a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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Might have to swing through for a minute after the bear buff drops... Sounds like the landscape will be ripe for new designs *cutie pie angel emoji*
jcwilk wrote:JasonY wrote:There a lot of annoying and weird people you can come across in-game.
Personally, beggers annoy me the most. Almost every baby expects to be clothed and it can get really annoying, especially if they jump out and run off to hump a BP they saw. A strange and also sometimes annoying thing people do is asking to be killed, Usually, they are baiting you to get cursed and killed. Today I had someone so sad that they threatened to grief if I didn't kill her.
So tell me, What's the most annoying or strange person you've found in-game?
The bb thing isn't annoying to me, having to make my own bp as a bb is so annoying... Getting one for free is night and day and they get snatched up real quick in small camps.
Interesting, I mean sure if theirs a surplus I'll give them. I just don't like it when they hump clothes or beg when it's a poor town.
Well I mean, if it's just lying on the ground unused then ya of course you should equip your bb with it, if it's being worn or being saved for something in particular or the bb is telling you to craft it then time for kick the bb
Edit - plus moving over something and humping it is usually the most efficient way to communicate when you can only type a letter or two at a time
There a lot of annoying and weird people you can come across in-game.
Personally, beggers annoy me the most. Almost every baby expects to be clothed and it can get really annoying, especially if they jump out and run off to hump a BP they saw. A strange and also sometimes annoying thing people do is asking to be killed, Usually, they are baiting you to get cursed and killed. Today I had someone so sad that they threatened to grief if I didn't kill her.
So tell me, What's the most annoying or strange person you've found in-game?
The bb thing isn't annoying to me, having to make my own bp as a bb is so annoying... Getting one for free is night and day and they get snatched up real quick in small camps.
The baiting to get killed thing is bizarre, i mean I've baited people to curse me to get to dt but can't imagine why someone would bother getting killed rather than just stripping and starving or finding a nice wolf. Maybe to get lineage locked out? Is that still a thing?
Probably the folks who annoy me the most are the pretentious twats who brag in-game about their hour count and expect the red carpet to get rolled out, or think they're a famous player that people ought to be excited about having the privilege of playing near. Get over yourselves, it's a game, if someone was important enough to give a shit about they'd be spending their time on something besides playing a niche mmo #realTalk
A water griefer might have berry remnants all over their face.
And that we hate that feeling. Failure due to unfair game mechanics is not fun or enticing. It is just discouraging and frustrating.
When I look around at a nice town that is doing really well and know that it is doomed to failure within a few generations due to forces that are beyond my control, I feel defeated. Everything looks great right now. I have done everything I can to improve the village already. It is well-designed and problem-free .... but I know it doesn't matter. Before long, the water will run out and the town will crash. Nothing I do in this life or a dozen others will prevent the fall.
The game has set an unfair challenge. It is a problem without a solution. The outcome was already decided before I was even born and I can't change it, so why even try?
It pretty much kills my enthusiasm for village building.
Well the knife's edge thing is different from what you're describing... I love knife's edge but I agree that what we are working with is not even on the knife, the knife is on the table and we're in the dirt wishing and sometimes pretending we're dancing on the edge but no, just dirt.
It's frustrating because the problems seem so obvious but maybe the solutions are complicated for technical reasons *shrugs* I just can't give a fuck about villages at all at the moment, now that there's at least one bell ringing I've pretty much washed my hands of it all. I've got my coordinates that's all I need, time to fuck around in donkeytown and weird distant satellite camps in a vain attempt at forcing metagame into a game that currently has none
A water griefer might build a waystone leading to a wetlands, but the wetlands has no ponds.
A water griefer might take one bite out of one pie from a slot box full of full pies and put it back at the very bottom.
A water griefer might sneak into your property fenced area and shift all your items over by one tile.
A water griefer might take your mother out for a nice dinner and never call her back.
Theoretically, eve spawns are already a rare event and only occur when they are needed, based on "when there are too few families or too many babies for the existing mothers to handle."
Yeah it is annoying though that so much of a family's survival or lack of survival is in the hands of that algorithm. I wonder how much control mothers really have wrt yumming, staying warm, staying fed, etc... Players joining is such a random pattern it's difficult to discern whether there's just not a lot of people logging in or whether you're being skipped and for what reason
Personally, I like a cluster idea. Pick a random point and have Eves spawn in a cluster around that point each day. The next day, the cluster moves in a random direction and new Eves begin to spawn in brand new territory. A new town will always have other new towns relatively close by in a random scatter and old towns will eventually need to find more distant towns if their neighbors have all died out. The cluster target could even move in a spiral or large circle that takes roughly one or two weeks to complete. If the culling is set correctly, the oldest unused areas could reset before the Eves return to repopulate the area, while the most active zones could potentially survive the culling and be revisited by lucky Eves.
I don't mind the cluster idea you're describing, the nice thing about the cluster center moving in a random direction over time is that it would, on average, not go in any direction so while it may veer away it's not going to gallop off endlessly. Plus it's a nice mix of keeping folks not impossibly apart yet still nondeterministic. I guess I'd hope the random field around the cluster center would have a pretty wide radius, maybe with unbounded normal distribution.
Downside with that is that it would likely retrace its own steps frequently which is why I was wondering about maybe having an expanding radius over time. A nice thing about them getting further and further away from the center is that it makes the apoc more and more difficult to prevent, in which case it would reset and become very difficult again. Maybe the radius should grow in a slowing manner so that the total area is increasing by the same amount each day? I dunno lots of interesting possibilities.
I suppose your cluster suggestion could be combined with my ever expanding thing, like maybe the amount the center moves each day and maybe the radius from the center could both be gradually increasing until apoc and then reset to be small again... Kind of like the world is becoming more and more unstable the longer it lasts. Maybe something like the "pyre" from that other thread could be used to reduce or start to reverse that process. Maybe some kind of continuous tug o war could be "fought" via monument construction where if chaos wins the world gets reset, if order wins... I don't know, maybe a map of the world gets released or something like that
Not crazy about the second part with the spiral or circle or whatever and aggressive culling though, that goes against the whole ancient civilization thing and it seems like it would end up being about the same as it is currently except that villages which are able to last through the cycle suddenly get reconnected with new eves for a short amount of time and then they're gone again... It just seems like a weird and unnecessary cycle, I'd rather have eves randomly and occasionally but continuously finding their way to the town rather than keeping track of some spiral via some completely out-of-band mechanism to know what "season" it is in the eve circular cycle
Spoonwood wrote:Punkypal wrote:Considering Jason called the Eve spawn pattern a "spiral" ...
When was that? Jason says 'zigzag pattern' here: https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=8344
jasonrohrer wrote:Eves are placed in a zigzag pattern spreading out to the west, which looks like this
A few days before that he said:
jasonrohrer wrote:A persistent Eve "moving grid" pattern, like this
I stand corrected. When he has said spiral is was in reference to previous spawning methods. I still think an actual spiral would be a better design than a westward highway
Yes, an actual spiral would be an improvement over the current westward square wave but I don't see why we would go with a deterministic pattern when we could be spawned in a statistically controlled random field.
It -should- be confusing as hell where we are when we come into the world, we shouldn't be able to derive where we are based on out-of-band knowledge of where the last 6 spawns were that just seems incredibly ridiculous. There -should- be a chance of spawning near an ancient city, or way the hell deep in the wilderness so that an epic journey back towards the center is necessary (rather than an ever escalating distance for everyone that goes from difficult to impossible and never reverses) variety is just so woefully lacking in any deterministic system.
We have bell towers to help us find each other already, the struggle of advancing a town long enough to finish a bell tower is one of the few bits of metagame that actually functions in ohol.
But thank you all for keeping the topic active, so far he has completely ignored the issue so let's keep nagging him until he acknowledges it's an issue that must be fixed because I simply can't see how this game can work with the current system. Everything is fleeting and meaningless with the westward march, and that sucks because the game has so much wasted potential that I'm sure we'd all love to see come together
Gamers pretending to be game designers is amusing, but gamers pretending to be economists is hilarious xD
Currently, curses are individualized. If you could see only your own curses on other players, it doesn't matter if some idiot curses you for making angry faces. He is the only one who will see your curse.
Basically, it could work like banishment in the hierarchy system, visible only to the banisher. If I mark you as someone I don't want to play with again by cursing you, then you won't be born to me or in my immediate vicinity. This lowers the chances of meeting you again in a future life, until the curse lifts. And if you manage to get close to me anyways - maybe you are born in a nearby village or to someone traveling out of town - then I am warned by that curse that you are a potential trouble-maker.
If shit goes down, I will know to not heal you. Or watch my back when you are nearby.
People who abuse the curse system to curse innocent players will have a harder time distinguishing between real threats and false alarms. Like the boy who cried wolf. While people who are more careful about cursing bad offenders would be able to trust their own curses to warn them of potential threats.
It shouldn't matter if you get the occasional undeserved curse. But if you piss off everyone you meet, you can expect more problems in future lives.
Will never happen. Anonymity is a core feature of the game, people getting info about your past indiscretions is a clear break from that. The curse system exists because it's not giving anyone information about you, the spawning system happens behind the scenes. You don't know if you can trust your bb, that's the point, they're just a random soul which you can take a gamble on or leave out in the cold. No hints to make that decision easier outside of their immediate behavior
They are all doomed anyways for the foreseeable future regardless of whether they fall behind or not. The game designer has rejected it as a problem that lineages can't survive updates, and he hasn't finished with updates for the foerseeable future. Even more curiously, the game designer has also referenced The Clock of the Long Now here: https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=4877, and that book has a perspective that implies that all lineages are extremely short lived and will be extremely short lived for the foreseeable future. We're talking like 1 second of a day short here.
Well, if the eve spiral isn't leaving everyone behind then towns can endure their resident families dying, so making lineage survival into an achievable thing becomes slightly less critical, which given his lack of prioritization on giving lineages a way to survive is probably a good thing
Interesting idea, though seems like there are a hundred better spawn patterns than the super broken one we have right now and that it would be a lot simpler to just use a less insane one to fix it rather than add a whole new thing like this... It's so frustrating that he won't change or discuss it, it's such an obvious source of broken game mechanics
jcwilk wrote:I meant trivial in concept, no change no matter how simple in concept is trivial in code unless one is looking at the code, which I'm not as that takes a lot of time to comb through and it's pointless if Jason hasn't given the thumbs up to the concept
So, you're talking about a concept where the players get frozen in time. None of us have that experience and none of us ever will in the real world. That may be trivial for you to imagine because of your background, but I don't think the idea of something existing outside of time was such a trivial concept to think up whenever it got first thought up... or I suppose, to a believer, when it first got communicated. I just don't see how a concept totally unrelated to people's experience would be easy to think up the first time that such a concept got thought up.
What... Lol... I'm talking about in terms of logic wrt virtual characters, not in terms of real life. We're talking about solving a technical problem not emulating reality. You're clearly just arguing to argue, don't do that.
jcwilk wrote:- all characters left behind that are currently alive have their hunger and age frozen until they log back in
There is a lot of game state that only exists at run time - players, held/worn objects, family relations, language definitions and learning, tools learned just offhand. We are talking about code changes, and Jason has certainly done once impossible things when he got motivated to do so (such as biome specific crops), but tracking down and making save formats for all that information is definitely non trivial.
I meant trivial in concept, no change no matter how simple in concept is trivial in code unless one is looking at the code, which I'm not as that takes a lot of time to comb through and it's pointless if Jason hasn't given the thumbs up to the concept
Keeping players alive during an update seems trivial. Here's an example solution:
- update process starts without warning
- kicks everyone off the server
- all characters left behind that are currently alive have their hunger and age frozen until they log back in
- update process finishes
- 12 hours later all characters still frozen are unfrozen
Frozen characters cannot give birth. If a player returns to a frozen character the character becomes unfrozen. Frozen characters can get murdered, force fed, etc, even though they're not getting hungry or dying on their own.
12 hours is arbitrary but seems like a reasonable compromise given the roughly weekly frequency of updates. It should be more than 8 hours so players can sleep if needed.
Simpler example solution:
- update process starts without warning, entire world is taken offline and frozen
- indication of when the world will be brought back online is posted somewhere, ideally the forums
- update process finishes, world remains offline until the indicated time
- everything is turned back on exactly as it was before and any attentive players will have a chance to quickly log back on and rescue their family before their character passes fertility
I'm not entirely sure what the current process is, I'm guessing it's something similar to the second option but without any kind of communication to the players to let them know what's going on and what they should do and why, which sucks.
Hetuw mod search function. Problem solved
jcwilk wrote:There is a huge, flawed logical leap from "it is possible to get to iPhones" to "every family will be able to get to iPhones for sure"
The word 'is' refers to being, and thus refers to the greatest of possibilities, and the greatest of certaintites. Possibility and being able to do something don't differ in meaning. Thus, the meaning of the two sentences does not differ.
Of course, that doesn't mean that every family would. Just that such would be possible for every family. If it's not possible for every family, then the statement 'it is possible to get to iPhones' is not correct, and would at best end up as something like 'it might possible if you're privileged or advantaged to get to iPhones'. It would also turn the game into significantly a matter of luck *intentionally* instead of a matter of one of skill of a group.
Bro, you really need to realize your inability to see shades of gray. I mean that in the sincerest, least condescending way possible as it's constantly an issue when debating with you. The most literal black and white interpretation of a vague statement is very rarely the intended meaning. Off the cuff high level brief statements are not contractual legalese.
jcwilk wrote:Personally I think this is fine, not all families require other families... Some are content with staying low tech nomads.
I don't think that will work. Here's why:
jasonrohrer wrote:"If we had to start over from scratch, but kept all of our knowledge, how long would it take us to get back to iPhones?" where iPhones are a placeholder for whatever sufficiently advanced tech we can imagine.
But that thought experiment involves survival too, which is one of the things that would slow us down. We have to eat, and keep warm, and fend off natural threats, and have babies to keep the civilization going. Obviously, we wouldn't get back to iPhones in one generation. It would take hundreds of years. Might it take thousands of years? Might it take longer the second time around than the first? Maybe the knowledge doesn't help. Maybe it was all about bootstrapping infrastructure. Might we never get there the second time around? Maybe we'd lose the thread. Maybe all the "right place at the right time" moments wouldn't play out the same way. Maybe retreading the same ground is impossible.
The world is the imaginary space inside which this thought experiment plays out:
"If we had to start over from scratch, but kept all of our knowledge, how long would it take us to get back to iPhones?" where iPhones are a placeholder for whatever sufficiently advanced tech we can imagine.
https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=8576
Thus, I would think the game would intentionally come as designed that in principle it's possible for every family to get to a high-tech point at some point in time.
There is a huge, flawed logical leap from "it is possible to get to iPhones" to "every family will be able to get to iPhones for sure"
How would trading be possible if non-deterministic spawning were again the case? I don't disagree with you, but at least to me, inter-town interaction becomes moot if finding them becomes all too difficult. Maybe such randomness though is more interesting than trading though especially if trading requires long periods of a lack of interpersonal interaction, so your idea could be better.
There are more things than the eve spiral that are broken about the game right now which need to be fixed prior to trade being a realplay dynamic, however, I agree that the eve spiral is certainly a pivotal variable in the equation. It's important to keep in mind that eve placement is not the same as town placement, and certainly not the same as bell town placement. Bell towers are by far the most important mechanism in the game right now and would help to organize the game in a non-deterministic world. You'd spawn, eventually you'd hear one or more bells, then depending on how experienced you are you'd either have a rough idea of where civilization is or you'd have a fairly precise pin of where you are in the world. Then you'd get to choose whether you want to start moving your family towards civilization or make this a new outpost that can get new resources. I'd love to see some rare biomes that have rare resources, a reason for far away outposts to exist, but let's assume that in the future some value to far outposts is a thing... I think that's a fair assumption. Anyways there's a lot going on with all the factors at play, but I think we want the eve spiral to be a feature that opens possibilities rather than limits them as the current one does.
Alright... you tried to answer that with the normal distribution. But, would the normal distribution lead to areas barren of resources as I heard happened in the few weeks after The Come Together Disaster, and before the main changes got reversed?
No, my suggestion included a gradually scaling up dispersal, the "increased inebriation" of the drunken dart player. Yes the center of the map would be pretty worked over but it would become less and less likely to spawn near the center as non-apoc time progressed. It could be designed to have the top of the bell curve be a "ring" that slowly grows outwards to avoid overconcentrating in the "bullseye". There's countless tweaks that can be done, that's the value of using simple math to spread things out over an area rather than complex rigid square wave structures which are very awkward to adjust.
This isn't much information, so I might be working with a small data set. But, on the pre-wipe server12 I remember once spawning literally inside of Frost's city walls. After that I spawned in some prairie which was left of Frost's town. Another time I remember spawning even further left than that more towards what was the part of the road that connected North Town and South Town. After the temperature overhaul I spawned fairly far right of Frost's town and others had spawned there also. Additionally, and perhaps more tellingly all towns somehow seemed to end up right of the original North Town, and my recollection is that LostScholar said on stream once that spawn's were going right.
But, I also spawned left of Hearts Kingdom on server7 also.
Another time I played on server4 and spawned inside of some players' castle who didn't want other players.
Yeah, the chance of spawning inside a town is definitely a pitfall of nondeterminism, however as I illustrated this is still a risk with determinism, perhaps even more of a risk, since players can anticipate where the eve spiral will be and get ahead of it. "running west" in the current system is basically all you have to do for a pretty big chance of an eve spawning in or near your town within the next few days.
Hypothetically, additional rules could be added to veto the random pick and "reroll" if the chosen spot is too close to human built things. I didn't want to get into this much detail though as my suggested solution is just an example.
I think a problem with the normal distribution idea comes as that outliers end up as one race towns. It might work without race restrictions though.
Personally I think this is fine, not all families require other families... Some are content with staying low tech nomads. The uncertainty of whether another family is near you strengthens the race spec update tbh... The nice thing about this suggestion is that not only is it possible that other races have spawned near you, but it's possible that they -will- spawn near you in the future, unlike with our current system (unless you run west ahead of it, and even then you'd only get one wave of spawns). So it could be completely viable to solve that problem by building a bell, and then over the course of the next few days/weeks as eves spawn vaguely near you they may be compelled to come visit, rather than eves spawning further and further away deterministically.
Yeah, so... server reset incoming to fix this.
I organized some thoughts about the state of the eve spiral (excluding the current bug) here btw https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=8878 hopefully we can get an improvement to how the eve square wave works soon.
The core of this issue is that after about a week the eve spiral has moved west by 10k which starts to become too far to migrate a family in one life even under ideal conditions. Below are the side effects of that in more detail.
(side note that I'm, for the most part aside from a quick note, ignoring the apocalypse in this post, for the point of discussion lets keep it about the case where apoc has been averted... ie, the best case scenario for civ building. If the best case doesn't work then the system clearly needs to be fixed)
It becomes impossible for new families to reach existing bell towers
The whole point of bell towers is to be a beacon for families to migrate to, right? When a bell tower is over 10k not only does no one want to spend a full hour running, but even if they did they wouldn't make it there in time to still be fertile. As it gets further and further, as it invariably will, it goes from an obnoxious, unfun, repetitive challenge to completely unreachable by any means.
Basically, when you build a town you have only at most a week for more families to join it and then you're stuck with what you've got completely isolated from all other online play aside from those that are born directly into the town.
As each existing family dies out they will never be replaced
Griefing and planning clumsiness can be a real obstacle for keeping a town alive, but normally it's a two steps back one step forward kind of thing... Failure can be recovered from, there are ups and down, ebbs and flows to a city as it flourishes and falls into pestilence. When a town becomes 100% cut off from any new blood then it only moves downwards. It's unreasonable to expect vets to protect a town 24/7, players need to sleep and work and spend time with families - Jason I'm sure you understand that. A town dying out should be a reversible problem, but instead after the week has passed and they've been cut off it turns into this weird type of sudden death mode where a single mistake will destroy the town forever.
Ancient civilizations can never and will never be stumbled upon
What's more exciting in a civilization building game than stumbling into a town that was built a month, a year, or even years ago? Imagine reading through all the notes and trying to figure out what life was like then. Imagine doing it as a new player who's completely unfamiliar with prior game dynamics and wondering about what it was like here, what killed the town eventually, or perhaps who killed the town. With the current eve spiral this is an impossibility, it will never even once happen. After towns get buried under a week of eve spiraling they are gone for good, never to be lived in by anyone under any circumstances, or at least certainly after 2 weeks it will never even be glimpsed. Month old or year old towns are pure fiction. Why? This is such a waste, there are loads of interestingly designed and horrifyingly designed towns that are only unreachable specifically because of the eve spiral.
The code for the eve spiral is currently completely broken
Due to a bug in the assumptions of how the eve spiral works, it's currently degraded into a single linear path northwards, much faster than normal (it likely leaves towns in the dust every day or every couple days now rather than every week), as described here https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewt … 668#p85668 and clearly needs to be fixed. Why not take this as an opportunity to throw away the code entirely and rewrite the eve spiral?
So this begs the question of what should it be replaced by to solve these issues? I know Jason doesn't like specific fixes to be recommended, so instead I'll present some ideals followed by a simple example of something that might fit those ideals (as an example, not as a specific solution I'm pushing):
Eve spawns should not be deterministic
The whole point of the eve spiral is to keep things spicy and interesting right? A square wave that makes the same spawning shape in the same general direction endlessly is not spicy and interesting. It does not lead to new unique lives. It does not add any mystery, only tedium. With non-deterministic spawns then even experienced players will be out of their element and trying to get their bearings for at least the first portion of their eve lives, if not the whole life. We'll be forced to decide between investing our time and attention into our new micro-civilization vs finding out where everyone else is and working towards establishing a connection. That's an interesting dynamic, getting our rough position for free is not.
I'd recommend taking a very hard look at normal distribution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution this type of distribution would be a great foundation for spawning people close together while still having the occasional outlier that spawns in an unexpected area. The typical spawn will have an easy enough time of finding other people but occasionally, someone will find themselves deep in the wilderness and have the option of establishing a far off outpost and trying to entice others to join them or making the long migration back to civilization.
Eve spawns should not regularly spawn people more than Xkm from spawns happening Y days ago
I left variable in place because I don't want to impose these arbitrary values, my point is that -some- arbitrary line should be drawn here about how long it takes for things to get far away, if they do get far away, and design the system to support that. Perhaps we should think about many different Y values, eg:
Do not spawn more than 5km from spawns 2 days ago
Do not spawn more than 10km from spawns 1 month ago
Do not spawn more than 20km from spawns 1 year ago
These are just examples to give you an idea of what I mean. Currently there's a linear relationship between X and Y but I believe it should be exponential or something much faster than linear. (as in, time scales faster than distance)
Eve spawns should utilize the full 2D plane
When the spawns march endlessly in one direction it really gives the game a one dimensional feel. Everyone talks about either going west or east, nobody cares about going north or south because it has no effect, it just makes it difficult to connect to everyone else... Which is slightly interesting if there was a point to that but there isn't, and even with a different eve spiral one could still strike out away from the "center" wherever or however that may be. If the eve spiral moved across both axes in both directions there would be far more area to disperse people across and it would give the world a more rich and complex feel rather than just the "newer" direction and the "older" direction. That's boring.
The actual "spiral" which is why we call the current (prior to this update) eve square wave the "eve spiral" did this but it failed the non-deterministic aspect which made it still repetitive and boring, and pointlessly and consistently far away from people on the other side of the circle.
Eve spawns should be, at least most of the time, not directly on top of each other
I think this one speaks for itself. Although one would think that using deterministic eve spirals would solve this, it's not really true because we know roughly where the eve spiral is going so we can just strike off in that direction and start a city up ahead and know that the eve spiral will eventually reach us and be spawning eves right on top of us. Aside from that situation though, the existing system mostly solves this issue so we should be thinking about different, less rigid ways to solve it.
So what's a possible solution?
The drunken dart player
Normal distribution can roughly be used to describe the placement of darts on a dartboard when aiming at the bullseye given an imperfect (ie human) player. The angle that the dart offset from the center takes is generally random (0-360) and the distance from the center generally follows the normal distribution bell curve. As one gets more and more inebriated the distribution gets spread out more and more and they become more likely to take out a window with a stray dart or at least leave holes in the wall.
This would actually be a great system for spawning eves IMO. As the system starts it will be a somewhat tight bellcurve coming out from the center at random angles, then as more and more spawns have happened that can be scaled outwards so that 95% of the time people spawn within 1km from the center, 5km, 10km, etc. Eventually after a very long time people will be thrown all over the map, but by then there will be all kinds of interesting past civilizations to explore.
A nice side effect of this is that it would give the apocalypse meaning, after everything was destroyed the range of randomness would be reset back to a tight cluster so it would be easy to find people again, easy to get to the center, etc... Everything built at the beginning in the center will be forever semi-reachable as people get more and more spread out.
Anyways, just an example solution... Please focus more on the ideals and I'd appreciate any discussion on any of the above from the community and hopefully from Jason. I very much believe that the current implementation, even when it's functioning as intended, is deeply game breaking and limits the higher level potential of the game.