[Ama86]

Best of luck. We’ve all enjoyed many years of Haven under your initiative. We appreciate that. I don’t much know what to make of Chinese waixu, but if that’s where your inspiration has taken you, bene. Please attempt to be more present in that than you have in H7.

[Ama86]

You won’t get answers to those questions. This version of Haven has been abandoned. No real amount of effort was ever put into it, so we were all fooled when we thought it was worth our time. It wasn’t. Your mistake is believing that your efforts would be paid back in kind. They will not. Now, with the announcement of a “new game,” it is abundantly clear that it’s a waste of time to keep up appearances in Haven.

I’ve asked questions of this upcoming new game, but one must wonder if it is worth one’s time. People with more time on their hands are invited to playtest it. I hope to hear that it was worth their time. I hope to hear that it is a breath of fresh air. I just don’t predict it.

[Ama86]

I would like to elaborate on my question. It may have seemed hostile and trollish at first.

AI can be used to great effect in some fields. It cannot yet be used to great effect in arts and literature. While it may seem far-fetched to attach a label like ‘art and literature’ to something as sordid as what we do in our microscopic community of MUD writers, the fact remains that we have yet to see an AI that captures the spirit of a game like this. It certainly failed to capture H7 and instead made a mockery of it, saddling us with cheap-feeling real estate and bland documentation. I (we? idk) do not want that. We do not want the soulless, hamfistedly misinterpreted ideas that an AI concocts from a prompt fed to it. We deserved better for H7, but we got what I just described.

Then there’s the separate issue of bugs. I’m no programmer, but I get the distinct feeling that H7 was coded also by an LLM. This will have been the reason for the countless bugs that plagued the version and largely caused it to fail. I bowed out early, but for the first six months, it seemed like every system was faulty. Everything was done wrong. Every calculation was incorrect. Was that because you got an AI to code it all for you?

Is this new game created with more seriousness, or is it more of the above?

[Ama86]

Did you make it, or did an AI?

[Ama86]

Let me reiterate in particular that you have here a game that died because it was saddled with a punitive mechanic that made people feel like it was not worth their time to continue, and was then faced with a rapidly dwindling population, but now the main topic of conversation is that people are saying the wrong things on the only social channel that is available to all players. Oh, what a hardship!

If you want this ship to emerge like the Flying Dutchman in that pirate movie where it had clearly already sunk, as H7 has, you cannot afford to bicker about whether this person or that is misusing a chat channel that is surely barren because nobody plays the bloody game. Where are your priorities?

[Ama86]

We all quit because 7 was shite, but it has always been normal to see the occasional bit of banter in newbie. As long as nobody went overboard and tried to transform it into the new OOC, it was never a problem. When this version first released, there was all manner of talk in there that was not at all in line with the diehard notions of ‘it must be a newbie asking or somebody answering that.’ When did this community become so regimented? Was that why it died out?

[Ama86]

I expect the intended goal was to keep the game from getting clogged up with high-tier characters who never went away and never lost any power. Same thing that Doom was meant to do. And just like Doom, it was wildly unpopular to the point where many would rather not play Haven at all than deal with it. If anything the Wild Hunt was even worse than Doom since it kicks in so early and often. Thus far, it appears to happen every five months. If that’s how long you can expect to have your character before it gets slammed with the “you need to be less powerful” hammer, it’s no wonder everyone quit over it.

Setting aside the unpopular concept of characters being forcibly neutered by the game, it was also a total misjudgement to have it happen so often, and for the first one to kick in just a handful of months into H7’s runtime. If I recall, it was deemed a bug that the first Wild Hunt caught so many people, but it would still have been far too early even if it caught only half as many.

I always felt like the whole issue of tier bloat could have been solved by making the lower tiers less rubbish. H7 even took some steps of the way towards that with the ability to buy additional focus points and such, but we never even really got to see if that would have worked to stave off the tier bloat because the Wild Hunt rolled through just as people were finding their feet, knocked everyone over like bowling pins, and then most of the playerbase saw no reason to play a game where that’s going to happen regularly.

[Ama86]

Turns out that you can massage a sentence to overcome the wildly arbitrary nature of the forum’s dear, benevolent automoderator. That’s what comes of leaving the game all up to an AI. In any case, I won’t carry out any further experiments. Just stop gaslighting other players by lying about what they see every time they log in!

I promise this is the last time I post here. I just had to see just how harebrained the dear, admirable automoderator is.

[Ama86]

The automoderator automoderated me for saying it, but I’ll try again, because the automoderator isn’t right: no, there isn’t any such thing as a natural decline in player numbers in the beginning of autumn. There is no such thing as a “jump-start of the who list,” with 29 players online on a Saturday evening. Nobody is served well by calls of ‘all is well, stop worrying.’ because the reason for the problem is very much known, and insisting it isn’t real doesn’t help anybody.

[Ama86]

We’re at the end of January. Holiday season is long past. Nobody refrains from playing a game because it was Christmas a full month ago.

[Ama86]

It’s also very peculiar to design that enforced turnover to kick in after, what was it, four or five months? I could see having it happen after a year or something, but sheesh. Are players expected to accept that a handful of months is what they get before the game says “that’s far enough”?

[Ama86]

I don’t think it’s someone who’s just messing with the Haven community for the lulz, or whatever the youngsters call it these days. This has been going on for so many years that it has to be more than that. No mere internet troll is that persistent.

People are not locked up in institutions just because they’re mentally ill. They would have to be dangerous or criminally insane in order to be deprived of freedoms to such an extent that they can’t even get online. While mental illness is clearly a factor here, there’s plenty of people with this degree of disconnection from reality who live freely in society. It’s just that Haven is a small enough community that this is our one prominent representative of it.

All this to say that you get nothing out of engaging with RG. For whatever reason, Haven has never been able to get rid of them, and it has been a recurring issue for as long as I can remember. The best response is no response. You don’t get anything out of prodding them for answers, because that’s always going to be either a badly-faked attempt at victimhood, or else “HAHA DIE ALL OF YOU, THERE’S THOUSANDS OF US” or something equally silly.

[Ama86]

Matias, don’t indulge RG during one of their episodes. It’s a mentally unwell person, not entertainment.

I’ve never run a MUD so I can’t really say how feasible it is to keep someone out of the community, but we can certainly deduce that that numerous days go by without Nova glancing at the forums at all. Also, for as much as I’ve grumbled about the automoderator, where is it now?

[Ama86]

Dom’t you worry, you’ll get an answer in the end of January, maybe, if you’re lucky.

[Ama86]

Lord almighty, I do know how to spell.

[Author]

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