a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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But look at this amazing story that came from it all. It's a tragidy, for sure, and there was much unnecessary suffering. But what a story, what an experience.
I do hope you decide to do only good in future lives, to balance out. Spread also love, and joy, compassion, and sharing. Humans are capable of both extremes.
Well, it was for him, but the normal player who just wanted to contribute, got stabbed from behind and closed the game frustrated does not have that kind of experience. For most of the players involved it was just another griefer ruining their fun.
Interesting read. One thing though: you did not become LITERALLY Hitler. Stop using that word unless in the right context.
Also, don't take Joriom's advice; this is just opinion. Population control is easier with less women around, so boys fill their niche as sterile worker drones, too.
Very smart. Instead of constructive criticism or just plain stepping away from the game for some time, let's destroy it even more.
Every griefer/murderer gets bored at some point and either stops playing or re-integrates into the normally behaving player base. Your selfish and self-entitled behaviour just leads to more frustration in this player base. Jason however will not be affected until the long term, as these players all already paid. So you just dry out the community of dedicated, enthusiastic and experienced players you actually hope to play with.
Apart from that, I am fairly sure Jason is already working on something regarding killing. There is just no way he ignores what 80% of threads here revolve around.
Every time I give my baby a name, it fucks up, I cannot name him a name without game's intervention. Even bobobobobobo has been change into bobby. Christ, I have killed so many of my babies because they had the wrong name. The only kid that had a normal name was jesus
The more I read from you, Trusty, the more I am convinced that you have some serious issues. Might want to get a psychological check-up.
[...]Also please consider the time period of in game vs ours. The reason we don't see a lot of murder In real life is because we are far advanced and have law enforcement, individual houses, and safety protocols on weapons such as guns. [...] In tribal days of any civ, murder wasn't uncommon, especially in fighting for resources.
Where do you get the notion from that murdering in nomadic and early agricultural times was common? As far as I know (I am no historian, but I know a bit about ancient times) this is more of a pop culture thing than actual historic fact. At least until the point where wars started, and even then the death toll in battles was not terribly high (especially when compared to e.g. WW1).
I wrote something similar already (and other players have the same wrong notion of how violence played out back then *wink wink* at TrustyWay and Goliath), but using violence against other humans was always a high risk strategy. In consequence it is just logical that it was only used if the reward was at least comparably high (remind yourself that you could pay the ultimate price here...), i.e. if your survival hinged on it AND no co-operation was possible for whatever reason (and nomadic tribes afaik often cooperated; they had to in large game hunts and in order to prevent disabilities caused by incest) AND if any lower aggression state than going for fatal injuries (like threatening in word and pose, shoving each other around, aiming for a knock-out, all the things you can see before and during a common street fight) has failed.
In the game violence therefore makes even less sense: Food is pretty easy to come by, and you can do fine and live to the age of 60 by having nothing else, so there are no real needs apart from that. Also, you do not have the possibility to just wound someone by e.g. carrying out a fist fight between the leaders, and all players can communicate in the same language (no language barrier).
The only reason to murder is because the risk, unlike in real life, is low, as you can get reborn immediately, and even lower for the aggressor due to limited sight and technical problems like lag and invisibility. It's not very historic, and whoever roleplays a baddie and goes on a killing spree is pretty retarded.
Because she's a hacker. You can tell from the sci-fi looking squiggles in the background.
Squiggles? That's the golden record on board the Voyager I space craft! You can build it now ingame I heard...
Currently I really feel like this game hates and shames males/boys. This needs to change for the better.
That's what is wrong with people today. Neither the game nor Jason (to my knowledge) hates on or shames males. What is wrong with you? It's not like the ingame life of a male is not worth living because of some disadvantages. It's the choice of players to kill off male offspring (btw. there are also enough communities who, if there is enough food, keep all boys and just a few girls, in order to prevent unchecked population growth in the next generation).
a multiplayer survival game of parenting
and civilization building by Jason Rohrerparenting not female parent ...please add some way for men to be part of this process and hence respected members of the civilization. Maybe make men better at killing bears and wolves? there is a tendency in game to starve and kill baby boys, this is actually the opposite of how things are done in ancient civilizations. The boys were the most valued not least,
You are just plain wrong to claim that in ancient history males were favoured, and even more so with implying that girls were actually killed more often. Educate yourself before you spread bullcrap.
how about let men take a wife, add marriage ...then there is a Father. The children of this union will be part of the male line.
If a civilization is down to only men, then can strike out and find an eve or a girl from another village (this was quite common in tribes that had no girls) marry her and carry on the family name. Please reconsider this hatred for males and male parentage. Make this a true family game and add marriage, make men great again.
Please reconsider your assumptions about other people's feelings towards stuff when you clearly don't know them. If you eat more apples than bananas, do you hate on bananas?
Lastly
Goliath and TrustyWay, in my opinion you are the ones who were griefing. Others already tried to explain why you are not in the position to complain, and you chose not to listen, but let me try anyway, if only for the sake of adding my voice.
You wanted to roleplay raiders. Cool, I can totally go with that. There were and are many great people and nations basing their sustenance on taking from others, like the sea people the Mediterranean, the Mongols, pirates. They took valuables from weaker nations and fueled their campaign with what they got from them.
What did you do? You had a rich settlement with advanced weapons and the infrastructure to make them, and you went to another village to steal... carrots. The food that is the easiest to come by in this game state. And you killed players for it, razing the whole village so that no one was there to farm more carrots for you in the future. In other words, you did not raid to take valuables while keeping the option up to come back later to raid more, you attacked for the thrill you get when having power over others. That's not roleplaying raiding, that's griefing, or at least roleplaying a village of psychopaths. No real raiders would have done something like this, because they risked their actual lives for stuff to keep themselves alive and well. You just killed people for a bunch of crap you could easily have made yourself in less time and with much lower risk than what you actually did.
If you want to roleplay raiding, do it right and in a sensible manner. If there is a poor village that just manages to make carrots, let live whoever does not fight back and let them pay you tribute instead of slaughtering everyone. Use your force not as an end in itself, but to accomplish things. Else you are roleplaying psychopaths, and you don't need to wonder if you give rise to more psychopathic behaviour. In addition to being called out as the griefers you actually were.
We decided to raid the east with 2 arrows and one knife to steal some girls, kill them and others if we could.
Yeah, sounds to me as if they were there for valuables...
I, and some others, already try something like this in naming our children and asking for names from our mother. Most of the time people will ignore this though, so names are almost always lost.
This is something I'd actually like the community to adapt, though some mechanism in seeing the names of people you already met and maybe communicated the names would be very nice and solve a LOT of issues.
How did people deal with murder in real life?
I presume since you studied the topic in great lengths for the making of this game, you already know the answer, or, put more explicitly, you know why the real world analogy does not hold for this game (or any other, for that matter).
Killing in real life was and is a high risk - moderate reward strategy. You could get their stuff, and women if you cared about that, yes, but you also more likely than not would lose your life trying to accomplish that. Thus no one in their right mind would just go killing someone else unless he/she was about to starve or needed to reproduce. That is killing in the sense it is performed in the game right now and not counting accidental kills for a higher social rank, which would only involve two individuals, not a whole village dying.
In real life, you don't normally expect to re-spawn after you death (certain religions not withstanding), so the risk of your own death is not something anybody in the real world takes lightly, but in the game, you can just start over, possibly even in the village you just tried to doom - even after re-spawn, no one can recognize you for who you were in an earlier life. In real life, you suffer one of the harshest forms of punishment, in the game, you lose next to nothing.
Also, in real life stone age I think it was highly unlikely for anyone to be able to slaughter a whole village of fifteen or more people without some form of resistance. Due to several features like insta-kill, limited view window, hard to distinguish individuals and lag issues, that is pretty easy in the game.
So I think the whole real world analogy falls apart with death in this game (as in any game for that matter), so you need to come up with some form of mitigation mechanism to make it equally risky to murder someone. In game terms this inevitably means some form of penalty after death, no matter what other means (of which there are many good suggestions around here) you or the community takes to prevent murder sprees from happening in the first place.
So, TrustyWay, you are essentially saying that you are one of the griefers ruining the game for others, and you want it to be even easier for you? Really cool, bro!
Plus, it really models the real world where there are people who do things for the greater good, people who do things for themselves, and people who do things for the devil.
What? Do you really think there are people that "do things for the devil" in real life? In my experience, every person thinks he/she is a good one, or at least does something unpleasant but necessary in the current situation. People that do evil stuff just because are comic book characters.
The thing you don't see is that we only have this one real life, whereas in the game we can be reborn however often we like, so it is not the same to waste your one real life vs. one or more of the ingame lives you have. Which is also the main problem all of the multi player competitive survival games out there have.
Honestly, Casdir, I'd advise you to stay away from the game for some time if it makes you so frustrated. If it's no fun for you, just leave it, at least for a while.
There is no obligation for other players to act so that you can enjoy yourself. That's the nature of a multi player game.
Oh, and lastly, I view it as completely normal to put unwanted children out in the wild where they cannot interfere with the ones the tribe actually wants to bring up. Your character being female does not necessarily mean you are wanted. Keeping population growth in check and all that.
This is a bit off topic now, but I'd just throw in that at the two occasions where I grew old enough in a camp where the water ponds were far away, they were not very prosperous and I soon left. Children starving while fetching water should not occur because camps should be founded near ponds (amongst other vital resources, of course).
I agree with your statement that griefing should not be or stay such a big concern. We will likely see short spikes as people want to try out new weapons.
Apart from that, I like playing both male and female characters. As other already said, being male gives more perceived freedom.
Thanks for your thoughts, I changed the title to be hopefully more informative.
Been thinking about exactly the same stuff. I dont think we should worry about distinguishing the matriarch, she'll be the one bothering to organize the tribe.
Yes, but she will change with age, and it is easier for immigrants if she is distinguishable.
Also, age will be a concern when succeeding since the matriarch work is teaching and you need long sentences to be clear.
Yes, which is directly contrary to the "only mother" role. Maybe a second person is queen? How exactly does the character count rise?
I think the best way to transmit knowledge deeper than "dont touch the planted carrots" is to use an apprentice/master relationship.
Which pretty much would be the second and third tiers of hierarchy, just that one chief has multiple apprentices. The workers could easily swap jobs under one chief, learning all aspects of the craft.
I would advice teaching many jobs to new players, like composting and rabbit hunting, not just farming and watercarrying.
I took that as a given that a reader would understand that this was only the example I gave. Of course there are dozens of jobs to do.
First of all, child watercarriers mean abandoned waterskins when they die, and i doubt there are many secrets to that craft that can be teached. Community knowledge wont ever advance if they are stuck with those jobs.
Water carriers don't have to be children, and learning to look out for your hunger meter is pretty much the first thing players learn in the game. As of death by other sources, there children are no different from adults. And yes, you cannot learn much from carrying water, but you can learn the basic interactions with the game, containers as well as a feeling for when and how much water is needed and what for. Also, there sometimes just is a job that has to be done, without any educational benefit. And, as I also said, I would never expect a worker to do one specific job for the rest of his virtual life, that would just be dull.
Agree on everything else.
I have been going on in topics about how important I find it to communicate in game to bring the whole player base forward. The reason why we might want to do that is that by teaching a sufficient amount of players something this thing will become canon, and everyone will know and do that (think how everyone knows to type F as a baby to indicate hunger, and no one apart from griefers dries out ponds anymore), which in turn will make our virtual lives easier and more efficient. This is directly opposed to doing advanced stuff like metal working on your own, because in the long term, having a steel chisel does not help a village as much as a reasonable amount of players knowing how to make a steel chisel and when it is appropriate to do so.
In the posts I have answered with that train of thought I proposed to educate while doing. Let's take the example of a farmer. As a farmer, you would tend to the fields, but also tell everyone you see that that row of carrots needs to stay untouched and why (gaining seeds with maximum efficiency). If enough farmers do so over the next couple of days, I think the "global" understanding that it is bad to just rush into the fields when you are hungry and pick a carrot from the fields should rise to a point where this is basically canon as well. That is not to say that no one will ever take your seeding carrots again; there are new players and griefers after all. But just as we hardly see empty ponds today, we should reach a point where people will just commonly know.
But thinking about this some more time, I think we as the externally (ie through this forum, discord, reddit) communicating players can do more to speed up that global advancement. For any idea to be permanently successful, enough players have to do it, and it has to be simple. So what about us players starting to establish a simple hierarchy in every town we get to or are born into?
It could be like this:
There is at least (and ideally exactly) one woman tending to kids at the fireplace (if there is no fireplace, at least in the center of the camp). This is already a thing for many players, so we should use it and make her the matriarch; the leader of the tribe. For short ingame description, let's call her the queen. Her role is to stay there, feed the kids, communicate and organize. That also encompasses to decide which kids live and which die for population control. It would be ideal if she could tell people apart (naming the kids would help), but I realize that cannot consistently be done due to age changes.
Depending on how well off the tribe is there are people in the second layer under her. At least there is a chief farmer who organizes everything related to the farm. He watches the food count the settlement has stocked, oversees which rows are for food and which for seeds, how many berry bushes need to be planted, the amount of fertile soil and so on. He also tells the queen how many of the newborns or immigrants he needs as workers, if he needs tools like clay bowls, and tells her the status about the farm from time to time, so she can make informed decisions and inform other 'chiefs' about what's needed.
The bottom of the hierarchy are workers. They just carry out the tasks they get from the queen (e.g. message carrier, tending the fire, getting her food) or from the chiefs (water carrier, farm and seed, make new soil). The nice thing is that every player here either has the knowledge about how to do his job already or can learn it quickly from the chief (or another worker if instructed), so it will not be a life of water carrying necessarily. You can just go to your chief and ask him to find a new person to carry water, because you want to go work for the smith instead now. So he in turn can ask for a new worker from the queen, who then takes over your water carrying duty for a while so you are free to do other stuff.
Queen and chiefs would elect their successors from their workers (or kids for the queen) and instruct them accordingly. Of course, these should be players already adept at the task.
You could tell them apart by clothing convention, depending on what you have at hand when starting. E.g. the queen could be the only one allowed to wear a reed skirt, as fur loincloths or similar for workers should be quite abundant soon and she will be by the fire most of the time anyway. I have no experience with that yet, but you could also use specifically dyed clothes for the chiefs. I invite you to work out something good and quickly achievable.
Of course the queen would have the most difficult job, probably even needing something to write down all important stuff nearby.
What do you think? Remind yourself in your proposals that the cornerstones for such a hierarchical system should be that it is easily conveyed with a small amount of words and adaptable and scalable to the situation.
Agree with you, but the good thing is that there are global customs that have stuck on pretty much everybody, and thus also stick fast on new players (like F for food as a baby or not completely draining ponds). My hope is that the same will become true over time for more stuff, allowing us to communicate more advanced stuff than "put the tools back where you got them from".
The ingame chat system is horrendous and I hope Jason addresses it soon. At the very least, a person needs to know you meant her/him when speaking while he/she went offscreen, so you don't have to run after them just to convey a short message. At this point, even some 10 character messages you can write on the ground that stay would be a huge help.
Low FOV is a problem with griefers, but could be solved with something like a watchtower structure you could build that increases it while you man it.
Maybe lengthy answer incoming:
First of all, I think people reading the forums are not the one you are actually addressing with this matter, as people who want to learn more about the game externally usually are quite aware of the matters.
Secondly, I myself have just picked up the game, cannot play too much and try to learn in game rather than outside. But still, as I am a social nature, I do not just want to spawn somewhere, have them nurture me and then not contribute while I try new things out. So a fair amount of time I will farm, get water etc. and not do any fancy advanced stuff. Maybe the reason why so little progress is happening is because others are like me.
Third, every couple generations a village does not have the expertise to know that they have to limit their numbers, so they all starve and migrate, and someone else has to get the whole thing going later. Again, no progress. And when it is late night or morning on a work day, not many people will be there -> little sharing of knowledge -> little progress.
The last thing is communication. The whole community is I think growing atm, so the mean experience of all players is growing very slowly, if at all. It takes only one newby who thinks that it is a better idea to take a carrot from the field than from a basket to spare the field workers some clicks and your seeding rows are plundered or at least inefficient. So you need to communicate where the information is needed: in the game. I've had two lives where my main work on the field was to watch over the one line of carrots that were left for seeds and repeat the same thing over and over again. I am sure there will be some kind of convention established once >90% of people know you need fully planted carrot rows for seeds, but this "level of education", if you will, first has to be met. So maybe do some farming work for some minutes of your life, and keep watch over those rows, and communicate, so others can learn. It is in your responsibility as experienced player to help all advance. Not so much by doing fancy stuff, but by teaching more people to do that stuff. Any form of advanced technology is useless if people don't know how to use it properly, so guide them there instead of complaining.
This game is a social experiment. The basis for all social interaction is communication. Established rules (like saying F for food as a baby, not draining ponds completely and so on) can help this communication be more efficient, so develop some rules for carrot rows, tool and ressource usage and COMMUNICATE THEM!
I'd honestly only see that as a problem if I happened to die more often from stolen food than not. Which I don't, even if you don't count the neglected child deaths. How often do you die because someone steals your stuff that you see that as a problem. Apart from that, I like to think that, apart from the not existing perma-death (as in, you play once and never again), it is a nice depiction of stone age society. They likely did not have the notion of some tool belonging to a single person. And some tribes likely also had all their stuff stolen or raided and suffered the consequences.
ETK03 wrote:Don't chop down trees that give branches.
I am not sure what you mean by this. Don't all trees give something useful and should we be careful to cut all? Which trees are best to chop?
Chop down far away trees or ones you have many of.
In principle I like that, though I have yet to murder or be murdered. One thing to consider though: In a colony not all people know all people (which imo is a flaw in how the game works right now, not necessarily a flaw of the players' interactions), so a foreigner comes, murders one of yours, one of yours murders him, but has now red hands. I am pretty sure most of the time these defenders of the colony will get seen as murderers from their own people who don't know them well enough most of the time. Voila, you have created a potential murder spree by just killing one player...
Maybe a work-around would be that you don't get red hands when killing a murderer?
New player here, but I disagree with Jason here. If it is true in the real world that you can tell in which state a thing is (here the well), it should be in game. In reality you can tell when a well is about to go dry (and btw., taking the last available water from it does not keep it from refilling from ground water afaik). Just listen if the bucket dropped hits something solid or splashes.
I mean, you did the same thing with ponds; they give us a visual clue as to how full they are. Even if I have never actively emptied a pond, I get a feeling that a pond with 1 or 2 charges left is better left alone until later, just from seeing the image. Why would you not make wells work the same way?
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