a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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Of course, there are other ways to do that too. For example, building are frequently just a way to organize a particular area and give it a recognizable purpose - bakery, nursery, clothing storage, smithing area, etc.
Yeah. OHOL is simple enough that you can recognize a building's purpose by its contents, and someone who runs the place will generally be able to fight the entropy just by cleaning the place up from time to time.
My post from January about property: https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=8883
TL;DR: property exists to make it easy to find stuff. In OHOL even a big town is small enough that it takes less than a minute on average to find the thing you need, no matter where it is. So we just don't need property.
We'd need property if, for example, a shaman had to perform a long and time-sensitive ritual in the middle of the town using a large and very precise set of mundane objects. If they tried to do that without property, they'd fail because of someone eating the carrot lying on the ground.
Property is useful as a way of saying "This stuff has a purpose you don't understand. Don't ruin my plans."
the median player only plays for 3.5 hours (20 lives)
Wait, that's ~10 minutes per life for new players, that's not good
Especially since the "being a baby" part of the game is the least interesting part, and you're definitely going to have to go through that again.
This seems like the only real difference.
Regardless, I think that the structure of the game makes it fundamentally less compelling long-term than other games.
Uh, sorry, but to me it sounds like you want to find a reason to give up and declare the game impossible to fix.
It probably doesn't help that everyone expects so many different things from the game. Perhaps it would help to write down a list of goals and non-goals for the game.
If the game runs out of players, no one will be able to get that perfect OHOL experience anymore.
Oh, there's one other huge problem. I set out to make the most comprehensive crafting game of all time. A small slice of the gaming populace loves huge crafting trees, but most people don't. It gives them the, "I'm never going to learn all of this, and why would I bother?" feeling.
On the other hand people seem to love to be taught by someone they know. Is there a way to encourage players to teach each other?
Find a needed specialist family and convince them to move into town, across the language barrier? That's a feat that tops mere "trade" in terms of social complexity.
I challenge this statement, if only on the basis that trade is by any reasonable interpretation something that happens regularly and over long periods of time.
Finding a specialist and moving them involves two players. Maintaining mutual awareness and relations involves two players per generation.
He also implied it was a dummy account designed to use soak people's curse points so the real one won't get as many.
Which is why he told everyone about it, right...
Villages exist over longer periods of time that characters, so the same does not apply to trade between villages.
Unfortunately villages do not have agency of their own, they're incapable of defending themselves or meaningfully interacting with each other. Until this is fixed, we won't get explicit trade agreements between villages either.
What we could have now is people moving resources between villages regularly. So that at least maintaining roads and having multiple villages is important for survival.
The goal of gene score is to make people care about their families no matter what, which presumably includes vegetables and shitheads. So you'll need to challenge the premise and not the implementation.
There are two problems here:
1. Recognizing bad behavior in automated way
2. Punishing bad behavior in a way that actually matters
The current system is clever: it recognizes that "bad behavior" is subjective. It's basically the same as killing all babies you personally cursed.
People who want to destroy a town do not care about their own survival, so we simply can't rely on punishments that last less than an hour.
One very old idea is to only allow people to spawn as their own descendants. If there are none, you're banished to another server until the next apocalypse. This way you'll really care about your children surviving, and not because of some artificial bonus points.
What exactly is the problem?
Presumably the alternative to being afk is to not play at all. Assuming gene score is worth it, having an afk baby to feed is better for the mom than not having one.
One possible problem I see is that the baby and the mom consume the village's resources but do not contribute anything. But presumably that's exactly as bad as a berry-muncher who walks around the village and doesn't do anything. The only difference is that afk players are easier to spot.
Another idea is to make people automatically join the leader's posse.
But yeah, it doesn't help when you don't know what to do. Orders help with that, but you still need someone with a plan and willing to delegate tasks.
Y'all keep talking about how all these teams of griefers are forming possies to kill everyone,. but Jason's data shows almost all murders are still solo acts. Your fears and complaints just don't match the facts, and yet you persist. Interesting.
Obviously the prediction is that the data will change after the update, and the solo kills will just become group kills.
Every life, you should see an obvious problem that needs solving in your village, and not be quite sure how to solve it.
This part is missing now.
Though I haven't see that myself so much. It's not like every town has all three "necessary" skin tones represented.
Because it's hard, duh. It's still a better strategy than anything else.
The idea that griefers are banding together constantly to get people is also not supported by the data.
That's not the idea. The idea is that they will do that after the change.
This data mostly says that group kills are rare. Thieves being killed is possible and revenge kills being done by opportunistic griefers is also possible, it's hard to say without data IMO.
I think this change is in the right direction, but it should be easy for new players to learn the posse mechanics.
Also this data does not include curses.
The more popular the game gets, the higher chance of griefers joining the game..
Do you mean that the community was unusually nice compared to the internet, and is degrading back to the average niceness?
Yeah, it happens to all games that are online multi-player.. The more known a game gets the higher the chance of "toxic" players joining in..
I wonder what the real reason is.
Is it true at all, or is it just our selective memory?
Is it caused by popularity, or does it merely happen over time?
If it's a popularity thing, what exactly happens? Do popular games disproportionately attract toxic players, or do players in popular games become more toxic?
Perhaps people with bad memories are just more likely to leave, while people with good memories stay and are later surprised when their experience regresses back to average?
If a griefer can turn the town against someone, clearly that's the problem, and not the cursing itself.
Of course, that problem might be hard to solve, so it might make sense to temporarily make cursing less permanent or something.
Kinrany, Mom doesn't have to choose..... babies can chose to follow their mom later, who then is following the other leader. Mom hears from higher up, and also can give orders to children.
I'm talking about the first ~15 years when the baby can't choose. Which are also more likely to be the time when the mom will want to be able to give orders.
I don't quite understand what you mean when you say that mom doesn't have to choose. Because the choice is there: follow the leader, or follow no one.
If she follows the leader, she can't broadcast to her children below 15.
If she doesn't follow the leader, she and her children won't hear the leader's broadcasts.
This isn't a trivial choice, although it's only a problem when the mom and her leader already use the system for something.
I do understand that changing how this works would make the default hierarchies have more than two layers. But I'm not sure I understand the significance.
Currently the only reason to ever care about depth is the titles, and honestly I think that's a problem with titles.
It's ridiculous that absolute majority of Supreme Empresses in the game have about 8 followers total, with one direct follower each.
Depth is just not a good metric for anything useful. It kind of characterizes the structure of the tree when combined with other knowledge, but that's it.
Having more layers may even be a bad thing when you already have 3 or 4, as suggested by this overview of this book about middle management.
The total number of followers would be more useful: for example, that's an upper bound on the number of players that will come together when ordered.
If the titles reflected the total number, then a Supreme Empress would be someone who can give orders to the whole server at once.
The game should incentivize honour.
I don't think building a utopia inside the game is a design goal.
Side effect of babies following their mom's leader: a mom who wants to talk to her children will have to choose between being able to give orders to children and being able to listen to her leader's orders.
We can tech up to arcade cabinets by 2022 and play 1 minute, OHOL-versions of Passage, to celebrate the 15th anniversary.
Haha, yes please
Somehow this thread is super disturbing even by OHOL standards D:
Yay!
The part about bootstrapping the leadership system was unexpected! May I ask if there was anything that convinced you that this change should happen? Or is it just an experiment?
Personally I'd prefer the slightly more sophisticated version where naming someone makes them your follower. I think it would also make the act of naming feel more meaningful. Buuut otherwise it would only affect the rare case where the mother doesn't care about the baby, but someone else does
Spoonwood, you're talking out of your ass and causing offense for no good reason. Please stop.
In all of the less terrible countries rape survivors are routinely provided with emergency birth control.
During most of the history of humankind people in consensual relationships didn't have access to birth control.
There's no conceptual relation between rape and the absence of birth control.
I am also an antinatalist. Having children is ALWAYS an evil act. All parents are bad people.
Except for the moral judgement. "Literally brainwashed with hormones" would be more accurate :0
Anyway, the initial curse system (pre d-town) had babies that were marked for everyone. That presented an annoying problem, where you had to decide how to treat cursed babies. Killing them was just busy-work.
Oh, I see, banning cursed players from spawning nearby does make sense as an equivalent/automation of killing off all cursed babies!
The reason people ask about this is to have a separate place for writing and reading stories, and not to get on the front page.
Rename the current "User Stories" into "User Stories Hall of Fame" and make a separate open subforum?