a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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What about the fact that in many situations weapons can be scarce and not immediately available to those affected, or how they require a tool slot to use now? What about how it is likely that the majority of people won't be willing to participate, or will be new and not understand these mechanics like you said?
Has it been considered that there may be many situations now where a team of 3 griefers will have completely free reign to murder people without them being able to fight back? 3 people is not a hard minimum either. If one person gets killed, it'll then be a 4 person minimum to "vote" the griefers off versus the 3 they need to grief, and so on.
The main purpose of the tool update was make it so players didn't run around doing everything themselves and would end up asking other players to use their slots for you when you ran out or wanted to save some.
It does tend to work pretty well in that regard, and I don't really run into too many problems with it. If I need something smithed and I'm working on clothing this life I just ask who's ever at the forge to make it. It also makes your job feel more valuable. If I'm cutting up kindling I know that there are at least some people who aren't able to do it.
My main gripe with it though is that instead of making players feel like they have "jobs" and giving some sort of role identity it simply relies on a system of finding someone who hasn't used up all their tool slots yet. If I want to have the produce I gathered cooked for example, it'd be more interesting to seek out a chef than someone young who still has slots to burn.
Creating advantages instead of penalties might work, but it runs the risk of players still doing everything themselves instead of handing things to the more experienced person. Many players REALLY don't like talking to people, and I can kind of understand. Typing things out to people and waiting for a response with the risk of them ignoring you slows down the pace of play in a game where you have so limited time and a limited amount of characters to type.
I sort of think it might be beneficial to add some sort of job postings board where players can easily without hassle post what they need created or gathered or maybe some type of quest creation system to negate this in a way. Basically anything that can deliver players requests to others through game mechanics if they so desire.
I think they key to all of these problems listed is to provide incentive without adding any punishment. I know a lot of people may think the only motive for doing things like marking graves or interacting with family should be purely based on the player, but it can still be enjoyable to have some practical benefits to these things.
Basically add interactions for things that can be beneficial but aren't necessary where any village ever needs to do them. Like farming pigs for example. Pork can provide unique food for yum bonus but a village can thrive forever without it. Something similar can be added for making graves or doing certain tasks with family.
I also believe the whole gene score thing can be improved this way. Maybe instead of having a punishment for players having their immediate family die young we can have a system that only rewards players for having long living family and doesn't punish if any of them die young.
Aw hell yeah I'm interested. Can you put it in a dropbox link maybe?
I become creepy uncle two days ago (I tried to yum food) I manage keep alive all my family members but most of them died few minutes after me.
In next life I found another strategy.
I had 6 kids within 2 min. other mams also put their kids next to fire. I spam all the time DON'T STARVE KIDS REMEMBER TO EAT STAY ALIVE DON'T STARVE KIDS and .... one of my sans starved next to fire so I cursed him using his name I CURSE X Y.
Reaction of kids : "?" "WHY" "?"
I : Because he starved! Don't starve kids.
After this town was fool of kids everyone with berry or carrot in hand. Even twin of my cursed son didn't dare to starve.
Maybe your strategy has worked its way around because I just started have pretty good luck with gene score lately. Enough to raise it to 47 so I'm enjoying 2 new tool slots.
I had three children my last life that I got the new player notification on and all of them knew to go straight to the berries. 2 lived to 60 and one to 40 so I guess that shows you don't really need any experience to not starve. Thank you for the positive score whoever you 3 were.
Its kind of pointless to implement an auto curse on vulgar sounding names because you'd have to go in a manually and apply the cursing mechanics to each one. If you truly didn't want these names used then why wouldn't you just remove the names altogether instead of just giving players the ability to use the names but punish them for doing so?
Honestly yeah. I'd like pretty much everyone to live to 60 above all else even if for your entire life you eat the village's food and do literally nothing else. Living to 60 gives your more immediate family members a good gene score while dying young hurts it for them. The extra tool slots you get when its kept at a high number can be pretty valuable and hard to maintain, and food isn't really all that hard to produce in mass.
So keep that in mind when you die young you're actually hurting your siblings, mother, descendants, and uncles gene scores.
Another game mechanics update so jason can attempt to redesign certain features to try to guide a certain user experience only for the actual ensuing user experience to not be any different or do the complete opposite of what he wanted it to.
If your motive was to encourage trade between peoples and encourage diplomacy it feels like this update had much of the opposite effect
Before this update families were mostly living separate because there wasn't that much reason to live with another family in the same town as there was no benefits and a few potential detriments to doing so.
This created some really interesting situations such as the whole suspicion of outsiders thing. Families couldn't speak the same language unless they grew up around each other so unless you were really given a chance with someone, it was very likely that you'd be killed if you entered another's territory due to not being able to say your intentions.
A lot of people would try to make peace, but others just wanted to kill anyone who wasn't in their family for fear of their own safety.
A few bad apples could go on murderous rampage which could tarnish another family's name for generations, making peace much harder because of it.
Now however families don't trade with each other like you want them to, they just live all together in the same towns so they have access to all the resources to become self sufficient. Nothing feels unique about them anymore. Everyone's all at peace, no one puts up property fencing around towns, and I have never once met someone that I didn't speak the same language as because every single town on the server has been multicultural for centuries. Negotiation and diplomacy aren't a thing anymore when they used to happen quite often.
But if you kill him and his entire family, how will you gather sulfur.
Obviously, you should have at least kept one of the girl children alive to gather the sulfur. Maybe keep her in a locked room so she can't run away from town. You can trade her pies in exchange for fresh "workers".
I was actually thinking about becoming a baby snatcher in one of my lives. The idea is that I will hang around a village and wait for a woman to give birth and then kidnap the baby and feed him berries to keep him healthy. Keep him with you at knife point when he gets old enough to run and hopefully he will be compliant enough to bring him back to my own village. There I will keep people of every race locked up behind fences and when we need a certain resource you can let them out and have them harvest it for you.
The other day I needed sulphur and realized that the family specialty update happened since I last played so I asked a black person to do it and when he said no I held a knife and threatened to murder him and then his entire family if he didn't so he gathered it for me the family specialty update is pretty cool guys
Spent a good amount of time building up genetic fitness only for it to tank by my 7 nieces and nephews who all starved in a town full of food before they turned 15. This happens all the time.
How do you even help these people? I know genetic fitness is supposed to make your relatives more valuable to you so you try to keep them alive but there are just too many people that just aren't smart enough to keep themselves fed even when given clothes and mountains of food. I want to be able to get my genetic fitness up.
Even new players should have zero problems not starving and I've seen it. You get plenty of flashing text and sounds and its not hard to know that you can just pick gooseberries or something. I can't think of anything else to do but literally stand next to these people and manually shove food in their mouths their entire lives.
What do you mean by griefing?
Do you have examples?
Ideally doing "bad stuff" would be the same difficulty as doing something good.
But there is still some unbalanced griefing left, would help to know what you're talking about exactly.
Smashing ovens, mass murdering for no reason, stealing or eating things for no reason other than to piss people off, babies running around saying f and then starving themselves to death instead of infant suiciding which fucks with peoples genetics, generally anything done purposely for no reason other than to piss people off and ruin the game for others. There are loads of people who literly will do nothing else in the game but these things.
A recent update did address some of these issues. If you are standing close to the person who griefed you, they can be cursed using a "wild card" curse ... "I curse you" or "Curse you".
I'm aware of these changes. But of course many times you need to curse someone by name, and you can't always do that.
I think it has been implied that the point of the curse system currently is to allow you to choose not to play the game near anyone that you don't want to, with people sent to donkey town if there is too large amount of people that don't want to play with them to spawn.
With the current mechanics it mostly is not possible to do this which I personally feel is due to the reasons I listed, which is why I don't think the system is working as intended.
Griefers are running completely rampant at this point and it's ruining the game. It's like half of the players I come across are griefers, and the methods to counteract this are no longer sufficient and aren't working as intended mainly due to two things I see.
1. The 1 hour limit on cursing
One curse per hour is not nearly enough, 5 curses per hour probably won't be enough. If you let me choose once per hour which player I don't want to be around I'm still going to be surrounded by griefers.
2. The way curses are applied in general
There are loads of times I want to curse someone but I am unable to. This is due to the fact that many times you need to curse someone by saying their name and you aren't old enough. You also may not know enough to be able to curse someone by saying their full name. Players can have complicated names, or run off screen, or get mixed in with other players. You really need to keep a player moused over for a bit to completely note their name, especially if it's complicated. If a players actions warrant them to be cursed, there should be nothing preventing people from doing so.