H7 Feedback

[Miles]

It’s been a few months since I dropped off of playing and I wanted to put together some feedback based on the experiences I had when I was playing. It’s possible some things I mention have already been changed or addressed in some capacity.

What I liked:
– I’d initially misread part of the Fabled helpfile and had misunderstood their functionality, but they’re actually really cool and could probably be made even cooler with some extension on their quest hooks.
– While I prefer small town horror as a genre, the transition to urban fantasy-horror felt a lot more consistent than the melange we’d consistently wind up with before. As much as I enjoyed secrecy as a concept, I think it was unsustainable in the way Haven was designed and stepping away from it was a smart move and a good way to address players often ignoring it in a game where unaware PCs were a vanishingly tiny minority.
– The plot clues system and investigation mechanics had some kinks that needed straightened out but were a vast improvement and created a lot of interesting and cool hooks to encourage organic interaction with characters you might not otherwise get a chance to engage with, on a basis far deeper than happening to sit at the same bar or attend the same party.

What I liked in theory, but not in practice:
– The mobile mist was actually really cool to me and one of my favorite parts of the new iteration. This is probably an unpopular opinion, but I really liked the way it moved around town, forced players to keep track of it, and lent some level of spookiness and danger to maintain horror elements during the transition to a more urban fantasy leaning game direction. It does have issues, though, in that it can be a serious hazard especially for new players, can wind up locking people out of play based on their location, and in that mob spawns are infamously janky and quirky in such a way that players require a ton of experience to safely manage and navigate them.
– The content restriction system, though it was a little buggy initially, was a really good change and one of the things that really made me want to try H7. In practice, though, it doesn’t really do much and many players seemed to just kind of ignore it. Staff didn’t seem inclined to enforce the policy in any meaningful capacity, and on occasions where it was blatantly violated (for example, repeatedly bringing up texted SA threats in group conversations or randomly making SA accusations in the middle of chill social scenes or using accusations of SA to defend a PK to people who have restrictions about that kind of content) staff didn’t really seemed inclined to do anything about it except belittle the people making the complaint. Sorry, Nova, but being open philosophically to the prospect of getting no-no-touched by vampire hotties doesn’t make me complaining about somebody trying to emotionally blackmail an entire faction with SA accusations in the middle of faction meetings and calendar scheduled parties invalid.
– Borough control seemed really cool in theory, but in practice I don’t think it really works. There’s no sense that the society or faction actually controls the borough, the mechanical manifestation of the fact only really exists in the form of additional favor, which is a bit of a bland abstraction. It doesn’t feel like it means anything that your faction or society controls a borough.

What I didn’t like:
– The removal of the old territory description system and the operation descriptions and customization from raids was a tough blow for me, and I felt like it really watered down a lot of the fun that used to be had there. I understand territory descriptions had already been gutted with an arbitrary cap on the length of descriptions, but I will always dislike things that dilute or delete players’ ability to do fun and interesting things whether it’s coming from a place of not wanting players to be fun and interesting or from a place of other players misusing those tools to be lame.
– The political capital and political thuggery systems are not particularly well-designed, balanced, or calibrated and led to all sorts of perverse incentives and weird behaviors that I really did not like. Plot participation should be worth way, way, way more capital than it was when I was playing. Fabled quests and calendar events were probably worth too much, though it’s hard to say if they were worth too much or just the only things worth a meaningful amount that I engaged with at the time.
– Favor payouts were incredibly unbalanced or flat-out broken for the majority of the time that I was playing.
– Kneejerk, undocumented nerfs and mechanical changes were rampant, and a lot of them were poorly thought-out or caused major issues. For example, while AOE was initially bugged to do more damage than it should, it was fixed within a couple of days. After that, it seemed to have been nerfed several times which made NPC swarms in raids increasingly more difficult to deal with. There was a bug with movement where sometimes you’d move way further than you were supposed to, and rather than identifying and fixing the bug, Nova implemented a hard-cap on how far you could move based on the type of movement which effectively made movement utility abilities useless in combat and made flying the only way to Go Fast ™. Then Nova gaslit me and multiple other players with movement abilities about the cap in several consecutive petitions documenting and logging it in effect.
– Retrospectively, removing the cooldown on abilities was a really bad idea, I think. Most abilities were sort of designed and balanced around the idea that there would be a cooldown on them, but removing that created a whole slew of balance issues based on how, precisely, or if, even, the ability degrades in value based on overusage. For example, if the duration of a disarm degrades when you use it multiple times, it’s not actually much of a loss so long as you time your disarm perfectly. Same for double. Other abilities, however, became completely useless once used. I was open-minded about this change and I think it was good to experiment and see how it goes, but I think we’ve conclusively seen that it’s worse.

Backseat suggestions:
– This is a pain in the ass, but I would refactor the automatic pathing of drive and walk to circle around the mist. I’d also work on an underground map to allow people to travel through prohibition era tunnels and catacombs to avoid the mist.
– Rather than having mobs spawn freely at a certain depth in the mist, I would have the mist spawn gates as it moves. Each gate would lead to a procedurally generated off-world instance with mobs to clear. The most minor gates would naturally close regardless of player interaction. Bigger gates would remain open until the instance is cleared by players. Factions/Societies/Cults would get notifications of potentially dangerous gates and timers on how long they’ll last. If bigger gates persist too long without being cleared for players, they lock a new micro-mist in place around them and start to spawn mobs in town until cleared. This makes the mist safer at the floor, retains the danger, and gives factions, societies, and cults a way more engaging and interesting reason to interact with monsters and hunt them than harvesting their bits. It also makes mist abductions a little easier to work with, as you’d just be putting the abducted PCs into the final room of the instance of the gate that ganked them. It should also make spawns a lot easier to work with, and procedurally generated instances should alleviate a lot of the jankiness with visibility and mobs attacking you from the other side of a building and then getting confused, wandering off, and reinitiating.
– I don’t think the winner-take-all functionality of borough elections is very healthy design. I’d rather see borough-specific political capital be a resource that factions, societies, and cults can spend to make meaningful changes and actions to and in that borough to enact and enforce their control in a meaningful, palpable way in-game, rather than through the abstraction of their control being designated and represented with increased favor payouts.
– I would restore much of the description functionality of operations to raids and I would repurpose old territory control, news, and description tools to apply to boroughs with dated entries falling off.

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