One Hour One Life Forums

I agree with you that this often happens.
But a lot of the things I learned I learned in towns that had enough of everything, so that I was free to just play around with what was there and discover things in a peaceful setting, with or without a mentor.

The case of kero is special though, since all the towns depend on it. Let's say you were a veteran player in a desert town, and as you died of old age you realized kero is needed, but all the gingers you encountered that life were new players learning how to cook and farm. You know what needs to be done, so instead of living another life in the desert family you /die to get to ginger. I'm fine with that. The interdependence really makes all the towns into one town, in essence.

But this doesn't really sound like a problem with the /die-command. This sounds like a problem with the community not spreading knowledge about how to solve certain problems. For all we know, those players might be happy if someone else stepped in.

I don't really disagree with your points here. I don't think those out-of-game tools are detrimental though. And trucks are ultimately an ingame mechanic. What else are we going to use it for except to bring stuff to towns that need it? We can't use trucks to move our towns to better locations, since we can't bring our babies and children with us. So the main use for a truck is to gather and distribute goods, in a world where there is no money, where mothers are dependent on their towns to raise their kids, and where ultimately all towns are interdependent, so that helping a different town is to help your own, most of the time.

Well, I don't think it has been abused. If people have reasons to leave - unless their reason is that they just want to leave more bone piles, they should be allowed to go. And no doubt the game designer wanted people to accept whatever life the game had in store for them. Between /die and runner babies I'm sure /die was just the lesser evil to him. There are other options that would have removed even more baby bones, like a pregnancy, where you get to leave before you're even born. But I think that is so counter to his vision that there's no chance we'll ever see an option like that. So I just think of the /die babies as all the children who would die in times of old, when mothers could give birth to ten kids or more and see three of them or less reach adulthood. Sometimes annoying, but that's how the world works.

(I'm glad for the cycle change though.)

Well, if these seasoned players use a mechanic to help all the towns stay alive, again I do not see it as an abuse. And there is so much for the new players to learn. Is it unfair that they don't know how to build an engine too? Once they know about it, they can do it.

It sounds to me less like a problem with a specific mechanic and more an overall problem with how we pass on knowledge in the game. Or perhaps, a balancing problem between the different kinds of challenges faced by players of different levels of knowledge.

For example:

Pies: Why do people know how to make pies?
Because everyone needs pies, all the time. (I'm exaggerating, but bear with me.)
How do we solve the problem that everyone needs pies?
Everyone makes pies. 
So everywhere there is a need for pies and a reason to learn how to make pies.
Notice that the solution is not that advanced players /die in order to get to the town that needs the pies.

Kero: Why don't people know how to get kero?
Everybody needs kero, not all the time at first, but all the time in late game.
How do we solve the problem that everyone needs kero?
One person makes the kero and distributes it. (Exaggerated but again bear with me.)
So everywhere there is a need for kero, but not a reason for everyone to learn how to produce it.
In fact, while one person makes the kero, we still need all the rest to make the pies.
Since we need them to make pies, we don't encourage them to (learn how to) make kero.

So maybe if we had something like a ginger town with lots of tar spots much closer, and somehow with an abundance of pipes, and where fish was like a feast plate keeping everyone full for a long time, all the ginger kids could spend their lives learning how to produce kero instead of baking pies.

I'm sort of brainstorming here, but I think you see what I'm trying to say. The speciality towns in a sense are not dependent on teaching this stuff to their inhabitants the same way all towns are dependent on teaching pies.

Perhaps somehow the game mechanics should be such that it was natural for gingers to build their towns not close to snow, but in snow. Maybe desert people should benefit from living in the desert and jungle people in the jungle, close to their speciality tasks, and with a mechanism that kept them spending less time on the more common tasks. For example food that is both plentiful and easily accessible in the biome, but that rots outside of the biome, and clothes that helps them (but not other races) stand the temperature and the bugs.

Just throwing it out there

Agree. I'm usually unable to teach a new player in a 'true' Eve camp that receives no help, I'm usually too busy. Towns are better places to teach, which I think is one of the reasons many are so eager to go quickly through the stages. For a brand new player, it's probably not the most interesting experience to die of starvation in an Eve camp, and the people who want that stage to last longer are most likely people who know a bit more about the game.

That said, I often prefer early towns myself.

You can't solo-practice rubber and oil in the tutorial, if you want to learn it by yourself you have to go to a small server with the option to Eve-chain.

Thank you too Strilar, I enjoy the conversation!

Sorry this got so long, I'll keep it short in the future

I'm not sure why you think new players can't learn how to drill for oil when there's plenty of kero available, or how to make rubber when the town already has rubber. I've rarely been able to save a town by doing something I had no experience with. But I have watched people save towns, and learned from them what they were doing and why, and with that experience I have been able to save other towns in succeeding lives.

Yet solving problems is one of the main parts of the game. I don't quite see the difference between a sesoned player who was randomly born in the right place at the right time solving a problem, vs a seasoned player who chose to go there in order to solve the problem.
If the issue is that the problem should not have been solved by a seasoned player at all, well... then we need different kinds of restrictions.
If not, the mechanics they use to solve the problem shouldn't matter.

And personally I appreciate the veterans who have popped into towns I've been in, especially when they were helpful, taught stuff, and helped solve problems I couldn't have solved alone with the level of knowledge I had at the time.

This might work on small servers, but might not work on bigserver2 if the population should ever fall to very few players during certain times of the day. In that case we want them to be in the same family, whereas on small servers we want them spread out.

Thank you, Jason. The changes may seem modest but they are very welcome.

A baby sling might help in the sense that you do not have to rush to the nursery, you can continue teaching your older child. But yes, if you get two babies at once the problem remains.

And yes, I suspect that even when population is high, a family could die out. Sometimes people die by accident, or they're bored and leave early, or they travel away from town for various reasons. We can know that at this time of day we usually have this many players, but we can't know that another player will be born the next five minutes that will want to stay in town.

However - nothing I say should be taken to mean that your problem should not be solved. I hope Jason looks into it. I don't think I have anything else to add to this discussion

Strilar, there is one thing the algorithm cannot control and that is how many players are available. I have been in towns that were buzzing with life when I was born, but by the time I became an elder only a few people remained. Incoming players will rarely be evenly distributed through the time we are pregnant. And out of the children we raise, some are boys and some will not live to adulthood. As much as I agree that too many babies is stressful, sending them to other towns might mean that by the time we are ready for new babies, no player is available to give birth to.

I'm not saying you are wrong. I fully understand and agree. But I do not think it is a simple algorithm to program. Tweak it for certain scenarios, and it will negatively impact other scenarios.

Cluttered spaces are a big problem for the inexperienced. I agree SID skeletons should vanish quicker.

Maybe we should create a habit where moms are not necessarily the teachers? In some towns long ago there were school buildings, but they were never in use when I saw them. I don't know how effective they were in bringing teachers and students together.

But we could make a habit of taking grown children to the garden or kitchen, locating a farmer or cook and ask them to teach our kids. Or, idk, we could say feathered fur hats are teachers' hats, and if you wear one you signify that you want that role. It might work with no griefers around...

Obviously Jason doesn't want this, but I don't think a pregnancy system would hurt the game, where the mother knows she is potentially pregnant while the fetus can choose to /die before being born after a few seconds of watching the town.

And I don't think anyone else will like this last suggestion, but I think it's worth mentioning:

Give men the ability to have children on rare occasions. If all the women are old and there's a young man, let him have a baby. It's a fantasy game, so why not, especially if it solves a problem.

Spoonwood does have a point. Getting iron takes effort, and our time is limited. There may be thousands of iron piles around, but it will take time to find them and bring them to our current location.

As long as family lines keep requiring a more varied diet, making iron more available shouldn't break the game. Maybe having more iron nearby would inspire more people to try out smithing and engine making.

Griefing isn't a playstyle.
Griefing is griefing.

This game places absolute beginners in towns with the most experienced players, and turns them into a family for a short hour. That's what makes this game special. Do we abuse it for our own entertainment, or do we make the most of the time we spend together?

If pvp is what you want, there are other games built for that. Be kind ingame and be mindful of the people around you.

What if the curse data is only shared with your current family?
If a family member has cursed someone nearby, you'll see it.
But if that family member is exiled, you'll no longer see who they cursed. And in your next life, the information is forgotten unless you yourself cursed the person during this life.

I wanted to give a warm welcome to all the new players, if they ever read this forum.
I've had a wonderful time the last few days. Even though most towns struggle right now, it's a joy to meet so many kind and eager to learn players. I hope you have a good time too, though this game will drag you through plenty of hardship. Thank you for giving this cute, crazy little game a chance. ILY