Paroxysm - split off
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Just to answer some of the questions that were asked:
Did I play Haven? Yes.
Am I willing to say who I played? No. I generally think leaving a digital footprint that lets strangers connect accounts and identities across different parts of the internet is a bad idea. That is not specific to Haven or this community. It is simply how I approach being online.
Do I have any relationship with previous Haven staff? No.
Am I keeping sexual assault as something that can happen in the game? Yes.
I am trying to steer Paroxysm away from obviously kinky content because I do not want that to become the tone of the game. At the same time I think difficult subject matter can have a place in a dark setting when it is being used as part of the story rather than treated as fetish content.
I think allowing that kind of material adds more to the setting than removing it entirely. It can create serious consequences. It can create grudges and conflict between characters. It can also make the world feel genuinely unpleasant in places which is appropriate for the sort of setting I am trying to build.
I completely understand that this will be a deal breaker for some people. I am sorry to lose anyone over it. I would still rather be upfront about what the game allows than have somebody discover it after investing time into a character. Nobody will ever be forced to roleplay anything they are uncomfortable with and players will always have the option to fade to black.
Is this a haven clone? It uses the Haven codebase so there is obviously going to be some shared DNA. That does not mean the goal is to recreate Haven. The audience I am mainly trying to attract is closer to the Armageddon MUD and Sindome crowd. The long term vision is a difficult survival focused and competitive game. That will not appeal to everyone and I am completely fine with that. I would rather build something with a clear identity for the people who enjoy that kind of game than try to make Paroxysm appeal to everyone.
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I completely understand that this will be a deal breaker for some people. I am sorry to lose anyone over it. I would still rather be upfront about what the game allows than have somebody discover it after investing time into a character. Nobody will ever be forced to roleplay anything they are uncomfortable with and players will always have the option to fade to black.
How is the bolded an opt-out in any way shape or form if the ftb insinuates that it happened to that character anyway, meaning the topic is likely coming up later which means they’re… still roleplaying about it? Because let’s be real, I don’t know of anyone who can just black hole memory that kind of event to the point it doesn’t become relevant later in any form. (Ignoring supernatural things being involved, obviously.)
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I completely understand that this will be a deal breaker for some people. I am sorry to lose anyone over it. I would still rather be upfront about what the game allows than have somebody discover it after investing time into a character. Nobody will ever be forced to roleplay anything they are uncomfortable with and players will always have the option to fade to black.
How is the bolded an opt-out in any way shape or form if the ftb insinuates that it happened to that character anyway, meaning the topic is likely coming up later which means they’re… still roleplaying about it? Because let’s be real, I don’t know of anyone who can just black hole memory that kind of event to the point it doesn’t become relevant later in any form. (Ignoring supernatural things being involved, obviously.)
I might have worded that poorly.
What I mean is that nobody would be required to actually emote through a scene they are uncomfortable with. They could fade to black rather than roleplay the act itself.
You are right that this does not mean the event simply disappears from the character’s history. The consequences would still exist and could still matter afterwards.
If anything that is probably my preferred way for this sort of content to be handled. I would much rather the focus be on the narrative consequences and what it does to the characters involved than on playing out the act itself.
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Anyway. I want to show off a few things I have been working on.
None of this has been pushed to the live server yet because it still needs a bit more polish on localhost. But I do want to make it clear that development is moving quickly and there are a lot of genuinely exciting new systems and features being added behind the scenes.
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If your game allows sexual assault, then it’ll be known as the game that allows sexual assault.
EDIT: The above message was originally a part of the Paroxysm game thread, before the topic was forked. I didn’t create a topic just to say the above, nor did I write the title for this thread.
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Absolutely wild to be like “I prefer there’s no kinky stuff but no I will not be removing the SA code. Check out this map tho”
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Do you want to talk about Paroxysm or do you want to keep talking about sexual assault?
If it is the latter then that is fine but I am probably going to dip out and leave you guys to it. I have explained my position and I do not think repeating the same discussion over and over is going to add much. I understand that people disagree with the decision and I am not expecting to change anyone’s mind about it.
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I refer you to my earlier statement, which was not intended to be a derailment so much as mildly helpful. this is not likely to be your crowd.
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T Tez forked this topic
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Forked some posts out of pity
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So there’s been a recent optimisation pass on operations. Amazingly the game can now run them on a shitty £5 a month server without crashing or noticeably lagging.
People in cover also now show as underscored. I kind of want to eventually make character initials display in brackets on the map too so you can immediately tell who is where. There are still some bugs around operations and I’m working through them. But considering the state the code was in on the public release I think this is a pretty solid step in the right direction.
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Funnily enough the use of LLMs is more of a dealbreaker for me than the SA code. Good luck with it all.
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So we’ve early deployed NPCs. The long term intention is to make them an actual part of the game’s resource loops rather than relying on offscreen assumptions. Eventually vampires will need to hunt NPCs for blood. Demonborn will need to torture them to maintain high Sadism and its associated buffs.
Cortex also has a monthly citizen arrest quota while being required to keep civilian deaths below a certain limit. So there should be some actual tension between enforcing the regime and simply turning the city into a corpse pile.
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I did some thread surgery to remove Jumpscare as looking like the originator of a related thread. Apologies to anyone who was disrupted by that.
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T Tez referenced this topic
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I dunno man. I feel like that whole “people deserve second chances/people deserve not to be burdened with who they were in the past” lingo in the year of our lord 2026 is absolutely a smokescreen for shady and shitty behavior. I personally agree that people sometimes deserve second chances and shouldn’t be associated with past actions so long as they own up to those actions and seek to effectively make amends for said actions as best they can. Often when people use the kind of language that they’re uncomfortable mentioning who they were, my immediate assumption is a) they did something awful or abusive; b) they have not addressed it; and c) they have no interest in addressing it.
Obviously some people have a personal safety reason for not mentioning who they were, but I feel like that’s an easy enough thing to say without weasel words around “digital footprints.” Maybe just me tho. I wasn’t on Haven and therefore have no dog in this here race.
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I dunno man. I feel like that whole “people deserve second chances/people deserve not to be burdened with who they were in the past” lingo in the year of our lord 2026 is absolutely a smokescreen for shady and shitty behavior. I personally agree that people sometimes deserve second chances and shouldn’t be associated with past actions so long as they own up to those actions and seek to effectively make amends for said actions as best they can. Often when people use the kind of language that they’re uncomfortable mentioning who they were, my immediate assumption is a) they did something awful or abusive; b) they have not addressed it; and c) they have no interest in addressing it.
Obviously some people have a personal safety reason for not mentioning who they were, but I feel like that’s an easy enough thing to say without weasel words around “digital footprints.” Maybe just me tho. I wasn’t on Haven and therefore have no dog in this here race.
CITIZEN COMMENDATION NOTICE
The Cortex recognizes @somasatori for demonstrating appropriate suspicion toward citizens with unexplained privacy. Such instincts are the foundation of a safe society.
Remember: a citizen with nothing to hide has nothing to redact.
Your diligence has been noted, Loyal Citizen.
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@Shygaming said:
Remember: a citizen with nothing to hide has nothing to redact.Your diligence has been noted, Loyal Citizen.
I get what you’re saying. However, given that there are bad actors who have attempted to masquerade as other people in this hobby for years, and who will often use the same language about privacy to justify said masquerade, I think one is liable to be a bit suspicious, no? Fool me once and all that.
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@Shygaming said:
Remember: a citizen with nothing to hide has nothing to redact.Your diligence has been noted, Loyal Citizen.
I get what you’re saying. However, given that there are bad actors who have attempted to masquerade as other people in this hobby for years, and who will often use the same language about privacy to justify said masquerade, I think one is liable to be a bit suspicious, no? Fool me once and all that.
I do not care. I am rapidly beginning to understand why Tyr barely spoke to anyone.Nobody has asked me anything about the game. It feels like people are far more interested in the possibility that there is some scandal to uncover or in repeatedly telling me they disagree with a design decision than they are in Paroxysm itself. Nobody seems particularly curious about the systems, the setting, the direction, or what I am actually trying to build. The only things generating sustained interest seem to be who I might have been on some other game years ago and whether there is some design decision people disagree with strongly enough that we can spend another three pages telling me they disagree with it after I have already acknowledged that they do.The code is open source partly because I sincerely hope somebody eventually forks it into the hugbox version of the game. Then they can have that and I can keep making the game I actually want to make without having this same argument until the heat death of the universe.That is why I am finding this whole conversation increasingly difficult to care about. If people want to talk about Paroxysm, I am happy to talk about Paroxysm. If the real attraction here is trying to unmask me, reconstruct some ancient hobby drama, or repeatedly relitigate design decisions because my answer did not change after the first three times, I genuinely have nothing useful to contribute to that.I’m going to take a break before this thread gets split into a fourth thread.I wish I’d gone for a walk before posting that. I posted it out of anger and I don’t think it was a particularly useful contribution.
Anyway. Yeah. I can see this probably isn’t my crowd and I don’t think continuing to argue about it is doing anyone much good.
I’m going to leave the thread here and get back to working on the game. I’ll be in discord if anyone wants to talk about it.
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I don’t know how to tell you this but who you are, the mechanics you choose to use, and your philosophy as an admin are all more salient in the day-to-day experience of playing your game in most cases than “can my character fly?”
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Nobody has asked me anything about the game. It feels like people are far more interested in the possibility that there is some scandal to uncover or in repeatedly telling me they disagree with a design decision than they are in Paroxysm itself. Nobody seems particularly curious about the systems, the setting, the direction, or what I am actually trying to build.
You didn’t build anything. A LLM did, on top of someone else’s codebase.
You’ve already been advised, with a lot more tact than I possess, that the attitude on BMD is broadly hostile to LLM usage in this hobby. By now if you had the capacity for original thought, rather than outsourcing it to a clanker, you likely should’ve also pieced together that the attitude towards exposing other players to themes of sexual assault, even more so without their consent and interest, is also a pretty universal anathema. So what you’re doing here is the equivalent of a Millennial fashion designer turning up at a campus Freshers’ Week and weeping, “why won’t anyone buy my skinny jeans?” This is absolutely not your target market, even if you did have anything creative to contribute to a creative hobby, run and populated by creative people whose developers and builders have a long history of putting in real work. I mean, I’m sorry, what do you want us to do here? Clap for Claude? The website is so generic I had to check the nearest bottle of tequila to be sure there wasn’t a lethal reason I feel like I’m seeing double, triple, quadruple the replicability of all that slop.
But even if there were posters or lurkers here who are pro-AI and anti-collaborative-storytelling, the latter of which is your own description, it still wouldn’t matter to seasoned community members half as much as the assurance of community safety in this hobby. This is a small niche, and people join games largely through word-of-mouth and reputation. Under ordinary circumstances, I don’t think this requires you to self-identify; I’ve joined games run by total strangers. But I’ve also bounced just as fast at the first glimpse of a red flag, because they hadn’t yet earned the grace of trust and benefit of the doubt. And here you’re waving a lot of red flags, from the actual theme of the game, to its codebase, to the sea of AI slop, to your own stated ethos of, “It’s actually good if players often don’t have fun, including having their character raped, but only and I mean only if they really, really don’t want that to happen.” Like … what?
It’s giving 5’11 guy thinks people on apps are shallow because he can’t get any matches, and no one even asks about his podcast, but his profile says “Free the Tate Brothers”.
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@Shygaming said:
Remember: a citizen with nothing to hide has nothing to redact.Your diligence has been noted, Loyal Citizen.
I get what you’re saying. However, given that there are bad actors who have attempted to masquerade as other people in this hobby for years, and who will often use the same language about privacy to justify said masquerade, I think one is liable to be a bit suspicious, no? Fool me once and all that.
I do not care. I am rapidly beginning to understand why Tyr barely spoke to anyone.
Nobody has asked me anything about the game. It feels like people are far more interested in the possibility that there is some scandal to uncover or in repeatedly telling me they disagree with a design decision than they are in Paroxysm itself. Nobody seems particularly curious about the systems, the setting, the direction, or what I am actually trying to build. The only things generating sustained interest seem to be who I might have been on some other game years ago and whether there is some design decision people disagree with strongly enough that we can spend another three pages telling me they disagree with it after I have already acknowledged that they do.
The code is open source partly because I sincerely hope somebody eventually forks it into the hugbox version of the game. Then they can have that and I can keep making the game I actually want to make without having this same argument until the heat death of the universe.
That is why I am finding this whole conversation increasingly difficult to care about. If people want to talk about Paroxysm, I am happy to talk about Paroxysm. If the real attraction here is trying to unmask me, reconstruct some ancient hobby drama, or repeatedly relitigate design decisions because my answer did not change after the first three times, I genuinely have nothing useful to contribute to that.
I’m going to take a break before this thread gets split into a fourth thread.
You’ve made it abundantly clear that you don’t care much for what people think or believe with regards to design when you’re convinced you’re in the right (which is a flaw you share with Tyr).
Maybe if you did care, people would assume you’re making a good faith attempting at building a good, interesting, cool RP space instead of assuming you’re making a weird PvP S.A. game.
Instead, you’re just being incredibly shady, and when confronted with the criticism of “this is just Haven, Again”, what you did was use an LLM to brute force remove every direct mention of Haven, without actually changing much of the real content of the game outside of like… Getting rid of the Order, changing the Temple to the Scum, and changing The Hand to Cortex or whatever.
I know because I made a character to check things out, and when you said you’d removed the references to Haven, I went to check things out again. So it was just a somehow more generic game than Haven already kind of was.
Except now you can kill and maim people without Sanctuary stopping them (which basically makes the fact that Sanctuary nullifies S.A. a moot point, because people can now just threaten to do bodily harm to someone who doesn’t say they agree to sleep with them - which is STILL r*pe, so you’re being pretty disingenuous and evasive when you suggest Sanctuary protects people from that).
Maybe if you cared, you’d be making a cool thing instead of getting upset that people are saying the project doesn’t seem very good, or cool, or interesting, or for their tastes.
You can’t even get the people in the Armageddon shadow boards or whatever they call it these days interested (your admitted target audience), because at least those losers realise “hey, hard coding and allowing non-consensual S.A. stuff is a bad idea for the community and will make things bad”.
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