The game is in its dying breaths.

[Talia]

I don’t want to sound doomerish and this is not meant to antagonize, but please, Nova, can you give us a ‘state of the game’ address?

Do you have plans to revitalise it?
Do you have plans to address the issues that drove people away?
Do you favour shutting it down and opening as H8 again?
Do you intend to just keep it running even with no people on it?

https://mudstats.com/World/NewHaven

The statistics tell a harsh story. At this point the remaining players can barely function anymore. The two big issues right now are:

The grid is too big and feels soulless.
The Wild Hunt destroys any kind of progress and encourages people to just leave in frustration.

My suggestion:
Gut the Wild Hunt. Just remove auto-nabbing and make it an entirely voluntary process that can be started at any time by typing “faenap me please”. That way people can use this soft-reset whenever they want to delete or re-imagine their chars.
But it gets rid of the frustration of being grabbed and this frustration is what killed off the pop after it had stabilised from all the other issues.

(Another suggestion would be to reduce the gridsize to a level appropriate for the playercount WITHOUT losing any custom homes/stores/etc., abandoned or not. But that is a lot of work and probably hard to pull off correctly.)

[Evermore]

Great suggestion. The whole idea of making it an opt-in thing. I don’t even care about the size of the grid. That’s fine as is. Even if it were small, we’d still need people to be motivated enough to go out there and roleplay. And from what I’ve gathered on Newbie before, a lot of people kind of just stick around to finish their stories and/or play the ‘my society vs the 63rd’ game.

I would argue what we could use most is an increase to gains. Make the few of us who are trying to stick around actually earn some increased RPXP (and favour, if that’s necessary?). In this current state, it’s actually impossible to even buy a few stats. There’s an arc to be had for us players, of us collaborating to push back the 63rd, but between the Wild Hunt resetting us, the speed and efficiency at which they operate in boroughs, and the difficulty of even becoming remotely viable as a raid/societal/political concept while earning maybe 1k or 2k RPXP a week.. Ouch.

[Dream]

You simply don’t get the brilliance of the game design. Without the Wild hunt the game would’ve slowly atrophied and people would have stopped playing.

With the Wild Hunt we were able to rip the band aid off and stop playing immediately.

No slow bleed means the wild hunt was successful in it’s task.

—-

Trolling aside. I don’t quite comprehend the whole point of the Wild Hunt if it’s stated intention is a complete failure. I felt like the game was going well, the day before the hunt we had plenty of activity going into a Christmas holiday. There was minimal signs of stagnation and struggle.

It didn’t have to happen.

[Ama86]

I expect the intended goal was to keep the game from getting clogged up with high-tier characters who never went away and never lost any power. Same thing that Doom was meant to do. And just like Doom, it was wildly unpopular to the point where many would rather not play Haven at all than deal with it. If anything the Wild Hunt was even worse than Doom since it kicks in so early and often. Thus far, it appears to happen every five months. If that’s how long you can expect to have your character before it gets slammed with the “you need to be less powerful” hammer, it’s no wonder everyone quit over it.

Setting aside the unpopular concept of characters being forcibly neutered by the game, it was also a total misjudgement to have it happen so often, and for the first one to kick in just a handful of months into H7’s runtime. If I recall, it was deemed a bug that the first Wild Hunt caught so many people, but it would still have been far too early even if it caught only half as many.

I always felt like the whole issue of tier bloat could have been solved by making the lower tiers less rubbish. H7 even took some steps of the way towards that with the ability to buy additional focus points and such, but we never even really got to see if that would have worked to stave off the tier bloat because the Wild Hunt rolled through just as people were finding their feet, knocked everyone over like bowling pins, and then most of the playerbase saw no reason to play a game where that’s going to happen regularly.

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