a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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Potatoes are next, before burritos. They require 2x soil (rebury when growing) and must be cooked before eating (like a popcorn that can't be eaten raw). They can be reseeded without letting the row go to seed (one potato sprouts eyes and can plant a new row). They will obviously provide more food than carrots. But how much more food? I can tweak the numbers until they look good, but how do potatoes fill a niche?
And then I want to add parsnips, suppose. They are pretty much starchy carrots. Need to be cooked before eating. What is their niche?
Then I want to add turnips. Rutabagas. Spinach. Kale. Broccoli.
Cabbage is for sauerkraut, and you need to make a kraut board and crock, and find some salt. But WHY? What's the niche?
There is only 1 single reward for growing food in the game right now, which is satisfying hunger. I can think of 2 variables in terms of food reward: # of calories, and # of bites (pies being 4).
I think you're finding difficulty in there are aren't enough meaningful combinations of those 2 variables.
People are unlikely to regularly explore the food tree if they can learn a single food, and get skilled at making that food quickly, as long as that food satisfies hunger.
Another road you can start thinking of is "in what other ways can food be helpful?"
Some one-offs ideas:
- food that changes body temperature for a period of time
- food that makes you faster for a period of time
- food that lets you use more characters when speaking for a period of time ("makes you smarter", to empower children)
The idea of having it vary by life/person instead of over a lifetime is interesting. Like you're born with a kind of randomized "nutrition makeup" that you attempt to satisfy by trying different foods. There's this guy in the village who is just obsessed with figs and grows nothing but figs. I don't know what his deal is, because I've tried figs, and they're not that great.
But it seems like a weird puzzle to be solving in each life (taste-testing each food), and you'd be solving it through trial and error.
Yeah, I don't prefer this one, either.
A budding village needs to be able to coordinate to make it over the first generations. If there's disagreement over which foods to grow, which not a matter of opinion but of life and death, I think it would lead to a lot of disunity.
If the nutrition profile results from player actions in a given life, it's easier to understand and manage. I think arguments over what to grow are interesting. They're already happening, but are being argued with math. Having them be a matter of taste that varies from person to person based on their life experience so far (my mother raised carrots and I'm sick of them, but your mother raised sheep, and you're eager to try carrots) seems like a richer story.
I like this, because it (typically) means the whole village has to pivot, or the village splits into the "carrot eaters" and the "sheep herders", will people trading places on occasion.
Let's see if we can break down the motivations.
Players mono diet because
- that food is superior (either because it IS superior, or it is perceived to be superior)
- that food is available where they are located (or they can migrate to a place with the favored food)
So, what can we change? We can balance the foods so none of them are outright superior, but that doesn't change player's perception. Often in games with metas (like this one), experienced players favor a certain crop over others, and most less experienced players follow suit ("you must be right, you've played longer than me").
So what about availability? If we look historically, people in Old World Europe weren't growing corn, because it didn't exist. But corn is heavily favored in the modern day.
What if player's couldn't favor 1 crop, because of their geography?
Experienced Eve's will attempt to migrate, but at a certain point they have to settle down.
This suggestion has a ton of more implications, more than I can enumerate right now. I'm hoping it serves as food for thought. : )
The playerbase is VERY adaptive. Once we hit max tech and berry-seas there is little to do but murder en mass.
This is a great point!
It's possible that the murder rate will go down once the berry surplus problem is resolved.
It might be useful to compare this weekend's murder rate to the weekend before, to put this in perspective.
Or maybe the server should implement a fixed grace period (15 seconds or something) when you actually reach 0.
This was my first thought.
Since food decrements on an interval of [2,22] seconds, making it 10 seconds is a fair middle ground. That way it's the time interval for halfway cold and halfway hot.
Based on my understanding for the vision of this game, this number seems high.
Players are killing each other can (and should) happen, but 1/5 lives ending in murder? It's likely that most newbies are going to experience (either cause of death or witnessing) murder on day 1.
This will make the game more interesting.
That might be true.
You don't mention which tools you think should become murderous, or maybe you're thinking new murderous weapons should be added.
Do you have an opinion either way? Can you give some more specific suggestions?
I think I was your daughter! Are you Gen 3 in this blood line?: http://lineage.onehouronelife.com/serve … _id=195417
If so, I was your second daughter. I helped raise the little ones along side you next to the carrot farm.
When Lily heard that you had passed, she went on a quest for iron in order to make a shovel and give you a proper burial. She came back years later having accomplished her quest. We were both old then.
I was nearing 60 when I was telling the little ones about my mother, "new Eve", because you the only mother in the village. Tragedy when Lily comes from the north with a blood stain. I fled, cried "Killer", but I didn't get very far. I died of old age.
I never got closure on what happened, but the bloodline continues after us, so they did well. : )
Very cool. I'm glad things turned out well in the end.
I was Leila, his Nameless man's first victim. I noticed him acting strangely about that house early on, but I tried to be more useful by filling cisterns, cleaning up, ...
At some point, I noticed he was just collecting tools, non-lethal ones, so right when he opened up the door, I went inside. He got mad at me and shortly after killed me. We had a mini-crowd, and I told everyone he was hiding tools.
I felt strange afterwards, because I wasn't sure I was ever going to get any closure on how things ended. The lineage line obviously helps, but it doesn't tell a story. Maybe if the game had a spectate mode? where you could watch things after you're dead, at least for a little while.
Although it's probably against the spirit of the game. When you die, you die. You won't get closure in the afterlife.
Recovering from vandalism can be implemented as making almost all actions reversible.
Jason said earlier in this thread that he opposes this. Page 5.
I'm a bit skeptical of it, too. People make mistakes, they do things they can't undo. I don't think you can make almost all actions reversible without breaking that tenet of the game.
One way to fix this is to make homicide resource-intensive, so that there's a necessary resource gathering step. And those actions are reversible.
For example, there could be a slightly VtMB-like humanity system:
Humanity meter that doesn't reset on death.
Fighting costs humanity.
Zero humanity makes one break down crying and starve to death. Or turn into a bear. Or both.
Shouting burns humanity to decrease someone else's humanity.
People over 50 regenerate humanity and can give it to others.
This seems a bit heavy weight, but it contains some ideas that I agree with.
Some thoughts:
- Is humanity revealed to the players, or is it hidden?
- I'm not convinced fighting should cost humanity. Sometimes you have to kill the serial killer, should players perceive that as a bad action? Keep in mind that most players learn what to do from the game itself (in this case, from in-game players, too).
- Please don't turn a low humanity person into a bear.
- How much can 1 person burn another's humanity? Are they allowed to spam it?
Perhaps we really should move to a separate thread.
Yeah, it seems that this thread is older than this one, where Jason was more recently active. I'm going to catch up on all the suggestions there, probably chime in the next time something like this comes up.
Thanks for all the feedback. This has been really helpful. : )
I assume you are like a horse or a cart. You drop items in hand and move with your captor.
...
Also, if you are holding a lassoed person, you have to keep holding the item/them so you can't eat
either.. If you put it down it would like how it works with horse.
I like these two together, because the captor is essentially bound to the captive. It makes it difficult to use the lasso nefariously.
How about adding this
- When you are a captor, you can be fed like a baby (hand to mouth, not breastfeeding).
Then, both the captor and the captive depend on the populace, which I really like.
If the captor drops their "hold" on the captive, what happens to the lasso? Does it go on the ground or the captive has it or...
Sorry, if there's a mechanic already with horses, I don't know how it works.
I'm not immediately opposed to it.
Some questions:
Once you're lasso'd, how do you get out? Obviously other people, but is it a basic action (no item equipped)? Do you need a sharp stone?
What happens when you're lasso'd? Are you completely stopped, or can you move slowly (1 tile every 15 seconds, say)?
These are obviously basic questions, but I don't want to assume. : )
While automatic solutions are most likely impossible, I disagree that determining what counts as griefing shouldn't be up to the designer. Griefing is a problem with the game's design, so it's the designer's job to fix it, like any other. And design by committee never works.
I agree with this. What I meant by "not up to the designer" is Jason, himself, monitoring specific players and making a judgement call on whether or not that person is a griefer.
There are several problems here that are hard to disentangle, but it's still necessary to discuss them separately, and they need their own names, more specific than just "griefing".
Here's one: terrorism is the kind of griefing where the weaker party can cause disproportionate damage to the stronger party.
This is a great point. It occurred to me that this thread is named "Jason's Murder Problem", but I am (and I think many people here) are talking a much larger problem space, griefing as a whole.
Joriom said that he kills most players by sabotage, not a knife. That is definitely griefing, but clearly not murder.
Terrorism, as you've defined it, is really a consequence of integral parts of the game.
1) The game is trying to kill you
2) It is possible to mismanage resources and starve the village
3) It is easy to do (2)
All you need to add is
4) There are players who are interested in doing (2) intentionally to other players
What if we added this?
5) It is possible to recover from mismanaged resources
Now we've got a new question (and one I like a lot), which is, "how do we implement (5)?"
(5) may already be possible in the game, but not if everyone in village is dead, which takes us back to murder. So, maybe murder is the appropriate topic for this thread, as opposed to griefing. Hm.
Sorry, this reply is way beyond the scope of what we've been talking about. I'm going to start thinking about murder more.
aowen wrote:"Dance on the grave" marking system.
I wouldn't limit it to dead players only. This would give them a chance to atone their misdeeds during current lifetime.
Atone as in become a productive member of society again? I'm happy with that scenario, but that's probably a difference of opinion.
One problem with any "after death" solution is that the griefer gets a chance to respawn before they've been marked. I'm not sure there is any way around that. In my experience, player's don't spawn into towns often, but that's probably just the current state of the game. If, at any point, it becomes commonplace to spawn into a town, then "after death" solutions have an unfortunate loophole that I don't know how to sew shut.
aowen wrote:In order to mark someone, a player must interact with their grave (Round Stone + Grave, maybe). There is a catch; marking someone immediately kills you and you become an Adam as well. Would lead to some memorable moments of selflessness.
If single person is enough, it's too easily exploitable by the griefers themselves.
This is true, but I think marking an innocent might be a little too much trouble for a griefer. A griefer' goal is to affect many player's game experience, not just one per hour.
aowen wrote:In order to remove the punishment, and spawn like a normal player, an Adam must die of old age.
Stand by the berry bush and eat berries? That doesn't sound like punishment. It's just boring.
I disagree that it's not punishment. People don't like being bored. It's like a time-out that parents give to children.
Preventing players from playing is not my intention.
I think that this is really cool.
I've read your suggestions, but I haven't put them all together to see if there are any holes. Response incoming (probably later in the day). : )
I'm fairly new to the game and I had my first murder experience only a couple days ago. It's been on my mind ever since and it's lead to some great discussions with coworkers. Here's some ideas on how to handle griefing as a whole in OHOL.
Some constraints:
- The primary goal of the solution is to give players a way to effectively counter reincarnating griefers. The consequences of being deemed a griefer must persist across lives.
- The solution should be resistant to a griefer exploiting them to generate false positives/otherwise affect a normal player.
- Automatic solutions (stuff that depends on the server determining if a player is a griefer) are too easy to exploit/maneuver around. As a dev, they're a nuisance to maintain. As a designer, you're essentially creating "rules" that define "good" and "bad" behavior (why would murder be necessarily "bad"?).
- - Since it's not automatic, and it (probably) shouldn't be up to the designer, the players must decide what counts as griefing.
A marking system could fulfill this criteria, here are some broad strokes:
- "Dance on the grave" marking system. The punishment for being marked is that you can only spawn as an Adam. An Adam is a 14 year old male. Adams spawn in remote areas like Eves. In order to remove the punishment, and spawn like a normal player, an Adam must die of old age. In order to mark someone, a player must interact with their grave (Round Stone + Grave, maybe). There is a catch; marking someone immediately kills you and you become an Adam as well. Would lead to some memorable moments of selflessness.
- - Caveat: have to remove Adam from firstNames.txt. Eve isn't in there either, so it would follow a precedent. Instead of Adam, could call them a less popular name, like Cain (a cool fit thematically, if "Eve" has any significance)
Some other ideas, which can be mixed and matched:
- Marking by popular vote: players can mark the grave of a griefer. The more people who mark, the more harsh the punishment. To combat exploit, you can only mark a grave if you were a "witness to grief", i.e. voters had to alive during the same timeframe as the griefer's life.
- Alternative punishment: Being marked means you spawn with a physical difference on your avatar (something like red hair or a Harry Potter scar). You spawn with this difference for the next [some timeframe]. Great dilemma as a mother, "I'll give you a chance to redeem yourself" vs "abort!".
- Exponential punishment: every time you get marked, the duration/end condition to become unmarked becomes longer/more difficult. First-time offenders are still punished, but repeat offenders only dig themselves in deeper.
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I wrote this mostly to sow some more ideas on this cool problem.
Hopefully Jason reads this and it helps brainstorm to a solution that is still within the spirit of the game.
Thanks!