One Hour One Life Forums

There are a lot of threads about trolling recently. I totally feel everyone that trolls suck and while I even agree that something needs to be done, I don't think addressing the trolls directly with gameplay changes and so on makes sense. In fact, I think the trolls are potentially an important part of the game. Some folks want eating-limits, or to make trolling harder. But I'd say to that, trolling _should_ be easy. Stealing, killing, and destruction in general are all The Easy Way Out and that's part of why it stings so bad. It _should_ sting.

I personally believe the issues we're having with trolls have less to do with the trolling, and more to do with certain illusive design decisions affecting our ability to communicate as one would expect. I'm not talking about character limits, I'm talking about the viewport and presentation of dialog.

It is _so_ hard to have a conversation with someone in a town, or even just alert anyone of breaking news:

• There's the overlapping text.

• The zoomed in nature of the game so you can only feasibly be talking with 2-3 people at a time.

• The zoomed view also contributes to the inability to yell or be heard by anyone in any town of nearly any size.

• It also means that when a fellow villager does come into view, you have about 3 seconds to rifle off a message, often something like "STOP". If you do manage to get the message off in time and their screen is aligned properly as not to occlude your message, the chances of them actually stopping are still, at best, a coin flip because it's likely they're en route to avoid starvation, head-down making a bow saw or have their own children to tend to.

Giving it a bit more thought, zooming the view out would effect too many things in the game. Part of the tension of being nomadic or searching for water is directly correlated with the zoomed-in nature of the game. Zoom it out and the whole world gen needs to be re-thought.

But I do think there's room to play with how text/speech is presented. In the real world, someone can yell loudly. It might be worth exploring yelling, perhaps it costs hunger boxes? But a yell could send out a message within a radius, even within the same current style. Players would either see it above the yelling players head, or if off screen, snapped to the edge of the screen and sized based on distance from yelling player.

This could even be implemented without adding anything special like yelling costing hunger points, and just have each player have a voice volume radius. Maybe your voice volume is on a bell curve just like your stomach capacity is. Younger and older players have less of a voice, and middle-aged players, the loudest. Even if trolls somehow try to abuse this new way of talking, it won't be anything too different from the current model of communication in the game and if there's a bustling village of a dozen people and something happens and 3 people cry out "THIEF" near the city center, the whole town can come to see how they can assist with taking care of the thief.

Taking care of trolls, defending the village and all other manner of people-problems _are_ interesting things to solve as players, and they should stay. But I believe this change would not compromise any of those issues and give us much more ability to begin to find our own creative solutions to these issues.

Let me know what you think, or if you have ways to improve on this idea.