Status of the other RPIs

Haven isn't significantly worse than the RPIs in terms of the roleplaying standard, they just lack a few of the features considered necessary for RPIs. Most notably there's no review process and you can have multiple characters (I believe three). In terms of how well people roleplay, it's frankly no worse than muds like Arm and SoI, and in some ways considerably better as their players tend to make a huge effort when it comes to character portrayal. Arm's emoting standards are hilariously awful, for instance, and SoI has always been plagued by bland and shallow characters due to the rigid setting.

It isn't a traditional RPI, and they seem to hate the term themselves, but I wouldn't take offense to seeing Haven listed amongst the RPIs as it really fills the same niche and plays almost entirely like an RPI with just a few minor differences. It also has way, way more freedom of expression due to things like the ability to write your own item descriptions and design your own house. This sounds horrifying to RPI purists because you envision people doing all kinds of insane, theme-destroying bullshit, but for the few months I played last year, I never saw a single instance of anything problematic. I also never saw a character description that wouldn't have been tolerable the RPIs, or really any wrong behaviour stemming from the low barrier of entry.

Haven's big problem is that the game is all about cliques, and if you're not in one, there's not a fucking thing to do. People won't give two shits about you if you're not in someone's inner circle, so if you can't find a clique, you'll be hard pressed to get anything more profound than the friendly acquaintance roleplay you can get by playing a likeable character who treats people nice. They also seem to have issues with metagaming in PvP because information sharing is basically accepted and all the game mechanics are pretty much in the open, so some people min-max and cheese the shit out of things.

Add to this: My PC did not even do the actual pk'ing. Can only presume I was bumped because they literally could not fathom how to handle a PC PK'ing anyone and did not want to deal with it happening again?

I am sure you could insert any reason ever to justify any of it happening but from my end it felt like no one took the role being played seriously until shit got real then everyone hit the panic button to appease the fury of the (seemingly considerable) Mary Sue community.

This is my last experience. If they have changed since then I do not know I am never going back there to check.

Yep. It's an opinion. And it wasn't good. Thanks for respectin' it though. Everyone has them.



Wait what. Why the 'but'? There's no but.. unless..





Ah. But you have a longer one. That is cool. I respect that too then.


Oh. Also. Aura never came into play. I personally never tripped the Understanding Alarm or got blood aura'd. Other person was not blood aura'd... We were both PK'd. We logged in to immediate. "Hi. We have to kill you because.. we just do." It was extremely obvious it was OOC comedown for rocking the game boat. The guy that PK'd me even OOC'd "I have almost never PK'd anyone in all my time playing. Sorry about this hope it was an good scene for you." Nice of him but made it that much more obvious what was going on.

Perhaps they made it more clear afterwards. But at the time. It wasn't. So. My opinion ain't changing. Good luck to y'all playing anything but something pretty fluffy. And be prepared for very.. very.. long emotes about ..how their milkshake tastes and such.

Item code is cool. I liked the environmental editing too. Beyond that.. Whatevs.

I don't know about awesome, it really has its limitations. However, when I tried it, I was pleasantly surprised to find that it wasn't WoW RP server type roleplay like I had expected. If you can get over the fact that half the playerbase is clearly of the "longer emotes = better RP" school of roleplaying, it has great characterizations and scenes, and there's a lot of plots going on if you can find your way into them as the game is set up to actively encourage player-run plotlines.

The issues are with the conflict aspect of the game and the heavy influence of cliques. The actual gameplay is sketchy, you also have shit like the ability to accrue experience on one character and transfer it to your alt in order to raise their skills. However, the roleplay itself is actually way, way better than 90% of what Arm's playerbase produces. I'd rank it amongst the RPIs for that reason alone.

On Arm, you're lucky to see emotes exceeding ten words, and many players' roleplay consists of grunts and nods. Arm has solid code and a sandbox gamist thing going for it, which is most of the reason so many play, but the actual roleplay is really awful in most cases and by far the worst of the RPIs. Haven is pretty much the exact opposite with a very contrived and artificial gameplay environment but stellar characterization from most players.

Yeah, there's really no quality left in the genre. Arm is a parody of its former self, SoI was a dud, and none of the other ones are designed to be well-rounded games. Arm and SoI used to be genuinely good games back in their respective heydays, but not so much anymore. Seems a truly great RPI will need the following three components:

1) Competent, sane staff. This is a pretty big ask. Most of the games have one or two each, but you'd need half a dozen to make a truly great RPI. It's almost impossible to assemble a whole team of admins who are good at the job, sensible people, and willing to keep doing it long enough to matter.

2) Full-featured game world that actually feels like a world and gives you a lot of options for character concepts, areas to play in, and things to do. Armageddon has this, though awful staffing renders most of it obsolete as you're prevented from utilizing the game's inherent features.

3) A solid, modern codebase with strong game mechanics and the capacity for improvements along the way instead of Arm's traditional "can't be done in this ancient codebase" dilemma. ARPI/SoI were sort of close to having this, but the only serious hope lies with Japheth's FutureMUD.

Without all three of these, a game will suffer in one way or another.

If you want to go with just a couple of admins, they both have to be able to perform the full range of admin duties. That's just as rare as half a dozen that can each do something well. Once your FutureMUD is finished, it might be possible to make do without a coder, so that can be scratched off the list. Still, you'd need storytelling, scripting, building, vision and ability to deal with often ridiculous players. Getting all of that in two individuals is quite a feat. The game is also much more fucked if staff burnout becomes a reality.

I'm not sure why people would be so up in arms if we did store/suicide after killing someone. I was informed that if you did that after a PK it would be retconned to avoid exactly that abuse. Now LYING to someone ICly that you would just leave town for awhile after offing them as an example of logical proof that they shouldn't expect the understanding to protect them. That would be perfectly allowable and we did that.

The biggest reason we carried out the execution, besides the fact we said we would multiple times on clan chat and no one told us not too. The super impossible to interrogate normal human wouldn't even lie to us. She didn't even attempt to make something up or give us a half truth or anything she just went YOU CAN NEVER BREAK ME AND YOU WON'T KILL ME SO AHAHAHAHA and she actually laughed. So we killed her and knew the bloodaura was coming and I got bloodaura'd and tried to hide out until it'd blow over but I got caught. Big surprise. I spent awhile trying to negotiate with my captors because my character valued his life he was just a sociopath.

PS - During our interrogation we used the illusion power or whatever to try and scare her into talking which caused enough psychological damage that it violated the understanding the the player even said as much OOCly but by then we'd already decided to kill her. We even counted down for her and over clan comms and still she didn't break and no one ordered us to stop. I used to have a log, not sure if I do anymore.


EDIT FOR FUN - Raven you shouldn't play haven it is a terrible game and I hereby announce you are a terrible person for playing it and only you and no one else! Others may play it but never you. JUDGEMENT!