One Hour One Life Forums

At least the new baby indicator really helps when you're dealing with, say, an AFK daughter you're feeding.  Even if you really, really need the babies (or want the gene score from them), you now don't have to hover around her every second in case one pops out, just stay nearby enough that you can rush back and save them if necessary.  Removes a lot of frustration in that situation.

She could have done better, but that's just an impossible thing to expect anybody to handle.  I see she did fine with the first two, at least.  Can't exacly blame her if after they started popping out every two seconds she just gave up.

(Sadly, I had no idea where she took off to, so I wasn't around to help, but I would have been able to handle 28 kids, either!)

Hi, Doc!  Sorry you got taken down with us.  It was worse for me, too, before the descendants who made it to sixty kicked off, but I think I'm still a long way from regaining those tool slots.

I know that's the idea, but I think it probably really does still need a bit of tweaking.  I genuinely don't feel like there's a strong coupling between the effort I put in and the reward I get from it.   Maybe the changes Jason's made in this update might help, we'll see.  But otherwise, well, it became crystal clear to me last week that once I managed that second extra tool slot, no amount of above-and-beyond effort to keep my kids alive and my town functional would get me any further, whereas stuff that's completely unreasonable and out of my control, like my daughter getting spammed with insane numbers of kids, could tank my score instantly.  That starts to feel more like random unearned punishment than useful incentive.

I mean, I was hovering near the top of the leaderboard for a while there, and it doesn't really seem to have done very much for me.

Sometimes there's really just not a lot you can do.

A little while ago, I had a newbie daughter when I was working on some important task that required leaving town for a few minutes. I don't remember exactly what it was.  Collecting water or scavenging a ruined town for rubber or something like that.  Something vitally important that nobody else was doing, and that would have taken longer to recruit someone else for than to do myself.

But I put that on hold.  I raised the kid carefully.  I gave her clothes and a backpack.  I showed her where  food was; there was lots of it.  I gave her a pie and told her what it was.  "Put this in your backpack," I told her.  "Right click to take it out.  Always have food with you.  Always.  Pay attention to your food meter.  Listen for when it dings.  Don't ignore it.  Always remember to eat, that's the most important thing.  Don't starve.  OK?"  She assured me she got it. 

"All right," I told her.  "Mama has an important mission.  I have to leave for just a few minutes.  You stay here.  Help out if you can, but your main job, until I get back, is just not to starve.  That's all. Then, when I get back, I'll teach you and help you with anything you need.  All right?  Can you do that?"  Yes, she said, she could.  "Don't starve!" I told her again, as I left.

I was gone less than five minutes.  Maybe more like three.  And by the time I got back, she'd starved.

I think, at some point, you just have to get philosophical about the newbie mortality rate.

That having been said, yeesh.  Yesterday I was #30 on the leaderboard, and I still only had two extra slots.  Which can be very easy to use up, especially when, you're in an early settlement where everything needs to be done, or surrounded by newbies who need help.  How stupendously lucky do you have to get to have the opportunity to be a useful jack of all trades?  Because making it to the very far end of the curve does seem to require a lot of pure luck. One life when your mom doesn't realize she's just reached menopause and won't put you down no matter now much you spam "O L D F F F O L D F!," and you're kind of screwed, it seems.

For me there are a lot of reasons, and people have covered most of them, probably.

But one thing that is at the very least a worthwhile and fascinating side-effect of playing the game, and maybe also part of the reason for continuing to play it, is that it can give you a sense of perspective on the real world.

Like, sometimes in the game, I look around a busy, built-up town with lots and lots of stuff in it, and I remember -- because, in the game, it's easy to remember -- that every pixel of this stuff exists because of actions that  all the players before me took and the decisions they made. 

And then I log out and look around at the gazillion different objects and structures all around me, and I remember that all of this exists only because of the actions and decision of lots and lots of other human beings, too.  Like, this laptop I'm typing on didn't just spring into being fully formed when I ordered it from Amazon, even though from my perspective it almost seems that way.  People put it together in a factory, and people built the machines in the factory, and constructed the building, and made all the executive decisions about designing the thing.  People coded the software and made the chairs the people coding the software sat in, and the machines those people used to make the chairs, and on and on and on, with each of us relying on what went before, back down through the ages.

And often we're stuck with the real-world equivalent of a massive berry farm with no gaps to set your damn bucket down, because of some decision somebody made out of ignorance or laziness or in the middle of a desperate time crunch, long before you were born.  Every time I'm in an early settlement and my noob kids do something that I know is going to be annoying for future generations but  I don't have the time and resources to fix, I think about that, and I feel like I understand life a little better.

Were you Mini Arab?  The one who kept writing "follow me" notes to the gingers and taking them out to work the oil pump?

If so, I was your kid, and the last Arab in gingertown.  They had a couple of bowls of sulfur, so I made them two buckets' worth of rubber before I died, and stocked them up with a few baskets of bananas and some extra palm oil.

I believe that was the Eis family, and it looks like they're still going.

I feel like the game can be more frustrating these days,  compared to pre-rift times, but that overall it's also much more interesting, and I think I'm happy with that tradeoff.

Aha, that might indeed explain it! I do think this was probably shortly before the update.

Nope, they're showing up on the family tree as dead.

I'm trying to decide what I think about this.  My first thought is that I maybe do kind of like the idea of a per-life kill limit.  It would certainly be effective against that particular form of griefing, although the concerns that it would just funnel the griefers into other, less easy to spot activities are reasonable ones.

My second thought is that I might prefer a two-kills-per-life limit to one if we were going to go that route, meaning that one person could dispatch twin griefers, at least.  Since that's a situation that certainly does come up (much more often than triplets or quads).  And I honestly can't think of a time when, as a legit non-griefing player, I've felt the need to stab more than two people in one lifetime.  That might be a little too complicated, though, and make less intuitive sense than a once-per-life limit.

Thank you so much for this.  That was driving me absolutely crazy.

Speak for yourself!  I was taught lots, and I'm still very grateful for it.  I try to teach others whenever I can.

But sometimes it's really, really hard to teach, even when you very much want to.  It's settled down some now, fortunately, and I've been able to give new players some good attention.  But during the first day of the current Steam influx, it was just impossible.  Too many newbie babies coming in a steady stream, too much running around trying desperately to keep everyone from starving and then starving anyway. 

To kaidu, I would say this:  There's never any excuse for berating people for being new or not having enough experience to know how to do things.  There are, of course, always jerks who will do that anyway.  There are also people who are happy to teach.  But if everyone seems to be ignoring you when you ask to learn, it may be that they're desperately busy trying to solve a crisis you might not even have the experience to realize exists, or they might be new themselves and not know how to help you or have any idea what the answer to your question is.  It's also disturbingly easy in this game to get hyper-focused on what you're doing and not even notice when somebody is talking to you.  (Or sometimes even to notice when you just had a baby, LOL.)

If you get brushed off, please keep trying.  The next person you ask might be more helpful, or the next life might be better suited for learning opportunities.

This can get frustrating and requires a bit of patience.  But a certain amount of patience and ability to deal with frustrating situations is honestly probably a requirement for enjoying this game, anyway.  It does generally pay off, and the feeling of accomplishment when you get some good instruction and master a new skill is, I think, worth it.

I do agree, though, that people can often be good about teaching the "how" of crafting stuff and neglect the more meta aspects of how things are done.  I try, when I can, to give newbies little lectures about things like which tasks are most important, what kinds of pies to make, proper sheep-shearing etiquette, etc.