One Hour One Life Forums

Well said.

I think most people do get it, though. Most of the time the experience is, I believe, both rewarding and in keeping with Jason's intentions.

Excellent, thanks!

That's a good restatement of what I meant, yes. I think it's right, but I could easily be missing something.

Good point!

If someone gathered or made something with a purpose in mind, you should respect that. There are many projects that require a complex set of inputs and operations and are time-sensitive, and if someone takes one thing away you have to stop your project and replace it... and by the time you replace it, many of the other things you have gathered will have been taken, and your project simply fails.

The problem is that it's not always easy to know when someone has gathered specific things for a specific purpose rather than simply having gathered them to add to the general-use inventory.

The more experience you have, the better you will be able to recognize when someone might be using something even if they don't have their hands on it right this very minute.

In the meantime, it's very easy to ask, and asking is always the polite thing to do.

I haven't verified this in the code, but based on Jason's descriptions, I believe it works like this:

A player joins and is directed to a server (or connects to one manually). Once connected to a server, an eligible mother on that server is chosen at random and the player spawns as that mother's child. Eligible mothers are fertile females that aren't in birth cooldown and whose lineage the new player is not on lineage ban from. If there are no eligible mothers than the player spawns as an Eve and the spawn location is some combination of "spawning at an old Eve camp" and "spawning on the next spot on the spiral Eve spawn chain".

Each time a female gives birth they're put on a birth cooldown timer chosen randomly from 0 to 5 minutes. Children who /die don't trigger the cooldown (or, rather, they untrigger it when they /die, resetting it back to zero).

Living more than thirty minutes bans you from your current lineage for 90 minutes (clock time, not play time, I think). Murdering or being murdered does the same. Using /die does the same. Eves who die of old age are not lineage banned and so have a chance to respawn as their own descendant sooner than the 90 minute timer would otherwise allow.

If you're cursed then only mothers in Donkey Town are eligible. If you're not cursed then only mothers not in Donkey Town are eligible. If you are cursed and there are no eligible mothers in Donkey Town then you'll spawn as an Eve in Donkey Town.

--

If a server's player population count is holding steady, then Eves should be pretty rare. Say there's 100 players on a server. Half are women. Assume half of those women are of childbearing age. That's 25 fertile women on the server. Each can have one child every 2.5 minutes on average. That's ten children every minute. That's ten percent of the server population every minute, dying and being reborn. That implies an average lifespan of ten years. Lifespans can be pretty low, what with children starving, /die-ing, and being abandoned, but I think it's a safe bet that in most cases the average will be higher than ten years.

As long as that's the case, then the fertile population on a server should be large enough to give birth to all the players dying and being reborn on that server, which means no Eve spawns will be needed. Random fluctuation and lineage bans may cause an Eve spawn occasionally, plus people using /die in order to get banned from all lineages and deliberately spawn as an Eve.

If the death rate is lower and lifespans are longer, then mothers will have babies less often (and fewer of them during their life). If the death rate is higher and lifespans are shorter, then Eves will start spawning, and will continue to spawn until lifespans improve or there are enough Eves alive currently that the male/female ratio has skewed far enough to provide enough females to handle the death/rebirth load.

In the limit, consider the case where all mothers let all their children starve immediately when born. Deaths and rebirths will be happening much, much faster than the birth cooldown will allow, and Eves will be spawning in huge numbers. Eventually nearly everyone will be an Eve. There will be a small percentage of the population which keeps getting born as children, and then starving, and then being reborn to an Eve who just had her cooldown timer expire. Figure it takes thirty seconds to starve as an infant, and the average cooldown timer is 2.5 minutes, so there would be roughly one perma-baby for every five Eves.

---

All that is the case when a server population is stable (for example, if it's one of the servers being kept at its soft cap). If the population is growing (because the server just became active) then it's like adding additional births to the natural death/rebirth rate - once that total gets higher than one per 2.5 minutes per woman, then Eves start spawning and keep spawning until an equilibrium is reached.

And if the population is falling, then it takes an even higher death/rebirth rate (and accordingly shorter lifespan) in order to get any new Eve spawns.

... at least, I think that's how all this works. I could be mistaken. If I am, please point it out.

Regarding the OP - those are some decent guidelines to consider, but ultimately your thesis is undermined (correctly) by this:

The value of anything in the game is always dynamic. It always depends on the local circumstances. It's crucial to recall the economic concept of "marginal value", which simply means that the FIRST pie is much more valuable than the TWO-HUNDREDTH pie. There is value in having stockpiled inventory (above and beyond the inherent value of the items being stockpiled! the inventory itself is valuable!) but there is also a cost to keeping an inventory, and an opportunity cost for the labor and other resources invested in the inventory that could have been used for something more urgent (the second shovel rather than the seventh horse, for example).

For most of the early game, there is almost always a very small set of urgently-needed things, without which everything will soon fall apart. As experienced players we all know pretty well what those things are and at what point they are needed. So for much of the game no value calculations are needed - just an understanding of the technology tree and the critical dependencies and chokepoints.

And once you get past the early game, there's pretty much no constraints at all, so value calculations aren't important - everything is abundant, and you have the liberty to pursue anything you desire (as long as someone is keeping an eye on the fundamentals so that, for example, compost doesn't suddenly run out).

New players simply aren't capable of this. But almost every new player will become an experienced player and will start doing all of those things on their own.

... assuming they have an enjoyable initial experience and don't just quit the game because some asshole yelled at them and then stabbed them.

... after you stabbed him, I presume.

It's true, you're not a griefer, just an asshole.

NEWSFLASH: People who are new to the game don't know how to play it very well.

Oh, and lest I forget, that graph is awesome! Thanks for the data collection and processing, thundersen.

So what's needed is a concerted effort by a lot of players to die in the tutorial of old age with a home marker, as many as possible, so that random other Eves start spawning there, and one of them eventually founds a successful line.

That's a good point. When a new server is added, the upstream server gets its birthrate cut in half. This leads to a big population drop (because the death rate remains the same) until it reaches the new equilibrium, and that's going to kill a lot of lineages (although not as badly as the absolute sterility inflicted on a server being remove from the active pool). But again, that only happens when the game population thresholds are crossed to add a server.

It's definitely possible, it's just a matter of how much Jason wants to redo the algorithm. As it is now it's pretty straight-forward, but has these interesting side-effects. Maybe it would be worth his very limited, very valuable development time to write a new algorithm and change the side-effects.

Oh, heck, you're right! Server 1 receives half of the new births, OR enough to exactly replace its deaths, whichever is smaller! If there are several servers active, Server 1 may have only one-third the total population, and thus one-third the total deaths, and thus only get one-third the total births. But as total population declines, its share of the births increases and keeps the server's population stable at its cap. So it doesn't experience the birthrate decline that any other server that isn't at its cap does.

There's two "caps" on a server's population - a soft cap and a hard cap. At the soft cap, the reflector stops sending it new connections. At the hard cap (the "max"), the server stops accepting new connections. The soft cap is currently 50% of the hard cap. So as it stands now, a server should rarely be above 50% full; it can exceed the soft cap if people manually connect to it directly, but when that happens the reflector will stop sending it new (non-manual) connections.

Thanks for finding that detailed post! Very interesting.

No, the decline hits everyone evenly, regardless of the server you're on and regardless of the number of servers currently active. If total population (number of people playing) is declining at, say, 20% per hour (i.e. there are 500 players now but the number is falling at a rate of 100 per hour or 1.66 per minute) then every fertile woman is going to have (on average) 20% fewer births per hour than they do when the population is holding steady.

This only changes when one server drops below the 20-player threshold. At that point, the server downstream of it (which will have approximately the same number of players, i.e. roughly twenty) stops receiving new players and everyone on that server becomes infertile, while the first of those two servers doubles its population and thus spawns some additional lineages. After that, as the player count continues to fall the decline is once again spread evenly among all fertile women on all active servers, until the next server drops below the 20-player threshold.

Edit:

Actually, you're correct, in this respect: While all females and lineages have to face a birth slowdown, and they all face the same birth slowdown, and while that slowdown could cause some lineages (especially the smaller and more vulnerables ones) to die off regardless of which server they are on... In addition to that slowdown, there is also a devastation which will be visited upon the inhabitants of the highest-numbered servers. They are doomed to extinction, stricken by mandatory sterility which knows no escape. They may actually be doing an outstanding job of weathering the universal storm (the across-the-board decline in fertility rates); they may be among the more successful of lineages across the server farm. But even if so, it is of no use; even if they are thriving while others are failing, they shall at some point suddenly receive a great curse, and their line shall continue no more.

This does seem a little unfair.

Jason could alter the reflector algorithm so that a server continued to receive its same share of new connections until its population reached zero. He'd have to make the algorithm more complicated, because right now whether a server keeps getting new spawns depends not on its own population, but on the population of its upstream peer. That would probably be annoying for him to implement.

introducing the new meta