One Hour One Life Forums

I'd hate to attack a strawman, but it seems you're assuming that the side with the most "power" wins.

The fight between griefers and police is very asymmetric. Like in Werewolf, police would win easily if they knew in advance whether someone is or isn't a griefer. The knowledge propagates differently, but the general principle is the same.
(And if griefers are actually able to kill everyone, that's not griefing, that's conquest.)

Time is on the police's side. (Well, except that time spent policing is time not spent growing carrots.)
Hit points give the police time to coordinate. Too many hit points will let the griefer cause too much damage in other ways, but two hit points is obviously better than one.
Making tools deadly will mean that everyone is armed at all times, which means that the villagers can help the police out-damage the griefers.

Most changes would give "power" to everyone, not only the good guys, but saying that this means that making changes of this kind is pointless seems like a fallacy. If you give each player a bullet, but one player has a gun while the other has a slingshot, then you know the outcome in advance.

Note that I'm not advocating for any of these specific solutions.

Perhaps you could fix this problem and some of the spawn-related problems simultaneously, by making spawn rules more deterministic.

For example, you could spawn players with better karma in rich towns. Policemen will have to sacrifice their own karma to keep their towns safe.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs#Criticism

It's very well known, but it doesn't seem to be based on actual research. Well, other than the framework of humans having a number of separate needs, which is just that, a framework.

Civilizations with heavy coordination is an awesome goal, but when communicating even small amounts of information costs too much, any strategy heavy on coordination is automatically worse than the alternative dumb strategy of throwing man-hours at the problem until it goes away.

So there are two reasons humans didn't die off IRL due to random murders.

First, humans are altruistic. Because altruism is a useful thing for a group to have, and groups that were full of psychopaths did die off. AKA evolution. I suggest we add a second property, mood, in addition to hunger, and use it to encourage players to be selfless and to punish behaviors that are negative-sum. Just having hunger isn't enough for this because mood is supposed to represent a motivation that is specifically not self-preservation.

Second, murdering other people is almost always not worth it IRL, because we have institutions that exist to pursue and punish murderers. Murders don't happen often not because people try to murder each other and fail, but because people barely ever try in the first place. The game doesn't have to regulate murder itself, it only needs to give the players the ability to coordinate and to reliably prevent and punish murder in a way that makes trying not worth it.

To the second part:

The game doesn't have to, and can't, mirror the order in which non-physical technologies were invented in real life.

Everyone in the game already knows the idea of money. You don't need a special "coin" object to have money, carts with pies would work just fine if players were able to and had a reason to use money. If players could reliably own objects and had a reason to specialize, they'd already "invent" money no matter what Jason thinks about it.

Same for writing: players already know how to write. We could write with bones if we wanted to, we could even encode numbers with random items inside baskets inside carts. We have the knowledge, we just can't use it efficiently, not because there isn't a special object for it, but because there is no object that can be used to store information efficiently.

That said, adding a bank goes against the game's design because banks are not physical objects, they're institutions made of people.

Trading only makes sense if the profits are worth the time spent. Is there ever a reason to trade in the game? Can anyone provide a concrete example of a realistic and reasonably common situation where trading is better than making the thing yourself or taking it without trading?

Also, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barter

If there was a mechanic that punished overeating, you could just let children eat carrots, and everyone would eventually get used to careful timing and eating at exactly the right moment.
Farms are also relatively easy to keep warm since they're small.

perfect

Here's a suggestion:

This way accidentally overeating a little is fine, an adult can totally ignore it.
On the other hand, the children and the elderly will need to be more careful since their bellies are small in the first place.
And a neglectful parent can totally kill a baby by force feeding, so you can't just stuff its face with carrots and hope it'll be fine.
And berries are finally useful because they're small.