[Dream]

I think its absurd to have to pretend that we didn’t hate Doom or didn’t hate Secrecy just because we hate the wild hunt even more than those mind-bendingly stupid mechanics.

I think the player base has voted with their time and stepped away from Haven because Haven doesn’t respect any of our time. Of all the stupid ass ‘turnover’ mechanics that have been tried. We’ve truly topped it this time.

In h8 maybe we just have our characters spontaneously vanish after 500 hours. Or our accounts get locked out for 6 months of a year to ensure ‘turnover’.

[Dream]

These forums are atrocious, you can not edit previous post it seems.

I was going to add that the wild hunt could be marginally improved if it didn’t nuke t2 characters. T2 characters have always enjoyed improved doom timers and better secrecy so I have no idea why their wild hunt timer puts them within the realm of two kidnappings a year AND a hefty 10,000 karma hit for the trouble.

[Dream]

Nova tends to shut down when ‘enough voices echo’ a sentiment regarding game mechanics that are questionable at best. I’m fairly confident that if there wasn’t such a hostile reaction to the wild hunt and it’s effects during the holidays, we may have gotten more information and a chance for something constructive to come out of it.

Would this have changed anything? No, I’ve never seen these turnover mechanics like secrecy or doom get even the smallest of adjustments to make them less brutally painful to the player base.

No one has ever once praised these mechanics either because they have never served the function that they intend which is turnover.

[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.

[Dream]

I made a total of 3 calendar events in h7 and every single last one of them got covered in mist and forced to relocate. I put forward a suggestion in a petition to just have the mist avoid calendar events if those events were made at least 2 days ahead. I don’t know how such a thing could be gamed but maybe its not an easy thing to implement.

One thing that really hurts is that banked karma is not earned back through regular roleplay. It was super slow to get your karma back this way but it was inevitable you would get it back if you roleplayed. That was YOUR karma. You worked for it, once you had it, you expected to keep it and use it till the end of an iteration. But now you have to earn it back and it comes back slow. Even an encounter is liable to give you about 1000 banked karma back at a time. It’s better than nothing, but I wonder what the point of this was.

One of the major driving forces behind secrecy, doom, the wild hunt, etc is to turn over characters and keep the game fresh and dislodge characters who stick around too long in positions. But at the same time, the process of moving onto the next character is punishing, it eats karma, it is hard to make it back (harder than ever before). It eats xp of course. It is generally just a really painful process to go on to the next concept..even though that seems to be the goal of all the other expiry mechanics that get tried out.

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On the positive side I really enjoy no sanctuary, I don’t think there has been a murder fest.

I really enjoy the content system. Remember the time we all tried to stick our preferences in the fingerset system and that was apparently a bad move? Well now we broadcast what we are into and open to all the time and as long as the other person is also interested in the same things, they will know it. I’ve had more proper victim scenes in h7 then in the last 3 iterations combined.

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Something I’m skeptical on: Resurrection and healing maims is too cheap and the negative effects are not properly felt.

[Dream]

I’ve noticed the LLM reuse the same Dr Vasquez character a few times. In some ways I like the continuity. In other ways, that b-i-t-c-h needs to chill on summoning demons.

[Dream]

Been a while since I dropped my 2 cents.

I think the fact people are complaining that they are gaining invitation through rping with t3s highlights one of the longest running problems with Haven. People don’t like to be exposed to danger and death. The entire concept of invitation is that you are INVITING bad things to happen to you when you hang out with people who are bad. Everyone forgets that anyone who is t3+ is bad. Tier is directly related to corruption and you are more corrupt the more high tier you are.

If you hang out with drug dealers and criminals in RL you are hundreds of times more likely to be victim to drug/gang violence even if you personally don’t participate in the crimes or violence itself. If you live in a bad neighborhood full of bad people, you are more likely to get into trouble. This is how invitation is sort of represented. You are hanging out with bad influences and its going to bite you eventually. This is what momma warned you about.

Iff we accept this reality as a pbase, I imagine most people who went t3 will want to drop back down to t2 so that they no longer push away people from RPing with them. But instead of doing this, people want to complain that the system isn’t working for them in hopes that Nova will change it. But I’ll tell you something in my many long years in Haven. No amount of bitching has ever made Nova do anything 😛

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There is an alternative route here. That route is to simply accept invitation. Accept the unexpected. Accept the things that can happen to you and try to enjoy it. We have content warnings now so nothing is going to happen that is going to go too far. Bad faith actor Billy-bob isn’t going to be able to rape your PC because you gained invitation.

If anything invitation is a bit like what Doom could’ve and should’ve been. It’s potentially a ticking timer that leaves you defenseless when it completes and lets all your characters choices come back to haunt them. I always advocated that doom shouldn’t kill you, it should just strip you of your sanctuary and let things happen as they may.

Now we sort of get that with invitation but with the added bonus that it’s honestly avoidable. You don’t need to gain invite. You don’t need to be best friends with high tiers and if those high tiers are offended they don’t have rp partners and butt-buddies. Then they should tier down and play the social game they want to play.

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On a tangent, vampires and werewolves have always been murderers! You can not play one and not be a murderer. Your existence means you will will kill some innocent at some point. The only way not to be a murderer is to feed on animals or go chained to take the massive debuff that gives you. This is how these archetypes are played. I’ve seen all manner of silly play, vampires who never have accidents and ignore the npcs they wake up with. Or werewolves who pretend they take magic pills on full moon that let them stay sane.

It doesn’t matter what tier you are with these archetypes. You are a net detriment on society and your existence is actively harmful. Play it as such or take the appropriate habit and penalty.

[Dream]

I’m wholly impressed by the LLM driven NPC’s and Patrols. I’ve been scolded by my base NPC’s for squatting and not being professional. The one patrol I experienced was just amazing. Gone are the days of repeating echos in a spirit banishing where you just have to make shit up. Now the even morphs and reacts to you and has a conclusion.

Everything about the LLM content is amazing.

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The grid IS crazy immense. But as we are up to 80 players active, maybe thats not too big anymore.

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Bugs aside, this new version of Haven is fantastic. The lookfor system seems interesting. I had a good social meet thanks to it as well.

[Author]

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