Holiday Season or Something Else?

[Maise]

The game has been so quiet as of late. Is it the holiday season or have people moved on?

[Lykaia]

The Wild Hunt has really hurt playerbase. Morale was pretty low and some just outright quit over it. There is also a lot of people that just seem permanently whoinvis, which makes it harder to find people to interact with.

[Maise]

The being constantly whoinvis is what I take as them not being up for RP. Which, I don’t judge them for,

But it is a very lonely game.

[Dream]

It’s a safe bet to say that the wild hunt wiped out the pbase. Some will trickle back. Some will never come back.

I think the endeavor through iteration after interation to encourage turnover of characters often closely aligns with encouraging players to just quit said characters and the game. There has been plenty of suggestions over the years to encourage turnover through positive rewards in turning a character over rather than penalizing long lasting and invested characters with a severe penalty or arbitrary deadline.

[Ama86]

It’s also very peculiar to design that enforced turnover to kick in after, what was it, four or five months? I could see having it happen after a year or something, but sheesh. Are players expected to accept that a handful of months is what they get before the game says “that’s far enough”?

[Matthew]

I think it’ the Holiday season, and while the Wild Hunt may have been a controversy, I have to say it actually did jump start the who list in that there are more people on now than there had been leading up to that occurrence. Game pops also ebb and flow, just the nature of long-running games, doesn’t mean people have permanently moved on.

I also think some folks are just quieter right now, whether that’s the holidays, burnout, or waiting to see what comes next. Even if more people are sticking to whoinvis, it doesn’t mean interest or investment is completely gone. In my experience the population rebounds when there’s new story momentum, new rp hooks, or that special whatever that pulls people back into play.

I know it feels lonely right now, but I don’t think the game is as empty as it sometimes looks, it’s definitely not dead; this is just a lull.

[Ama86]

We’re at the end of January. Holiday season is long past. Nobody refrains from playing a game because it was Christmas a full month ago.

[Maise]

I’d agree Ama86.

I think people are just done, and that’s their right to be. Playing games like this takes a lot of time and effort. Nobody likes having that wasted.

[Ama86]

The automoderator automoderated me for saying it, but I’ll try again, because the automoderator isn’t right: no, there isn’t any such thing as a natural decline in player numbers in the beginning of autumn. There is no such thing as a “jump-start of the who list,” with 29 players online on a Saturday evening. Nobody is served well by calls of ‘all is well, stop worrying.’ because the reason for the problem is very much known, and insisting it isn’t real doesn’t help anybody.

[Ama86]

Turns out that you can massage a sentence to overcome the wildly arbitrary nature of the forum’s dear, benevolent automoderator. That’s what comes of leaving the game all up to an AI. In any case, I won’t carry out any further experiments. Just stop gaslighting other players by lying about what they see every time they log in!

I promise this is the last time I post here. I just had to see just how harebrained the dear, admirable automoderator is.

[Ckaleb]

Forum post titled ‘H7 feedback’ has most of the discussion of why various players are no longer present. Not much more to be said.

[Maina]

For me, it was the extreme bugginess a little while before the Wild Hunt. Put a lot of effort into my first plot just to have the game keep rewriting it.

This soon spiraled into feeling a bit like none of the work or RP I was putting into the game was paying anything back. Nonsensical IC decisions, RG, IC drama spilling over into OOC drama as it always does.

Contrary to what some others say, I think the game is in the best place – mechanically – it’s ever been. The problem, for me, is the bugs and the pbase.

The Wild Hunt actually almost tempted me back, with the option to make some tweaks to my character and try to freshen things up. But I couldn’t get up the energy to actually do it. The pbase is even smaller with even fewer people I want to interact with.

[Ckaleb]

I’ve recalled, since launch, this counter argument against the broken gameplay loop. That someday, somewhen, people would start making T4s and T5s to reintroduce antagonism to the grid and progress the main gameplay loop. I think if the game were in its best mechanical state, a state I would define better as ‘having systems that are indicative of a consistent design philosophy,’ its mechanics feeding back into the intent of the product- RP, then it would have produced adequate incentive for players to engage in its activities and progress through its systems.

I think calling this a player failure to engage is a lot like a bootstraps argument: That if only the playerbase was more compelling, more invested, less dramatic, more proactive, then things would be better and you would then have a reason to engage. Would it not be more sensible to observe how many of the players you would like to RP with, the most proactive ones, do not enjoy the product as it is? Take away the players and the bugs and look at the foundation players are building on. See if the world building captures your imagination, see if there are places in the Grid that you want to explore, is combat engaging- does progression thereof feel like your character has earned it thematically or that you grinded for it? Have you made a Lieutenant or Monster and if so, why not? Do factions give players adequate tools to manage and orchestrate? Are there meaningful reasons to attack other factions, and likewise is there any reason at all to act within your faction’s interests if they cannot enforce their theme upon you?

That last question was a bit pointed, but it’s very, very important to understand that the quality of the playerbase is often dependent on the quality of the product. People act based on incentives, and when the second most important thing about a female character, in priority of description order, is their cup-size, I can see maybe a little bit about some of the intent behind the product.

[Maina]

Haven has always had a particularly terrible pbase. Pretending otherwise is pretty silly. It’s infamous for it. This is less because the mechanics are bad (though some of them have been) and more because the game allows bad behavior that very few other places do. People can be fun to play with while still being toxic in other ways. And they can be toxic and unfun to be around and be mechanically good at the game.

I came back to New Haven due to new mechanics (which have largely worked out for me, except for the bugs) and a hope that the new policies would curb some of the historically awful behavior the pbase exhibits.

It worked for a little while. A lot of the people who did not like it left. But there are many reasons someone might leave. Maybe a good player is friends with a bad player and leaves when they do. Maybe the bugs. Maybe changes in design philosophy which are not bad but simply not to their taste. People leaving does not mean the game is a failure. It just means it has a different audience. Which, again, is something I consider a good thing.

But it hasn’t really advertised, so we aren’t getting new players who enjoy the way things are as fast as we’re losing old players who don’t. If there is any core flaw at all, I would say it’s the immense complexity that’s built up over the years without adequate onboarding. The complexity itself isn’t a bad thing. I enjoy it. But I did try to recruit a new player who just really struggled every step of the way and eventually quit.

Anyway, I judge mechanics based on how well they achieve what seems to be the game’s goals, not based on how much the pbase likes them. Because if a game has a clear vision and the mechanics support it, there’s players out there who will enjoy it. And I think Haven’s codebase is fighting itself a lot less than it used to. It gives you stuff to do and reasons to do it. And so I did stuff and had fun until bugs got in the way. Past versions spent a lot of design space just trying to cover for flaws or force behavior in certain directions. It felt like you were wrestling the game to do anything out of a very narrow purview that didn’t feel very realistic at all.

I’m not sure any of your complains fit any less in previous versions. If they do, it’s a matter of personal preference (like whether it’s worth exploring the grid) and not objective fact. To me, the code changes are almost universally improvements. I’ve played off and on since Haven 1. I just, apparently, have different priorities to you.

Anyway, I don’t have to explain myself to you or anyone. The thread asked why people haven’t been around. I gave my answer. You don’t have to like it. It’s true for me regardless of what you think, and a random thread from ages ago doesn’t speak for me.

[Ckaleb]

Let us presume then that there is not enough of a correlation between the quality of the product and the ‘good players’ leaving (we must assume that your incentive to play is with good writers, else complaining about the playerbase would not make sense). Would you care, relevantly, as this forum is called ‘Game Discussion,’ to discuss? the mechanics and state of the game beyond a conclusive ‘I don’t have to explain myself to you or anyone?’

Let us first compare definitions.
Term: A game in a good mechanical state.
Ckaleb: ‘having systems that are indicative of a consistent design philosophy,’ its mechanics feeding back into the intent of the product- RP, then it would have produced adequate incentive for players to engage in its activities and progress through its systems.
Maina: how well they achieve what seems to be the game’s goals, not based on how much the pbase likes them. Because if a game has a clear vision and the mechanics support it, there’s players out there who will enjoy it.

The second definition, of course, of course, responds to the first. I think both statements are more or less the same, barring one point; not based on how much the pbase likes them

Firstly, ‘how much a player likes them’ I feel is a misunderstanding on what ‘player incentive’ is. Incentive to use the mechanics is merely the WHY. For instance, if there was a mechanic to count how many pieces of paper you picked up off the ground with no rewards or further explanation on why you were doing the task, we would say this mechanic is lacking in incentive. It is not merely that the player does not enjoy the task, it is that the player does not have a reason as to WHY they should.

Correct me if I am wrong, but I will now arrogantly continue and assume that we no longer consider ‘what players like to do’ as being part of the discussion, as it is no longer judged a point either of us are making.

Because if a game has a clear vision and the mechanics support it, there’s players out there who will enjoy it.
I won’t be mean and ask ‘where are they?’ You’d already feel you’d answered that question in that the game has failed to advertise itself, though I fear pragmatically that you will not find them. I’ll try not even to touch on the subject of changing the product’s vision without care for the audience that’s stuck with the game and how various products across the entertainment industry have fallen time and time again to be something they weren’t. Instead, I would like to ask about the vision itself.

And it really is a question because I have no idea. What is the vision of New Haven exactly? I think it’s about gang wars and legions from Hell, but I’m not really sure. Some of my complaints did indeed fit in previous versions, but not many of them did. Bluntly, the vision of H5/H6 (I can’t speak for former versions) was about horror and monstrosity. Every part of the game revolved around predation and temporary safety. You couldn’t be incredibly strong without being a monster, and you’d predate on people or you’d suffer. I would fully agree that after staff stopped running content and managing the playerbase to stay within its theme that Haven 5/6 were left with difficult faction management that made it hard to reinforce the world’s own lore and the Understanding. But we’re not talking about any of the previous iterations. We’re judging H7 as a standalone product and whether it successfully hooks players in with its gameplay loop and mechanics, and whether or not my gripes about game mechanics applied to them are irrelevant as we’re not talking about ‘which is better.’

So uhhhhh… To be honest, I think the game is lacking in vision altogether. I believe chargen says that it’s Gothic Fantasy, but there isn’t a lot in place that have captured the incentives of players to pursue those themes as time has gone on. My explanation for why the mechanics are in such a poor state was through a series of questions about lacking mechanics and the player experience. If you believe the player experience to be good, what do you think Haven 7 is supposed to be? What mechanics are in place to encourage that vision?

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