One Hour One Life Forums

I also think it takes a little bit of practice to get good at swords -- which means that the people who are best at swords are people who have killed the most with them.

So there's sort of a contradiction of the concept of a "peaceful swordwielder" because 9 times out to 10, the raider will be better at the click meta than the peaceful civilian.

And if a "peaceful civilian" wants to get gud at swords... and I guess the best option is to go raiding yourself, right?

Frankly I think the fairest thing to do (and to eliminate a lot of the SIDs) is just to have an Eve waitlist and get rid of the likelihood that repeated /dies will lead to Eve.

If you want to Eve, add yourself to the waitlist.

You can play normally (as a regular baby), logoff, and maybe wait a few days and comeback.

If you're at the top of the waitlist, online, and there's room for an additional Eve on the map, you get spawned as an Eve.

Offline people get skipped but they keep their spot on the waitlist.

Really really simple.

/SHOCK

In some countries in the world, it's common to use commas as decimal points xD

Hmm, it feels a little complex to me.

I'd rather see an emphasis on cheap personal homes and easier inheriting of a family home first.

I wrote about this here, but the gist is that I'd like there to be something static that is worth protecting, rather than forcing walls and asking players to protect nothing that is inherently valuable within the walls.

If there were a strong incentive to family homes/huts, I think this might make the game a little bit more colorful.

Would be interested to see if anyone went through the logs and calculated the average amount of times a player needed to /DIE (SIDS) before they got their Eve.

Love both of these ideas.

Just anything to make the map less uniform and more interesting would be nice.

PROPOSAL 17: BETTER WILD ANIMAL AI AND PERIODIC ANIMAL ATTACKS

In the real world, I think a strong incentive for building village/town walls was because of the fact that people sleep.

IRL, you couldn't have eyes everywhere at all times, so when people went to bed, you could have dangerous wildlife crawl into the village and:

- Eat all the food
- Attack the livestock
- Do bad things

Walls made it such that only a few people only had to watch a few points along the perimeter.

So my suggestion goes like this:

1) Make periodic wild animal attacks (kind of like the hound attacks in Don't Starve, or the monster attacks in Dwarf Fortress or Rimworld)

When people are expecting animal attacks, there's a greater incentive for people to build walls and develop better security.

Furthermore, you can't blame a computer for griefing (and AI don't use exploits, which is inevitable in any PvP community). Instead, I think it encourages for the community of players to band together to overcome a particular PvE challenge.

Also, Dwarf Fortress has a function where the increased wealth of a settlement attracts bigger attacks. This provides inherent scaling to the game.

WHY PEOPLE BUILD WALLS

If OHOL is meant to be a simulation of human society (note: key word "if" -- I'm starting to increasingly believe it's not meant to be -- I had a bad dream last night with regards to massacres/wars -- because inevitably war is associated with horrific things including sexual violence :c), one thing Jason is correct about is that virtually all ancient civilizations had walls.

Ancient humans built walls around their cities since the earliest times.

Note that a city wall isn't exactly the same as a border wall -- and in fact border walls were comparatively rare (for obvious reasons: in the sense that what a crazy amount would it cost to build a border wall!)

In either case, I took to myself to start looking deeper into the reason why cities had walls. For most articles I read online, the most common reason for walls was for security and defense against marauders/animals. There were also some sources that mentioned that walls were important as a form of surveillance and immigration control. It was easiest to tax people at the city gates. Additionally, walls/gates were convenient for keeping people in the city when you didn't want them to leave (think Berlin Wall, and stuff like that happened more often in history than you might expect).

One interesting article that I read argued that contrary to the popular notion that the first walls
(pre-Bronze Age) were built for military protection, there was a massive social purpose and motive to building walls. I really liked this general model, so I'll spend some time discussing this in some greater detail.

This sort of intrigued me a lot -- we're not in seige era yet (so concentric castle designs aren't really relevant) -- so why so many walls dividing a single community?

And this is where I started to increasingly like this neighborhood boundary concept.

You see, in places like ancient china, it was very common for the landowners (nobility) in China to build cloistered estates.

In fact, any landowner with any degree of money to their name built one, and this was their family residence. Chinese (and Japanese) nuclear families (thanks to Confucianism) were quite large, and in fact you'd even get great-grandparents, grandparents, uncles, cousins, etc. living in the same "house". Single-family homes weren't really a thing in ancient China (unless you lived in a hut and were super poor). Critically, these family residences were walled (although often the houses themselves formed part of the wall), so they produced a sense of exclusivity, privacy, and security since you couldn't exactly just walk into the courtyard. Importantly, it also kept beggars and other paupers out in the city streets.

Even small residences (from less wealthy families) were designed with a central courtyard and large enough to host an extended family.

So I really started considering the idea that early walls first started as a separation of class. Nobility build walls around their property (which includes land) to keep out the urban poor from... doing silly things like stealing the chickens at night when everyone is asleep. Whether or not the poor actually stole chickens at night is debatable in itself. All that was necessary was paranoia/fear, and then you have a walled estate.

Consider the existence of gated communities in modern societies.

This is a gated community (walled neighborhood) in the US.

This is a walled neighborhood in Baghdad.

Why do gated communities and walled neighborhoods exist today? Answer: the perception that the outside is dangerous or filled with unsavory people. Incidentally, to the rich, the poor are perceived as unsavory people, so a high prevalence of poverty in the neighborhood will increase the likelihood that a rich neighborhood association will get together and build a community wall to separate the poor from the rich.

TLDR; Walls don't have to exist around entire cities. In fact, walls were first part of houses (for families). Then walls were part of communities (to separate rich from poor / privileged from unprivilaged).

As an added comment (I think this is related to futurebird's thread about stress vs. excitement), I think I'm coming to feel that I do play this game a lot for comfort.

It's kind of like candy-crusher, I guess?

In the sense that a lot of times I like going to a town and doing something mundane but helpful -- fetching clay, baking pies, planting carrots and milkweed -- it's really calming to me, and I like that part. My favorite part is having kids though, haha. I love carrying them around town asking if they're new (even though I'm still pretty new), looking for extra clothes/furs, teaching them something, or telling them about something I saw even if I've never personally tapped an iron vein.

I love having awesome and amazing kids.

I love seeing a child doing an amazing job making a sheep pen after telling them we don't have sheep, being able to tell them "good work" when I see the pen nearly done.

I even (as morbid as it is) like the feeling when my cousin accidentally stabs my son and there's this brief moment of "omg what have I done" and shock. I love all of that.

I think there are a lot of really beautiful things in OHOL (particularly with regard to family and accomplishment), especially when many of people live in a sad(der) real world where there might be family problems, or there might be violence/hate/grief/helpless, or various circumstances that make it so easy to lash out in anger instead of channeling energy to somewhere constructive --

OHOL to me, is addictive because it's a little virtual world where you can prove to anybody that they're important and valuable, and their contributions can become something amazing.

I like how it can fill people with confidence, hope, meaning -- and maybe have further impact on their lives when they walk away from the computer screen. (And also make me consider how I want to be a parent, too).

And I think all of that is contained a very delicate world.

I don't really play OHOL very much at all for the "thriller" component. TBH I don't even think OHOL is even that thrilling (even with the water updates), because when you've played the game enough, the meta is essentially the same and it's a grind regardless once you've learned exactly what to do. Rather, OHOL's main appeal after hundreds of hours of playtime is the magic of oxytocin (which comes from a great community), and the fact that the **people** you play with (not the game mechanics itself) are interesting. Also, there are a lot of games that are great at being a "thrill" or a rush of adrenaline to players, and frankly they usually do it far better than OHOL (at the cost of usually having a somewhat toxic gaming community).

I would be really saddened if OHOL (and everything we love about it) disappeared because of a fundamental change in the playerbase and community -- and the types of people who are drawn in and others who are repelled away.

@RedComb That was a great read! Futurebird shared it on discord and I would really recommend Jason to take a look at those articles if he gets a chance! They're really insightful.

:sweats: I tried to make it as plausible as possible but it's really hard to make a trade scenario that remotely makes sense! XD This scenario does push it, but it's ....weakly.... plausible (maybe).

So, in other words, there's nothing that iron is worth trading?

Is there anything that's worth trading, for that matter then?