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.

[Ambrose]

THEME CHANGES:
It’s hard to overstate what a jump things seemed to naturally take from H6 to H7. I agree with Miles that the shift from small-town horror to urban fantasy-horror was a smart move. The adjustment period of the first few weeks took acclimating, as we weren’t entirely sure what to expect. Gunning each other down in the streets constantly? A tenuous, uneasy alliance? A generalized hugbox with the edges filed off? Remains to be seen, as it’s fluctuated a bit based on leadership of groups and population of the game.

The removal of Sanctuary seems like less of an issue than initially thought; aside from a few rocky instances early on, Charon coins have not often been necessary. Sanctuary was often clunky to navigate and opened all sorts of victim-blamey drama.

GRID:
Not much actionable for this version in here; more feedback for future versions.
I still think the city is twice (or more) as big as it needs to be, rooms-wise. The number of non-player locations (graveyards, playgrounds, factories, etc) should be halved (or more) in proportion to player locations (shops, houses, brownstones, etc), and the overall area shrunk. It’s just Too Big. The size caused the potential for running across naturally encountering/ambient scenes to shrink to virtually nil in this version. I appreciate that there are plenty of properties to go around, and thus no people fighting over the previously very limited in-town property, but… whew.

More use of verticality instead of x/y. The towers, apartments, elevators, etc are super cool. So are lofts! More of those! Apartment buildings have the bonus of being able to build RP pockets and communities. (On the other hand, mansions and large houses suffered because of verticality; nobody needs 7x7x5 rooms.) And speaking of communities…

The loss of the Nightmare this version also made sense (streamlining systems, removing a very cheap/easy griefing tool), but it also made travel more of a nuisance.

BOROUGHS, ELECTIONS, FAVOR:
I really dig the boroughs in concept, and I like the election systems in concept. Being able to have a theme for each borough that you can style your properties to is cool, and it’s nice to not have the restrictions of districts. Unfortunately, in practice, there’s very little to differentiate living in Highgate vs. living in Northview Park — and also nothing to differentiate living in a Temple-controlled borough or a Hand-controlled one.

The addition of Lieutenant guests and their powers to use on other players gave people a lot more fire under them to take boroughs from the 63rd, which encouraged gamewide cooperation and gamification of the election systems — which, themselves, were initially very opaque and frustrating, an all-or-nothing of your two weeks’ contribution for that borough, dictating whether or not you got any of the Fun Currency until your group took another.

I didn’t care much for Favor payouts being tied to whether or not your group had one or more boroughs, and also REALLY wasn’t a fan of schemes impacting favor payouts. I already have enough of a carrot to run the thwart, I’m getting karma — I don’t also need a stick, telling me I should fuck up this other player’s cool story bit ASAP or else my Fun Currency payout will take a hit.

To piggyback off of what Miles said about territory control — I think perhaps a marriage of the two ideas could be cool. Perhaps the faction controlling a borough could have powers over it, akin to territory control? Raising or lowering taxes (and thus property prices), running schemes/haunts on their citizens at a discount, maybe running city or calendar or lookfor events in the borough they already control gives them a trickle of Favor directly? Raids could lower their control, either reducing the amount they can ‘spend’ on their other actions or making elections happen sooner… I dunno, spitballing.

I think the favor report command is a huge step in the right direction, and that less opacity is a good thing. I know people will just game the system… they’ll do it anyway. At least people with legitimate confusion will be able to see where the disconnect is between what they think they should be earning and what their contributions are.

Personally, early on, I received 0 favor for multiple weeks, despite leading a faction that owned multiple boroughs. Recently, I’v received more favor whilst barely logging into the game than I had the entire time I was throwing my whole ass into it, and it’s hard to not get burnt out or dejected — especially when I’d SEEN others with thousands.

COMBAT:
The ranged weapon distancing changes are great, vis-à-vis optimal positioning and all. It’s much easier to comprehend than previous, adds another layer to combat.

I also agree that the ability cooldown removal might’ve been a mistake. As it stands, the diminishing returns that can be suffered from ability use spill over between combats, meaning that if I used the ‘push’ ability last fight while hunting, the next fight, it might be so depowered as to not even function. ‘Regenerate’ degrades from 20DF to 2DF, and once it reaches that point, it remains there for a significant while. Some abilities don’t seem to do a ‘diminishing return’ — they just don’t do what they should. Landmines, grenades, etc will notoriously sometimes consume the object, use the ability, and not actually fire the effect/leave an armed landmine/leave a functional grenade. As a result, I either spam abilities hoping they’ll work, or I neglect to use them, expecting they won’t.

Gun modifications are cool. The fact that they burn out is rough; the fact that they burn out AND Engineers/Commanders/Underworld Moguls/maybe even Gun Disciples can’t give a discount or duration bonus devalues and deflavors them.

[Chiara]

I joined Haven 6 in its last month and quickly fell in love with a lot of the systems. I would consider myself somewhat of a casual or social MU* player and so I was enamored with the social systems the game had to offer from the extensive clothing system, to the well-made player spaces/stores systems, to the various mind-game features. Especially that last bit really felt like a way to game-ify roleplay in a way I hadn’t seen before and I thought it played very well off of the small town horror setting.

This is to say when we moved over to Haven 7, I found the change in pace and the change in mechanics very jarring. It was very difficult in those first months trying to grasp the mechanics, and something I had felt was very roleplay heavy had suddenly felt more like a MUD with janky combat mechanics where everyone was rushing to score brownie points for their faction by completing doldrum tasks.

I really didn’t vibe with it well and I recognize that this is probably on me, but I found it difficult to be a cog in the machine in Haven 7. In Haven 6, I found it very easy to be just another citizen stumbling through nightmare land, but in Haven 7, it felt like I was part of a team to beat the other team with some light roleplay events on the side. I couldn’t figure out how to become involved in player plots in an IC way and the OOC tell system being revamped really formed a barrier to getting help in being involved.

Worse, I started without a faction as a not-so-clueless normie, and it seemed like 95% of other people had started out in a faction! Nobody seemed to be recruiting, nobody seemed to be talking about their faction, and all of the action and drama seemed to be happening in faction spaces! I felt lost and unable to get unstuck of this rut of having backstories and motivations that seemed irrelevant because nobody cared who I was. In Haven 6, I would be at least useful to some hungry T3 or T4, but in Haven 7, I struggled to even find encounters or patrols. It felt like being a weak person was the wrong decision, because nobody had any reason to manipulate me or use me as a pawn. By the time I had become associated with a faction, things got very min-maxy with boroughs and I quickly burned myself out before my society exploded. This was about when I bounced off.

Again, I want to stress that it’s just my experience, I know some people loved the urban fantasy vibes. I was just yearning for more Haven 6 I only got to experience for a month 🙂

Okay, so what I liked:
– I thought the warnings system was great, if a bit janky. There were multiple circumstances in Haven 6 where I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to communicate that I OOCly didn’t want some SA to happen and those situations were a bit stressful as I wasn’t sure what constituted fail RP. I think this is a common trapping of RPI/RPE games which permit dark themes. Haven 7 seemed to have a great answer to that.
– The map had so many cool set-piece locations in it! I’m only bitter that I could never seem to coax anyone into going to them!
– The colors in this iteration were gorgeous, I loved them so much.
– The plot system I thought was *probably* cool, but I wasn’t able to ever figure out how to get involved with them naturally. At least I enjoyed reading the descriptions!
– I really liked the new demonborn systems. They made for much better interaction.

Here’s what I didn’t like much:
– Personal preference, but I really preferred the small town vibe. I was constantly stumbling into horrific things in Haven 6, but Haven 7’s map was so vast that it felt impossible. The LLM-generated descriptions I understand as a necessity for such a size, but it kind of killed my interest in reading any room description.
– The factions felt too few in number. Even though there were decent options, everyone piled into a couple factions and they became so central to roleplay that this game felt competitive. I really enjoyed being able to embody a normal person’s struggle with the craziness of Haven 6, but in Haven 7 I felt more like a recruit on a SWAT team. I missed all the cults from Haven 6 scheming from the shadows, though I guess that was always a player-run thing.
– My first experience with Haven 6 was seeing someone be abducted into the nightmare and it was a uniquely terrifying experience witnessing them plead tearfully to some unknown entity while everyone else went about their day, none-the-wiser. At the time, some entity had whispered to me as well and it was such a perfect ‘beyond your comprehension’ horror moment. I could not fathom this happening in Haven 7 outside of a plot, because the players were all too spread out, the nightmare doesn’t exist, etc. This was a huge loss for me.
– The new Tell system completely crippled my ability to communicate with other players in a productive manner. If we had the same Tell system in Haven 6, I would have never understood about 90% of the mechanics in the game. Yes, newbie exists, but the people I was playing with in Haven 6 were actively teaching me game mechanics as we went along in a nice way. In Haven 7, I couldn’t communicate when I had made a mistake, I couldn’t learn so many opaque mechanics which had no documentation (because I didn’t know they existed), and so on. I understand why it was changed, but it still made it even more isolating.
– Speaking of, there were so many janky game mechanics that weren’t properly communicated that figuring out how to play Haven 7 was like deciphering a puzzle. Just so many concepts like feeding being gone, what political capital was, how to earn favor, when XP would be doled out, what invitation is, what took the place of fixation in ambushes, etc. I feel that if Haven 7 had cooked longer and come out with a properly explained ruleset it would’ve been less disorienting.
– The new looking-for system (I forgot what it was called), never worked much for me. There were lots of idiosyncrasies that having people able to Tell me would have solved, but I was just bumbling around trying to find out why I couldn’t get into any patrols. I felt like I was missing out while people in factions did these activities together.
– I won’t harp on the mist too much, but while I never personally had any problems with it, people were constantly getting grabbed in the time-out box and it really felt like a MUD where I needed to gear up and rescue people at 4 am or they’d DIE. It was almost roleplay-less because of the urgency and it was not what I came to Haven for.
– Windermere was a pale imitation of White Oaks and there was very little intrigue to play around. White Oaks felt like it was built on top of piles of skeletons, but Windermere was kind of just there and the campus was difficult to find interesting nooks to roleplay in.

And I guess I’ll end by saying it felt like slice-of-life was dead in Haven 7. I may, again, be the outlier here in that many people are in it for the intrigue, the competition, and the themes… but I felt part of what I enjoyed about Haven 6 so much is that it was simultaneously that and people were just trying to get on with their lives. Like yeah, sure, the poltergeist down the street wants to turn every napkin in the world into plutonium – but can’t you see I just wanna save up enough to open up that book store I always wanted to?

That element I didn’t see many places in Haven 7. I saw some people pursuing it, but if you did, nothing interesting would ever happen spontaneously because the map was too large to support coincidence and all of the supernatural goodness was happening at a plot or in some petty faction feud over who stepped on whose lunch last week.

Anyway, like I said, just my personal feelings. I recognize a lot of this is on me not playing in a way conducive to Haven 7 and rolling a bad hand of social levers to pull on, but I wanted to share my thoughts all the same!

[Dream]

I made a total of 3 calendar events in h7 and every single last one of them got covered in mist and forced to relocate. I put forward a suggestion in a petition to just have the mist avoid calendar events if those events were made at least 2 days ahead. I don’t know how such a thing could be gamed but maybe its not an easy thing to implement.

One thing that really hurts is that banked karma is not earned back through regular roleplay. It was super slow to get your karma back this way but it was inevitable you would get it back if you roleplayed. That was YOUR karma. You worked for it, once you had it, you expected to keep it and use it till the end of an iteration. But now you have to earn it back and it comes back slow. Even an encounter is liable to give you about 1000 banked karma back at a time. It’s better than nothing, but I wonder what the point of this was.

One of the major driving forces behind secrecy, doom, the wild hunt, etc is to turn over characters and keep the game fresh and dislodge characters who stick around too long in positions. But at the same time, the process of moving onto the next character is punishing, it eats karma, it is hard to make it back (harder than ever before). It eats xp of course. It is generally just a really painful process to go on to the next concept..even though that seems to be the goal of all the other expiry mechanics that get tried out.

—

On the positive side I really enjoy no sanctuary, I don’t think there has been a murder fest.

I really enjoy the content system. Remember the time we all tried to stick our preferences in the fingerset system and that was apparently a bad move? Well now we broadcast what we are into and open to all the time and as long as the other person is also interested in the same things, they will know it. I’ve had more proper victim scenes in h7 then in the last 3 iterations combined.

—

Something I’m skeptical on: Resurrection and healing maims is too cheap and the negative effects are not properly felt.

[Ckaleb]

By far the greatest achievement of Haven was curating a playerbase of proficient writers to tell stories. I think, at its core, that’s been the objective of Haven. The promise of its premise.

I want to take a moment to list a few of my favorite moments, how the community aided in creating them, and then have a comparison of the setting across iterations and how mechanics helped or did not help in setting a foundation for the community to tell stories.

H6
-A woman on the cusp of her 30s, seeing the final year of her youth, desperately shivering out a cigarette from a smushed pack in a ditch as the rain runs mud through her shoes, trying to ignore the voice in her head repeating ‘BURN.’
-a copy of someone else’s ill-considered dreamlife begging for a way out of the responsibility or pregnancy in a world she knows will end before her child’s had any time at all to experience so much of the life she wants to bring it, having her vertebrae cracked by a found family deluded by her need to ‘save’ her.
-A buddhist angelborn man struggling with escaping the Samsara because he can never escape desire without isolation, standing up for his values to what might as well be one of God’s angels and getting his tongue ripped out for it. Making the decision to leave a person he loves afterward and stay a Stranger to another foreign land in hopes that is soul will know peace.
-A Circus freak thrown out into a world with a body that will ensure she will never belong in it visiting the hospital to feel better through some demonic sadism, and instead finding a girl writing poems about a man that may as well have been another one of her dreams.

H7
-A nihilistic gnostic sadist so weathered and tired of a penance of duty that she doesn’t want, accepting a cup of coffee from her enemy and too jaded to care if it’s poisoned. Waking up in a hospital room and being fatecrafted such that it was the last mistake she ever made.
-a son named by his mother, translated to ‘hope,’ dying alone in a hole for executing a serial SA predator hellbent on pride.
-a dreamgirl sobbing in a pitifully decorated home, emotionally abused by a sociopathic boyfriend aided by an eidolon, bargaining for love with just so many handfuls of dollar-store lollipops.

For these stories, I do love Haven. All of them were granted gracefully (and in some cases, perhaps lacking grace) by other players that I have enjoyed writing with and getting to know. All of them have occurred over the course of a year, and there are many, many more. They’re tragic, melancholy, and very inspired by the settings by which they come from.

But I miss Haven 6. Haven 7 just isn’t inspired in so many ways. I notice more of the players above that have been with Haven for a little longer were more willing to move on from the small town setting, but I don’t think the city setting managed to inspire nearly as much creativity and character interaction in spite of its many additional systems.

In some ways, H6 was bound to be unhealthy by the sorta hopeless reality that it exists. There were many players that played in this iteration who had a strong tendency to ‘bleed’ into their characters and vice versa, and I felt the move to H7 was very healthy for their mindsets especially with the content warnings. I recall one of them, in H7, saw a ring depicting St. Bartholomew and thought it should have a content warning. Suffice to say that these players should never have been playing H6 in the first place given the premise and its content, and yet I found that these same players for which the new setting benefitted most left early on in the iteration. I do think there was something unhealthily attractive about how dark H6 and before was/were, retrospectively, and I can’t answer definitively whether the change was good because it allowed people to get healthier, or if it was bad because it catered to an experience that wasn’t invested in anything but the problems to begin with.

I’m sure it’s a little of both and a lot of neither.

The new grid is mindless. I can’t tell you what sits on Elm street, but I can tell you that Elm in H6 was flanked by White Oak’s modest path across the street from a pizzaria turned botique. I can tell you it lead from pavement onto a dirt road where a pet store sat with a door that was always locked, but wasn’t hard to pick open. Ultimately a good grid is one that you interact with. I didn’t mind AI going into H7, I actually thought it was a fairly acceptable writing tool, but after just a few weeks I noticed I couldn’t be bothered to read the utter lack of intent of anything on my screen. It all reads the same and has nothing to say, nothing to inspire. Each room, wherein they’re actually different from the last, have very little environmental storytelling. There’s a graveyard of statues in Petris Park RIPE for description of various bodies to humanize the tragedy of being petrified, but instead because it was written by an AI it had little more to say than ‘this is spooky and the statues might have been people.’

Everyone else has said everything I would about the systems. I would say ‘what iteration of systems.’ My abilities changed constantly, information in the help files quickly got outdated, and I eventually lost the will to care much about combat as attempting to use it for story purposes would disruptively impact my characterization when it changed or arbitrarily didn’t function against mist monsters the next week.

Why did we care again how quickly people progressed? Was it because people built T3 power fantasies that took on T5s? Could this simply not be addressed by removing the ability to buy focus and leaving it to the merits of corruption to be more powerful (which is an intrinsic part of the setting?). I, for one, liked very much that my abusive found family would crack my pitifully weak character on the jaw everytime she was a little annoying. It made the relationship monstrous and served the story and setting. And, now that the stronger characters are less powerful than they were and favor is generally harder to accumulate in a passive manner, why is there still a doom mechanic? I do not need new characters to tell stories, I need the retention of older characters so that my character arc maintains a trajectory provided by the context of persistent interaction.

I played H6 for about five months before it ended. In that time I played 3 tier 2s, one tier 3, and one tier 3 enemy all of which could engage with the entirety of the grid. I know guests weren’t intended to be played for so long, and there was some ‘abuse’ that could happen since they didn’t have to follow the same rules of LF drain and stuff, but LTs have nothing to give to the grid and neither do monsters. They’re extremely pigeon holed experiences with little options to surprise and innovate on the experience as antagonists. The last compelling monster couldn’t last long enough to follow up antag the other party in a weekly manner, and the last compelling Legion member was killed while he was afk in the Legion camp (because players could/can just walk in there for some reason). Then again, what other way was there for a character to deal with that LT other than the repetition of taking boroughs?

H6 altogether was a much more consistent experience of various systems that all assisted to aid in the gameplay loop of its setting, while H7 is a lot of experimental ideas thrust onto the former iteration without much thought on what incentives drive people to want to write. H6 wasn’t perfect, and it did have a lot of problems that the new iteration solved that I’m not getting into for the sake of not writing a novel, but it had a vibe I wanted to write within. At this point of writing I find myself just… Apathetic about Haven as it is. I log on every now and again for those that are still playing so that I don’t just abruptly dismiss my character from what they’re trying to write, but I have nowhere I care to take my character. All threats and issues are either endlessly self-perpetuating or are too ephemeral to be used for what I feel is meaningful characterization. What incentive is there to antag players? It used to be a necessity and created a drive to commit unspeakable acts to maintain power, definitive power that defined tiering up.

[Ckaleb]

Also, thanks for the Fairefield Parking Lot. What a wonderful gem to stumble upon in an otherwise identical series of roads and 3×3 houses.

[Ama86]

– The city is far too big. As Ambrose said, it should have been half this size at most. You never run into anyone organically and the game feels like a ghost town at all times. Social gathering in general never seemed to take off on H7. People might get together for actual calendar events, but aside from that, there just hasn’t really been a culture of hanging out in accessible places. I think the combined factors of the city’s bloated size, the oppressive mist discouraging travel, and the heavy gameplay shift towards conquering boroughs has left little room for organically emergent roleplay. It just felt difficult to meet people, a problem that is poisonous to a roleplaying game.

– As a non-combat player, the mist was fairly ruinous to my enjoyment. It made a large segment of the city off-limits at any given time, even just for a quick visit, and it meant I constantly had to cross-reference addresses with the player-made excel map *and* then the website mist map anytime I wanted to go anywhere. Wanna check out a store? First note the address, then open up the excel map to see where that is, and then the website map to see if there’s mist there. If there is, well, then I just can’t go there, simple as that. The goofiness of half the population riding horses, and seeing extravagantly-dressed, bling-wearing 9.5 characters with “they smell like a horse,” was also really daft. Furthermore, misspelling an address with the drive command will usually send you driving senselessly into the mist and put your car in the shop for a few days, you in some monsters’ clutches, and subsequently to the hospital with a severe wound. After the fifth or sixth time, I subconsciously stopped wanting to leave my home borough at all.

– Windermere was an enormous disappointment. I’m sure I’ve already complained enough about it elsewhere, but suffice to say that it feels like something from a totally different game crudely grafted onto Haven without any attempt to make it match. It has no synergy with the rest of the game. I don’t know if the AI that generated it was given no information about Haven’s lore and systems or simply neglected to include that in the result, but it doesn’t tie into anything and has none of the features that it needs, and which the school sphere had in the past. It’s the product of a machine that knows nothing about the actual game and just spat out its interpretation of “a spooky gothic college,” so it isn’t connected to any of Haven’s lore or mechanics or the activities that the game guides players towards.

– While it’s a matter of personal taste, I can certainly say that the constant vying for boroughs was not appealing to me at all, so the fact that H7 revolves almost exclusively around that made it difficult to like this version. Everything else took a backseat to the dull minigame of borough control, and when I decided to opt out of it, it soon became apparent that this made my character largely irrelevant. The faction I was in also dropped any form of contact with me when they realized I wasn’t valuable in that ratrace. Since it’s the only real purpose of factions, you’re kind of dead weight if you’re not interested in that.

– I’m sure an LLM can be used to good effect in some parts of the game, but its inclusion in seemingly every aspect of H7 felt weird. The lack of human emotion in room descriptions and documentation was palpable. I don’t want an AI to take over my character and emote for me on patrols. I don’t trust an AI to interpret my roleplay and base its application of the invitation mechanic on machine learning. The AI NPCs were interesting at first, but when they started talking about characters who weren’t present and events they couldn’t possibly have witnessed, it made me wonder if they’re actually monitoring the whole game and able to “know” and talk about anything and everything. Felt like an unpleasant security issue.

– The new forum is awful and the new site in general has brought a weird sort of distance between the game itself and the community around it. While Haven never had the liveliest forum culture, there’s almost none in H7. Questions in Ask the Staff get answered once a month if at all, most threads never get replied to or get 1-2 replies and no meaningful discussion, and a number of players have reported being unable to log into the website altogether. I couldn’t until I changed my game password, for whatever reason. By and large, H7 has felt like something that was half-finished and then essentially abandoned. It doesn’t feel like a game that’s being looked after.

That’s a lot of negatives without any positives, but I don’t really have any positives, which is the reason I stopped playing. Given recent sentiments on here, I suspect a lot of players have negative feedback that they’ve held back because the forum has been so dead and because of the unpleasantness of the automoderator randomly deleting posts it deems “not positive enough.” H7 hasn’t felt like a healthy thing. It has felt like trying to make the best of bad weather. There has been a certain lifelessness about it.

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