One Hour One Life Forums

Jason,

Thanks again, I appreciate you making a great game. As a computer scientist myself with a masters degree, I get the technical things you're saying about hash tables and such. However, I'm one of your 14,000 inactive players with 100+ hours of game time at the moment and I thought I'd chime in and tell you why that is.

While I appreciate your idea that OHOL should always be a struggle, it gets boring starting over from scratch. Finding milkweed to make rope, to make hatchets, to make snare traps for watering pouches, to form a bow drill and a hatchet so I can make a fire to finally get to the state where I can make a water pouch or a clay bowl to start a farm. When I come across a civilization and I don't have to waste an entire life making advanced tools or a sustainable compost farm, what is there to do really? I can build or raise sheep or hunt for gold to make a crown. I mean what's the incentive? Your goal was to defeat routine boring tasks you see in games like farming ore all day in world of warcraft to make weapons, but you pretty much just created this same kind of routine in a more boring, annoying way by making it random as to where resource spawns are with time limitations. Once you really understand OHOL and how to craft just about anything, there is no challenging task anymore. That is what really has prevented me from playing recently and turned me inactive. Extreme gamers like me need a challenge. We need a near impossible task to accomplish that we can strive for. Currently, OHOL has none of these tasks. Everything in the game is pretty much accomplishable with the right spawn.

Griefing is a symptom of endless resources. I agree with you. Once I had done literally everything there was to do in OHOL from building a base from scratch, to crafting a crown, the only entertaining thing I found left to do was to see how many people I could kill with a single life. After killing 4 people, I endless ran around searching for more people to kill and died to a wolf. That was about the point in my OHOL career I just quit.

As far as the horse update was concerned, I didn't even redownload the patch to play for the horse update, because why would I do that? I get a horse to travel to another town that has the same boring resources? Again, my point is incentive. There is no incentive for end game play in OHOL. That is what it is really missing. I don't want to go through the boring tasks of developing a civilization if there is no chance that civilization can better itself to do far more advanced tasks.

I know your time is limited as a single developer, and as I said I greatly appreciate what you have made so far. It has brought me great joy and is fun to play. In my endless hours of troubleshooting and becoming an efficient machine at playing OHOL, my opinion is you just won't captivate players like me if there aren't more features added, more stuff to do, more things that are almost unobtainable that we can strive for. I know adding lots more stuff to do and more features is asking a lot, and I don't expect it of you. I just wanted you to know my rational and give constructive feedback as to why I'm no longer captivated and active in OHOL. Best of luck to you! Even if I never play OHOL again, which I'm not saying I won't, what you've created so far was well worth the money I spent for the time I have enjoyed playing. I may revisit OHOL in the future when it is more developed, but right now I just kind of put playing it on hold and keep reading your emails for content updates until I see something added to the game that peeks my interest.

Sincere Kudos,
Exgrathanor