I started playing Haven when I was 21 and I think I low-key didn’t realise how much of a baby I was at that age. Because of that I feel like there’s no way I can describe this game without sounding like I’m talking about an abusive ex, but the truth is it did have a pretty major impact on me, and I don’t feel like pretending it didn’t for the sake of Cool Detached Stoicism internet points. I realise the expectation is just to unequivocally dunk on it, and if I do anything else I will look crazy, but here is my very honest take:
Haven, its core gameplay loop, and its playerbase, were basically three games in one. It would average around 10-40 players online at any given time depending on seasonal peaks/lulls and timezones, so yeah, big game. Its old forum currently lists 322 registered members, and given it’s gone through multiple member purges, I would estimate the total number of people who’ve ever played it is actually much higher.
The three games it was can IMO be loosely categorised as:
Tyr/Ouroboros/Nova’s game: head dev, coded 90% of it, currently the only active staffer.
Daed/Editor’s game: head storyrunner, had a reputation as a stellar roleplayer many years prior on the RPI scene, pretty much everyone agrees he was the coolest of the bunch and a lot of people have said he’s why they were playing.
Discordance/Amatsuka/Anodyne’s game: made all the fertility/rape/pregnancy/fetish/kiddy/school/misogyny stuff, was in charge of community management until Tyr replaced that job with bad AI.
People who were there for one aspect of this game were not necessarily there for other aspects of the game, just because of how big it was. You can argue they were still complicit, because why would you play a game where so much shittiness happens just because you like other aspects of it? And inevitably you would run into other aspects even if you weren’t primarily there for that, which is usually when people would either quit or rage or both. Although the fact that Tyr has had a longstanding policy of never banning anyone, no matter how harmful they were to the community, until/unless they either literally threatened to track him down and kill him in real life, or tried to bounce back a donation through their bank, meant that mostly all of these incompatible personalities would stick around making each other miserable for eternity.
So anyway, with that primer out of the way, the stuff BMD is probably most interested in gossip about is Discordance’s game. That’s Blackfield, the school sphere where paedophilia RP happened. It’s also weird fetish code, like Blackfield staffers had supernatural semen. Pregnancy was a coded system (made by her) tied to sex code and fertility code. If a heterosexual pair fuck, and the female half of that equation is codedly fertile, and protection either isn’t used, fails, or is faked (there was condom stealthing code), then she can get codedly pregnant. Paternity is tracked. If she later had sex with a Blackfield Staffer while pregnant, the super semen would replace the original paternity of the baby. At one point the game had IUD code, which was a way to essentially opt out of fertility altogether on a female character (at an in-game cash cost, which you pay at the hospital). Later IUD code was removed because, according to Discordance, it didn’t add anything to the story. And this is the tip of the iceberg of all the insane fetish stuff that game had.
Some people may have heard of Azazello/Cullen. He’s an OOC friend of Discordance’s because go figure, they’re both really into rape RP. She’d protect him to the point of giving his high-powered character a free reskin in chargen, so that other people who were avoiding him wouldn’t know who he was. She’d moderate anyone who talked shit about him in a blatantly biased manner. This is also the tip of the iceberg of staff abuses I could describe here.
Largely in the latest version of Haven, almost all of this stuff was removed, and Discordance is no longer an active member of staff (although I suspect she still has staff perms to snoop on players or whatever). I have my theories as to why all of this stuff was removed/changed, I don’t personally think it’s because Tyr had an ethical problem with it. I think he just came to realise it was bad for his game’s reputation.
After Tyr released the Haven codebase, it was picked up by literal Nazi Ppurg/Asanads/Pooch and a psychopath called leah, who is not to be confused with a much chiller Leah/Niamh who ran various successful games in the RPI sphere. Ppurg & Haven-leah made a new game called Duskholm, which is basically just the parts of Haven that were Discordance’s game, all the stuff that was removed in this latest iteration. Just the sex dungeon school etc.
It feels a little unfair to call Daed’s game just that, because a lot of the tools were actually coded by Tyr/Nova, but for the sake of this staff split explainer I’m gonna stick with it. Here I’m talking about the story side of the game. Haven had some pretty excellent storyrunning tools that I genuinely haven’t seen on other games, which emphasised empowering players to worldbuild, customise the existing world to the fullest extent, and create opt-in, controlled corners where they could tell their stories with other players they jam with, with relatively little staff oversight unless they either did something stupendously rule-breaking, or directly asked for it, and even then whether or not staff could be bothered was always a question.
Daed ran the metaplot, but there was plenty of story to be had with other players, even if you weren’t involved in the metaplot. You didn’t have to touch the school or any of the game’s crustier parts. Players could, to a limited and opt-in extent, play Gods of their own personal interpretation, Archdemons in Hell, Fae spirits, and organise adventures for players of their choosing. For instance, I played Mammon, Archdemon of Greed, who lived in Hell, but could communicate with players on Earth from afar if they opted into Mammon stuff. I storyran a bank heist, etc.
If Tyr & Disco were mum & dad, Daed was basically the cool uncle, in that nearly everyone liked him, and he had the most direct communication with the playerbase. He routinely expressed disgust for the paedo stuff in particular, and at one point PKed a paedo player’s character, which as story staff he was definitely not allowed to do — but no one was mad about it. Eventually he split off to make SuperMUD, his own game, without any of the Discordance code. It’s currently in development, and he now goes by Editor.
Tyr’s game is where I will tepidly defend Paroxym as a concept, if not in execution. I think a lot of his code is cool. I’ve played a lot of MUDs and MUSHes and haven’t found one that scratches the right itch for me in terms of the coded aspects of the game. I like his emote system, RP-focused combat system, in-game social media system, freeform item creation/customisation, storyrunning code, secret society conflict, cars, and how customisable and open to interpretation character builds are.
I don’t think a game that utilises the Haven codebase is automatically suspect just because it uses the Haven codebase. I would ask a lot of questions, which others already have, like “are you keeping all the rape stuff” etc. Paroxysm is, SuperMUD isn’t. I genuinely think a lot about his code is excellent, and a lot of it is stupid, and I largely wouldn’t judge anyone for wanting to play around with it.
I would personally never in a million years use Tyr’s code, for one very simple reason, which is that if I ever do make a game, I don’t want to feel like I owe any part of it to someone I would otherwise freely talk shit about, which I will now proceed to do:
With Daed gone and having taken some of his best player collaborators with him to SuperMUD, and Discordance’s community management role largely MIA, Tyr (now going by Nova) replaced all these jobs in his new iteration with AI. So you don’t have all the rape/paedo stuff anymore, but now you have AI storyrunning, AI community management, AI grid-building etc. I think this guy can code, but I also lowkey don’t think he has an actual pulse or any real understanding of what causes people to emotionally connect with stories and with each other. I don’t think he’s capable of community management or even mentally understands what function that serves. I think shitty players turn up on his game all the time and then he sits there and thinks, “wow, it’s such a shame my wonderful game is ruined by terrible players for no reason, that’s definitely not my or the game’s fault though, it’s the players” when obviously staff’s job is to curate their playerbase, and not hand that job over to a misogynistic, paedophilic rape fetishist.
All that said, through this inaction, the game has fostered a very mixed fanbase which includes a literal Nazi Disord called Darkchat, sexpests who’ve abused players OOC and even IRL, and one crazy overattached girlfriend called Kestrel. Fuck all of the above.
A bigger concern for me with any Haven offshoot wouldn’t just be what code is being kept, and what relationship it has to former/active staff, but also what community it’s fostering and importing over with it. So that’s why I asked Paroxysm’s dev who he played before, and it’s the first question a lot of ex-players will have, because Haven has had its share of psychos plenty of people would not trust as staff.
Diatribe done, all my best to SuperMUD. I personally don’t currently intend to play, because I can’t stomach most of the Haven community, even those who aren’t literal real-life rapists or literal Nazis. But I do have friends committed to it whom I think highly of, and if after its launch they tell me it’s actually a cool space, I will probably jump in too.
