[Mirabel]

You were very correct Mirabel. College should award favor too. To both students and teachers given that students are capped in standing in all societies and factions as well. It’s basically saying if you want to contribute to our world feeling like a full and complete world with students and such, you have to suffer and not experience cool things.

I strongly suspect that Windermere was designed by an AI. It’s the result of prompting an AI to draw up the lore for a supernatural college, without giving it much concrete information about the game as a whole. That’s why the sphere is totally disconnected from the rest of the game, tying into absolutely no other features or mechanics. The documentation is that trademark LLM hodgepodge of ultra-generic filler that lacks the human insight to how this actually meshes with the greater context–which, in this case, it doesn’t at all.

As far as I can tell, faculty ranks simply don’t do anything. It’s purely cosmetic.

[Mirabel]

Back when the features of 7.0 were first being announced, I made the following observation:

I get the impression that everyone will have to be part of a faction and compete for control over boroughs. There’s no support at all for anything else. The whole of HavenRPG has seemingly been cooked down to that single venue of play.

And that appears to have been correct. While you’re allowed to play a character that isn’t part of the favor rat-race, it basically means opting out of almost everything that’s new in this version. You’ll be choosing to play a character who is fundamentally irrelevant.

It’s a question of opportunity costs. In previous versions, there wasn’t nearly as much to be gained from the faction treadmill, so that wasn’t what determined whether or not a player mattered. Not to the same extent, at least. Now it’s more like, “do you play a central role in a faction and spend most of your time grinding favor, or are you basically irrelevant as a player?” This is only exacerbated by the fact that players can’t make their own societies, and it costs fifty thousand scheme influence just to make a cult–which, to my knowledge, nobody has done so far, or even seriously contemplated doing.

Combined with the fact that the college sphere is more watered-down than ever and truly serves no purpose beyond social roleplay for funsies, being connected to literally no other aspects of the game at all, the end result is that 7.0 is a game that revolves around competing for squares on the map by being the best at wrangling a set of highly opaque mechanics where the only real way to tell if you’re doing it right is to ask other players if they’re getting more favor out of it than you are.

[Mirabel]

It does really add to the feeling that 7.0 is for combat and PvP, and not much else. Playing a character that doesn’t revolve around those things almost feels like you’re playing the game in a way that wasn’t intended. While there wasn’t significantly more on offer for non-combat/PvP people in previous versions, the social side of the game was helped along significantly by the fact that the playing field was a small town instead of a gigantic city.

[Mirabel]

So far, I’ve had it happen from:

1) Wonky pathfinding taking me into a misty area for no good reason

2) Going to a store and then the mist had migrated to the area while I was in there

3) Running an encounter, and then you emerge in whatever place the target was at the time, which then turned out to be in the mist

4) The fact that typoing an address drives you to whatever intersection corresponds to the number you put in, i.e. ‘drive 31 maroner avenue’ takes you to intersection 31 instead of telling you there’s no such address

Some of these have happened more than once, too. One does not need to play carelessly or fail to take necessary precautions in order for this to happen. While it’s possible to be lucky enough not to run into the problem, it very much is a problem, and one that needs addressing.

[Mirabel]

I mean, it’s just silly at this point. Is 7.0 intentionally designed such that non-combat characters aren’t really an option? And from what I can tell, combat characters aren’t spared the insufferable fate of “oh, the mist migrated to where you are? Here’s a defeat and a day or two in the hospital. Enjoy.”

This is so disruptive and – unless you take great pains to never ever go anywhere that this can occur – so inescapable that it’s just daft. This happens on a regular basis despite doing as much as can reasonably be expected to avoid it. I’m made to feel like I’m playing the game wrong because I didn’t make a warrior character who goes around armed and armored at all times.

This cannot possibly be what was intended with this version, and if it was, I think it was a great big blunder. Whether it’s the pathfinding driving you into the mist, or the mist migrating to your area while you’re in a store, or an encounter taking you to some arbitrary place where the mist currently is, there are so many ways in which you can be forced into an inescapable and unwinnable fight.

This is not nearly avoidable enough, and I’m tired of being repeatedly forced into the hospital for long periods of time because of it. This is just obnoxious.

[Mirabel]

At the very least, if there’s meant to be an army of monsters rampaging through the city 24/7, there needs to be clear demarcation between the inner and outer boroughs and a setting that prevents you from accidentally driving into the latter. It’s obnoxious having to research the location of every address before driving to make sure it isn’t in the mist, not to mention the risk of having the mist move to your area if you dare to spend any time in the outer boroughs. It really does feel like the game is designed from the assumption that all characters are expected to be monster-battling survivors who go around armed and armored at all times, with very little room for any character concept where that doesn’t fit.

And on top of fixing the pathfinding, can we please also make it so that if you typo an address and write ‘drive 25 maroner avenue’, it doesn’t drive you to intersection #25 on the map instead of 25 Mariner Avenue? It should only take you to an intersection of you type ‘drive 25’ (or whatever) with nothing else after it.

[Mirabel]

And on that note, my calendar event for today is postponed for the aforementioned reason.

[Mirabel]

2. Car pathfinding is tricky and will (as of the last time I checked) take you through the mist even if it could have gone around it to reach the destination, leading to lots of car crashes and so many horses on grid. Not that horses are bad, but we might get some more variety back if cars only crashed if the destination specifically is in the mist or some other measure like that.

Yes, this. Playing a non-combat character is almost impossible as it stands. Anytime you drive anywhere, there’s like a 20% chance that the game sends you in the wrong direction and into the mists where you will wreck your car and get attacked by monsters. It’s honestly so bad that it’s chipping away at my desire to play.

Just now, driving from the Ivory Quarter to a Downtown shop, the game decided to take me in the stark opposite direction and drive northwest instead of southeast, into the mist. Hey presto, wrecked car and unconscious with a severe wound an hour before my calendar event. And it’s not the first time this happens.

Combat with monsters should be reasonably avoidable, otherwise it’s a game where all characters must be warriors. That certainly isn’t something I want. I actually think the whole idea of dangerous monsters constantly roaming the city streets at all times, rampaging from borough to borough, is really bizarre and extremely unrealistic. There’s no way to suspend one’s disbelief enough to accept that this is a city people live in and lead at least relatively normal lives. If fighting for our lives against monsters is meant to be an everyday fact of life in New Haven, the city’s makeup and basic concept is completely at odds with the way the game is played.

In previous iterations, monsters were in the forest. That was believable. It made sense, and it was avoidable for those of us who don’t play characters where battling monsters with swords and guns matches the concept. The town itself was at least superficially realistic–you could see how there would be coffee shops, a school, people going to night clubs or the beach. Those things are entirely at odds with the idea of a city where bands of deadly mythical creatures mill about in the streets all day, every day, attacking everything in sight. That calls for a post-apocalyptic survival horror setting.

[Mirabel]

I gained RPXP for the first time yesterday, but still have not gained karma in 7.0 despite doing activities that should award karma. And due to the -100/day decay, I’m in the negatives which prevents me from spending my 25k personal karma, so I’m stuck at tier 1. My petition was marked ‘investigated’ with no comment, and later deleted without a solution to the problem, so I don’t know what to do at this point. As it stands, I’m permanently limited to T1.

It seems like a clear bug that karma debt will prevent you from spending your personal karma because it subtracts any negative karma you have from the pkarma pool. I have 25k pkarma, but since I also have -1000 karma, the game thinks I have 24k total karma and tells me I don’t have enough to tier up.

[Mirabel]

The sheer number of new systems and major changes is definitely a little overwhelming, but I suppose that just takes time to get used to. There’s a staggering amount of bugs that make it difficult to figure out how things are meant to work.

The AI NPCs are very impressive and I think that could be used in more places. With a grid as enormous as this, it would really help fill the city out, since it’s essentially almost totally empty outside of a few ever-changing hotspots. Haven has always lacked a meaningful NPC presence, and this can be a great solution to that. I’d love to see anything from interactive shopkeepers to summonable demons, even if it’s just for flavor and RP without any mechanical impact.

Windermere is a little plain and generic. The campus is almost too realistic and thus kind of flavorless. There’s no obvious gathering place, no hotspots, and having like eight entrances leaves the place without a natural funnel for for player traffic. The lore behind the sphere is also kind of barebones, but we can work with it to build on that with our characters over time. I had just hoped for more of a hook that might give the place some weight. As it stands, there’s basically no reason to ever be there outside of calendar events. The room descriptions are very pretty, but the place is a bit dull.

[Author]

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