One Hour One Life Forums

You have yet to refute my main idea on civilization in OHOL with anything more than "I have 15 years of game designing experience and you don't".

Forgive me but some things that you have said in the past are legitimate idiocy.

Until now, but as cantface points out, don't lump in all the people who are unhappy with your updates into the same category yet again.
We both remember how well it ended last time you did this, so quit while you're ahead.

You hide behind a wall, you ignore the people who oppose you by assuming things about them like they just dislike you or that they're entitled or whatever you come up with this time around.
But I'm still there, my arguments unaddressed. You're still wrong.
You say game desgining is hard.
I agree but, I say you're an idiot for systematically ignoring part of the problem.

I really like this thread title.
Complexity vs simplicity.
The two are linked together in a very interesting and intricate way.

Specifically, through emergence.
Simple rules giving rise to complex behavior.
We see it everywhere.

There was a time when Jason understood and acknowledged this:

This was, I think, the first time Jason replied to me.
I was already fascinated myself by this very concept, but to see it being applied like this in this very game, it made me excited!
It made me want to... re-build civilization! From scratch!

This was when we discussed slavery and prisoners in the old /die thread.
At least then, the only magic thing in the game, cursing, was made to deal with its only anomaly, griefing.

By now its even gotten to that part, with no solo killing, murder face, impossible to miss kills, posse rules, you name it...

Pre-fences Jason:

Post-fences Jason:

That was Jason pre-property fences though.
That was before the turning point.
Before that cursed night when he decided to go with his magic fence idea.

At first they were still sold under this emergence idea, "the fences are just atoms that people can play and build molecules with".
But let's be honest here, humanity didn't come up with private property because suddenly building magic, unbreachable fences was made easy.
Nevermind the idea that it emerged when villages started growing larger and denser due to the ease of survival brought by evolving technology, just privatize everything in a village of at most 20 people!

And even then, you can't really call them "building blocks in a sandbox" when you try to force their usage at every opportunity you get.
I'm more inclined to call them "contrived fences".
Find any excuse to use them even if it doesn't make sense and use them at all costs!

Fast-forward to today and we have all of this convoluted bullshit where even veterans themselves are confused about the magic rules sometimes.

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I think it's more than just this.
I think not only does he believe that, but he also believes he hasn't succeeded because his playerbase is unwilling or somehow against him.

I witnessed this personally everytime some issue popped up.
There was always a point where he would say he believed we were motivated in complaining because of x and y rather than z mechanic being actually unfun.

People opposing the temperature update? "you guys just want easy lives"
His initial area ban being too wide? "you guys just want to go back to the villages you were playing in which is what I'm trying to fix!"
People opposing fences? "you guys just want communism"

Don't believe me on this one? Sounds too exaggerated?

There was a time when Jason understood not to assume people's "true motivations" when they complained and instead knew he just had to dig to find out the culprit.

I think this time is long gone.
I think you can't really say you're looking for a solution to a problem when you literally go in person ingame and install fences yourself.
I think you can't really say you're looking for a solution to a problem when you literally think the problem is that the people who are playing your games are politically motivated and suggest they use fences at any opportunity (excuse) you get.
I think you can't even really say you're thinking rationally when you do things like that..

Lots of things I agree on in this thread.

Though I think Spoonwood makes a point here.
I can personally attest that back when I played, the game was fun even if we weren't on the edge of starvation all the time.
I would always make sure to upgrade the city's tech. That's the way I had most fun. I'm not saying other parts weren't fun, farming and procuding certain foods were its own fun and I even came to love Eve camps myself, but the most fun I had was when I could advance the tech.

I clearly remember being born, promptly checking at what level a city was at, checking if there was no problem that would take priority over tech upgrades (such as food crisis, bears, iron needs, you name it) and if the city was ready for an upgrade, I would work on that right away, even though we weren't technically starving.
Looking back on it, you can clearly see Maslow's hierarchy of needs in this. I didn't even know what that theory was at the time.
And yet here it is. If every villages were starving, I wouldn't have focused on tech upgrades at all.

I had tons of fun. First time learning to build engines (which I did last because it did always look like a daunting task) which I most likely wouldn't have tried to if villages were always starving.
Upgrading simple wells with a Newcomen pump, improving the smithing area with Newcomen technology, etc etc...

Anyways, back to the thread, my point is that what you define as making challenges fun, i.e. having a reason to be productive, has some complexity behind it.
If back when I played I would have most fun while upgrading the city's tech, it's not because water would run out.
As Spoon points out, Newcomen pumps used to be able to go on forever and you could install them on any pond you wanted. Some people even believed it was inefficient to make engines due to the iron cost.
Yet I was more than happy to start working on a diesel pump.
The "reason" to be productive, so to speak, turned out to be just progress itself.
The fact that my efforts were enabled by a fundation of other people who were able to sustain not just themselves but me on top of that gave me the time and the ability to work on upgrades.

And in my mind, this has always gone hand in hand with population growth.
If people like me existed, people who could just work on tech all their lives without having to worry about food production, that must mean that we can sustain other kind of people/workers.
Literally civilization building.
And to me this felt natural. If I produced tech that can produce food in a more efficient manner, that means more and more people like me will be born and be able to survive and do more interesting things.
That was the reason for being productive. Literally.
In my mind, it was just as Jason said in his trailer:

MAN, WHAT A TRAILER! I always love re-watching it!
Always brings me back! Literally perfect.

So, yeah..
Back to the thread again.
Knowing this, the answer seems obvious to me.
The challenge has to be that we need to sustain bigger populations! That's where the idea comes from.
And back when I played (and still up to this day in fact) something odd would occur.
Big towns, instead of exponentially growing in population, would start to just die out on their own, for seemingly no reason.
Keep in mind that water couldn't even run out! Yet it would die.

There was no doubt anymore for me, once I played the high society update, about what the problem was.
When that update rolled out, something very interesting happened.
One of the first town developed enough to be able to produce the new clothing content.
It was insane. Everyone wanted to try it. This town was flooded with people. No one would /die out of it.
The town was literally flooded with sheep dung because of the amount of clothing that was being made there.
I even remember playing a few lives in other, less advanced, distant towns and noticing a trend of people stealing horses to migrate to that town.
At first I didn't make the link. But when it hit me, it was clear as day.
That's what was happening. People were starved for meaningful tech content that would allow technological progress!
That's why big towns would die out! Eureka!

For me, that's where the idea of pushing for content as a solution came from.
There was no doubt, for me, that if Jason pushed these kind of updates, the amount of players needed to make it challenging in the first place would come naturally.
If Jason made a farming automation update, the people interested by it would naturally come and it would be naturally challenging to support this kind of population.

Anyways, back to the thread, yet again.
Around the time the game started going downhill (what with the fences and all), some people in the forum started suggesting update ideas.
I remember a push from some people like futurebird for a storage update.
Some wanted it to solve the big trashy clutter that would always happen in big developed towns, others like me wanted to have specialized storage to be able to stockpile and sustain larger populations (rather than "emulate" it via food value degradation overtime).
It would have killed two birds with one stone.
But yeah, this isn't the first time this idea surfaced.
I was hopeful the first time I suggested it that all of this nerfing nonsense was happening because Jason had ran out of ideas.
But it's clear today this isn't the case.
And so, I suspect this will fall on deaf ears, just like it did a year ago..

My reply is mostly a reference to Jason's old posts.

Ever since I joined this forum, Jason has always been ranting on about how he wants this game to be different from the rest of existing games.
He wants it to stand out from everything else and to be something unique.

From a very old reply of his lecturing me about why people shouldn't continue on their projects because towns that would merge together would allow people to avoid the old lineage ban.

He has always been very concerned about this.

You get the point.

You can look up his posts that mention minecraft or don't starve, it almost looks like an obsession, but a healthy one if you ask me.

Even to this day he still rambles about it, here's a recent quote:

Though from reading this one I'm not sure how much of Don't starve he played.

Don't starve is in no way focused on crafting/building stuff, it's just a part of the game.
The true focus of Don't starve is literally in its title: survival.
That's the most important thing and the highest goal in this game: to survive.

To make my argument clear, in short, my point is that while Jason was so scared to make "2d minecraft" where survival is so easy that the only thing people do is build random stuff, he didn't notice that he's been making the game so much focused on survival that it's becoming Don't starve "with parenting or whatever".

And just to be clear, I don't hate survival games. I loved Don't starve.
I just don't like this game becoming one.
And for a reason I will explain below:

I'm not.

The first time I heard of OHOL, I was intrigued and I checked out the steam page.
There I saw the trailer. It was amazing.

Both trailers in fact.
And to this day, it is still undeniable that one of the main selling points of the game was that you were gonna build stuff, build civilization.

Why else would you, as the creator, promise to stay one step ahead of your playerbase?
Why else would the second trailer be entierely focused on the number of craftable obbjects in your game?
And if you're still not convinced, just look up, it's written white on black:

Survival was never meant to be the main focus.
Survival was meant to be just a part of it.

I wish you would have joined in early 2019.
Just before it all went downhill. You would have seen it.
It was paradise. One of the top best games I had ever played in my entire life.
I was hooked. It was perfect.
It was JUST the right amount of parenting, caring about your family and making connections before sadly saying goodbye, mixed in with an awesome civilization building part.
I had a blast learning everything there was to do in this game.
The trailer still brings me back to this day, it makes me nostalgic. It reminds me of this era.

And then one day, it all went downhill.
Jason decided overnight to do a complete 180 over his previous design philosphy and here we are.
He even admitted he lost faith in content a couple months ago:

Putting aside the validity of these statements regarding what people find or don't find interesting, I mean building things is literally the god damn main selling point in the trailers and I would hope most people know what they're buying, what could even be the problem?
I say most casuals give up because they join and have no idea how to be of use and don't know where to start (do note Jason's reluctance to even include a tutorial).
They feel useless. And making survival harder and making their environment harsher isn't going to help this issue at all.
Veterants have less and less time to teach new players.

But I digress, to conclude I'd like to say that if Jason is just going to make this a survival game from now on, he might as well start a new game and leave OHOL as it was instead of completely destroying it like he's been doing for a whole year now and trying to turn it into something it was never meant to be.

Yeah, I know right.

If you like to remember these old posts, check this one out.

Some very interesting stuff in there.

Life token limit, definitely the best update ever.
Totally made me want to come back and play.

Yeah, clearly that life token update really worked out.
There's yet another recent thread talking about the /die command.
People really care about their boring lives filled with the same content/endgame over and over again.
They're definitely not bored. Adding content would be totally unnecessary.
We should decrease the number of tokens again, it will make lives meaningful once again.. somehow..

Oh yeah, the rift was definitely amazing.

Disclaimer: this is a big post! If you don't feel like reading it, don't.
It's fine, I really don't care anymore at this point.
But please! Please don't bother trying to reply to it if you just "skimmed through it".
Just don't bother, it's fine.

Ah, yes! The old arrogant Jason is back.
I was hoping he was gone, but there he is yet again.
Some things just never change I guess.

It's interesting to you only because you see what you want to see.
At the end of the day, even if you manage to finally end up with the most contrived, frustrating and boring form of forced trade, people will still tell you that family restrictions was a terrible update.
And for the very reason you so desperately try to ignore whenever people point it out on the account that we don't have 15 years of game designing experience.
It's not because people's criticism seemingly "hides" useful information that it invalidates it automatically.

As for the iron scarcity stuff, did you ever consider that if you pushed our reasoning a bit further, i.e. the fundamental idea that for people to be able to make decisions, they need more options/choices and error room to be able to take risks (which means less dumb gimmicky restrictions), you'd get to Maslow's hierarchy of needs?
And I'm not even the first one to point this out. Almost a full year ago. Dissapointing..

Here's one of your relatively old posts I dug up which, by the way, reminds me of Dodge in a horrifying way:

Hey, you know those things you wanted us to do and started trying really hard to force upon us about a year ago?
Trading, war, private properties, economies, governments.
Yeah, well, guess what we're NOT doing while we struggle our ass off just to be able to barely survive?

But I don't know, you tell me, people may say a lot of good things about Maslow and how smart he may be, but at the end of the day, he doesn't have 15 years of experience in game designing.

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Following this I would like to address something.
Something which I believe may be at the core of the issue here.

If the reasoning behind all of these updates is that "life is just boring if survival is too easy" then I'm afraid you're plain wrong.
When I see nihilistic points of view like these I get scared for the game.

Modern life is more than just survival. As was said in that thread, modern challenges are simply different.
You mostly had everything right in this thread.
It's good to still have challenges to overcome, but these challenges need to eventually move up the Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
Otherwise you're just making another dumb survival game. And I'm not here for that.
The standard of living will eventually need to get better and survival overal easier.
Otherwise what even would be the point of building a civilization?
Of course, survival being easier in an advanced civilization means you could spend your life doing nothing and eat for the rest of your life.
But like you point out in the "everything runs out" post, these people would be making a mistake because idealy the modern challenges would need solving.
Imagine if everybody in the world would stop doing anything overnight. It would be a disaster! The economy would crash, civilization would collapse!

To make this point short, this abundance that you may or may not think makes us so miserable brought us exactly everything you think your game lacks.
Think about that. You may need to change your vision of things and not just for this game.

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Literally nobody ever said that.
That's a big strawman you're making there.

In fact, I'd say most people actually do want to have interesting interactions with families.
It's not because we oppose your way of forcing interactions into the game that we despise interactions.
Like for example adding war swords and calling them "rich dynamics" because people are literally so afraid of griefers that they finally ended up building fences around villages, all while saying it was a gigantic pain in the ass to do so. Are you going to back down on it now and say it was actually a good idea because maybe the problem was the fences specifically?

I mean, at the end of the day, we all want a good game to play.
I know it's very dumb to say, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that you believe we want the opposite, especially when I remember stuff like this:

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And now it's the "let's see how Jason ignores people's criticism/ideas" moment!

I want to make it clear that I didn't remember any of the following posts off the top of my head, but I looked for them out of pure intuition and it barely took me 10 minutes.

That post of yours about people not having 15 years of game designing experience and only stating problems instead of suggestions really worked out didn't it?

I think the real problem was always and still is that you just don't pay attention to what people are telling you.

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Is this your way of saying that it was yet another dumb experiment just like with the rift?
Because if it's not, that's still not a good justification for this unfun and frustrating update to remain.

More like you don't have the capacity to understand them.
That's why I bother repeating myself multiple times with different words.
So you have a chance to assimilate the concepts I try to explain to you.

Your posts are generally short and barely allow the conversations to progress.

These concepts included the idea that mechanically limiting people will make them be less inclined to take incentives and therefor result in less variation overall in the game.
Did you get it?

People didn't refrain from making this choice because iron is infinite, that's bullshit and you know it.
Even if iron is infinite eventually towns could still die due to a lack of it because people can't just travel infinitely.

People refrained from making this choice because the only people capable of making it needed to support a whole bunch of noobs behind.
Taking the risk of changing the noob-meta of simply staying in the berry field was too high because the game was made too hard for the non-veterans.

Did you read the previous posts I linked?

If you have truly read and understood them, then that should give you a pretty clear idea of what should be done next.
Adding the option of mass-producing (to sustain higher populations) and storing surplus of resources like I have always been saying to resume.
This recent thread should help you out a bit and a clear roadmap could even be made using it.

Like I keep saying. I am obviously not advocating for dumb reskins. That should be obvious.
If you read my posts, that is.

That's great! Then there's no problem, right?

Wow, what is this kick-ass game you're talking about that has space stations and stuff?!!
It sounds amazing! I want to be part of "Humanity" whatever it is!
It has a lot of extra content over OHOL.
Kind of makes me want to play it, you know, unlike some other game.

Wait another month and you can make it a whole year.
At least as far as I can tell from my own posting history.

This started after the property fences update.
Which was the very first sign that Jason wanted to abandon the idea of making tech-related content and try and make contrived mechanics to impose trade and what not.
Which was a big surprise to me then. I mean, even the people playing could and still do feel to this day that this isn't how natural progression should go.
We shouldn't jump from small, 20 people villages to private property and trade just like that. And that fit the theory I lay out in my post.

I also have a bit of a theory on this which I cannot directly prove, so take what I'm going to say with a grain of salt.

But recently I began to think that these people are also the kind of people who really don't care that much at all about the crafting part of the game.
I mean, they fundamentally don't see the appeal in building things (like civilization) and as such reject the idea that adding more craftable content could be the solution.
They'd be the kind of people who would say, for example, "I never tried to make an oil rig or an engine, looks too complicated to me".

Of course this is a gross generalization of people, so feel free to prove me wrong if you think you're an exception to this.

Jason also seems to fall into this category according to me.
One of his usual arguments is that before all of this he had been steadily adding more and more content to the game, only to notice that people "didn't trade, go into war or have private properties".
I mean, at first glance you can sort of see how he could be right, but this fails to take in account the fact that we're talking about meaningful, tech-related content.
Jason really likes to completely disregard that part of the argument. Presumably out of laziness.
Isn't most of the oil stuff way, way older than just a year at this point? Yeah. Pretty old.
It also fails to disprove this theory I have which is that we needed a bunch more tech-related updates before these things could start to emerge naturally in some primitive form at the very least.
In other words, maybe we stopped the content updates too early.

Another one of his patented arguments is the player numbers.
I admit this is kind of unrelated as it was originally made in order to disprove the idea that these non-content updates have been driving players away.
But don't you see how cynical it is?
The idea is that the "player numbers have been dwindling down, are dwindling and will always be dwindling down".
Great! We've proven nothing! We're running in circles now!
This exactly proves nothing regarding the quality of the updates or the validity of the basic idea behind them.

The only thing that's changed is the general satisfaction regarding the updates.
And the only theory that hasn't been tested within this unproductive and hellish year of OHOL updates is the one that, you guessed it, asks for more content.

No, I'm all for capitalism and specialization/culture in OHOL.

You're just not gonna get any closer to it with these simplistic and gimmicky mechanics.
And even then such clunky mechanics are never going to give rise to something that feels authentic/natural and/or satisfying.

Oh look, it's a wall of toxic filth that epitemizes that all griefing does is empower entitled paper dolls to enforce their style of game play on literally everyone who pays for this game.