[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!

[Chiara]

There should be one at Sovereign Bank and one at Windermere, but I agree there should probably be a list somewhere.

[Chiara]

I have no horse in this race, but I want to clarify a detail. To preface, I am a relative novice to Haven (I joined near the end of Haven 6), I may be wrong.

When Arachne used ‘double’, it created an illusion. Targeting the monster now instead targeted Leon; and as the monster was command-stacked to be attacked, Arachne automatically shot Leon by accident.

Double : Unspecified range; Pick two targets, for one round if anyone
attacks one they’ll instead target the other and vice-versa.
Roleplay : You can cause someone to temporarily confuse you with another
person.
Consumes your attack for one round.

It is afterward that Arachne course-corrects to ‘attack Leon’, which correctly targets the monster.

This is my understanding from having dealt with illusions from combat before, and this is all I wanted to clarify. Again, I could be totally wrong.

[Chiara]

I do think we could use more societies overall, but this is also the very start of the game.

[Chiara]

Grid

So far I’ve enjoyed what the grid offers in terms of space, but I do find myself missing the unique shape of the old grid. I’m hopeful that as players continue to settle in there will be more and more locations to hang around in.

Lookfor

I’ve been a little disappointed in trying to use the Lookfor system. I think it’s mechanically proper and I don’t have a problem with the way it works, but I just haven’t managed to get any interaction on it on a personal level using the support mode. I can’t say if this is or isn’t related to the way it works as opposed to prior patrol systems, but this has just been my experience with it.

LLM

I haven’t had any opportunities to interact with LLMs at all. Frankly I wouldn’t even know they were involved if it weren’t for the occasional newbie chat talking about them. I’ll use this to segue into my minor gripe, though, which is that I find starting out factionless and non-supernatural to be a pretty isolating experience in Haven 7.

The society recruitment mechanisms seem to be all player-run and I’ve found it a challenge to create any IC discussion on that topic since most aren’t starving for members; tells now being hit or miss makes it even more difficult to break past this barrier. Living without a faction/society/etc, Haven 7 is a rather quiet game where there seems to be little going on outside of calendar events and drinks at a bar. I do hope this changes as we get past the game’s first weeks and months and the options for societies diversify, but this has just been my personal experience I wanted to share.

Etc

Some other mechanics like cdrives, opportunities, and incitements haven’t really come into play for me yet and I have a bit of a hard time conceptualizing how they would. Acedia, invitation, and favor have also been beyond my grasp and so I suppose I’m still waiting to see the new features Haven 7 has to offer.

One thing I am enjoying quite a bit is the way Peak Hours work, I feel like they really stimulate roleplay for those locations.

[Author]

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