please. i am begging people. when new to a game, take a week to get a sense of the culture and if it’s a good fit for you before you do shit that sucks up everyone’s attention and energy, and make sure you even understand the basics of how the game runs and why before you make a thousand suggestions about how to change it.

I submitted my first short story to Amazon. It’s cheesy erotica, but… I already have my second ready to edit, I have my community pages built out, and the hard work of just doing the first one is done.

I’m really fucking excited for this.

After deciding to unblock Ghost and see what all he’s written since he’s been unbanned, I stand by what I said: the man’s a slimy piece of shit, more importantly, one who gets off on drama and tries to stir it up. More of his time is spent insulting people than anything else, and yeah, any community that wants him, I don’t want to be part of. His is the most obvious fucking weaseling I’ve ever seen, but WE’RE the bullies, clearly.

Yeah. Everything still stands. Hope he reads this!

It’s days like today I remember a lot of the community has social skills as their dump stats.

Honestly, the point of “let people come and see on their own if people are talking shit about them rather than jumping through hoops” is really solid to me, and fits with the motions for transparency. It will make it feel less like a secret club and more of an open part of the community.

i feel like trying to language police a hobby full of erotic writers and social outcasts is, uh, a choice.

i sure wish the type of character i like to play didn’t tend to attract so many creepers.

don’t page people about how excited you are for a TS scene that may have just been a false promise and my character keeping yours on the hook, ffs. even if there was a chance the moment you brought it ooc that went out the window.

generally just don’t page people you don’t know about TS.

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.

Feeling like I get to flex a little with the kind of character I love to play, in my preferred genre, finally having the mental capacity to actually feel like I can both RP and be creative at the same time, and starting a storyline I’m getting really excited about.

I really missed RP. It feels so good to be back.

So we’re getting our first images from the James Webb Telescope, and they’re beyond stunning.

I know these are all over the internet right now, but in case anybody hadn’t seen them… well.

I just woke up (west coast shit) and I still have feelings I’m trying to process about this, so, sorry for bumping this again but I’m literally not sure where else to put it.

I was pretty emotionally fine through most of that. Legitimately trying to offer advice. Honestly, the bannings weren’t even my major concern – it’s accountability and improvement, the two points I listed, in whatever form they take. I think that’s what’s been missing, and seeing people falling right into the same toxic shit they’d been doing before was what prompted me to even post over there in the first place. I’d been good about keeping my distance. I wasn’t going to get into any kind of major debate, but then I was asked to give something.

I took it on good faith. What I posted yesterday on MSB amounted to hours of stress and thought, emotional labor that I really was putting out for the good of the board. I knew they wouldn’t be popular thoughts with the crowd there, but they were genuine ones. I kept my criticism laser-focused on staff actions, and the one time someone felt caught in the crossfire, I apologized.

And I was pretty okay, though I think my exhaustion was starting to show, when I was called a bully doing mean girl shit for that. I didn’t think I was going to change anything immediately, but maybe I could give them some things to think about and chew on.

The blatant attempt at manipulation and gaslighting (actual gaslighting, as in, trying to make me question my whole reality, not the colloquial way it’s been used as lying) at the end, though? That wounded me, I’m not going to lie. Partially because it was so clumsy and, honestly, how did they think that was going to work on me? But mostly because it was coming from the one person who looked like they were really trying to engage. That was some cold, evil shit.

6/24/24: Updated. Not putting current character out there too publicly at the moment, very rarely RP these days. Doing some writing, let me know if you want to connect about that.

FORMER CHARACTERS
Silent Heaven: Jessica
Arx: Bliss, Eamon, Renfry
The Celestra: Toucan
The Network: Sarah
Ravencroft Academy: Cel
Haven: Nahid, Emilie

@Roz james somerton plays MU’s now?

@hobos said in Bannings:

But I understand why she felt the need. And why she felt the need, to me, is a far more egregious breach of decency as it comes with a particular power dynamic and a particular sort of exploitative abuse.

There really was no need and that’s sort of the issue here. She could have chosen not to violate the NCO, she could have chosen to not manipulate people to the degree she did, she could have chosen to just… not do any of this. She chose to. She chose to do things which actively harm people. No one forced her to, it was her choice, and many of those people whom she has directly harmed or indirectly harmed don’t forgive her for it, particularly as this is representative of a long pattern of toxic behavior from this player.

If that made her feel unwelcome, then may I introduce you to the phrase, “Oh no, not the consequences of my own actions!”

@hobos Nobody who is hurt by someone has to accept their apology, especially when it’s a repeat of years of the same behavior. Especially when it only looks like they apologized because they got caught.

It can take years of work and positive action and rebuilding trust in order to accept someone back in, and frankly, even then it’s always going to be on tenuous ground because a repeat, even a minor one, can collapse the whole thing. (See, in fact, the discussions around Macha here.)

That simply hasn’t happened.

@Runescryer The thing is, you proudly touted that you “HAD RECEIPTS” and made a big deal out of it, and then when you brought it out, what it looked like was you going “this character was mean to my character so this guy is a creep :(”

Frankly, I don’t think anybody looks good here, this is some of the most asinine drama to hit, but you were the one who went immediately “THIS MIGHT BE DWOPP” and stirred up that possibility. The person wasn’t. You jumped to one of the worst possible conclusions because … you didn’t like a potential way the story might go, because of a private scene?

and lord, we all know what I think of Lithium. I fully expect ZG had their reasons for the bans, and that they were based off of patterns of behavior. But you made a very specific accusation and then your evidence sucked.

@Runescryer

You made it clear that you thought the person you were talking about was DWOPP. Just because you never named Lithium doesn’t mean that it wasn’t Lithium you were talking about.

ETA: also the fucking irony that this drama was over the possibility of spreading a rumor.

This is shocking behavior that to a lot of us has, unfortunately, become pretty commonplace. This player is unwell, and has been a massive thorn in the side of Haven’s community for over a decade. Engaging and spurring it on only makes it worse, unfortunately, I’ve seen this repeated literally dozens of times.

Haven is practically dead, it isn’t surprising seeing her moving on to new games. My genuine advice is don’t provoke her, handle her quietly when this happens, and move on.

Anything else, the only result will be more and more escalation.

also, i’m not going to greet everyone, because i don’t like some people and it’s as simple as that.

if you’re trying to promote and defend your game smarmy condescension is a really interesting choice