[Evalina]

I did quit too. I considered coming back before, but saw there was no one left and a pretty irritating bug was affecting me and I got swept into the faenapping thing and just kind of didn’t

[Evalina]

It is worth mentioning evermore was right on one thing, unless this was fixed, tells were incredibly broken while I was playing and their words suggest it still is. I had friends who I tell’d frequently, where we both confirmed tells were on, were we had each other added, and it was still a roll of the dice who could tell who. Some I couldn’t tell. Some couldn’t tell me (and I assure you my settings were right, I am obsessive about that kind of thing).

So I kind of get in some cases why people use newbie to ask people stuff that should be in tells – tells sometimes don’t work even if both players want them to and not everyone is OK sharing their discord.

[Evalina]

…ugh can’t edit messages but I want to clarify this isn’t me supporting breaking the rules. It’s Nova’s game, Nova decides what is for what. Making a one-off joke or comment in Newbie isn’t going to cause a nuclear reaction, but it’s simply not a chat channel, it’s meant for just questions, answers, advice. And doing anything else in there is kind of disrespecting the game Nova gives you for free.

[Evalina]

Ah, Haven. Even with a handful of players left, still arguing heatedly about how to use it. Never change 😀

But I have to say, the least toxic time I’ve seen in Haven was when OOC was just available to everyone. Having OOC available to newbies made newbies have a much easier time getting to know people and made veterans less able to turn OOC into a toxic echo chamber. It was nice. As someone who pays for OOC, I found the quality much less pleasant when it went back to being exclusive.

[Evalina]

Not playing right now to be clear – I figured I am not really the target audience and kind of gradually left – but I think the answer is really simple.

If you’re having fun, keep having fun.

If you’re not having fun and you don’t see anything quick you can do to have fun, move on. Plenty of fun things out in the world.

Probably so long as there’s people having fun, all is well. But stuff like statistics is all sideshow to your enjoyment. It’s tools. If you’re looking at the numbers to the point it ruins your enjoyment, stop looking at the numbers. If you’re not enjoying yourself overall……

I feel the same new char wise by the way. A haven character is a massive amount of effort. I am not motivated to play again because of the game – I am solely because I put so much effort in and I feel bad letting it slip. Sometimes Haven is really beautiful, but it’s hard to experiment or try something fresh when everything comes with a workload. Even just coming back having to find RP partners again and praying I don’t end up disliking it this time…

I do wonder though, what do people love about Haven at this point? And perhaps more aptly, what do you love about Haven?

[Evalina]

Going to be honest, I checked in, saw my 3-1 was faenapped after a month or three break, logged right back out.

Some other bugs didn’t help, but yeah.

[Evalina]

Some people told me they did in fact get a cost for resisting an imprint.

Which is quite strange – I resisted multiple, including some I honestly expected to potentially coma my char, none of it cost me anything.

I petitioned it ages ago, it’s been a while but I thiiiink the response was ‘Not Enough Information’?

I remember thinking at the time it does seem like it’s unintended based on Nova’s response, but also I had no idea what he wants from me exactly so…

[Evalina]

When running anything, from a mud to a public bathroom (which has more in common than I intended now I think about it a bit…) you’re going to get criticism. That’s part of the process. There’s a difference however in, ‘This thing you did isn’t fun’ and ‘You’re doing a terrible job’.

We can simultaneously appreciate the work Nova does, and provide feedback that can be scathing at times. While being down on everything may demotivate him, instead showering him with praise will mislead him (and probably end up demotivating him when he starts wondering why despite doing everything right, it doesn’t work out the way he wants to)

Providing feedback is a sign of people being invested and caring, which is usually a very positive thing. It’s often the same people who will give comprehensive feedback that also are happy to praise new things they like. The opposite of love isn’t hate but apathy, and all that. There’s also a vast difference between, ‘I would prefer this’ and ‘I think this isn’t working’. It’s important to seperate the two.

There’s plenty about H7/6 I don’t prefer. I’m not private about that. But I also recognize that for who the game is intended for – it’s veered in that direction much more. Just, that hasn’t been me for a while now, which seems intentional. Which makes me a bit sad, but life is life. Still on that decision whether to take it as it is or not.

Conversely there’s a lot about H7 I do like. Same about H6. I always thought MyHaven was a great addition, I love how the LLM is used, dream scenarios are oodles of fun and I think the grid is absolutely fantastic.

Conversely, there’s things I perceive to be flaws. Nova may disagree – but say, the new patrols, I’ve lookfor active’d about a week or three and got a single llm patrol and 1 person it keeps wanting me to engage with.

Likewise raids/operations. The way you describe them – you need to use specific mechanics and have flight? Sorry, but that sounds less like fun puzzles to be solving every raid and more like ‘They’re balanced in a way you either know how to cheese them in a way that is probably quite repetitive or you’re going to lose’. I think if that’s a widely shared view point and not just you poorly communicating how operations went H6, that probably indicates some sort of issue. Be that issue how it’s balanced, how it’s designed, or how it’s communicated to players / causing them to engage with it, who knows. Or maybe an issue of me not understanding why that is in fact the way it is meant to be.

Conversely these raids haven’t felt challenging in a fun ‘Figure it out!’ way. It’s mostly been a case of either having some extremely good raiders along (like Ambrose who is a monster at combat mechanically) and some really good utility skills, or you just kind of exist to lose. You can try to draw them away to buy a bit of time and do a few other clever things, but most of the time…

Is that intended? Maybe. But Nova probably hasn’t the faintest clue how these things feel and play unless he spots people talking about them. He has a life, he’s busy, his logging is kind of shitty I think and I doubt he has any meaningful statistics on player engagement and behavior. He either hears it from us, or he probably won’t hear at all how it’s playing. There’s absolutely issues in the game that existed for half a decade or perhaps more that simply put he never knew were there. He does not have the time to try every command he programs in, let alone to track how we interact with them and combine them.

So I’d say feedback is quite necessary. And that can perhaps feel demotivating sometimes because people are more likely to think ‘I dont like this, lets share that’ multiple times than ‘I like this’. Usually ‘Oooh, cool’ is a one time reaction while, ‘Ugh, this sucks’ is a daily thing.

We don’t really know Nova’s design goals for raids. But it is true we’ve been losing quite a few of them – it /feels/ like I’ve been losing most of the ones I’ve been in, and I certainly try just about anything short of making an optimized build – and I would say that if the expectation is that in the long run we’ll need someone with flight and a specific strat to win every raid, that’s probably going to work a lot more to demotivate me, at least, than it is to entertain me. That doesn’t sound fun to me at all. Right now I am not enjoying Raids as much as I did operations.

Part of this is that a lot of the time I feel like I lose in a way that is so overwhelming that there’s not much I could have done differently to win. Losing by a hair is fun. Winning because of a clever play is fun. Losing because a spawnwave instantly blasted away the core of your team? yeah, not fun. Not for me, at least. I think it’s entirely okay if not every raid can be won without some kind of play like someone rushing the item while everyone else is gunned down and tries to buy time.

I think it’s pretty unfun if that is every raid. Clutching victory from the jaws of defeat is only fun if that doesn’t feel like /the/ way to win, to me. I feel like there’s a balance there that older versions failed to achieve in one direction (with operations often basically just being deleting the bullet sponges with the objectives often an annoying timesink until, apparently, end of H6) and we currently might be failing in the other direction (with tricks and plays to get the objective done being the only realistic way to win).

But who knows? Maybe this is how Nova wants it to be. He won’t tell us, so all we can do is share what we think, how we feel, and what we’d like to see. He can listen, or leave it. I’d hope he’s not taking it as a personal slight when people don’t see eye to eye on him on his design, especially when he’s often not one of the people actively engaging with his design. As he put it once, though I am sure I am getting the words wrong if not the meaning, if something was to happen to Haven, we’d lose a game we spend tons of time with, he’d mostly get some hours of his week back. Sometimes he does play it, but he’s probably never going to play it as much as we are. Which is fine. And it is very nice of him he works on the game despite that. But if people don’t speak up, he simply will not know much of the time.

Of course the key to that is doing so respectfully without suggesting he is dumb, lazy, uncaring or whatever. But the ball is kind of in his court to ban people who do so (and I really hope he does, because if they do it to him, they’re absolutely also behaving that way to the rest of us).

And sure, everyone who disagrees can also just go and make a new game. I think that’d render this one pretty bad though. In my opinion, passion is what keeps a game flowing in interesting ways, a game is started by a dev and in a way completed by the player, who fills in the dots and actually renders the game from a theoretical prototype into an experience. Players have a tendency to see games they love and invest time in as ‘their’ game too. And I think Nova doesn’t like that very much going by his past statements. But it isn’t something they do out of malice. In fact, it’s probably the greatest compliment you can hope to achieve – you managed to make something that resonated sufficiently for people to feel attached, protective and possibly even nurturing over it.

Either way, if he doesn’t want topics where people pick apart his designs, he can say so and people will stop doing so. I know I’d stop engaging at least. But from my perspective, it’s healthy. People aren’t whinging about stuff they haven’t tried or implying bad things about Nova. They’re sharing their experience, opinions and desires concerning a system they’re actively participating in on the regular. What’s wrong with that?

[Evalina]

@Vanashis Ah, I did not know that, sorry.

Sounds like that renders the game pretty miserable in low periods though….

[Evalina]

@Vanashis I think one important thing to note is that operations’ difficulty was set by players.

I never had issues winning low difficulty operations even with just 2 or 3 people.

The legion scales, but does so with such aggression… Right now the only way to win most of them is to keep the legion busy while someone else fulfills the objective, and even that fails much of the time. I don’t think that’s per-se a negative thing, it certainly makes the objective actually relevant opposed to past iterations where it was often done after the operation was already won.

I think adding a bit more soldiers would probably be a good thing. Or even returning a simpler / less busted version of manpower (just give every society 5 per week or so capping at 15, substract 2 per borough they own, done) and letting societies themselves pick which raids they consider worth spending these on.

[Evalina]

Honestly I don’t know context or whatever roleplay happened here, I am just a bit shocked by the callousness on display in this thread.

The reason not to kill a character nilly-willy isn’t because they cost karma or whatever. It’s because people invest time and effort into stories and generally it’s best to either engage positively or not at all. Death can be a good end to a story and part of an arc for another, but death for the sake of death just takes away from the game and adds nothing.

I am not sure why anyone would be so eager to kill. If it’s because they were in your view bad then just call that out, (as @lykaia did, thank you!) but I struggle to see why anyone would read this thread, read how people think about lieutenants and pking, and consider spending hours to days to weeks to months of their precious time trying to create a compelling lieutenant while the attitudes are what they are.

They’re meant to be rabble rousers and impress how bad the 63rd is. I think making the leap from ‘They’re meant to be really evil!’ to ‘So we should kill them!’ sure is consistent but boy is it unfun. The game flies, lives and dies, by its villains. Something this game, I would argue, has been sorely lacking in recent iterations. Surely we can have enough consideration to not normalize murdering the few people who choose to do so – a lieutenant (a good one) is effort just like a normal player is. And sure the barrier to murdering them should be lower. But I think the game would still be a lot better if we’d kept in mind ‘hey, we could really use some good lieutenants to make the 63rd more than a piece of text that means we lost favor, let’s encourage or at least not pee in the cheerios of whomever is giving that a shot’.

I think expecting them to be clique tools is assuming the worst. I certainly hope we’ll have the good faith to play lieutenants for the purpose of impressing the big bad legion, and engaging with them in a way that keeps a ball rolling, whilst they might fill in roles needed by the playerbase (e.g. fleshformer lieutenants) without serving specific pcs / ooc friends.

But good faith starts on both sides. Maybe Athena did something to earn themselves a bit of bad faith, maybe not. I don’t know. But I find this general discussion horrifyingly inconsiderate of antagonists.

And yeah, doing 0 RP on a kill is just… At least bring in others so they have a story about it, ideally. Publicly execute someone by hanging citing the legion’s crimes if you’re a bit evil. You know? There’s a lot of potential fun here and instead a character is just cast into the void, all the cost none of the benefit. I don’t think that’s very fun for anyone…

[Evalina]

???

They are roleplay generators, antagonists. We’re incentivised to kill monster guests but certainly the polite thing is to let them do some story if they’re trying that.

I don’t know what your source is on their existence spawning NPC Lt’s but that’s not in any helpfile I know of (?) and sounds unlikely anyway unless Nova intends for us to PK every last Lieutenant on the grid at all times. Which would ruin the point.

Speaking of ruining the point.

This sounds bizarre to me? Why would anyone put effort in telling story and creating compelling villains if you’ll deem them ‘kill targets’ and get rid of their effort ASAP with no thought or care about whatever they may be planning. Which presumably would have been RP, perhaps even fun. These guests exist to be villains – villains don’t generally exist to just be shot, but to tell a story with arcs and drive through it other people’s story and world. If it was just about murder then I implore you to look at the wonderful commands lieutenants have and the way they can completely ruin your day using them. They do not, in fact, need to fight you in the mist (or anywhere) to stomp you if they feel like it.

Sorry, I really hope there’s some context here, because if we’re just deleting people because ‘Well we’re supposed to’ then that’s a serious WTF to me. Like, consider your fellow players, even a monster does put effort in their monster. There’s a reason we usually let them show that effort and talk a bit, when possible… And lieutenant guests aren’t monsters. They’re evil yes, but evil like the Hand is evil, just, slightly more so. Are we going to PK T5s too once they get on the grid?

[Evalina]

I don’t know the situation but it stands out as strange to me that killing seems to be the goal here and roleplay the optional sidequest. I presume there’s more to this unsuitable for this forum that makes this discussion maybe hard to have (?)

[Evalina]

Game has a memory leak -> uses too much memory -> server runs out of memory -> everything else on the server stops working.

The whole game + forums + old forums are all hosted on the same physical machine I am pretty sure, so this happens.

[Evalina]

I figure this might be handy until Nova gets time to respond, this is from a note he did in H6:

There seems to be some confusion around hypnotise amensia. This ability lets you make someone
remember an event as if it happened in a dream, that’s it. It doesn’t allow you to target something
more than an event, and it doesn’t stop the person from figuring out that the ability was used on
them. This is a basic ability used to help cover up the supernatural, it has next to no utility on
the supernaturally aware who know that it exists since they will reasonably conclude if they had a
dream of you beating them up and they have bruises the next day that you beat them up and used it on
them. Memory potions can be used to meaningfully remove memories but even these will usually fail
after a few days on T2s and higher. There is deliberately no way in the game to meaningfully remove
memories long term from more important characters with sanc.

[Author]

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