a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
You are not logged in.
After 48 hours of not playing the game, this was my thrilling first life.
I'm born in a small village. They have virtually nothing but are already have well requiring newcom tech to get water. Only two people in "town" besides me. Not enough to maintain town and operate that tech without it being a huge un-fun hassle. No sheep pen (Think there was once, but got torn down or fell down). Only two buildings. No roads, no organized farm. Small berry patch is half dead. No food stockpile. A few tools and a small smithing area. That's it. This town has got to be no more than 24 hours old. Already practically dead.
Problem: Actually advancing and maintaining a town is too hard to do because something as simple as getting water is the hardest thing to keep going. Treading water (no pun intended) is the best most towns can hope for.
Anyway, I decide to go to work trying to get the place back in order. Before long I have a baby. This player immediately (one letter at a time) starts calling me a bitch and puts on an "evil face". I decide this town of three players can't afford what clearly is a greifer, so I try to dump baby in the woods to die. Baby runs back to town. I say, "DONT FEED. THIS IS A GRIEFER" of the two players in town, one feeds the baby anyway. As soon as baby is 3yo the person who fed the baby picks up a bow and starts trying to kill me, never saying anything. Just attempts to murder me. This goes on for about 5 minutes of me running around serpentine pattern until the player with the bow and arrow starves to death. So I grab the bow and go back to town. That was the ONLY weapon the town had. No other arrows, no knives. I see my greifer daughter standing there naked still doing nothing. I ask her to explain herself. She calls me a bitch again. I was about to shoot her when I have another baby. I can't pick up the baby because if I drop the bow, I can guess what the greifer will do with the town's only weapon. I say, 'FEED THE BABY" The greifer says "LOL" - The one other idiot in town doesn't know how to feed a baby. The baby starves. Greifer says, "IM GONNA KILL MYSELF" and then starves. I don't even have to shoot them. They new the game was up and they were off to greif elsewhere.
Problem: Ruining others play experience is still the most popular profession in this game. There is no real discouragement to greifing. But the bigger problem is there is not enough reward for doing something other than greifing. (See, water is a major struggle mentioned above). When you are born into a town that seems to have no hope, why not just try to ruin it all?
Also, kudos to the brilliant person who instead of talking or asking any questions decided to murder the town's only fertile female. If your goal was to keep the town alive, that was a super smart way to go about it!
Anyway, after all this and being the only female in a town at age 37, I decided to forget it and head to the bell that rang. Its 2170 away and I know I can get there before I die. I want to see if it's a new town or if the one from 48 hours ago is still alive. I run towards the town for 15 years (along the way I had two kids, twins, who were one person playing two accounts. Once they got too 5yo I left them my backpack and clothes and ran on. Later I found they they both died back to back 7 years later.)
Problem: Something about this game is way too complex for most players. In a virgin wilderness, abundant with berry bushes and wild onions, not to mention all the food you can dig up, many players simply can not survive.
I don't even know how to fix this. Is no one watching the tutorial? Maybe if you keep starving to death you have to complete the tutorial again before you can log into an actual life? IDK. Anyway, I kept on and finally made it to the Bell City. Along the entire trip I never saw one sign of life except one bowler hat left about 200 spaces outside of where I started. over 2k of distance and nothing.
Problem: Players are way to spaced out.
Not enough resources to even make roads to cover that distance, and why bother? With so little in between there aren't even pit stops along they way to make it more worthwhile. Besides, if you tried to build a road, the towns will be long dead before you could even get the road half finished. I know, I've been trying. Anyway, I see this Bell City is now a new town. No bell ever rights from anywhere else, so I presume the old city, which itself was maybe only 7 day old is now abandoned and dead. This new Bell Town looks only 3 days old at best. I'm sure it will be abandoned in a few days.
Problem: An "Old" city should not be measured in days. I know 7 days is supposed to be like 10,000 years. And there aren't really any modern day cities that are that old, but then again, it doesn't take someone 10 years of their life to make one piece of paper either. so that isn't very realistic.
The last thing I'll mention is I see no families from 48 hours ago are still around. Not only that but the oldest family is only around 20 generations, so the oldest family isn't even a day old. This is very depressing.
Problem: Why should a player care about family lines? They don't survive. If a player does care about trying to keep a family alive, they are going to get turned off because it doesn't seem like it can be done.
You have no control of if you come back to the same family. I've read that an Eve that makes to to 60yo can come back to same clan ONCE in next life but I've never seen it happen to me, after being an Eve that made it to 60yo at least 6 times now. I personally don't like getting bounced all over the world to all different families where each time I have to endure a new learning curve of what they need, and how it's set up, etc. I think most people don't like this either. I'll sometimes have 5 or more babies do SID in a row almost instantly. Why? I assume they are trying to get back to the town they were in before so they can continue what they were working on. As it is, if you're female you spend half your life birthing other players and keeping them alive. You have hardly any time to do anything, and it's frustrating as hell to not be able to keep doing it.
Hey, if people like a completely fresh start and a new place every life, great. But maybe there should be an options in the settings. Either 1) try to birth me as close to my prior life death coords as possible, or 2) make my rebirth completely random. That way we won't be bleeding players who are tired of feeling like they never get anywhere in this game and you're just a hamster on a wheel.
And seriously. If towns don't start lasting longer than a week, I don't think I'll last longer than a week. Seriously, it's becoming tedious as fuck to keep building towns to just see them fall down and get abandoned before anything is accomplished.
Jason, despite whatever your data might say, the player, not being able to see any of that, does not know where to look and the world feels vastly empty. I have ran eastward towards a ringing bell along a ley line for 45 minutes nonstop and not seen one sign of life along the way. No dropped basket, no corpse, and certainly no towns or waystones. And this has happened more than once. The world feels empty.
You say a town isn't supposed to last forever but "forever" feels like only a week. If any "town" lasts more than 24 hours it's a rare miracle. I don't mind a town eventually running out of resources and dying, but we haven't even come close to that happening. No town has stripped all the iron, or stones or trees or goose ponds or anything else around it entirely. They run out of water and can't get rubber because they don't have the right two families which can happen at any point in time due to bad luck, one greifer, or low server population. That's the only resource that seems to matter and is making it impossible to keep our towns alive. Water. Are we trying to simulate the world or just Ethiopia during a major drought? We have no rivers or streams, just wells that run out of water almost instantly and goose mud puddles that only contain about 10 bowls of water, and if you take that water out it practically never comes back because apparently it never rains in this world either.
We've been thinking only certain biomes are desert. IT'S ALL DESERT! Welcome to the post apocalyptic outback Max.
I posted an idea pretty much exactly like this on the Reddit OHOL /suggestions thread.
One advantage you missed was the ability to determine roughly how you are positioned to the "equator". If you are seeing lots of jungle, you know you are near the 0 "Y" coordinate. Lots of arctic, you must be north or south. I suggested also that penguin only appear in the south and maybe above a certain latitude the bears spawn as white polar bears. That would be fun I think.
I don't think you'd need a northern/southern rift. Just after a certain point, it's all arctic with no trees.
Also, instead of Eves moving always to the West, they should spawn out on both sides of the center. Furthermore, if an area sees no activity for 7 days and is "reset" That area should be able to spawn a new Eve, even if it's back closer to the center than other Eves have spawned. This would put an effective cap on the maximum amount the player base can get spread out, depending on the amount of people playing.
I just had a idea. What if a structure could be made, like the town bell, that would make a radius around it a no killing zone. Except players could click on it to "vote" to turn it on or off. If it's marked on, then it's a sanctuary in that radius. The wilds would be at risk to go into but in larger towns there would be a measure of safety. Also, as a town gets bigger, it seems to attract the griefer element anyway. The average player who's killing people for fun has gotten bored and likely is quitting the game soon. They don't have any interest in searching the wilds for a lone traveler to try to chase down and kill. They want to shoot fish in a barrel for a few laughs because it's easy. A large town is their target of choice. Once a Bell City manages to get around 20 or so people in and around it it seems murders are happening constantly. I'm sorry, with only 20 people, someone shouldn't be killing someone every 30 minutes or less.
Three things
1) Make murder hungry work.
2) Give people more time to get healed. As it is now, even if pads, needle and thread are in town, you'll die before someone who knows how to even heal finds the objects they need and manage to treat you.
3) If you reach a threshold of active curses against you, you can't pick up weapons until your count expires. Maybe three curses, and that's it. Want to be a cook or a hunter? Too bad. Be good and wait a week. Anyone who is being a good person shouldn't get three curses in a week. If you are picking up more than that from "misunderstandings" then you aren't doing a very good job being understood.
------
I'd like to add in that I've never seen a "town guard" position except AFTER a town of 12+ people was destroyed down to 4 people because a couple of twin greifer murders killed 4 people, ran 4 off who didn't return, got killed themselves, and left the town in a shambles (which had previously been humming along perfectly). And so then out of frustration and desperation someone spent the rest of a life as a "guard" because one more griefer and that would be the end of those last 4 people. And I don't know if the town ever made a comeback because after all that disruption a bunch of people all spawned 9k to the west and neither they or their offspring won't ever make it back.
It's not even that two people can mess up what 7 or 8 people are doing. It's that they can actually destroy a whole town. And that might have been days in the making. It was what HUNDREDS of players lives did and were doing. And there are dozens of large towns all across the map that are completely abandoned and coordinates unknown to almost everyone, and I believe the thing that caused most of these to be abandoned was someone going on a killing spree exactly when the town numbers were already low, and intentionally targeting females.
It doesn't bother me so much that someone can kill. I'm not bothered so much that someone even kills me. I am outraged that one person can kill an entire town if they try to do exactly that. Being so very spread out with Eves spawing so very far west each time doesn't help, as people can't even get back to the town if they want.
You're starting over from scratch, so you'd be rebuilding civilization.
I guess you're right that it's a game of rebuilding civilization. Just never actually doing it. We start, then we start again, then we start again, etc. I suppose you can play Monopoly except only go around the board once and then reset the game completely and start over. After about the sixth time doing this you start to question what's the point and why are you bothering. Which is what pretty much all new players are wondering after about a week.
I will note that people were playing with belltower towns far away like as has happened now before The Rift in "Boundless World 1.0" so to speak.
Last night saw only four families according to fug. That's not Eves appearing too frequently, but not often enough.
Only four families huh? How many members did each family have? And I'm sure during that time Eves were popping and their families dying out every hour, and that's just for the ones who survived long enough to start a family. The eve starting zone probably moved another 1000k or more to the west, until you finally got one stable family out of it. And how many players did the server have? About 50? This constant "restart" feeling is why there are few people (also, they get bored and decide to play a psychopath murderer a few times before they quit). This might not be happening if there were 200 people online, but there are not that many, and this Eve triggering that happens only snowballs and makes matters worse. The mechanics need to be adjusted so the game doesn't keep spreading us out when we are already few in number and already ridiculously spread out. How about we try to get some of these problems addressed so people actually want to stay and play instead of being a fanboi apologist. If you like playing on a server that doesn't have many players on then by all means, hop off the main server and go to one with nobody there.
I'm not liking it either. The "zigzag" is too narrow. New Eves will be not too far off the center line but now are appearing so far the the west it's effectively not possible to get back to "civilization" We aren't really rebuilding civilization if every few days the entire server just shifts to a practically new world every week.
Also Eves seem to appear too frequently. Might have something to do with a vast number of players who insta die so a struggling family can't get any offspring. I've been looking at the family trees and ill see a generation where 12 children born and 11 of those all SIDs themselves? Seriously? The 24 lives per hour needs to be lowered to 12 or less. If I have a kid in a city they choose to live 95% of the time. If I'm outside of a town doing some work they die 4 out of 5 at least before I can even say "hi". So I assume you want to be born in a town? Maybe wait more than half a second to let someone tell you if the town is literally just 5 seconds away.
Finally, greifers are still too powerful in their ability to completely ruin the game for others. 1) It's hard to curse anyone if you're too young to write their name out. 2) Cursing seems to do nothing anyway. So what if they appear 100 spaces away on a infinite world. They will come back. The curse should do something like if you get cursed after you just killed someone, you can't pick up any weapons for a week. Want to be a hunter or a cook? Too bad. (unless you kill someone who just murdered).
I was just born into a no name ginger family that's Eve was Glinton (No idea how or when name got lost). When I died I had become a Stork. I've no idea how that happened.
If you are using one of the mods that show your coords, when the current city with a bell tower rings its bell, go to your TOWN WELL, click to set Bell A to 0 , 0 and then post what the coords are for your town (only after making Bell A zero!)
UPDATE: Seems two bells towns are ringing. If BELL A is at (0 , 0) then BELL B is at (3072 , 452). My numbers below are (I think) based off Bell A
I have started in:
Small hamlet @ -7898 , 1005
Settlement @-9820 , 842 (not 100% sure correct)
Settlement @ -8225 , 480
also found DEAD villages at:
-6104 , -64
-5504 , 51
-2184 , 91
-585 , -29
Is there any way to remove a coord from the coords list?
Say it's just in the middle of town in the way of where you want to set up something, or getting in the way of a straight road. Everything else seems able to be removed.
No, that does absolutely nothing. If i type, for instance, /ROPE - then the tab stays on the rope related steps. But / ENTER goes back to the problem I'm talking about.
Also, on the guide there is says [Z]. What the heck is this for? Typing Z seems to do nothing.
I find it extremely annoying that the / tab that shows recipes stays open and keeps changing as i pick up things and move around. Is there some way to close it? For the life of me I can't figure that out.