[Miles]

It’s sort of a self-feeding cycle, though.

Bugs and major issues and minor issues alike persist for weeks and months on end which amplifies the frustration from players who are having issues because of that, which feeds into criticism, which feeds into staff burnout, which feeds into the frustration, and on it goes.

I’m not sure how the game’s supposed to get better without actual player feedback that isn’t instantly dismissed or ignored. Nova has a propensity for kneejerk changes based on whatever he’s had a negative experience with most recently and that doesn’t make for great game health on a systemic, holistic level. For example, the unannounced, unacknowledged hard caps on sprint and jump distance that people have been petitioning as a bug for months, which actually nuke several abilities and entire builds/archetypes and which pigeonhole flight/wings as the only viable way to Go Fast. Or the chain-nerfs to AOE attacks which has made the issue with mob density in legion raids so much worse. Or the nerf… to… landmines??????? A meme ability that only like 2-3 players have managed to use with any effect in the game’s entire history.

There are a lot of really genius things about Haven but I don’t think it’s usually many of the systemic design elements. It’s usually stuff like the customize command, or the built-in multidescer, or clothing layering, or any number of things that seem like so much common sense and that we miss when we play other games. I don’t think anybody leaves Haven and misses favor or secrecy or borough elections or any number of mildly incoherent game systems that either don’t really work, brew toxicity, or incentivize weird behavior. I think the only actual major game systems that really stick the landing are combat (when it doesn’t implode on itself) and SRing? Both ancient and heavily refined. New systems need that refinement and you can’t really refine systemic things very well based on subjective personal experience and kneejerk tweaking. It’s also hard to refine systems when you blackbox them and neuter any feedback or bug reporting capacity from players.

I appreciate the hell out of all the work Nova put into New Haven, but it feels like early access. Before I bounced I was running into bugs on pretty much a daily basis, sometimes bugs that wasted hours of my time, and half the time it was impossible to tell the difference between bugs and unannounced, undocumented changes. It’s gonna need a lot of refinement and I hope it gets there, but that refinement isn’t going to happen absent feedback. Absent feedback we’ll get a lot of ??? stuff like ‘landmines inflict 1000% thuggery because feral children might later detonate them on accident when the fight’s over except unannounced and undocumented enjoy the trap nerds’.

[Miles]

@Matthew

Sometimes in situations like that, even remotely, you’ll find that the only way to be sure that the person actually gets a decent scene is to go there and do it yourself. It’s one of the reasons being in any kind of role where you’re responsible for other peoples’ behavior can be such a nightmare, though it gets a lot easier when you have at least a handful of people you can trust to be responsible and delegate with.

@Matias

Given that escape doesn’t work when you’re being RP’d with, and that even with bargain flight running there is a substantial timer before it fires off, I’m not sure what “risk” you’re talking about that requires you to no-rp instapk the victim before they even wake up. There is no such risk. The only “cost” paid is your time. If the victim mouths off then you can just emote and then kill them. The game was specifically designed to eliminate “costs” and “risks” of actually bothering to RP, it’s one of the things Nova did best.

@Lykaia

That’s not really an excuse. I’ve given the offline bodies of some of the biggest trolls the game has seen more attention and effort than it sounds like happened here. There’s really not much of an excuse. Zero RP PKs have actually been reversed in the past. It’s just incredibly bad form.

@Athena

From what’s been written in this thread, the apparent thought is that a mist monster initiated the combat and then you attacked one of the people who then went on to PK. What was the thought process behind attacking the person? Was there some confusion about who initiated the combat? It sounds like they originally thought you did, did you think they did?

There might actually be something to learn from this in that the game may benefit from clarity as to who is initiating combat so there’s less confusion and uncertainty when it starts. That confusion and uncertainty doesn’t really make any sense ICly as people don’t, you know, magically toggle into combat mode without knowing who they’re being attacked by or actually being attacked.

[Miles]

It was relatively viable until AOE got inexplicably chain-nerfed to the point of uselessness.

[Miles]

I’m not talking about those guys either. I have extreme doubts about your cited death justifications, though, dude; none of that checks out with what I know about what’s happened ICly. Entropy is absolutely right that the answer is to look in the mirror and figure out what needs to change.

[Miles]

Combat characters generally aren’t much, if at all, better at combat than non-combat characters. If you mean is it intentionally designed so that it’s impossible to completely avoid combat, though, and I think that’s what you mean, maybe?

I think two changes should shore this up, though, and maybe they’re already planned or in progress, who knows:

1) An underground tunnel travel system for bypassing the mist and getting from building to building. Bootlegging or old subway tunnels etc.
2) The driving autopilot should probably go out of its way to avoid mist when possible and to prompt for confirmation when unavoidable.

[Miles]

I agree with the stated intention of the change, but I do not agree with a lot of the characterization of events over the last week nor do I think the changes themselves actually accomplish the stated intention.

My ideal scenario would be a world in which people do what is fun and makes sense organically for their characters and then to allocate the ‘value’ obtained through those activities with intention and political forethought.

We’ve definitely seen that instead, the borough system made people feel pressured to engage in activities specifically for borough control, and more particularly in a specific sort of activity.

Some activities are worth substantially more than others, the calculus in the political contributions announcement seemed to imply that hunting was the most efficient and primary source of capital; that’s pretty far from true.

There are also functional incentives in how systems like the competition incentives, etc., work that steer people towards some really un-fun and twinky ways to maximize the system. For example, if you’re the first faction allocating resources to a borough, you’re actually punished for that, and if you’re the last, you’re kind of incentivized. It creates a dynamic where you don’t actually want to consistently invest in the same area, you want to surge into an area that’s already contested by two other groups at the eleventh hour and save all of your resources and energy for that last week.

Obfuscating the mechanics is great and all for making it harder for people to figure out how to twink the system and what weird behaviors are incentivized, but those incentives are still there. They’ll likely always be there in some form. The system needs a lot of overhauls and just obfuscating the underlying mechanics won’t prevent people who know where the weak points are from hitting them. For me, it’s a lipstick on a pig change. It’s throwing a tarp over a minefield and then telling people to go play in it. I probably won’t be engaging with the system in any serious capacity beyond what happens incidentally and organically going forward but I absolutely do not expect that to lead to any borough wins.

I also worry that the competition system actually, quite contrarily, incentivizes large and heavily social factions to aggressively cannibalize efforts made by smaller factions at every opportunity, using smaller groups to ‘prime’ boroughs for take-overs.

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