Haven

Wizz

@Shygaming said:

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.”

SpilledBeanz

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.

Clarion

@Yam said:

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.

Pavel

@Clarion said:

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?

Pyrephox

@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.