Haven
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So whenever someone says that they’re not worried about the extremes when it comes to MUing, you can remind them that Haven existed and enough people thought it was neat for long enough that it’s getting a spiritual successor.
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So whenever someone says that they’re not worried about the extremes when it comes to MUing, you can remind them that Haven existed and enough people thought it was neat for long enough that it’s getting a spiritual successor.
technically still exists as the developer constantly reiterates the game, with two spiritual successors currently (duskholm i think, and then this paroxysm one now) done by people who aren’t the OG dev
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I regret this thread so much
How do I delete my life choices
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Live and learn young one.
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So whenever someone says that they’re not worried about the extremes when it comes to MUing, you can remind them that Haven existed and enough people thought it was neat for long enough that it’s getting a spiritual successor.
People generally do not take on a massive unpaid second job as hobbyist developers unless the thing they actually want to play cannot be found somewhere else. If there were more roleplay focused games with a genuinely competitive focus I absolutely would not be putting this amount of effort into Paroxysm. I would just go and play one of them.
So I would not really take the existence of successors as evidence that people thought everything about Haven was great. Sometimes it just means there were parts of the game people genuinely liked and nobody else is making anything that scratches the same itch.
I also think people pleasers usually make terrible hobbyist developers. If you are constantly compromising your vision to try to keep everyone happy then eventually you stop making an actual game and end up with a chatroom that has some mechanics bolted onto the side.
I’m not going to play defense squad for anyone here. But I do think Tyr left the hobby in a better state than he found it.
Whatever criticisms people have of him personally or of the direction Haven took over the years. The codebase itself is an incredible starting point for anyone wanting to build their own project. It represents years of work and an enormous amount of his life. People can now build things that otherwise might have taken years just to get off the ground.
I think that deserves some acknowledgement.
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I strongly hold that there is a line where something being a kink does not excuse engaging with that topic unequivocally, where it should not be shielded from society condemning engaging with that topic, and that “no actual X involved” is a terrible test for drawing that line.
I agree, and would like to curveball this into a somewhat silly scenario that gives further reason why ‘no actual X involved’ is a dumb defense. In the form of a meme. Perhaps a GIF, even.
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I’m not going to play defense squad for anyone here. But I do think Tyr left the hobby in a better state than he found it.
I was just going to drop a “critical squint” gif and leave it at that but I genuinely think it’s important (to me) to express that a very unsettled/unsettling person can put a lot of work into something, years of effort even, and the result of that work does not always deserve credit. you’ve got plenty of other good codebases out there as a strong starting point; someone who enabled literal Nazis and CSAM does not belong on any kind of pedestal or, I’d even argue, deserve to have their work redistributed with the best of intentions.
to state it more clearly, ew, fuck that guy and fuck what he made, he did not leave the hobby in a “better state.”
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I had to double check my calendar to make sure it wasn’t 1996 again. These stories are museum grade. This really has been a wild hobby, hasn’t it.
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Pure kink games kind of stick out like a sore thumb in this forum, and it feels like Haven was a pure kink game.
For one more perspective: I avoided Blackfield and the Academy almost completely. My experience of Haven was:
- Horror themes which were sometimes very fun, like vampires who were codedly required to feed (predators gotta predate), and genuinely creepy and threatening monsters. Supernatural power had a real, inescapable cost IC
- Extremely good building tools for regular characters, including being able to build in a wild creepy offworld universe where vines would try to reclaim anything you built and you’d have to regularly go out there and machete them back. Fantastic clothing/object editing options, too
- Built-in Actual Danger, which was sometimes fun, like it being necessary to ally yourself to a lesser evil so you were safe enough to avoid a greater one, and sometimes really frustrating and dumb, like a friend being killed while offline because they fell asleep somewhere unsafe IC
- Really cool metaplot. I was lucky enough to be involved in the AI plot Daed ran, which felt so unique and special and weird, even if I eventually got overwhelmed and drew back a bit (SORRY DAED, it was so cool)
- Extreme IC/OOC divide/masquerade vibes, which at the time I thought was immersive, but looking back was terrible and dumb and opened up weird avenues for abuse and made it harder to make actual OOC friends. I am v lucky @selira took me under their wing
- Tons of coded systems that let characters meaningfully contribute to plot, or run micro-scenes using interesting tools, or contribute to lore
All of the downsides mentioned were also 100% there. The community was bizarre and often toxic, playing female characters could be super unpleasant (I mostly played dudes but tried a female character and nope), the IC/OOC masquerade made everything worse (especially for the few people who really tried to obey it), way too people leapt at any opportunity to be a dick, etc etc.
There was a lot there outside the Academy. It wasn’t necessarily good, but it was at least bad in multiple ways.
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I avoided Blackfield and the Academy almost completely.
I hope this doesn’t come across as too… combattive a question, but I genuinely have to ask:
I can understand someone ignoring or compartmentalising away a great deal of negative stuff in order to get the good stuff—staff abuse, favouritism, toxic players, etc. We all know of games where we have a playerbase of people despite some behaviour we’d find unacceptable because the RP is great over in this walled garden… but how do you do that where there’s a whole “this is the bit where we rape children” section of the game that you’re politely ignoring?
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@Pavel Is it that surprising? Firan, for example, had loads of players in its heyday, lots of Noble Privilege and a whole incest metaplot. Most of the players probably didn’t engage with those parts of the game very deeply, or even were aware they existed. I remember the incest family Demon cult from the very beginning of the game on The Reach --plenty of people (including me) played there while not even touching their whole…thing. How MUCH bestiality play was going on in the average Werewolf game, do you think? Because I guarantee it was greater than zero, especially in oWoD where canonically, werewolves could and did fuck wolves to get more werewolves.
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it’s not surprising I guess, but I definitely have a line where I nope out of a place and I find it genuinely hard not to side-eye people who don’t seem to at all. there’s also a big difference imo between games where you’ve heard there’s maybe some weird things going on behind closed doors that aren’t sanctioned by the game but not openly stopped, and games where that stuff is explicitly part of the theme and run by staff, and that’s where the side-eye grows a bit more intense.
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how do you do that where there’s a whole “this is the bit where we rape children” section of the game that you’re politely ignoring?
In my mind it was more “oh, that’s the section where some people badly roleplay teenagers and some people do weird creepy teen/teacher stuff.”
There are plenty of things that are 0% okay in real life that people want to explore in fiction, and teen student/teacher is pretty regularly covered even in mainstream TV shows. I think little kid characters were forbidden when I was there, but rules changed in various iterations of the game.
I nearly forgot, but I did actually create an Academy character at one point (an older teen), because I thought the creepy oppressive school vibes might be interesting. Instead my character got in trouble for, iirc, feeling attracted to another male student? I remember thinking that was pretty boring and uninspired, and not exactly the dark spooky horror academia vibe I was hoping for.
Honestly, at the point I played Haven I had only played games with big sections I didn’t engage with or had to ignore. The first MU* I was on outright banned any mention of homosexuality IC or OOC because the game runner wasn’t cool with it. Armageddon RPI could be a murderfest and I didn’t engage with 90% of the systems or game world despite playing there for years.
And just to be clear, I’m answering in good faith to contribute my perspective of the game, not to argue how “okay” any of it was.
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