Cc:
Subj: When Games Become a Job
Time: Tue Jul
1 11:50:54 2025
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One of the appeals of games is that they generally present you with a goal and a clear way to achieve it, just grind hard enough or get good enough, and you’ll beat the obstacle before you and that’s satisfying.

So when it comes to borough elections/politics that’s a large part of the point, people being able to go oh we’re trying to take this place, let me go do a patrol there, or let me go get a thing and drop it off and having those efforts reward you with a higher chance of winning the election and more favor each week as well.

But say if elections were just based on the pure number of monster parts or something people contributed with no other modifiers, just a linear thing. You know what’d happen right? People would want to win so they’d push themselves to grind way past when they stopped enjoying the grinding, they’d push other people in their faction to do it, casual players who can only play on weekends or a few hours in the evening would get utterly swamped out of significance, large factions would utterly dominate small ones, the leaders of big groups would make deals to carve up territory among themselves etc. We know that’d happen because stuff like that happens in online games all the time, it’s the norm in fact.

So the system is balancing two competing interests, to be responsive to what people do, but not so responsive that all that bad stuff happens. That’s why you have all these relative pools, so if you just head-down at one thing or push your group to it won’t help that much compared to having a group doing a diversity of different things according to their interests. It’s also why a lot of stuff is once per week, or graded so that minimum effort or doing a bunch of stuff particularly crammed together doesn’t work. It’s why there’s the 63rd punishing non-competitive districts and penalties for being the incumbent or owning additional boroughs.

And it’s doing a pretty good job at that so far, we can see both when people do stuff and make effort that they can gain a bunch of influence but also that when groups or individuals have gone to an unfun, really grindy place it’s rarely helped them much at all.

The problem is that a lot of the time when someone goes more try-hard or grindy and it doesn’t work, their response is often to just push even harder. So they make themselves do stuff they won’t enjoy just to get ahead, but if it doesn’t work or doesn’t work very well then they have to double down again because now they’re even more invested and it becomes this doom spiral of misery. What’s more it often starts to spray out in other directions, maybe they become convinced that the code is broken, or it’s rigged and the staff is out to get them, or other people are cheating, they develop weird superstitions about what the optiumum thing must be based on what other people are doing. If they’re a non leader they give their leader shit about how they must be doing a terrible job, if they’re a leader they complain that their members must be sitting around mudsexing all day. Other people start feeling like they have to do things they don’t want to to be a ‘good’ faction member or they’ll feel guilty, so they push themselves to do it, and everyone is being more and more miserable as what should be a game becomes a job, it’s a complete nightmare.

And the thing is, all the things that give favor are things at least some portion of the playerbase finds fun. Lots of people enjoy going on hunting trips particularly with others, or playing a raid as a little strategy game, particularly if they can have cool moments sometimes of saving someone about to go down or pulling out an underdog victory, lots of people enjoy going on plots, and going to or coming up with social events or creative outfits, early on in particular lots of people talked about how enjoyable it was to do a courier RPFight, or a patrol event, or a haunting.
And that’s what makes it particularly heartbreaking to watch people ruin their own fun to try and maximize their chance to win an election.

Especially since it won’t work, you’re going to lose elections sometimes no matter what, you might just get unlucky and a bigger group or one with a lot less penalties picks the same borough as you to focus on, or you might get unlucky and nobody picks the same borough and the 63rd come in and body you, or you might just have too many penalties from incumbancy or owning other boroughs to overcome. No matter what you do you’re going to lose plenty of elections no matter how optimally you play. The good news is that the stuff you did in that borough will still mostly be there when the next election comes up, and in the meantime, you likely have a bunch of advantages going into the next election round, and if your faction mates weren’t that helpful? Well, great, that means when you do win, you’ll get even more of the favor.

I’ve made some changes, so polling data is no longer visible, neither are the percentages in order file, although faction report will still show you the top people for the last week. I’ve added an up to 5% random swing to elections, and I’ve updated favor rewards so you can get up to 200 or so favor each week from your general individual contributions to things city wide, regardless of how your groups are currently doing.

I’m hoping this will help take the temperature down a few degrees, it’s great that people are so invested and I dont want people to feel bad about strategizing or trying to win things, just to be aware of when youre at risk of stepping over that line from energizing and fun competition to stressful and onerous. This is a game, and also it’s a RP game first and foremost; the only reason there are mechanics is to help support the story and make it more interesting.

I’d really appreciate it if people could help me with that by not putting too much pressure on each other and trying to keep the environment fun-first focused.

[Eudaimonia]

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Area: Announcements – Note #285
From: Nova
To: all
Cc:
Subj: findtimes
Time: Thu Jul 3 11:13:17 2025

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You should now be able to use the ‘findtimes’ command to help you find compatible times with other people.

[Author]

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