Haven
-
-
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.”
-
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.
-
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.
-
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?
-
@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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Is it that surprising?
I suppose not. There’s an old adage about drawing the ‘acceptable/not acceptable’ line directly underneath wherever we’re currently standing. I can tolerate or understand a whole bunch of adult-based weirdness in RP around me while child characters doing the same repulses me to the point of incomprehension.
That said, though, a lot of times there are rumours of hinky shit happening, so it’s a little different to “I was fully aware of what was going on.”
-
Is it that surprising?
I suppose not. There’s an old adage about drawing the ‘acceptable/not acceptable’ line directly underneath wherever we’re currently standing. I can tolerate or understand a whole bunch of adult-based weirdness in RP around me while child characters doing the same repulses me to the point of incomprehension.
That said, though, a lot of times there are rumours of hinky shit happening, so it’s a little different to “I was fully aware of what was going on.”
There’s an adage that I really like, that took a long time for me to really take to heart outside of literally TTRPGs, which is
“No D&D is better than Bad D&D”
And this is probably a fair amount to do with why people kept around Haven as long as they had. People love D&D. Or lots of people say they do, except for Thing X, or Thing Y, or Person A, but they can’t stop playing because of This Reason or because There’s Nothing Else, and then they just get stuck in the same cycle over and over again, and refuse to try branching out for whatever reason.
I dipped out several years ago because I came to the realization that it both was just a poorly run community creating harm on the internet and it just wasn’t fun, and that I shouldn’t spend my time participating in either of those things frankly.
But, Haven just also typically caters to a pretty specific, niche subset of the MUD community.
And I expect for many people, they’re able to compartmentalize because aspects of the game scratch very specific itches. If you want a “crunchier” game that feels like it has some amount of tactics behind it, Haven (during the time I played) was good for that. There’s lots of Number Go Up chasing in the Haven codebase during the times I played. You can go out and mindlessly kill supernatural boogens in the woods between RPing and Events, there’s PvP elements, there’s a Money stat that gives you money.
Just lots of ways to enact any number of power fantasies.
People (myself included, in my earlier time there) also just spent (and probably still spend) a whole bunch of time complaining about the game, and the creator, and some of the complaints are super valid, and others are people being Terminally Online And In Their Feelings, but almost all of these people continued to play despite all of the badness, because in the MUD side of the MU community, there just aren’t many modern, urban fantasy (likes to brand itself as horror, but grimdark urban fantasy would be more appropriate IMO) MUDs that have what many people on that side of the fence want.
And what that seems to be (based on my experiences Post-Haven, trying to find games that do have more mechanical crunch to them, and checking out other communities within the RP Enforced and RPI side of MUDs) is they want an MMO or Skyrim Style experience where they can also just write long emotes (or just ignore vast chunks of the MMO side of things to do Their Own Thing).
-
Hi.
This has been a hard thread to read and try to figure out what I should be saying in it, but I do feel like I need to be saying something. I tended to play Haven in six month to year-long stints, getting a character in, established, meeting some kind of goal, and then bouncing for a bit until I could come back and do so. I can’t say I didn’t have a character in Blackfield; I can say I did not enjoy it and got that character out ASAP.
The real question that keeps coming around is people wondering what compels people to play a game like Haven, and all I can really offer there is my own experience. I joined Haven in roughly 3.0, which I want to say was around 2014 or 2015. This was one of the lowest points in my life. I was sleeping on a couch, had recently gotten out of the most toxic relationship of my life by far, had no work, no prospects, and my mental health was in the gutter. The answer was therapy, but I couldn’t afford therapy. But out of all the hurt and pain I was experiencing that time was a real sense of wanting to change myself, and that meant engaging in more negative parts of who I was.
I had met my ex playing Achaea, and I tried to pick up and radically change my old Achaean character, but it was too many memories to go back there. I had met one new friend (spoilers: this was bad), and started looking at other games to play with them, and found this game on … I want to say Top MU sites. It was a horror game, and I liked horror themes, and so I poked in, looked around at some of what was there, saw the theme that corruption is power, and decided that I wanted to give it a try.
Let my friend know, and we made characters that same day. And thus began one of the most intense roleplaying experiences of my life. I lost myself into Haven, because what Haven became was, functionally, shadow work. I heard rumors that there was an even seedier underbelly than what I was seeing, but it wasn’t really on the surface, and honestly, coming out of world of warcraft RP, people play some very, very, very messed up things. I just decided that wasn’t probably actually a thing and mostly ignored the players taking part in it.
Later iterations of the game made that harder to ignore, but so it goes. By then, I was invested.
I was not always the best player. I engaged in what could generously be called light griefing, including keeping characters locked in rooms largely inaccessible from the grid, punishing people who i perceived as misbehaving with making it so their character couldn’t speak for RL days on end, and IC harassment campaigns. Other people hit back just as hard, and I had my own little Grima Wormtongue in my ear in the form of my friend - Azazello - telling me that these actions were right and proper and nothing like the things HE had been made to go through on previous games, and that people who complained about it were just weak.
I also endured my share of griefing, including someone who actively threatened the characters of anyone he knew were OOC friends with me ICly if they even stepped out of their grid homes anywhere he could get to them, just because he didn’t like me. People in this thread were part of that, they’ve acknowledged it to me, the reason I bring it up is because I was both the victim and the beneficiary of a lot of staff favoritism.
I got hooked into metaplot, I played an unhealthy amount, it was toxic as hell and it’s pretty impossible to deny it. I’m only hinting at things. There are more stories.
And all of this was basically in version three and early days of version four. That’s when the griefing hit a point where I basically had to take a break.
I want to talk about what kept me going back in those early days, though, and why I bounced off of WoD games at the time – similar settings, similar vibes, but they just didn’t have what I was looking for. I wanted a game where I felt in constant danger and adrenaline, where we could be nasty, vicious little creatures, where we could be cruel and punishing. It opened up a steam valve I hadn’t realized I had glued shut my entire life, and it let me get a chance to really review the nastier parts of myself, figure out which ones I liked, which ones I didn’t, shape the ones I could into something better and discard the ones I couldn’t, and what was just going to be in my nature that I would have to learn to live with and learn to work around. Shadow work, just done in a much more informal way. I liked that I was in a community of people just as messed up as I was, even if I had major issues with a lot of them, and that I could test wild things and see how people reacted to them.
The speed and quantity of RP was completely unlike the MUSH scene. The quality was a significant step above the MUD. There were game elements that gave me a solid sense of character progression, and storytelling tools that really let me branch out, and all these things were fun. They weren’t why I kept playing.
Eventually, I realized the rumors that were creeping into my ears about who Azazello was were true, and after about a year, I withdrew from him pretty heavily. I took my break, I tried other games, I took a step back and watched what people wanted out of RP, and I came back in with a character with which I tried to do my part to reshape the culture of Haven into something a little less toxic; I think, to a degree, it worked, but only temporarily. The sharp edges I still had on me from Haven got honed away on other games, but the ability to slip into a character immediately like she is a second skin is still there.
The game is fucked up. I actively told people to never play it even when I was there in full force. A lot of people describe it like a drug habit, and that’s not an inaccurate way to talk about it, but it was also a lot of other things. I made friends from Haven I literally spend 15+ hours a week hanging out with, talking to, chatting with, a decade later. We have all, by and large, moved on and grown as people. I stared into the abyss of who I was and came out the other side with a much firmer grip of what I believe and value and who I want to be. I learned that things which I saw as immutable are anything but that, and things that I saw as inevitable weren’t actually that big of a thing.
I learned to be okay with not being okay.
Haven was a crucible of an experience where I got to tell some really good stories, refine my writing chops, put myself through an emotional wringer, do terrible shit, and come out the other side.
But, honestly, I should have just gone to therapy.
Hello! It looks like you're interested in this conversation, but you don't have an account yet.
Getting fed up of having to scroll through the same posts each visit? When you register for an account, you'll always come back to exactly where you were before, and choose to be notified of new replies (either via email, or push notification). You'll also be able to save bookmarks and upvote posts to show your appreciation to other community members.
With your input, this post could be even better 💗
Register Login