One Hour One Life Forums

Pretty cool. It'll be interesting to see if any nifty automated tools get built to use this data. For instance more expansive family trees, statistic graphs and so on.

Yeah I remember hearing somewhere that once you were assigned a server it kept putting you on that server. I guess another effect of that could be more chance of running into your old line or being born into another family in that town. (A pro or con depending on your perspective and the design goals.)

I agree that it should probably bounce you through the servers each time, though that would make running a deliberate eve more tedious.

Wouldn't trying to beat the melting be part of the fun challenge of making a snowman, if it wasn't too strict of a timer? Not in real life maybe, but still...

Hah, I thought that was what was going on when I saw those two names.

Yeah, I've noticed that the multiplication of food products actually seems quite generous. I've been hearing a lot of lines dying off with plenty of food to nocturnal infertility or griefers. You get a lot of food and product for that one sheep poop!

Fair enough. As far as it getting fixed, hopefully it's not embedded too deep in the basic systems of the game. Can you continue building the device while they're stuck in it? "A monstrous fusion of man and lathe!"

I don't think focusing on the singular event is quite the right way to think about it. The unsheared sheep is not what has high value here, it is the rule.

Because I guess I was kind of insane, I did this thing:

My estimate on the time to make and carry the mixed bowls is a complete guess based on what I think a skilled player might manage. Of course distance to berries and carrots affect it. Once you factor in the time that goes into farming the berries and carrots, I would guess that each mixed bowl is worth about 1 minute of time, probably more for slower people and noobs. So shearing the sheep first probably costs about 1.5 times more. And this doesn't count the case where someone shears the sheep again preventing any new lambs. Each time that happens adds another 1 minute to the cost. So someone overshearing could easily double the cost of sheep. In fact... I just realized I overlooked the 30 seconds it takes for a shorn sheep to grow its coat, so I've underestimated the cost. It might approach 2 times the cost even on the first shearing.

So the cost of a single infraction is tiny in the long run, but failure to maintain the rule has a pretty notable cost. The "extra" fleece is a one-time gain, taken at the cost of interrupting the cycle and possibly weakening the rule a bit. The newbs are watching. There is a definite baseline cost that doesn't ever go away, although the situation will determine how much additional circumstantial cost is associated with either choice. I would guesstimate that if you find yourself in a situation where it is truly necessary to sheer the last sheep, probably a mistake has been made at some point. It just seems like a risky choice to me. Rules function best when they are simple, low cost, and people aren't rationalizing around them too much. Anyway, enough rambling from me on that point.

We're pretty much agreed then. I tend to wonder how many greifer types commit crimes in real life.

It's a frank and troublesome truth: Dishonest people prey on those who forgive and show pity. Yet forgiveness and trust are also key for cooperation. People who are less prone to forgiveness in the first place are less likely to become the victims of these sorts of people, but also more likely to be abrasive and unyielding to others. And the more forgiving types tend to get into debates with them. I actually fall pretty firmly on the forgiving side of the spectrum (very high agreeableness trait), but knowledge of how dishonest people operate and the incredible costs they cause everyone else lead me to not be so quick to condemn the less agreeable types. Both personality types have strengths and weaknesses, and of course most people are somewhere in the middle on this spectrum.

Basically, if you forgive everything, everything goes to hell, and if you forgive nothing, everything goes to hell, so you have to learn to discern each situation. Your personality just determines which side you default to when unsure, and there are costs and benefits to each tendency. What's actually more important in the long run is whether our goals are the same. If we are trying to make the game more enjoyable for honest players who aren't behaving overly selfishly, our differences in approach will mostly converge on the same solutions, though each side may present different insights.

Lol, if children could pick up babies you could make people stacks.

Cool, I enjoyed reading this. Took me a minute to get the wordplay of Snow-Less. Cool. I will definitely consider following any bells rung.

The base fluctuation is unavoidable, but it seems like the handling of it could be improved. Is there any good reason that the minority server HAS to be starved off artificially? Why not just let that line receive its fair probability of children and give all lines on all servers a fair chance of dying off?

As I see it there are pros and cons to this:
Pro:
*The overflow servers are no longer rapidly doomed once the overflow stops.
*Survival is based on skill and not number of players more of the time.

Neutral:
*Survival will still be sensitive to dilution caused by the number of fertile lines.

Con:
*Lower number servers will no longer be guaranteed to be the most active. Populations will be more diluted.
*You might need some way to keep manual connections on higher servers from stealing births. Make some servers manual only?
*Maybe server cost increases since players will not be as strictly compressed into fewer servers (Significant or not?)

My impression is that even if you give fair probability to all lines, servers will still die off when population drops, it will just be more manageable and fairly distributed. After all, a full server will automatically get more births due to having more women.

This thread includes Jason's comments about the algorithm, including a desire for most player to have the "full server experience" most of the time. You'll note that he actually essentially describes nocturnal infertility in this post: https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewt … d=162#p162

So here's my idea:
1. New logins are born to a random mom on an existing server (ie a server is randomly picked, with the weighting depending on the number of potential mothers on each server). Maybe weight the births lightly toward lower numbered servers (when they are not capped), so that players tend to pool back into them, but established towns can still keep ahead of the curve for a while. But, I'm not sure this is even necessary.

2. When a server hits its soft-cap (100 in Jason's post above), then it overflows half of its logins to the other servers, repeating step one for those.

Yes and no. Being useful AND personable is certainly a good ideal, but it's not quite right to assume people can "just do that". The variety in people's temperaments is quite wide, and roughly 40-60% genetic. (This is different from heritability; identical twins have stronger personality correlations to each other than to their parents, as I recall.) That doesn't excuse people from responsibility and doesn't mean they are without choice, but acting against one's personality (read: default tendency) requires an exertion of will.

I'm sort of thinking about this in terms of the Big 5 personality traits. It seems like the traits mainly in play in this debate are Conscientiousness (including tendency to be goal and achievement oriented, to persevere under adversity, and to value established order, hierarchy, and routine), Openness to Experience (including interest in pursuing new experiences, ideas, and values, interest in art and creative expression, and desire for spontaneity), and Extraversion/Introversion (Extroverts are more energetic and outgoing, and experience more reward from socializing and actually more positive emotion overall, whereas introverts are more likely to be more withdrawn and contemplative on average).

Based on cursory impressions (which I should note aren't that reliable except for Openness and Extraversion), I would estimate that that Aurora is probably pretty high in Openness as well as Extraversion within this community, and pein is probably higher than most in Conscientiousness, maybe fairly high in the intellectual side of openness, and maybe a bit lower in Agreeableness (ie less forgiving and compromising, but also less likely to be a pushover or wishy-washy). Conscientious people are sometimes described as judgmental, and don't have time for people that they don't consider to be pulling their weight. I could be off in these guesses, and I'm just trying to illustrate more clearly how these traits might relate to the disagreements at hand.

I have a speculation that video game players tend to be higher then average in Openness across the board, just given that games are very much about experiencing novel challenges and scenarios, and overlap quite a bit with other artistic media. (Maybe less so for people who exclusively play sports or FPS games, but maybe that's personal bias talking, heh.) I was surprised I couldn't find any research about the topic. But within any crowd you can find sub-gradients, and within each trait there are sub-traits, so there are different "flavors" of openness and conscientiousness, etc.

In any case, I don't think that being an RPer necessarily indicates that you are better at communicating on the practical level. I'm not really sure how or if that might correlate with specific personality traits. I mean, maybe being more extroverted means more likely to communicate, but it certainly would imply much about whether the communication is useful or helpful, though.

I think from a practical philosophical perspective, we accomplish the most if we focus on what we individually can do to improve things for everyone, which of course can include debating these things and making criticisms. I just think it's important to keep in mind that to a degree, Conscientious types and creative types have always clashed, but that both of these groups (which again, do overlap) benefit from a balancing effect provided by the other. Artists benefit more from their gifts if encouraged to balance them with discipline and discouraged from bad ideas, and conscientious types (who tend to be inflexible) can benefit from the adaptability of creative types. As an example, organizations become more likely to fail if they become too liberal (weakly correlated with openness) or conservative (weakly correlated with conscientiousness). They either waste resources on bad ideas and crash, or fail to adapt to changing conditions and crash. So the tug-of-war can be annoying, but is actually more functional than one side dominating.

Anyway, enough bloggin from me I think. Hope this is in some way interesting if not useful.