a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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I'm all in favor of removing the ability for players to reliably and rapidly return to "their" towns to continue working on "their" projects, whether that return is in the form of rebirth into an existing lineage in that town or respawning as a new Eve in that town after the previous lineages died. It runs extremely counter to (what I believe is) Jason's vision.
I think this is what Jason is trying to do in this thread.
That issue, however, gets mixed up with some other separate but related issues:
lineages dying off (which is mainly due to nocturnal infertility)
towns dying off when lineages die vs being revived by later Eves vs being lost forever if the respawn camp is lost vs being saved by the bell or the Eve spawn spiral
players coordinating to "artificially" keep a lineage and/or a town alive perpetually by manipulating the spawn and birth mechanisms
early game play vs. late game play
Please think carefully about the problem you're trying to solve, and keep it separate from the ancillary issues - although you may need to think through those as well in the process of solving your primary problem.
Today I and four other people spawned, in fairly rapid succession, as children of twins. Sadly, we quickly realized that our mothers were new players and had no idea what to do. As you might expect, both mothers were very soon dead. The oldest of us had already run off, and the rest of us just figured we were doomed. But! As we were trying to figure out what to do, our sister - the runaway - came running back, saying "FOLLOW" ! So we did, five tiny children trekking through the wilderness, keeping each other alive as we went. And before long, our sister had led us to... a small abandoned camp! There was a berry farm in need of tending, a few other plots started, some tools scattered about, a forge, a bit of iron...
And with a resolve born of shared desperation, this band of children cast aside by two mothers set about the business of rebuilding the camp. The first frantic scramble to feed ourselves soon gave way to a whirlwind of progress. We worked together as a team, everyone rapidly finding something vital to do and keeping each other up-to-date. We were born to do this. We were two separate lineages, but all one family, each of us working side-by-side with our "no relations". Because we were related. We shared the same heritage of surviving the hapless twin mothers, working hard, and building a legacy.
I don't know who started the camp... but I know that we were the ones to make it thrive. I have been born back into that camp four times today, and while it has had its ups and downs (and may not survive the nightly die-off) there have been a multitude of children. Twelve generations so far as of this writing. So if you've been playing today, there's a decent chance you've been there as well. You'll recognize it by the two distinct family lines working together in the one town, neither of them with last names.
Here are the family trees:
http://lineage.onehouronelife.com/serve … id=2513451
http://lineage.onehouronelife.com/serve … id=2513453
If the town truly takes off, I'd ask anyone who has the opportunity to please erect a sign naming the town "Gemini", in honor of our late mothers. They couldn't give us the start to life that all children deserve, but at least they brought us together.
I was Eve Dick's first daughter and birthed the rest of her line.
Mama Eve was not in a good camping spot when she started having kids. We struggled for a bit, but then the bell rang, close! After a bit of discussion, we decided to set off for the bell. We did pretty well travelling together and mostly keeping each other alive. But before we got to the bell... we found another city! Pretty well-developed but abandoned and in need of repair. There was an entrance gate on the south side of town across the road, with the town name on the sign. "Taluna" or something like that, I can't recall exactly now.
After we had been in Taluna for a while, one of my daughters decided to set off once again to find the bell. I told her to go in peace and to carry our family name to the new lands, and the rest of the family stayed where we were.
Sounds like she made it and did well for herself.
1. If you are Eve, and you live until old age, you will respawn near your death spot the next time you are Eve. This was added a few years ago to make the game 100% playable if only one player is online. You can continue your village as a hermit forever, and progress up the tech tree. (And people who wanted to play this way were successfully doing so on the empty high-number servers.)
I have heard this 'rule' in a mangled form: that your 'saved camp' location becomes a potential spawn point for any later Eve, not necessarily for your next Eve.
Anyway... if this was done just to support the case where there is one player online, then it's moot now. For one thing, there's never only one player online these days, and probably won't be until at least your final update. For another, if someone wants to play single-player mode they can run their own server; it's trivial to do now that Awbz has a Windows build, to say nothing of linon's public practice server. Both of those provide ways for people to continually respawn as Eve in the same place.
So if you never intended for most people to ever revisit their Eve camps, then you could probably just remove this feature.
That said, I've had this happen to me once, and it was a pleasant surprise when I recognized my earlier Eve camp. It took me a bit to realize where I was, because it had changed somewhat since I had built it and died. It was very nice to revisit it, and to see what had happened to it, and to bring it back to life by giving birth to a new family there. I wouldn't want it to happen often, and I certainly am not interested in constantly chaining back to keep working on the same town the way that you're saying some people are doing. I'd like this "feature" to continue to exist - not to support solo play, which isn't needed any more, and not to stay in the same town for life after life after life... but just as an occasional gift for the sake of nostalgia.
2. The new /DIE baby suicide system allows you to cycle through all family lines on a server until you are Eve again. Thus, you can play as Eve whenever you want.
I certainly hope you'll retain this. I like playing as Eve more than playing in the developed towns, especially at night when the population is falling and it's just you and one or two other people sitting there with nothing to do in a gigantic town that has everything fully built and fully stocked.
But the net result affects everyone, because the same villages are kept alive even after they die, removing the challenge of reaching higher tech or longer-term projects (like the bell tower).
I don't think there's much of a challenge, really. There are a handful of experts that can produce bell towers in their sleep. They're just about able to make cars now, any time, anywhere, as long as an iron mine exists. And whether or not a settlement survives once it reaches maturity (i.e. compost and pies) is basically out of everyone's hands - it's determined almost entirely by whether or not the server population is falling and the lineages on that server thus being starved of children. If children keep coming, even the worst towns will live; when the child pipeline is shut off, even the best towns die.
I think the big towns with the top-tier tech are continuing to exist because they have bells and you tightened the Eve spawn spiral so people are spawning closer to them and are making the journeys to repopulate them from scratch. I think that means it's working as intended.
Those are obviously turtle doves.
i cant finish an engine in a life
This is the intention behind this game.
Ah! I'd read the post but not really paid attention to it. But yes, the code doesn't lie.
Based on your registration email, IF you get pushed down to one of the last two servers in the chain (i.e. if the upstream servers are full when you connect) THEN you will ALWAYS connect to the first of those last two servers or the last of those last two servers.
Of course, that post was from a different time, trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist any more, and not even really solving it (since as he noted, you can always manually choose which server to connect to). So if the load balancing algorithm were being tinkered with anyway so as to not intentionally starve specific servers of births, then the stickiness part of it could be changed as well (and might as well be).
data data data
I'd add another con could be that servers with populations under ~20 are more likely to give replayers lineage bans from all current lines, causing a few extra eve spawns overall.
Though I'm not sure what connection magic forces replayers to stay on their original server.
Is there such a thing? I'd been assuming that each "get reborn" button click triggers a new connection that goes through the reflector and is redirected as per the algorithm.
I mean, it wouldn't be that hard for Jason to have implemented "sticky" sessions, but I wouldn't have expected it.
If they feel strongly enough, which I do here, this leads to shooting someone.
Well, now there's your problem right there. That's a pretty stupid thing to feel that strongly about. Don't be so gosh-darn trigger-happy.
@ crazy eddie, you call everyone immoral and evil.
Not true! I call some people stupid.
Mostly though I call people helpful and friendly and polite, because most people are, thankfully.
However i think its a horrible idea to get people that shouldn't be cursed to sacrifice themselves like a reverse lottery just because of a few bad apples.
Any system will have both false positives and false negatives, i.e. some people who get cursed but shouldn't have been, and some people who should get cursed but don't. And while you can make adjustments, anything that reduces false positives will increase false negatives and vice versa.
What I'm saying is that I'd be okay with making cursing a little easier and a little more common. Not much, but some. That will reduce false negatives (so fewer people who deserve curses will escape being cursed) but therefore it will also necessarily increase false positives (so a few more people will get cursed that didn't deserve it).
Kind of horrifying to think that you need to essentially waste food (produce it suboptimally) in order to keep the town from getting buried in raw meat, but yeah, I see your point.
An odd side effect of being very, very wealthy.
It's a good problem to have.
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Off topic, I know, but anyway... It's weird that clothing and baskets and wooden carts decay but raw meat and grains don't. It might be nice for them to decay after, say, an hour, and add objects like a granary or storehouse or smoker so that you could stockpile them if you really wanted to (preferably in a somewhat compact manner).
Reading some old posts, I get the impression that griefing used to be a lot worse than it is now. Implementing Donkey Town for cursed players apparently made a big difference.
Honestly, it barely registers for me. Now and then there's some murder, and sometimes things are annoyingly difficult because a tool has gone missing, but mostly my game experiences have been overwhelmingly positive.
I wouldn't object to doubling the curse tokens, even if it means a few additional people get cursed who don't really deserve it, even if sometimes one of them was me. I don't expect to get cursed often (I don't think I've ever had anyone curse me at all, actually) and if I got sent to Donkey Town through a misunderstanding I'd shrug my shoulders and ride it out.
I'm not sure your ideas would add much to the game.
I'm not sure the wheat and mutton biomes are preventable. Converting them to pies is constrained by the plate supply. But even if plates were infinitely available, the best you will do is convert 15 tiles (three wheat twelve mutton, loose) into one packed box. That's a big improvement but ultimately there's an imbalance - if the population isn't consuming four pies for every compost produced, the excess has to build up somewhere.
What with compost being used to make baskets, rope, saplings, trees, stew, burritos, etc. and what with having plenty to eat besides pies, there's gonna be an excess.
To get people to consume pies in proportion to compost usage you may have to destroy the berry field. Which seems appealing, but that leads to a famine among the children, and now you've lost a generation and killed the lineage.
Because while Jk Howling was off getting a new hoe, someone else watered the dry planted carrot rows without sticking around to keep them from seeding.
and then i stabbed those 2 asshats but i had to quit as more and more people made useless drama
This is the funniest thing I've seen you say with a straight face.
Greep, you're an idiot and a power-tripper.
Some of what he wrote there is predicated upon old presumptions, such as "all the players on a server are going to be crammed together into a small area" and "there will be lots of towns close to each other". In that case, having more players on a server is good, because it gives you more people to interact with.
Those were the days of towns that lasted forever, constantly repopulated with multiple Eves spawning nearby.
Nowadays, with the spiral spawn location chain, lineages are mostly isolated from each other. The number of players on your server is irrelevant. What matters is the number of players in your lineage, because that's who you will interact with, and the number of new connections being directed to your server, because that determines whether your lineage will be growing or shrinking.
I intended to be hostile and I wasn't trying to convince you. So, thanks!
If there were a single server that were large enough to support all the players, there would still be nocturnal infertility and the same number of lineages would still die out every night.
The only difference from the current situation is that currently, if you are on a downstream server you are guaranteed to have your lineage die due to server sterilization and if you are on Server 1 you are (almost) guaranteed to not face any downward population pressure from falling birthrates. If everyone were on the same server, every lineage would face the same chance of dying out. That chance would be very high, and it would be guaranteed that a certain number of them will die, but every lineage would have a chance to compete against the others in a devil-take-the-hindmost race.
Carrot seeds are clutter and I will shank your ass over that.
Pick enough for the next crop, keep it out of the way, and then FUCKING STOP.
(* I won't really shank your ass over that, that was hyperbole for rhetorical effect, I don't kill people in game over trivial shit like you do)
we should also spread it out, like smaller but multiple berry farms and multiple sheep pens, ovens, etc
Two berry farms means that one of them will go untended. I have seen this numerous times.
Also, it's a waste of labor. One or two people can easily keep a very large berry farm tended, even a highly-used one. Two berry farms needs two or four people, because you can't split one person's attention between two different locations.
I have seen a very successful use of a second berry farm, once: a small one right next to the sheep pen. No one used it besides the compost-makers, who also tended it. The crowd ate from (and tended) the big one elsewhere. It was perfect.
by the time I made it to the bell town, I pass 5 or 6 big dead towns. no one in them at all. one died due to no sheep and no compost, but the others well I have no idea. Everything was there, lots of pies tools and berries and compost. it just looked like a zombie town or the griffer won somehow?
When people start logging off and going to bed, the game population falls, and sometimes one or two of the servers are deactivated. When that happens, first all new births stop, and then all the towns die, no matter how well they were doing at the time.
Later, the server gets reactivated, and all those dead towns are still there waiting for people to discover them.
Maybe that's what happened here.
btw, I just realized the answer to the minor mystery of why you so often see an Eve and her first child spawn simultaneously - i.e. the moment your screen goes from black to visible you see that you are Eve with a child already there, or a child with an Eve who hasn't moved from her starting tile.
Here's why that happens:
If global population is increasing, almost all the new connections will be sent to the two most-downstream servers. The upstream servers will be kept at their soft cap, and the last two servers will split their incoming connections 50/50 (using coin flips, not alternating). So if two players click "Get reborn" at nearly the same time, and if all the upstream servers are at their cap (i.e. nobody has died there in the last minute or so), then the two incoming players will be assigned to the same downstream server about half of the time.
So then what happens?
Sometimes, there are plenty of eligible mothers on that server, and the two players will be born as children into already-existing lineages (different ones, most likely). But often there will be no eligible mothers. When that happens, the first connecting player will be spawned as an Eve. AND, when the second player connects a few seconds later, there is still no eligible mother... except the newly-spawned Eve, because Eves spawn without a cooldown timer! They only get a cooldown timer after their first child is born! So the second player by necessity spawns as the new Eve's child.
Since it takes a few seconds from the time you connect to the server until the time your client has finished loading the map, by the time you see your surroundings the game has already allocated both the Eve and the child and so you see them both at the same time - as long as the two players clicked "Get reborn" within a few seconds of each other.
Mystery solved.
I second much of what xlcame wrote.
Most objects have natural places that they should be. You can reasonably expect to find them there, and you should plan to return them there if you need to use them elsewhere for a short time.
Most activities require a collection of equipment and materials that are specific to and (mostly) unique to that activity. This naturally leads to having different places where different activities take place, so that all the equipment and materials needed for that activity are close at hand. New players might not have any idea where the bow saw is, but experienced players should expect there to be a carpentry area, and should make efforts to move butt logs, ropes, bow drills, adzes, froes, mallets, and bow saws to that area and to keep them there afterwards and to move everything else away from that area so that there is uncluttered workspace available for carpentry projects.
Besides being found where they are used, you can also expect to find equipment and materials where they are created. No hoe at the farm? Go check the smithy. No rope at the carpentry area? Go check the milkweed farm. No bucket at the farm, or cistern, or well? Go check the carpentry area. Not there either? MAKE ONE, or let someone else know it's needed and ask them to make one (say "please", please!).
There is a degree of spontaneous organization taking place, and that's good. It allows for dynamic reorganization in the face of changing circumstances. A famous principle from campus planning is to plant grass everywhere, then see where the grass gets trodden down by people walking to and from various critical locations, then make sidewalks where the grass was trodden down. The paths arise naturally from human activity in ways that you cannot easily predict, and then once the natural and efficient paths have been identified you improve them.
The same thing happens time and time again in OHOL. There's no single optimal city design. There are a lot of valuable guidelines, but every situation is different and may require ignoring some of the guidelines. But you can see where activity is naturally taking place, and then take steps to make that activity more efficient by "formalizing" it, i.e. moving the needed tools and supplies there and moving everything else away.
Putting down wood floors and making walls is a good way to help with this, but often the people who start those projects make it sized for the current needs which ends up being undersized for the future needs.
A nursery is a great idea, and usually develops after the basic practice has already gotten started in small scale during early settlement. Someone happens to be near the middle, on a warm spot, with a kid, and doing some task that doesn't require a lot of travel. Other people have kids and ask if she can feed them too. Eventually that location becomes the informal nursery, and then eventually either it becomes "formalized" or someone builds a better place specifically for that function but in a less-cluttered spot.