[Vanashis]

There are quite a lot of guesses in this thread as to what staff does and doesn’t do on their own game, which I find a bit surprising, but aside from that there have been posts on the topic of feedback and changes from Nova. I tried to post the links to the old forum topics, but it got automodded, so you’d have to go to the old forums and then FAQ, and then to Town Hall. The topics to check out are ‘Feedback vs Backseat Development’, and ‘Gibberish and anti-play.’ I’m sure there are more threads about the subject that Nova wrote, but I don’t have time to look through them this morning!

Petitions can be made for bugs or anything you think could possibly be a bug. Those are important to submit.

Using ‘make petition’ also has the option to change the type. Valid types are: Bug, Suggestion, Request, Renovate, Missive, and Typo.

It’s so easy to make a suggestion without bringing about a culture of doom and gloom that has been going on in game on an OOC level.

What we’ve been seeing on the OOC channel has not been constructive criticism or sharing suggestions. It’s been I hate this, staff is dumb, other people joining in and talking about what they hate, and it makes me wonder what makes people stay. They are still logging on and playing every day, but they are also complaining as if they are forced to interact with this world that they are not enjoying.

I once woke up to way too many messages in my DMs from a player listing off everything they believed was wrong with Haven and why they hated it. My only response was, “When I don’t like something, I quit doing it, and I find something that I do like.” That’s logical to me. We aren’t in some political situation, a life or death situation needing to defend our people. This is a game… When Miles wasn’t having fun anymore, he left. That makes sense to me.

Games generally require a certain set of mechanics to be followed in order for players to be successful. Professional gamers know exactly when to pop what, when, why, and how which makes them incredibly better at those games than the average Joe. If people want to go to a raid and get into melee combat when a mob of NPCs still has full defences because that is how that player has fun, then they are going to have fun… but they probably aren’t going to win. There’s nothing wrong with doing things out of order if you are there just for the fight and enjoy engaging in combat. if you are looking to win, though, then you’ve got to figure out the strategy. The only thing I really see “wrong” about the raids currently is that not enough players show up anymore (and there can be a huge lack of teamwork when a larger group does arrive). Most people have 3 month attention spans, and they move on to make a character on a new game and interact with that one for a while, so a lot of characters are missing at the moment. However, there are lots of new players, and many opportunities to teach them in an IC manner how to play and why we fight the Legion.

This thread started out about frustrations with current raids. I tried to offer a helpful suggestion on how to make them more enjoyable and doable, because in my experience, these raids are not as difficult as the last iteration of operations. It’s gotten way off course, but I do hope people who want to keep playing can focus on the things they enjoy, work on how to manoeuver around the things they aren’t wild about, be respectful in their feedback and suggestions that they submit to staff, and have some patience.

I hope to continue to RP with those who are still around. We have a wonderful, diverse group here of writers.

[Vanashis]

I don’t know about all of you, but if I were running a MU* and saw people regularly publicly picking apart the systems and complaining, and sharing how they don’t like it or that things need to be done differently, I imagine it would be hard to feel energised about continuing to pour my time and effort into maintaining things.

I assume we all chose to play this game for a reason… Out of hundreds of text-based worlds available, people who tend to stick with Haven do it because there’s truly nothing else quite like it, and a big part of that uniqueness comes from its beautifully designed systems. These systems are not impossible, but they are complex, intentional, and also rewarding to learn. A lot of it is obfuscated, and that is supposed to be for your own benefit. It isn’t our purpose to understand how everything works and why (look at the chaos of how many people tried to find the loopholes to cheat back in H6, or to ensure they had the “best” build, etc, once they had access to the code).

If a person feels strongly about how a system could be done “better,” the wonderful thing is that the former Haven code is open source, so absolutely anyone can build upon it and create their own version of the world they envision. When we play games, we are entering a world created by someone else that they are graciously sharing with us, and not for us to redesign. That isn’t to say players can’t make a suggestion via a petition of implementing something that would truly be fun and cool, and benefit the playerbase as a whole, but the tone generally portrayed on OOC and on the forums isn’t very constructive or helpful.

Designing, coding, and maintaining a MU* is a massive labour of love. I invested years of my free time into one, and when feedback crosses into constant complaint because a design isn’t how someone else would have done it, it can drain the joy from that creative work.

At the end of the day, I think we all want the same thing, and that is for Haven to continue to be a place where creativity thrives, our stories unfold, and players feel inspired to log in. The more we can respect the work that goes into giving us this shared world and focus on the things we love about the game, the stronger we can become as a community, rather than one that is doomy and gloomy. We don’t have to agree on every design choice, as that’s probably humanly impossible, but we can absolutely choose to value the spirit of collaborative storytelling, and give gratitude and understanding to those who give us this game to play. It could be taken away in an instant, after all.

[Vanashis]

@Evalina, operations were altered towards the end of H6, AOE got nerfed, and no matter the difficulty, if no one showed up to oppose your operation, the waves would bring in 60 NPCs at a time. There was still a way to win them with 2 to 3 characters, but you pretty much needed to be able to fly, and then follow precise mechanics.

I won’t bore you all any further with how I believe the raids can be won, but I’m more than willing to chat about it on the OOC channel if anyone wants to discuss it.

[Vanashis]

I know that looks like a lot, but historically, that’s a pretty small mob compared to what operations would bring in if no opposing groups would show up to an operation, and it was simply your group against the NPCs.

The issue is simply that people aren’t attending raids like they used to. I think it is a matter of encouraging others to fight, taking the IC threat seriously, and trying to do something about it. If each faction and society sent in 3 T2 characters each, Legion raids would be more than doable every time.

The other thing is with so many newer players over the last couple of years, there’s often a lack of understanding in mechanics and they don’t know the tips and tricks to deal with mobs, nor do they have the knowledge to give proper instruction when they are trying to command what others should be focused on. As a non-combat build character (for the first time in all of my years on Haven), my character listens to the instructions given in the raids, but on an OOC level I am cringing because many of them are making the wrong calls if they desire to have the upper hand.

There are many things that can be taught within IC groups, from first aid classes to learn the stat of “gadgets” so that they can use triage and then sparring where they learn how to use tasers in proper turn, setting up their myattacks, training the characters in which order they should use those myattacks, performing AOE attacks on mobs further than 10 spaces of a friendly, trying to maintain your distance to keep up those AOE attacks for as long as possible and not having characters run in butt-up against the mobs while the rest are further out, sticking together as closely as possible to triage and move protect, everyone focusing on the same NPC each round when they are in short range in a group and never using AOE in those situations, etcetera, etcetera — the list goes on.

I see a lot of RP opportunities for experienced players with combat build characters to teach others and engage in their faction and/or society teamwork. It can be frustrating and disheartening to lose often, but there’s incentive to train up your armies and rally the troops.

[Vanashis]

P.S.

And also are the responses, “Just give the monster a Fabled, they’ll be back in six weeks,” appropriate, and Is that knowledge characters would know? Would characters feel like they should be providing the monster with a Fabled, knowing that in six weeks the Fabled will return unharmed?

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