Haven Redux

[bean]

i enjoyed the concept of H7 as much as arachne and maina did. the idea of it, basically. i think the idea of an internationally important hub of supernatural activity makes way more sense as a big city than a sleepy seaside town.

i just didn’t enjoy how much of it was ai-generated. and while crayon says the ai npcs were opt in, they were unavoidable if you rped in faction hubs at all.

haven has always had many faults, but what kept me coming back was stories and a desire to write with other people. H7 stole that. realistically that is a player culture issue as much as it is a design issue, because even undoing it won’t stop people from flooding a redux with countless ai slop-shops. i tbh don’t see myself playing any version of haven going forward unless policy aimed at addressing this is at least semi-successfully implemented.

in theory, i would take big city haven over small town haven.

in practice, i would take every lovingly hand-written desc and 3-sentence lore helpfile over every 6-paragraph ai desc & half-hallucinated lore file.

i will play any version of haven that has real human creativity at its heart.

[Talia]

I liked the setting of a big city for H7 in general. I didn’t lke the soulless and way too big grid amongst other things. There was an over-reliance on AI in the making of H7 like others have already said. I think sanctuary being gone in H7 was better and the content warnings were a big improvement.

I miss from H6: Slow combat (it was much more soulful) and the SR system and player culture around it. Those little SR adventures were fun and they were sorely missing in H7.

But I do NOT recommend scrapping H7 and making H8 in the form of a H5 rerun, simply because I think it will just kill whatever remains of the playerbase. Most people who want the H5/6 feel have moved on to Duskholm and as long as H7 runs it has at least the chars already made to come back to.
I know I wouldn’t have the motivation to make new ones if H7 was killed.

[Diego]

I made a little list of the things I liked from the iterations I’ve played. With the idea of certain features being ported over to whatever comes out of it, these are I think the things I’d like to see the most.

H5:

• Nonreligious player factions. The scope was wide and the variety was fun, from biker gangs to god cults to simple clubhouses.
• Storyrunning without your own character necessarily being involved. (Applies to H6 too but still)
• Playable Higher Powers rather than Eidolons

H6:

• Cults as a faction type, though I wasn’t huge on Sects as the opposing force. I’d rather have secular factions and cult factions.
• Tier caps on more impactful stats like Contacts
• The Founding Family system additions with family secrets
• MyHaven as a whole

H7:

• Lieutenant guests as a less killy alternative to living nightmares
• Census command, checking where the game is healthy and where it’s struggling
• Custom melee discipline

[Dream]

I’d consider playing if there was some semblance of people being on board.

However every iteration of Haven contained some sort of self-own mechanic that eventually made it impossible or untenable to keep a character for any length of time. (or society)

Secrecy decay>doom>wild hunt

These are the things that truly CHOKED each and every iteration of Haven.

The day before the wild hunt in h7 we were rocking 25-35 players at peak. The week after. We went to 10-15, 60 days later was the first time Nova made a mention about the wild hunt and just gave a general (i’ll tone it down). By that point it was 5-10 players..and it just spiraled from there.

It was a self-destruct. I dont know what the obsession is with a coded way to strangle players out of playing the things they want to play.

Any revisit of an old iteration is going to contain the SAME problems that led to the eventual drop off of each Haven.

BTW Haven 7 was genuinely good, it was absolutely the best iteration and the AI stuff was still an improvement over anything we had before, even if sometimes it was mildly repetitive and annoying. Especially with recent anti-AI sentiments in society. You could have Haven 7, without the AI and without the wild hunt. Thats it.

You could have Haven 5 without the worst bugs and without secrecy decay. Thats it

You could have Haven 6 without doom. Thats it.

Any of these iterations would work.

[Alpha]

I prefer big city Haven to small town Haven because ground zero of an international struggle for power having dirt roads, podunk diners, and the inevitable 15 strip clubs/sex shops always felt weird, and people never really behaved, dressed, or drove cars that matched the small town setting.

That said, as long as this is just spicing up the bedroom for Haven and not a whole new project stealing time/attention away from 5K, I don’t mind either way as someone who stepped away from H7 partly because of the time-cost of keeping up with the systems of such a big and involved iteration.

Keep the AI NPCs though, whatever happens. It’s nice to have thematic characters to talk ideas through who are enthusiastic and supportive of plans without needing to be flirted with to keep their attention on the mission. Bringing back the old FFs with NPC versions of the Heads would be an absolute banger; my crown for a Wilson family dinner with Patricia at the helm or a discussion of legacy and empire with Augustus Inigo.

Also, doesn’t need to be Blackfield, but bring back full support for the college. No child characters, the community of this hobby is not mature enough to handle them. The academic niche is a powerful tool for storytelling as a campus brings diverse characters together in ways that factions/cults can’t, since everyone who belongs to them already shares some sort of ideals/beliefs/goals.

[Evermore]

I’m personally not that stoked on the idea of rerunning old versions. From what I’ve gathered, these all had their own major issues, and I’m already mildly annoyed at the idea of this ‘small town’ vibe where people are driving around in hyper-exclusive cars, building excessive mega-mansions, and having the playerbase split up in school/faction/townies even harder than it was right now.

Honestly, I think the main issue with H7 seems to be a main issue that I have heard others complain about being present in previous versions. Decay, a doom mechanic; basically, all these mechanics that are thrown at us, severely crippling players or punishing them for sticking around/playing a character for a while while offering just about nothing in return.

What killed H7 was that first big hunt, which sadly was around when I joined the game. I saw the playerbase hit 30+ before it came around, and when it hit, the playerbase struggled to stay around 10. It has not recovered since, and that’s because it has completely shattered trust. Trust in that the players’ time and investment is respected. Trust in that these systems are getting reworked some. Trust in that their feedback about how negatively this Wild Hunt mechanic impacts their motivation/gameplay is being received positively.

Do you genuinely believe that, if you launch Haven 8 as a reroll of some old version, it’ll do well in the long run? You could, honestly, remove the Wild Hunt mechanic of H7 right now, and offer some incentives to returning players, and work/commit to revive H7 first. Otherwise, you’re likely just setting up this new Haven for a 1-2 month period of popularity before it inevitably declines, and I’m sure with its brief revival comes the return of the same cliques, the same groups, the same power-players, that are prone to causing a lot of friction that deters other people from really committing.

[Evermore]

Got to add, as a new player I liked how H7 was a fresh, clean sheet in a way. A major issue with Haven you’d read or hear all about is a certain element of elitist gate-keeping. Of people wanting others to play how they felt the lore/mechanics should be interpreted. Of people being able to impose veterancy and superiority over others. Of people stifling RP because they can point at a helpfile and use it to strong-arm others into ceasing their creative efforts.

It would be super overwhelming to suddenly have to, basically, start completely anew in a game setting that I’m not familiar with. I’m just one person, of course, but I would not be motivated in the slightest to stick around if I try to log on one day, only to find out H7 has been replaced with an old reboot, and I’m basically completely back at square 1.

The people still around H7 are still working on keeping the city and situation stable. Hell, we have ACTUALLY been able to fight off the Legion incursion, which nearly had every borough occupied. We would all welcome any returning/new characters with open arms. We’re all waiting for a little surge of activity to go run Lookfor events again, to run plots again, to run encounters again, to host events again. This is why I think the better path forwards is to rebuild trust, and to incentivize people to return to Haven as a whole, instead of throwing a nostalgia-flavoured piece of candy at them in hopes of gaining a brief resurgence in activity.

[Nymfette]

I agree with the people that say that h7 is conceptually the best haven version there was. The H5 and H6 lover are with Duskholm.

The primary issue for H7 is that rising upwards is basically impossible because of how the Wild Hunt works. It makes tiering up not possible. The big city is better than small seaside village, but the map is extremely bloated and it would have been, in my opinion, better to create smaller subdistricts where the the delves bleed through so we could actually see more of it and hunt in those places, and beyond that, forest. A lot of forest.

Eidolons were completely neutered and there was nothing left that you could do with them anymore beyond spying on your members. There is no reward mechanic, there is no encouragement that says “This is my reward for you.”

Favor has some cool rewards, but the mechanics behind it are impossible to understand. Some received a whack amount and some nothing. Karma worked most of the time, but with the Wild Hunt, it was just not enough to hope for to ever achieve anything higher than a T3 and hold on to that.

The mist is genuinely inconvenient. And leaves outer boroughs largely abandoned by people who do not specialize in combat.

I liked feeding in h6 more than the antagonism in h7. Acedia is conceptually strange.

I do think that the thing that really killed h7 is the Wild Hunt and that we would still have 20-30 people playing if not for it, harsh as it may seem to say. I know none of us who are left are excited to see the next one in two weeks.

[Ama86]

The main problem with H7 is that it was all built by AI. Anyone who ascribes the version’s failure to anything else is wrong. The whole version failed because its creator chose to let AI make it all. This is the reason that it’s all AI slop. If you cannot find it in you to tell AI slop from real writing, you were the target audience of H7. Those of us who could distinguish between human writing and machine slop quit long ago. We saw that H7 was just that: AI slop.

Haven has been fraught with controversy, so of course, no version of it will ever be hailed as the best ever. I suspect that any player will say that the version in which they arrived was the best. The fact of the matter is that for all of this game’s history, we struggled against weirdos and ageplaying perverts. In attempting to adjust around those, some of us were labeled as that, too. People like Ppurg and myself have been written off as weirdos just because we attempted to accommodate the part of Haven that was consistently popular. That’s it’s school sphere. Nothing else ever stood up to the test of time. All other aspects of Haven, across its versions, failed to be good enough to really get the population outside the school sphere to be enough to sustain a game.

It was always the game that had a school, and then a separate sphere. Then, as the school was systematically dismantled, the game diminished. The last step of that was H7 where it was wholly AI-generated, and no effort at all went into the facilitation of a part of the game in which Haven’s most important players had made their marks known. It was simply left out. It was left adrift. It was given this mark: if you care for this, you are not really wanted here anymore.

For that reason, many players left H7 in its first three months. Other things were wrong with H7, but I think that people would have been willing to put up with these problems. However, since the school sphere of Haven has always comprised half of the playerbase, shoving them all aside killed this game.

At no point throughout this game’s history has it ever done well without the invigorating presence of the people who kept the school sphere alive. I’m certainly not the only one of them, but I am one of them, and this game’s decline can be traced very clearly to the decline and enshittification of this part of Haven.

We held this game aloft for a very long time. Anytime the school sphere died, so, too, did the game as a whole. This is why two alienated players chose to make a new “siser game” whose popularity has made it clear that they were not wrong. It was the administration of Haven which was wrong, having once attracted people by promising an interesting coming-of-age storytelling platform, and then abandoning after you had attracted the players who were looking for that.

H7 was shite. It was garbage. It was AI slop and rubbish and absolute nonsense. Now you seek to turn back the clock. It’s good, in a sense, because turning back the block is the only thing that saves this community; but the fact remains that you have systematically alienated this community to the point where literally all players quit when they saw what H7 was. They gave it a chance, they offered their patience, and then they said no. They said no thank you. That is why this game is now entirely dead.

[bean]

i mean is it really dead if the alleged proof of its demise is a copypaste of it? like what is this high horse even. you can’t be acting better than someone whose code & years of hard work you’re using to make your point

stay original or stay humble

[Alpha]

I love the school sphere but I want to be clear:

The school is fun when people are putting effort into making it feel like school.
Once that effort is underway, people with far more drive & free time put in effort to make it feel like a ballsweat-drenched whorehouse.
The former leave, the latter are shamed, the school coasts on autopilot until a player-wipe.
The reason the school was historically so walled off from the rest of the town is that the people in town were utterly disgusted by the school and the people in it & the only way they could have peace was to pretend it didn’t exist.
So to paint Haven as a game that ever fully relied on the school is either delusional or rose-tinted levels of biased, but most assuredly incorrect.
It is very possible to be a school player and not be written off as a weirdo; most of us are ageplaying perverts though because ain’t no way all these 18-21 year olds are played by anything but 35-55 year olds and I stand ten toes down on that.

Now that Duskholme exists, it’s possible that Haven’s future school sphere, whatever shape it takes, won’t wind up sticky and unappealing. I have hope. I’ll definitely be at the college, no matter what iteration of Haven we wind up with next.

On another note: If new players in H7 are hearing quite so much about everything wrong with previous iterations and everyone’s pet grievances from a decade ago, maybe the issue with H7 isn’t the Wild Hunt, it’s an egregious overabundance of toxic OOC bitching and griping in Discord instead of actually playing the game; you know, the same problem as always.

[Evermore]

I won’t say that isn’t likely also a part of the issues. But, no, I also genuinely believe the Hunt is a terrible mechanic that does little motivate/incentivize players, and mostly exists to cripple someone, stifle progress, etc. There’s plenty of posts already detailing the many things people dislike about it. Also, just so your aware, I don’t even have a single person I met in-game friended on Discord. I try and avoid that sort of stuff. I mostly learn about these things from conversations that emerged after asking questions on Newbie/through Tells. I don’t think other new players I met, like Sebastian, were getting into toxic chats on Discord with other players, too. Bit of a wild assumption if you ask me (at least when it comes to genuinely new people)

[bean]

i mean when someone makes the argument that the main thing wrong with haven is players who adhere to the established theme & documentation & expect others to also do that … and forum rant in a way that makes me doubt they even enjoy the game they’re playing … i just assume that player is not actually new. cos new players usually arrive with rosy glasses, eager to learn/adapt/conform & not yet disillusioned, and if they’re not happy they just never get into it and dip. whereas established players have a hard time letting go of a game they hate due to years of investment. they don’t actually want to be playing that game anymore, they want to be playing a different game that doesn’t exist, so they just play their own version of the game and ignore anything that stands in the way of that. which is very annoying for everyone else who wants to be playing the actual game btw, so then i assume you write off their annoyance as elitism. but bro i’d be annoyed if i signed up for violin lessons and then my teacher pulled out a ukulele, and said it’s just a matter of interpretation

but it’s the internet tbh and anyone can claim anything. i for one identify as a legume and if you try to say otherwise you’re an elitist griefer

[Evermore]

I had rose-tinted glasses. But I came in just around the time that first Wild Hunt happened, and I saw the playerbase decline rapidly. Which, of course, I couldn’t link together at first, but it’s through these forum posts and some conversations through Tells that I started to get more of a picture about the game state. And what I’m also talking about is what was generally mentioned whenever this MU* was brought up elsewhere. I didn’t join before H7 because of the heavier no-consent elements of the old Haven versions, mostly, but news of the introduction of these content warning flags along with a few other big changes made me so much more comfortable giving it a try properly. Again, I understand where you’re coming from. Just letting you know I’m not getting into exhausting and toxic OOC rants about the game with people on Discord. I’m also still enjoying the game I’m playing, I don’t know what suggested I wasn’t – My main gripe with the game is the Wild Hunt, and it still being active/a looming threat when it so clearly caused massive player loss and disinterest.

[Evermore]

It’s quite a derail from the actual topic, too. Let’s focus on that. I’m quite interested to see more takes on the implementation of AI. I’ve received it quite positively, myself, much as I understand and relate to the frustrations of an over-reliance on it.

[Author]

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