One Hour One Life Forums

I starved to death several times yesterday.  I can't remember the last time that happened.  Got abandoned as a baby more than once, too, which is something that had previously become pretty rare.  But there was so much chaos, and so many people eating all the food and so few people who actually knew how to replace it.  Also so many newbie babies spawning in needing help and taking time away from things like food production.  I played several lives, and the only time I lived to sixty was when I was blessedly male and free of that particular interruption.  I spent that life making stew and sauerkraut, and repeatedly announcing to the general population that there was food right here in these pots and they should come and eat it. Even then, I think a lot of them starved.  I did teach a newbie who was wandering around cluelessly picking up and putting down my squash how to make the stew, at least, so I at least feel like I did something for a new player, other than repeatedly saying, "Welcome to the game!  Sorry, things are nuts right now because of all the new players.  It's not usually like this, I promise."

It basically feels exactly like the last time we had an inrush of Steam players, only perhaps even more frantic, as there are more difficulties and limitations now.  (I genuinely have no idea how anyone managed to cooperate enough to make rubber in all that mess.) But I'm sure it'll die down.  It did last time.  And hopefully a fair number of them will settle in and stay!

But in the meantime, RIP my excellent genetic score. Ah, well, easy come, easy go.  I think mine was unfairly high, anyway, because I randomly happened to be near the top when Jason made it harder to change.

I think what it's not designed to support is large populations of clueless beginners.

Sorry for not replying sooner, Alec.  I had to get to sleep.

I was Daisy Love.

So, you think I was born in a spot that had accidentally been culled of animals?  For what it's worth, I went quite some distance around the town in most directions on my sheep hunt and saw absolutely nothing, so it was a pretty big area.  Although I don't think I went very far east, which is maybe the most likely direction to have actually found something in.  (Based on this post, I think Gomez was in the same family but separated early on, and found towns with no problem.  I'm guessing they were towns with animals.)

Hope this gets fixed soon.  I gotta say, that was just about the saddest life, most depressing life I've ever lived. It was such a promising town, too!

Maybe they could have, I dunno, a necklace or something.  You could call it the "family jewels."

Yes, and you have to stop, hover, look, and read, which can be an issue when you're in the middle of something, and is something I often forget to do. Oh, if I had a nickel for every time I wanted to talk to someone I'd just been working with again and realized I'd never gotten their name.

But it's particularly egregious when it comes to family members, who you'd think you really ought to instantly pick out in a crowd.  True story: a few days ago my daughter was shot with an arrow.  If I'd realized it was her sooner, I might have been able to save her, but I spent entirely too many precious seconds thinking it was some random stranger who'd been shot in a conflict I didn't care about before I realized it was her.  Seeing your daughter shot in front of you really ought to be something you understand immediately!

Ah, that explains a lot. I was wondering why the town I was in last night was so eerily underpopulated.

Rubber-making can be a little annoying to do, but oh so satisfying when you put those sweet rubber wheels on all the carts.  I've had a couple of lives I've mostly devoted to that, and it always leaves me feeling like I've really accomplished something.

Well, OK, now I feel slightly bad for getting you stabbed again.

I think you have it exactly right, by the way.  Griefing is a form of bullying.  I mean, not the worst form or anything, for sure, but that's still what it is.  It's messing with people who haven't done anything to you and spoiling their chill and their fun just because you can.  Which is why some of us have no tolerance for it.  I was bullied enough when I was your age.  Never willingly putting up with that crap again, y'know?  I don't want to let people make me feel like I felt when I was 13 and messed up and miserable and jerks wouldn't leave me alone, or to watch anybody doing it to someone else.  Not even in a stupid game.

And I think DestinyCall had it exactly right on the other thread with "go play somethin else for a while."  When a game gets that boring, or that frustrating, or brings out the worst in you like that, man, for your own well-being and sanity -- even before thinking about anyone else's -- it's good to take a break.  There are other things in the world to do, things that will actually make you happy.  When you're feeling like you can find interesting things to do in the game again and like you can have fun with it again without doing stuff that makes you feel scummy afterward, it'll still be there. (I took one myself a while back when I started feeling that way, and it really helped.)

Anyway, it sounds like you've come to a mature conclusion, and one that reflects a level of self-awareness too many people never achieve, so good on you!  And I hope whatever's rough in your life, it gets better for ya.

That URL doesn't seem to be working.  I'm getting a 404 error on it.

I myself am kind of torn on this issue, because I'm not super thrilled about enforcing gendered names -- I generally dislike the idea of forcing gendered anything -- but, on the other hand, I do get genuinely miffed when I try to give my son a name that turns out to be taken, and going to the next one down the list slaps an "a" on the end and turns what I tried to name him into the feminine version.  (My apologies to Michaela and Gabriela and probably quite a few others I'm forgetting.)

Immersion breaking, and really freaking confusing. Please let us never go back to the days of having 27 people named Jesus in one town.

Why am I sometimes seeing the murder-mouth "!" show up in red and sometimes in white?  Is it white during the three-second grace period, or is something else going on there?  For a little while there, I was mildly confused about whether all the white "!"s around me indicated people who were homicidal or just expressing surprise.

I think "teach by doing" is absolutely the best way to go.  Whenever possible, I make the person I'm trying to teach go through every single step themselves.  In my experience, if you just have them watch you, they often tend to have trouble following, or to get distracted in the middle, or you turn around and they've wandered off to eat and missed critical steps.  I think they're also likely to remember it better if they go through all the actions themselves.  Plus, it's easier to type out comments and instructions to them when you're watching them do it instead of doing all the clicking around yourself.

I agree that "teach by telling" is the least useful, except maybe for simple one- or two-step things (and not always even then, for very new players).  I do sometimes have to resort to it, though.  I've occasionally run out of lifetime before I can finish teaching a task, for instance, and have to try to summarize the rest of it quickly and hope they're able to figure it out.

One thing I will mention about teaching is that there are details that often confuse newbies that people seldom remember to cover.   It's all well and good to show someone how to use a bowl on a dirt pile, but if you don't also show them how to use a basket on a compost pile, they're going to be stumped as soon as they run out of already-dumped piles of dirt.  And the intricacies of bowls and buckets and different kinds of wells and which thing you use to get water out of which other thing can create ridiculous amounts of confusion.  So, as much as possible, I try to address that stuff, too.

I do feel a little bad, right now, though, because I really like teaching new people and think it's important, but the few times I've gotten the "new player" message so far, it's been in situations where I'm afraid if I take too much time to talk or teach instead of working we're going to be in danger of starvation, and I've ended up neglecting the poor newbies much more than I'd like.

Worse than that, I think every town I've played in since the update has had a chronic shortage of firewood, sometimes with the fires actually going out because of it.  And I understand why.  Chopping more than one tree at a time is just punishing.  I'm certainly no longer doing what I used to do and taking a cart and an axe out for multiple trips to stockpile up two or three stacks of wood.

Jason has said the reasoning is that he initially made only hardwood trees hard to chop, but that left out the juniper and people were griefing juniper, so he had to make the juniper hard to chop, too, and for the sake of consistency he just made all the trees hungry work.   I admire his urge to make the game align with real-world botanical fact, but I think this is one case where it's probably better to fudge the realism in the interest of better game mechanics.  Making all the useful trees hard to chop and all the useless (or essentially useless, like pine) ones easy would be ideal.

This bears repeating, I think.  It's often impossible to know whether someone just sat an object down a moment while in the middle of using it, or if it's been lying there uselessly for generations.  I know some days it seems like whichever conclusion I draw, it turns out to be wrong.  If I figure someone is using it and leave it alone, it'll still be there half my life later when, dammit, I could have been making use of it.  If I pick it up to do something with it, someone will come along two seconds later and be annoyed.

More than once, I've found myself thinking it'd be nice to have any way to know how long something has been sitting where it is.  Maybe Jason needs to invent dust.