One Hour One Life Forums

I'm not sure it will work, but it doesn't seem impossible.
All of IRL social structure has no actual effect by itself. Information affects the world through people. [1]

Family relations are fixed. They provide very little information because your uncle will always be your uncle. In contrast, the hierarchy labels proposed in this post would change over time. This makes them orders of magnitude better at conveying information, if we were interested in raw capacity. You could say they're a better tool for communication.

[1]: See also all the math problems about perfect logicians, like this one about people with blue eyes. Or this very long story.

This also means that Alice didn't exile any one of us! So we can trust each other and go to Alice if we have a dispute.

There would, but these consequences would be caused by other players, not by the game physics!

Like many social things, it's very nebulous and subject to network effects and other weird stuff. I think there are two necessary conditions:
1. There's an equilibrium where everyone forces everyone else to support the system
2. There's a way to bootstrap that equilibrium, and doing that is profitable

I imagine the equilibrium state to be that all must follow the orders of their superiors, and all exiles are enemies and must be killed on sight. Consequences:
1. Exiling people gets them killed.
2. No one wants to be exiled.
3. Only griefers and rebels are exiled.
4. Killing exiles is usually a good choice.
5. Killing is also dangerous, but pretending isn't.
6. Everyone sees everyone else killing exiles.
7. ...

Doesn't need to be perfect. As long as the queen is not too much of a tyrant and shows her power from time to time, people will usually follow orders, especially when it's all the same to them anyway. Many would even be happy to have a purpose and be doing something productive, even if it benefits someone else's goals.

As above, I don't want to have rules against friendly fire, so you can just try to kill them.
Other people will probably try to stop you though, unless it's common knowledge that rebels are stronger than loyalists.

There are many edge cases to consider, but they don't seem insurmountable.

1. Is a hierarchy a tree, a DAG, or an arbitrary graph? Trees are simpler, but arbitrary graphs should be OK too.
2. Subordination should probably be transitive. Your superior should be able to do anything you can do.
3. But this probably means that you should be able to exile yourself, in case you're staging a coup.
4. In case of a DAG, should you be able to exile someone on behalf of your superiors too?
5. What happens when you exile someone? Does the hierarchy get split in two?

This can get a bit complicated. Should work out okay if only the graph itself is stored, and everything is defined in terms of graph traversal.
It's tempting to just have clans, like many games do, but I think clans are way too simple, not suitable for a game where everything is in flux. A clan would get bottlenecked on the clan leader.

That's not what he said. He said "griefers", not "killers". There are other ways to grief.

That said, killing is clearly not the only way to stop griefers, now that we have cursing as "I don't want to play with them".

Low pop balancing is what keeps games alive when player population drops to single digits.

How easy is it to make the second car compared to making the first one?

I feel like cars and planes are currently the equivalent of 7 wonders. But in the real world they are mass produced goods: anyone either has their own car or can rent one, and anyone can buy a plane ticket. They are actually extremely cheap compared to their utility. They were never viable without factories.

I also feel like OHOL shouldn't be about PvP, but I don't think PvP is avoidable. The only way to have no PvP is to make it impossible to affect other players and their plans in negative way. Without PvP OHOL would become something like a multiplayer game of alchemy.

I feel like the anti-griefing measures are already way too complicated and should be redesigned from scratch. Griefers learn. Without a mathematically perfect system it will always be an arms race between griefers and ant-griefing rules.

The first step is to find a precise definition of griefing.

OHOL's business model is not f2p or subscription. OHOL's main selling point is that it's a unique experience, not that it keeps you hooked forever. Veteran players provide valuable feedback, but the main audience and source of income that keeps the servers running are the noobs that stop playing after a few hours. So a demo with ~3 lives would already be like 90% of the game.

Seriously though, having two hands (primary and secondary) and hotkeys would make it so much faster to do stuff.

F to apply the main item to the secondary item.
X to swap items in hands.
C to swap main and floor.
Z to swap secondary and floor.
E to swap main and backpack.
Q to swap secondary and backpack.

(Mnemonic: higher keys are for backpack)

Picking berries while holding the bowl in the secondary hand would just require aiming once, then alternating between mouse clicks and F keypresses. This would be significantly faster than even 6 clicks. Only slightly slower than 1 click with sufficient training.

The main risk is that learning by watching will be harder.

It would be perfectly realistic because we have two hands, unlike OHOL potato people

I find communication in the game very draining. Doing anything at all requires tracking so many things that talking to other players is very distracting, and the constant context switching takes a lot of energy.

I wish it was more common for people to be literally unable to do anything in the game. Right now I usually only talk to babies while they're still useless: I use this time to show them around and suggest jobs that are being neglected.

Note that two-way cursing encourages players who live longer on average.

It's the same skill!!

It absolutely doesn't matter whether it's the real world or a virtual world! The people you're trying to do something for you are real!

There are lots of variations. Local or remote, hired help or volunteers, long-term or short-term, large team or a single assistant, etc. Compared to all these dimensions, whether the work is being done in the real or in the virtual world is basically irrelevant.

Disclaimer: I'm not a manager, I don't have this skill, and I have bad social skills in general. So I may be underestimating how common this skill is, and I may be wrong about the differences between real world and virtual worlds. Take my words with a grain of salt, even though personally I'm very sure of everything I said above.