[Ama86]

Lord almighty, I do know how to spell.

[Ama86]

Goodness gracious. As much as I’ve disliked H7, Mathias and the player behind that character has been reasonable at every turn. While it has been some two or three months since I played, he always stood out as someone who was pretty good. While I found him a little milquetoast at times, it’s absurd to me that anyone count call him some who needs to “learn how to rp.” He was perhaps not the very best I ever met, but he was fine. I found him to be a 7/10.

I did quit playing some two or three months ago, so I can’t rightly say that I know what has happened since; but I will say that pof Matias was profoundly, almost boringly well-behaved and at no point ever gave me the impression of someone who was up to no good. What his character is up to isn’t my business, but the player seems like a well-behaved persion. If the person I’m replying to has evidence to the contrary, it should be presented.

[Ama86]

– The city is far too big. As Ambrose said, it should have been half this size at most. You never run into anyone organically and the game feels like a ghost town at all times. Social gathering in general never seemed to take off on H7. People might get together for actual calendar events, but aside from that, there just hasn’t really been a culture of hanging out in accessible places. I think the combined factors of the city’s bloated size, the oppressive mist discouraging travel, and the heavy gameplay shift towards conquering boroughs has left little room for organically emergent roleplay. It just felt difficult to meet people, a problem that is poisonous to a roleplaying game.

– As a non-combat player, the mist was fairly ruinous to my enjoyment. It made a large segment of the city off-limits at any given time, even just for a quick visit, and it meant I constantly had to cross-reference addresses with the player-made excel map *and* then the website mist map anytime I wanted to go anywhere. Wanna check out a store? First note the address, then open up the excel map to see where that is, and then the website map to see if there’s mist there. If there is, well, then I just can’t go there, simple as that. The goofiness of half the population riding horses, and seeing extravagantly-dressed, bling-wearing 9.5 characters with “they smell like a horse,” was also really daft. Furthermore, misspelling an address with the drive command will usually send you driving senselessly into the mist and put your car in the shop for a few days, you in some monsters’ clutches, and subsequently to the hospital with a severe wound. After the fifth or sixth time, I subconsciously stopped wanting to leave my home borough at all.

– Windermere was an enormous disappointment. I’m sure I’ve already complained enough about it elsewhere, but suffice to say that it feels like something from a totally different game crudely grafted onto Haven without any attempt to make it match. It has no synergy with the rest of the game. I don’t know if the AI that generated it was given no information about Haven’s lore and systems or simply neglected to include that in the result, but it doesn’t tie into anything and has none of the features that it needs, and which the school sphere had in the past. It’s the product of a machine that knows nothing about the actual game and just spat out its interpretation of “a spooky gothic college,” so it isn’t connected to any of Haven’s lore or mechanics or the activities that the game guides players towards.

– While it’s a matter of personal taste, I can certainly say that the constant vying for boroughs was not appealing to me at all, so the fact that H7 revolves almost exclusively around that made it difficult to like this version. Everything else took a backseat to the dull minigame of borough control, and when I decided to opt out of it, it soon became apparent that this made my character largely irrelevant. The faction I was in also dropped any form of contact with me when they realized I wasn’t valuable in that ratrace. Since it’s the only real purpose of factions, you’re kind of dead weight if you’re not interested in that.

– I’m sure an LLM can be used to good effect in some parts of the game, but its inclusion in seemingly every aspect of H7 felt weird. The lack of human emotion in room descriptions and documentation was palpable. I don’t want an AI to take over my character and emote for me on patrols. I don’t trust an AI to interpret my roleplay and base its application of the invitation mechanic on machine learning. The AI NPCs were interesting at first, but when they started talking about characters who weren’t present and events they couldn’t possibly have witnessed, it made me wonder if they’re actually monitoring the whole game and able to “know” and talk about anything and everything. Felt like an unpleasant security issue.

– The new forum is awful and the new site in general has brought a weird sort of distance between the game itself and the community around it. While Haven never had the liveliest forum culture, there’s almost none in H7. Questions in Ask the Staff get answered once a month if at all, most threads never get replied to or get 1-2 replies and no meaningful discussion, and a number of players have reported being unable to log into the website altogether. I couldn’t until I changed my game password, for whatever reason. By and large, H7 has felt like something that was half-finished and then essentially abandoned. It doesn’t feel like a game that’s being looked after.

That’s a lot of negatives without any positives, but I don’t really have any positives, which is the reason I stopped playing. Given recent sentiments on here, I suspect a lot of players have negative feedback that they’ve held back because the forum has been so dead and because of the unpleasantness of the automoderator randomly deleting posts it deems “not positive enough.” H7 hasn’t felt like a healthy thing. It has felt like trying to make the best of bad weather. There has been a certain lifelessness about it.

[Author]

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