Two years ago, was when I first joined this game.

I can't even really say that first impressions even gave a decent idea of the game. Imagine a World of Darkness campaign, but with the worst players. FishMalk VtM's, or the 'Lone Wolf'. Almost every. Single. Character.

Dark storytelling is fun. Getting constantly gimped because of code rather than RP, is not.

I'm going to start by saying that Haven has a select few good players. But that's also like saying you need to crawl the green mile to find a single flake of silver. Code works against RP, and the overt community of griefers. Usually, a game only has one of these problems.

But Haven was cursed with both.

Since the devs have unconcerned themselves with balancing, I'll be concise. The game is poorly balanced, and is lopsided in favor of code abuse, rather than roleplay. This is obvious in coding in 'Professional' (Noncombatant) focuses, but completely making it worthless to RP out. Combatants in every single sense of the word, have it made.

But only if they min-max.

Do you want to be a social character and avoid the trash-heap arms race of powergamers? Well, hope you can handle being removed from RP by combat focused ones. Excluded from plots on that basis alone. And getting antagonized by literally everything that needs to leech off of life-force. Expect little from the attacker. Because a major chunk of its antagonist playerbase seems to not know what RP is. And use code to fill it in for them.

So, what's there to do, you ask? Well, between the borderline illegal depiction of minors, on the side of the players, and the endless ooze of impervious macho men who don't kneel to the theme of horror… Not much. You can probably make a character, ERP, while you wait to be accepted into a better MUD.

If you want to have fun in Haven, take my advice. Treat it like how it wants to think RP works. A one-off experience of shallow ERP, and then tossed into the trash like a wet tissue, before moving onto something better.