One Hour One Life Forums

I second this, though I think being able to repair containers would help a lot.  That way we don't have to transfer everything inside constantly... cus that is just annoying.

While durability is always a risky design move, sometimes it works.  The way it is implemented in this game at this moment is not one of those times.  I think adding the ability to repair and maintain items would change it from simply annoying to fun, but I believe that containers degrading is a bad idea.  This game sits on a grid, and has one object per grid slot.  The grid is very largely spaced.  Container items help make up for this space issue, but it is a bit clunky.  Still the overall charm of the game compensates for the interface shortcoming... until now.  Now you have a situation where you have containers full of items that need to be replaced with new containers and that means find the space to take everything out and put it into another container.  Also once everything is out of the decaying container, you have a decayed container object eating a grid slot that needs to be dealt with.  Effectively, the game currently feels like grid management, the game.  This isn't a challenge, it is just annoying.  Repairable items would go a long way towards making the decay feature positive, though I'm sure there are other means of tuning the situations.

That said, I do very much like the tilling and compost updates and how there are tiers to the hoe.

Griefing is not a normal healthy behavior, no matter how you look at it.  Griefers are either people who derive pleasure from causing suffering in others, or people who fail to recognize that the other players are real people, with real feelings, or they are individuals unable to experience empathy.  Occasionally you might get people who do it because they over value someone who is of one of the above mindsets and foolishly seek to appeal to them.  Basically, there isn't a healthy version of intentionally inflicting pain on other people, no matter how you try to spin it.  So no, we do not all grief.

That said, this game is one of the most grief proof games I have ever seen.  The entire premise of only living 60 minutes kind of removes the worst of it.  I just roll my eyes when I see someone trying to be a dick.  All  see is "oh, there is a broken person, must suck to be them in real life." and then I get reborn in game and that is the end of it.

I'm disappointed by this update and I'd like to explain why I feel the apocalypse mechanic ruins the game for me.  I told a lot of people at GDC about this game and it has 3 unique features that make it stand out from the heaps of other games in this genre type.

3) After 60 minutes, you die.  Your character is impermanent.  This means dieing is that that important, what is more important is moving the game forward for the next generation, raising the next generation, etc.

2) For the first few minutes of play, you are a helpless baby.  You have to beg other players to take care of you.  This gives time to become attached/invested in the community you have been born into. (Note that adding names actually damaged this slightly as people began valuing their name living on over everything else)

1) The world is persistent.  This means if players screw up and ruin natural resources, that is it, they are screwed and have to move on.  This makes the desire to pass on knowledge to other players very strong and pushing players to find inventive sustainability solutions as well as drawing parallels to the real world.

Adding a reset button to the game, which is what the apocalypse feature does, ruins the most unique aspect of the game.

I had assumed a slow decay nature reclaim would be eventually introduced for sectors that went for a few days without players interacting with tiles.  Essentially, rebuilding a block of the server in the wild state if abandoned long enough or something along those lines as a game world does eventually have to deal with the finite nature of itself, but I was expecting something that would be less than obvious to the player, and more importantly, outside the players direct control, thus ruining an area could not be quick fixed.  So now I would like to outline the problems this feature introduces.

1) Players never know when the the world could be reset next.  They can never expect to some day come across the same city they were in once days or weeks ago.  They wont think, "some day the pile of rocks I put here as I starve as an eve could be used by another player."  They will think, "the sever is just going to get reset eventually anyway, no point."

2) Using up limited resources doesn't matter anymore.  After all, the server is just going to reset anyway.

3) Griefing behaviors don't matter because the city is going to vanish when the server resets anyway.  If they don't matter, they become normal gameplay.

4) One group is building a new city and having fun.  Another group has ruined their city and desires to reset the server, and they do.  Screwing over the other players.

5) New meta game, grief the whole server at once by resetting it!

Now I would like to focus on what made the server not being reset so cool.

1) Thoughts like: "Some day, when the city is stable, I can create a caravan with others and we can build a new city in an area that couldn't support people otherwise."

2)  "We can build roads to link cities."

3)  "We can polish and refine our city to be better than ever."

4)  "We can explore because we have enough food."

5)  New players can learn how to play here before getting blind sided by wilderness.

I guess what really struck me about the game was the ripple effect.  How my action changed the world and the experience for everyone, for good or bad.  And eventually any action would be sponged away, through the march of time, as players picked up and moved anything I put down, as time decayed it.  An instant wipe conflicts with this, so I'm not a fan of how it is being implemented.

I'm sorry that this isn't edited and coherent and pretty, but I have to take off for something.  I just thought it would be helpful to articulate the reasons why the server reset button kind of killed the game for me and some others.  I also happened to sit through one already and it seems like it may have crashed some stuff too, but that aside if this were to be implemented, one that has to be prevented is better than one that is initiated.  (IE enough players have to do x y and z every day to stop a reset, or something like that).  I am out of time though.  Anyhow, was enjoying the game until now, so thanks for that.

When holding an item like a basket, currently you can not set it down and swap it with another basket.  I think this changed when the item rotation was added.  If a normal click could swap baskets with items on the ground or other baskets that would be great. 

When the wolf hat is on it is hard to get things into and out of backpack.  It also got harder in general after the last patch, again might be related to the item rotation feature being added.

I can't remember for sure, but it seems like baskets also could not be rotated out of carts and boxes now, which would be nice since death by not being able to set down to pick up is difficult even when we had easy basket swapping.

Really like the game.  Nice work. Maybe we will run into each other at GDC.