[Crayon]

@bean
Garbanzo.

[Crayon]

I didn’t want to engage with this because the OP specifically requested no arguments, however, I feel obligated to defend Dad’s honor here:

[quote=Evermore]Of people being able to impose veterancy and superiority over others.[/quote]

[quote=Evermore]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.[/quote]

You lost me here. The entire point of the Hunt and similar mechanics is to keep the MUD from becoming topheavy with karma wealthy players stockpiling, retaining, and using karma faster than any new player could hope to catch up with. The mechanic you’re complaining about most does the thing you claim to want most.

[quote=Ama86]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.[/quote]

School spheres are cool.

Haven’s school spheres are actually [i]historically unpopular[/i]. The [i]appearance[/i] of thriving only came about by completely isolating that sphere of the game in a small sub-sphere where the size of the sphere facilitated more engagement.

In Haven 1, to the best of my knowledge, there was no school. It was mostly a concept of a school. Theoretically there was a Haven High somewhere and it had students and a football team called the Gatekeepers maybe, but it didn’t exist physically and virtually nobody incorporated it into their characters’ backgrounds.

In Haven 2, there was a physical school, but it was virtually never used and the players of school age characters pretty much never went to school or did things at the school.

In Haven 3, there was a school, it was incredibly unpopular, and a handful of especially stinky eggs drove changes that would come in the next iteration.

In Haven 4, there was a school and school age characters were limited to playing in that school. For the first time it became somewhat popular.

In Haven 5, the school remained, but play in it was seasonal and largely contingent on large groups of active, story-centric roleplayers joining it at the same time. There were a few windows of success but for the most part, every time those player groups bounced in disgust, the sphere would crumble.

In Haven 6, ???.

In Haven 7, there is a college sphere and it’s not super popular.

For most of Haven’s existence the school sphere has been unpopular or nonexistent.

[quote=Evermore]Of people wanting others to play how they felt the lore/mechanics should be interpreted.[/quote]

Yes, that’s how collaborative narrative works. We all have a set of guidelines and rules in the form of a very deliberately light lore we’re supposed to be following, and as this is a written medium, the only things keeping us coloring within the lines are ourselves and each other. Haven is very, very, very deliberately designed to have as lightweight, easily-learned, and nonrestrictive lore as physically possible specifically to make it easier for newbies to adjust and get up to speed. If [i]that[/i] lore and the expectations it brings are too much… I don’t know what to tell you, mate.

[quote=Alpha]maybe the issue with H7 isn’t the Wild Hunt[/quote]

I actually had a friend keeping an eye on the login metrics for Haven around this time period because I could kind of smell the direction the wind was blowing and wanted to have a finger on the pulse so I could try to identify what was making it so weak. The biggest dropoff was actually a month or two before the Wild Hunt, around when I started phasing out of play. I don’t know anybody else’s particulars, but I felt like I was running into bugs around every corner, it was taking them a while to get fixed, and I was too tired to keep trucking. That’s not a knock on Nova, I’d have been fried after a [i]fraction[/i] of all that work & months of opening bug fixes too. After the first dip, the Hunt delivered a second big dip, but I would argue that at that point the game was already self-selecting for players that overvalue long-term code power and perceive systems like karma as incentive structures moreso than as permission structures.

[Crayon]

I would probably give Haven Redux episodes a try, but I suspect the novelty and nostalgia will fade fast. I’m not sure how feasible it is to backport the panoply of bugfixes or how likely it is that abuses, exploitation, and behavior issues would be any better.

As for what features I’d like to see backported:

1) the weekly RP XP and karma distribution systems were an improvement when they worked and make a huge difference in my likely unpopular opinion
2) the SR’d combat improvements in H7 were phenomenal and a ton of fun
3) Myhaven is a banger, imo
4) the AI-animated NPCs were actually pretty fun and don’t get slop on anybody’s face unless they’re dunking their own head in the trough; this could probably even be extended to giving people the ability to customize background, personality, etc., on NPCs for animated shopkeepers etc.

That said, while revisiting old versions is a great way to have fun with friends, if the goal is to make the best game, I’d rather see you try to isolate some of the elements people have the most nostalgia for and try to stitch them back into the fabric of a future Haven, with the first thing on my mind being the small town horror vibes.

I think H7 was actually quite good, the only real obstacle to its success was that it felt unfinished and undertested, and it felt like you burnt out before we got there (understandably).

I think the best format for a Redux run would be a pop-up game with a set lifecycle and somebody running a plot to wrap it up before we all remember why things changed.

[Crayon]

Some notes:

Regarding being mindful of your angle of approach, we’re verging on the line between clarifying mechanics and advising optimization, so all I’ll say is that you can deterministically avoid or minimize dangerous/invisible noncardinal spawns by carefully choosing how you approach the mist. This will also solve your problem most of the time if you think nothing is spawning. It is spawning, it’s just spawning on the other side of a wall somewhere.

Mist spawns don’t scale to the number of people at all unless multiple people are in different rooms and manage to trigger a multispawn before getting pulled into a combat instance.

Doom stack spawns only happen if you’re very near to the absolute center of the mist. Difficulty does indeed scale the further you go into ‘wreathed’. Another idea might be having more levels of description for how deep you are, but this might detract from the difficult but very thematic loss of understanding which way the mist thins. Doom stacks only normally happen if you’re way overambitious, crash near dead center in the mist, walk out of a building into near dead center, or the mist’s center sneaks up on top of you when you’re not paying attention.

Mob stagger can be a bit rough, but it can be mitigated with Stamina. A good impmrovement would be requiring mobs to do a certain minimum threshold of damage in order to apply stagger so you don’t get turbo staggerfucked by four kobolds hitting you for 1 damage each assuming they can manage before knockbacking you into the ocean.

I don’t know that ranged mobs are phasing through doors so much as it seems like some are flying up on roofs? I’ve seen frost sprites do that a few times and mysteriously wind up with Z-level distance on me. If medusae are doing it then that’s not cool.

Mob status effects should not stack. This would also be a huge improvement for the some-say-he’s-still-snared issue that’s been cropping up in raids and operations for a very long time.

Rescue respawns seem to be resolved but it does seem to instantly trigger a depth-calibrated spawn on clearing the lair camp which can be problematic.

Butchering is okay, imo, but the kill ownership should probably only apply to Big Game Hunts. With Mist Hunting, it causes more issues than it solves.

I agree that the CXP calculation is punitive to a lot of character types and has perverse efficiency incentives.

Kobolds and rats are actually worth plenty of CXP at low experience and if you’re spawning griffons and gargoyles you’re going way too deep for your britches.

The bigger noob trap for low CXP characters is devourer plants which are a pretty harsh stat-check to going deeper than waist-high, but maybe actually necessarily so to train people to be careful with depth. I hate them and love them at the same time.

[Crayon]

Lots of misinformation and dated information in this thread.

Most of the mob AI issues seem resolved. Mobs spawning on top of you or behind you is incredibly rare. As in, using some obvious tactics to mitigate surprises, I’ve had spawn-on-tops and spawn-behinds happen twice in probably somewhere in the vicinity of 500 spawns? I believe both occasions happened because the mist epicenter shifted on me.

The majority of the time you’re experience a mob “appearing on top of you” what’s actually happening is that the mob is spawning at a noncardinal location concealed by a wall and as you walk around the corner into its view it walks into you. You can avoid this happening by being mindful of your angle of approach relative to the mist’s center and understanding sightlines.

I largely like the system as it stands. I agree with Pingpong that the ankle/waist bands should be a little wider to give people a little more time to react before having a [SPOILER] run them down for 50+ damage a hit. I believe they actually were a little wider at the start but were made smaller at some point, but I could be misrecollecting.

Adjusting drive-pathing to intelligently avoid driving into the mist unless the destination is in it would be a huge QoL change and vastly reduce abductions and crashes. Providing a warning/requiring a confirmation if it is in the mist would be good, too, and ensure the player knows they need to be ready to roll on-arrival.

I do think MJJJ has a point about having places to stop and RP while working your way into the mist. That would be a big boon. That said, I don’t think the random safe-parks/lawns were great either.

There should probably be some mechanism to both let a newly logged in character know that the building they’re in is enveloped by mist when they log in, and to facilitate their leaving short of using escape or owning a horse and being fast. They can/should call players but maybe underground tunnel networks could give people some fun, abolition-era themed venues to escape from misted areas without having to go outdoors, as well as fun access points for Delves.

Because of the exponential nature of mob loot values, any loot that doesn’t need to be butchered, like the necklaces, is always incredibly low value relative to difficulty. These could probably be 2x as valuable and still be substantially worse than other equally hard stuff, but maybe worth the inventory space.

Also kobold (and all mob) knockbacks are cracked out and sometimes whip you hundreds of distance away. This should probably not be the case.

[Crayon]

Also she typed ‘attack Leon’ because she just used double.

[Crayon]

Stitch, for your part, it sounds like you did the best you could with a terribly shitty situation. It’s one of the most unenviable, un-fun positions you can wind up in in this game, and as best as I can tell you navigated it with grace and decorum. I’m sorry for any of the hate you got about it, whether it was from people bothered by Leon’s behavior or by his OOC friends who wanted him ressed.

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