a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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So, here's the plan:
What purpose is the elder part of this serving, again? Is that to make it harder to grief, or to give more sense of 'family respect' for elders, or...?
This idea does a lot of what I was trying to address with my post #66 in the 'Architect's Hat' thread. Except that I address griefers simply by having the lock tell you who has keys to it (so that if necessary you can kill them and nullify the lock), rather than require a complicated 2-person construction team. I still think the whole 'elder stone' thing is complicating things way too much. It's hard enough to complete projects without having to cajole someone else to help you. I still ask: What if there are no elders atm? What if the only elders are incompetent? What if they're trying to finish their own project and have no time to help? What if they're happynova? Just fix locks. Locks can do all the things you want here, without the magical elder stone.
Giant biome themed tech trees would be a nightmare to create and balance (and the act of perfectly balancing them will almost certainly ensure the tech trees are substantially the same with different art). You have to get it perfect or one will be supreme, and then if you pop as eve in any biome but the perfect one, suicide. Same for specific location resources - if you don't find one of them in your eve life, may as well suicide. No point in starting a town without one of the unique resources. Might even be no point unless you find one near a biome edge, so that you have access to both biomes. Always place them in center of biomes? Now biome size dictates town spacing - too large and towns will never find each other, too small and you risk one town accessing more than one. Unless they are claimable, but then only if anyone else has actually found all the surrounding ones. Eves always pop by one of them? Now you have the spacing between these resources dictating the eve spiral (assuming it's even doable code-wise?). It's a pandora's box.
Unique resource nodes for non-critical resources is probably the best bet of the fixed-location strategies; then you're not dooming your town by not finding one, but it still *might* generate some trade, maybe. But all this is why I think allowing the towns to create the unique nodes themselves is better. It doesn't cause non-optimal suicide problems, at least no more than already exist.
Look, first off if you want locks and keys to not be a giant waste of resources, you need to make ingots able to have a small part split off, like how clay nozzles are made. Give a small chance of destroying the ingot if you like (1 in 20 at most) Then the 'steel chunk' can be used to make the locks and keys. Now make it so that once they are placed, the key becomes part of the person. Nobody wants to waste space carrying around a key. That person now opens that door/chest/whatever, simply by opening it in a normal fashion. The player who 'owns' a key to that item can also make a new key for that item, by using a chisel (or whatever) on the locked item. So now you can pass keys to those you want to. Now - and this is key - if all the owners of keys or a locked item are dead, the lock vanishes. So now the worst a griefer can do is one life worth of locking up a room. Oh, and btw, when you look at a locked door or item, it tells you who owns the key(s) (maybe echoes to the room, like reading paper). So by the way you can find out the specific griefer who has locked that item. And if they're still around, kill them, thus unlocking it. The griefer can of course take off into the wilderness never to be seen again. Good riddance, enjoy your life of solitude and your lock vanishes after you die anyway. Congratulations, now locks are convenient, not a waste of steel, and not a good griefing tool.
It's astounding to me that people don't see the potential benefits to control over resources that would come from private property.
It shouldn't be astounding, in the current game the benefits are marginal at best. And I've noticed a lot of people do have trouble imagining beyond what is. But are you going to increase the amount of iron on the map 10x so that everyone can have their own axe, their own hoe, etc? Not to mention build their own lock and key, each of which ridiculously cost an entire steel ingot currently? So the town now can choose between using that 10x iron to make 10x the same tools and gear, or they can use those tools and gear communally - as they do now - and make the iron last 10x longer? Which do you think makes more sense Jason? If you don't increase iron, how long do you think a town of mini-fortresses squabbling over the limited iron will last now? Creating competition between towns and family lines could be interesting. But doing this between individual members of a family is not going to help. It's going to work directly against the feeling of family you've expressed interest in elsewhere (and feeling of family will be much more beneficial to the game as a whole)
People DO see the benefits over controlling certain resources - namely that trade may become a thing. Maybe some interesting stories and conflict. There have been suggestions to facilitate this that don't involve locks and magic wall hats. Do you really think people want to be hamstrung by a contrived elder-only building mechanic? People already coordinate on building right now sometimes, because it's faster to have one person stake and another person place. But what happens when there's no elder in the town? What happens when the only elders are newbs or idiots? When they aren't interested in helping make walls? I think in this case your more hands-off approach (I just give you the tools, you decide the rules) is much better.
I don't think that small communities share freely with each other, now or historically, ever. I think that's a utopian myth.
What makes you so sure of this? You should watch the opening sequence of the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy. It showcases just such a society. A primitive family-group-village, that has no sense of ownership, because everything in their life is found in nature, effectively unlimited. Their lives are upended when a glass soda bottle is thrown from a plane flying overhead, and they find it. They find it very useful, but it is the only one that exists in their world. And it causes bad changes in their society. The latter part about the bottle is scripted in the movie of course, but my understanding is that the lack of ownership was in fact true until relatively recently, when they were rounded up onto 'reservations' and could no longer continue their traditional ways of life.
Despite being scripted, I think the premise of the movie could hold true for the game. There is no ownership right now because we depend on each other, and everything we have (aside from iron) is found in limitless quantity everywhere in the world. Introduce unique resources that only one family can control, and you will have ownership.
To resolve the issues with buildings you probably need something like:
I still think we just needs to forget about buildings and heat. You're trying to use one variable (temperature) to create demand for two things (clothing and buildings). So guess what, they're fighting each other. And right now clothing wins by a mile. And of course it does! You can take it with you! Jason keeps getting obsessed with the 'perfect' math to make the building sim right; it's never going to work. Something is always going to be out of balance. Buildings need their own reasons to exist that don't compete with clothes, and there are plenty of possibilities:
- food (and baskets) that is not in a building decays faster
- Only inside a building can you build shelves and clothes racks (clothes racks make clothese not decay as fast)
- machinery like newcomen devices will eventually rust solid if left outside
Perfectly good reasons to build a building, and they do not compete with clothing for heat bonus. Keep it simple.
Don't like this idea. Buildings are often the only thing that's left of a civilization. They SHOULD be hard to build. As Tarr said, give us REASONS to build them, and it will happen. I think chasing some ephemeral version of 'property rights' in a game where you play for an hour is a wild goose chase.
Unless they get a 1 hour ban no matter what, and the burial just ensures that they will come back "later" at some point.
Yes, I think there should be a delay. I'm with some of the other commenters, in that i think that part of the charm of the game is that you have to learn to let go of what are probably typical control-tendencies common to survival game players. You just have to accept that when you die, other people are going to live and do things in your absence. I think burial allowing rebirth in anything less than an hour would be a mistake. Everyone you knew in your previous life needs to be dead, so that it feels more like a new life, even if in the same town. But it really would probably be a good idea to add a rebirth button for lines in which you're eligible. Otherwise people will just suicide till they get there. Why exacerbate the suicide problem?
As for griefers, I like the idea of curses from within your family line excluding you from that line at a lower threshold than donkeytown. Even if some innocent gets caught up by accident or deception, it's not the same as being sent to donkeytown. They can still play the normal game with other normal people, just not in the town they were in. This family-line-curse-ban should be longer than donkeytown though, if not permanent. And frankly I still think - as I suggested months ago during the original curse discussions - that it would be good to provide a complicated means by which people can permanently keep someone out of their family line.
Also, graves are great and all, but crypts would be a really good thing. Stone wall + another pile of stone = crypt wall. + candles = consecrated crypt? Maybe only in an enclosed building though? And you can place like 4 or 9 or whatever bone piles in there. Again, help with clutter.
I'm not really a fan of the 'randomly limited tech' idea, but I wonder if tech-as-reward might be a thing? Maybe anyone who has lived to 60 in the longest family line of a given week, then in the next week if they are an eve, that new line has access to special tech of some kind (or even my afore-suggested extended life)? It could be just superficial luxury, or a minor bonus, or something more major. This would theoretically make any given life important to try to live to 60 (in case that family is the longest of the week), but also would make you want to try and make sure that family line lives the longest? I mean it wouldn't necessarily be a huge motivator, but when it comes to game rewards usually people don't need huge ones I think. You could even tier it, so that if a family with the 'special' power is also longest lived this week, they get another, higher tier reward next week? I also don't think it would really do too much in terms of improving immediate family dynamics. I mean you only have one hour, there's really just not a chance to form a 'real' connection in that time I think.
I'm also perplexed that there have been no extremely long or even eternal family lines. 288 is the record, on a less-populated server, and 11 months ago. The usual weekly record never tops 80. That's 19 hours, and is impressive, but.... it's clear to me that it's just not important enough to anyone. I envisioned people hopping on discord during desperate times and trying to recruit players to keep the flame burning through the night.
I'm pretty sure that basically comes down to irl sleep cycles. I would guess (and this is just a guess) that the majority of your active players are North American, with a smaller number of Europeans, and fewest asians. So when North American and Europe are asleep, the overall population declines too much, and towns start dying. Plus griefers and boredom, as mentioned before. My main suggestion there would be to improve the game more, to attract a larger player base. Maybe address some of the things that lots of people request repeatedly, like more storage variety, and a tiered iron access tech tree. The game just feels so Flintstone-like right now; a primitive base lifestyle with cartoonish cars and airplanes tacked on (though not dinsoaur-powered in this case).
Once you had a more solid playerbase, I think you could experiment more with some of those ideas. But I feel like making some of those changes wholesale now would be pretty risky. Except the leaderboard, that could be done now of course.
What if there were special rare resources that only spawned once every thousand tiles, like silkworms that allow you to make special silk clothing, or rare dyes for both clothing and buildings, or marble deposits that could be crafted into special tombstones and statues, or animals that can be hunted and crafted into special clothing/decorative items. Luxury items that you can show off.
This would sort of help, maybe. If they're just luxury goods it'll be kind of hit and miss. And conversely, if they're part of vital tech, you risk that at any given moment nobody would have access to one or more key resources, simply because nobody spawned near one or managed to survive long. widely scattered luxury goods is definitely easier to create and balance than a web of strategically important goods.
As for roads, turn the car into an asphalt paving machine. As long as it's has a tank of tar, it lays a road wherever it goes, so long as it is adjacent to an existing road tile (if that's even game-engine possible). It needs to have better economy than rails though. Way better.
that's what I think you should do Jason have biome dependent teck trees... and then make all biomes very big so that its harder for some one to have a multi biome settlement and would have to trade with the locals of the biome... or just concur it...
Won't work. You'll just be back to biome borders/corners being the ideal settling spot, due to access to different biomes. Just like before the temperature updates.
I'm hesitant to make the max life longer than 60 minutes. The game does what it says on the tin. ...I'm not sure the extra time really matters, or is a strong enough incentive.
I hear ya. I guess I thought since it seemed like you were totally throwing out the premise of random lives and not repeating, in favor of a new meta of intentionally allowing people to repeat lives to make them care more about their line, that maybe all things were on the table. It had previously seemed to me like the random lives in different places thing was pretty fundamental. I'm honestly very surprised you're open to institutionalizing repeating. Does the time matter that much if it's all about the stories? If the default life is one hour, I think the tin is still accurate enough.
I do think the extra time matters, both in a real and a psychological sense. How many times have we all watched Twisted just barely run out of time to complete his many projects? And even beyond that, just knowing that you have that bit of extra time is a reward that is concrete. And if extra-old people had extra-old faces, it would be kind of a merit badge I think.
The other boons things are interesting.... though I wonder how it would work in an elegant, flexible way. I mean, if you KNOW how to refine uranium, but you're in the wrong family, does it just not work if you try it? Does it not even show up in your crafting hints? How do you know you are not able to do it? Wouldn't it be frustrating?
Ya that's a very important question. I don't think the baked-in ability thing is a good idea. Again you're taking away choice from people. I mean obviously if your family has built a 1-off boon then later generations don't have a choice then either. But at some point someone did. In my mind, it was going to start with some kind of research, and you'd have to choose what you're researching at the start, and if the thing is already done then at the very start you'd get a sound or or other indicator that it's not available - maybe a text echo. So you've made your lab table, assembled your glassware, made your research journal of many pages, and you try to use the journal on the glassware, and maybe sort of like reading a paper, your player speaks ":looks like someone else has already done this". Ideally they would have checked the various monument home markers beforehand to make sure it wasn't already out there (if the home markers were part of it). It would definitely need though.
And I think you'd only want to have an array of 'special' resources specially made to be monopolized in the system. Because if you randomly forbid ones, you risk creating a broken trade or tech tree, would be my fear. But ya, the boons thing is trickier for sure.
Maybe, instead of every existing family on the server being marked as B, and locking you into only one family, instead we simply lock you out of the one nearby family to your family in an area.
This won't really change anything because you still haven't given people a reason to care about a specific family line. Who cares if you can't be born to Montague family? They had the same stuff. Every family will have generally the same stuff, unless you've also got some resource reshuffling behind your back. It'll be exactly the same as now - you'd like to be born back in your old town if possible, but if not oh well, the next town will be broadly similar.
Oh, and like some people have said, locking you into one family as long as it is alive is a TERRIBLE idea. You will absolutely end up with people griefing the place just because they don't like it and want to leave. The way to handle this sort of thing would be to Create a mutual ban when there is a murder between two families - they each are banned from the other's lineage. This prevents internal sabotage in case of war. But otherwise, if there's no murder, let them get along. You need to let people choose war or peace. If you try to treat people like tomcats you've poked with a stick and tossed in a cage together, your game will die.
Now, how to make people actually care about their family line? You need to make the families have actual structural game-mechanic differences. Again, I talked about this in the other thread. I proposed a couple ways. You can reward the player for successive births in the family line by extending their life. The more generations you've spent in the family, the longer your life is. This, in combination with presumably being in the same town, will be a strong incentive to actually care about that family line that you've spent the most time in. Because if you have to start over, you're back to the 60 years (or less?) life.
Second make civilization-style achievements/wonders, that are family specific. This one is harder to swallow in logical terms, but it opens up the doors to trade, conflict, and many more interesting stories. You need a broad array of these things, some bring boons to the family line (extend lives of everyone in the family by a year) some are unique resources (your family is the only one that can produce uranium, or centrifuges, or gunpowder, or whatever. Ideally you would have a lot of these, to allow every family to have one, but - and this is crucial - ONLY ONE. And then you make some tech require MORE THAN ONE of them. This way some tech would actually REQUIRE trade, because your family can only produce one of the items required. Well, trade or war. If you kill off the other family in the vicinity of the 'factory', then your family (or any family) can use it. Perhaps only until another family researches and builds it though. Then the free-for-all factory crumbles. So you see, what you create here is the OPTION for trade or war. You create explicitly monopolistic resources, and let people decide how to interact.
Now family boons (life extension, extra food pips) those could work the same (the antibiotics one makes a bottle of penicilin, which can be consumed to add a year of life) or different. Maybe only one boon of each type can exist, and strictly benefits the family that owns it, but one family can own multiples. This tends more toward war though, and would tend to make familys/towns try to accumulate them by finding the ones owned by other families, and destroying them, to make room for their own family to make them. The resource way is more neutral.
As to the problem of 'awareness', well, you need to allow for multiple 'home markers' at once (which would be nice anyway, just so one can have both a bell marker and their actual home). Each one of these wonders would have their own marker. Of course you wouldn't want to spam the player, so certain items would allow you to see the markers. Compass, map, whatever. It might also be interesting if people could 'give out' their location via radio. So if you say something like "My transmitter is at these coordinates", anyone listening on the receiving end gets a marker for your transmitter. Note - not actual coordinates are exchanged. That's just what you say into the radio, that causes the marker to appear on the other end. There's a variety of other ways to deal with this, that do not require villages to be cheek-by-jowl, and could possibly give more use to airplanes and cars.
Now, much like the life extension by living successive generations - you will care about your family/village if they have one or more of these monuments, because other families CANNOT have the same ones. The downside of the monument method is that it requires a lot of intricate balancing, vs simple life extension. But it could be done, and I think it's your best shot at getting actual legitimate trade. With a maybe a side of war.
It's not a new post from Jason someone necro'd the thread. Which is fine. But look at the date.
The "Why are there no Wars" thread? Says he posted it yesterday for me.
I think text/text background color are the simplest. But has the disadvantage of only working if the outsider is talking. And if they're hostile they would avoid that.
Now as for war, like Tarr said lack of awareness hinders the carrying out of war greatly. But beyond that, there's not much reason other than rp/personal vendettas. Nobody can really control any particular resource, and that's the main cause of war irl. In general terms everyone and every spot has access to the exact same set of resources. And the only truly important one is iron, because it's required for life, and it's limited. Yet all the iron mines will eventually run out. This is not analogous to the real life march of civilizations. This is analogous to the world of The Walking Dead, where everyone is just scavenging whatever they can get of essentially a finite set of resources.
One potential solution would be for the game needs to have resource nodes that can continually be exploited, and several of them. All required for certain aspects of the game. Then you might end up with trade, or war, if people can find each other. And that's a critical point. The radio would be very useful, because you could broadcast to the world that you have perpetual iron, but need copper. And the people with a perpetual copper mine could respond. But without being able to find each other, that's useless.
Now beyond this, if you REALLY want war, then I would say set up a Civilizations-style wonder system. Your town can build a great wonder with great benefits; but only one can exist in the world at a time. So now if someone else wants that wonder's benefits, they're either going to have to trade you for it, or fight you for it. Depending on how your deep tech tree goes, some resources could potentially even be accessed only through wonders, so if anyone else at all wants that resource, they have to go through you. But - similar to previous post - time might be another good motivator. Build a certain wonder in your town, and the life of all citizens born to that town get an extra year or whatever of life (what exactly 'born to that town' means I'm not sure - possibly born to one specific family?). Things like sanitation, anesthesia, penicillin, etc. Maybe general life-safety tech like a firehouse, or evac chopper, or ambulance. If they have to be limited to a tile it might sort of limit what makes sense, but you get the idea. These wonders might also act similar to bells etc, in terms of acting as a beacon. So they have benefits, but they have the downside of making you a target. You'd need to allow for multiple markers though. It's already bad enough having your home marker replaced with bells.
If it does come to war, the attackers can destroy your wonder, and replace it with their own. But they cannot just steal the wonder - that'd be too easy.
So ya, that's my proposal to make trade/war more viable.
I think there's two issues at play here: incentives for war/trade, and incentives to care about your lineage. I'll talk about the lineage first.
If you want people to care about their lineage, you need to actually incentivize them to care. There's just no real reason right now other than the pride of seeing your family survived X generations. And - not unlike real life - I think the best incentive is the dearest resource of all; time. What if every subsequent life you lived in a given family, your total next life was extended by some amount of years? Would that not make your particular family line important? The more times you can come back to that family, the longer a life you can live? Maybe up to 100 minutes? If you went up 5 years at a time, it would take 8 generations lived in the same line to extend your life to 100. And then it just goes at 100 from then on. I think that would potentially be a powerful incentive. And just to be clear, the added time needs to be in the middle of the life. Nobody wants to live an extra 40 minutes at 5 pips.
Of course, with such an incentive would come gamey-ness. First off, it would need to be stipulated that the lives are non-consecutive. None of Tarr's 'suicide at 40' tactic. You have to die, and be lineage-banned from that family, to make sure you're not suicide-chaining in the same family. Otherwise you don't get the generational life bonus. There may also need to be some sort of stipulation on variety of accounts or something, to prevent the 'closed circle of friends' gamey-ness. It may also be interesting to stipulate that you must live the life to 55 years of age at least, in order to qualify for the bonus in the next one. This makes your own life worth a bit more, in terms of avoiding being murdered.
It may also be useful to actually allow the player to choose to be born into a past lineage, if they qualify for the generational bonus. So if the ban time has passed, and the line is still alive, then the player gets an option to be reborn in that family. If you don't do that, then the incentive will be even stronger to just suicide through a bunch of lives till you hit your preferred family, which is really just annoying honestly. Down the road, extra-old players might have even more wizened faces or something, to distinguish them as extra-elder.
I think it would be a very interesting incentive - I don't think there's anything most people would love more than extra time.
I'm taking steps to correct it, including contacting those reviewers and telling them the truth. And really, I mean the truth.
No link to the 7-page forum discussion eh? Just your quick version of things, nothing else for them to judge based on? Ya, seems totally truthful and above-board. Are you afraid that if people have two sides to the story, they might actually form balanced opinion and decide that your story is not snow-white-pure? You should be.
er......I through they don't pay you the money......And I insult them with words and give a 1 star on taptap.
but if they do... then some of the problem is fixed....
This is why it's best to get the full story, rather than third-hand info. Anyone who read this entire topic would have seen this fact mentioned several times. This topic has been remarkable for the degree of candor displayed by both sides, in ways that don't really help them. Well, maybe Jason mostly. But the fact remains this info was here, one just has to look.
Jason, this legal blog claims that they can seek trademark for OHOL, although it would be tricky. Read the comments at the bottom:
That blog is spot-on, whoever wrote it definitely read the entire topic, unlike a lot of people.
As far as trademark, I'd guess a lot depends if the Chinese are registering it just in China's system, or internationally. I think Jason would have no trouble trademarking in the US because the record of him having original use is clear and overwhelming imo. But outside the US, it's going to be a fight probably. Especially in China. And not a cheap one I'm guessing. They say an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Jason may find that a free to $250 assertion of trademark may have been worth many thousands of dollars in litigation, if it would have dissuaded those actions in the first place.
The takedown requests don't mention the artwork is under public domain and the name One Hour One Life is not trademarked. I feel they don't accurately describe the situation. I'm not a lawyer, but can't they sue for damages if your takedown request is successful and then later proves false in court? I'd suggest treading carefully.
This. I think you should be more careful Jason, those requests seem dangerously reckless and misleading. And takedown requests granted would cause actual provable financial harm to DD. Which would be grounds for a lawsuit. You talk so much about high principles and 'fraud by omission' Jason, but those takedown requests seem a much better case of fraud by omission than activities by a 3rd party Chinese company in another language, in a market you had no intent of entering. Your actions are specifically targeting DD financially Jason. this is dangerous for you I think. You don't get to choose the timeline of the facts involved in a case. And ends do not justify means. Be careful, one of these levers may control a trapdoor under your own feet.
DD pays some amount of popular Chinese youtubers to mention (at some length, not just a sentence) in their videos that Jason is the original creator? Youtubers will get more views than some boring 'meet the team' video. They do this until such videos reach Xmillion views? Use correctly attributed videos to correct a bad one? This seems fair, and would not potentially damage DD's product. And I wouldn't think it would be terribly expensive, though I don't really know what that sort of social media costs. Also could have a quick turnaround time, potentially.
It's been suggested many a time that buildings could have non-temperature factors (storage, furniture, reduced decay of food and/or machinery). Jason seems reluctant to do this for some reason. He's cited 'hunger and temperature' as the two big things in the game. As if having just two big factors is good. Chutes and Ladders also has just two factors. That doesn't make it a good boardgame.
I keep wondering if there will eventually be more aggressive food decay. It would give a strong incentive for buildings if food left outside decayed very rapidly. Especially meat.
Actually it would cost 250 or so.
Actually it would cost him $0 to CLAIM the trademark (™). It would cost him money to REGISTER the trademark (®) . They are different things and I used the word "claim" for that reason. In a case like this where the mobile devs are reasonable people, claiming it should have been plenty.
My understanding is that VOG = Voice Of God. I guess the ability to speak to everyone on the server at once?
Jason didn't "fail" to establish copyright protection, he pro-actively chose to release the game in the public domain.
Copyright is not the same as trademark. This has been talked about several times in this topic. As has been pointed out, he could have easily claimed *no* copyright, but claimed trademark rights. This would have cost him $0. This entire situation would have been avoided, or at least greatly ameliorated. Trademark rights can be claimed post-infringement, but I would guess he gave up any hope of actually trademarking the art - in this specific case at least - when he allowed it to be used in the port with his knowledge and consent. He could still trademark the name of the game, but I don't think that will help unless he could also get it ruled that 'one hour life' is too close and not legal, AND get that enforced. In Asia. Good luck.
Edit: Button for explanatory screen in-game sounds reasonable though. As he says, the game is already bought at that point.