One Hour One Life Forums

Yup, cars. And roadkill?

Source: https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLifeD … its/master

Hm, I'm not sure, if I got the birth/spawn mechanics 100% right, but I think the problem can't easily be fixed with boosting the likelihood of getting girls.

1. Updates. Servers must be restarted and all players need to update and respawn. => All lineages are wiped out at least once per week. I doubt that Jason will have the time to come up with a fix for that. I'm no game dev, but have made other distributed software (incl. servers, clients, databases, ...) which must be updated without interrupting user experience. It's hard and probably impossible for a solo dev with a system that wasn't designed for this from the start.

2. Number of players going down. Whenever that happens higher numbered servers will get no new spawns and lineages die. Now this could be tweaked by increasing the likelihood of getting girls when server pop is low. But eventually there will be no player left to spawn and tweaking the odds does nothing. I suspect that the player number goes up and down a few times every day, not only once when people in the US go to sleep. At least one server will suffer from this each time it happens. As far as I know you are assigned to a server when you first spawn and then stay there for subsequent spawns. So if you've spawned on the highest numbered active server and the number of players goes down, you're screwed.

I wonder if these two things are the reason why so many people feel that a 50/50 chance is unfair.

Apart from these two scenarios, I personally think that it's fine to sometimes just be screwed by RNG, if you're the last girl.
The chance for getting four boys in a row is 50%*50%*50%*50%=6.25%. It's bad luck, but it's not a freak event. It can happen. (But if you ONLY get these four kids, I think it means that there are just no more players available to spawn.)
The challenge is to not be dependent on just one mother. If you are, your family is either in its early stages or something else has gone wrong (girls starved for no good reason, sneaky sneks, griefers, ...). And if you end up in a situation like this, these can be the most rewarding lives. Being the last girl that saves the lineage, celebrating the birth of HOPE IV, raising her and hoping that she will make it... Any tweaks of the 50/50 chance would endanger these experiences.

What do you folks think? Especially about point #2, the player number going down. Is that plausible? Bonus question: Do we have data on the number of players over time by server?

I'm with lionon. Satanic babies leading bears into town just feels like a cheesy exploit. Griefers should have to make an effort.

Splendid!

I agree. It's good that we have it. I think it's an interesting choice to weave it into the game like this.  But it's not perfect. I agree with
- Group curses for multiples (tarr)
- More severe punishment for repeat offenders (tarr)
- Curse as slash command with unlimited text length (lionon)

Streamers mob ruling innocent players to Donkeytown are the last thing this game needs. Do you have a documented example?

Exactly. In one of my recent lives my mum managed to wolf down two entire mutton pies while raising me. And this was a smallish village with a tiny pen and not much food. That is just painful to watch. I would love to see individual food statistics in the family tree. I'm sure we'd be amazed about the amounts of food that some players annihilate in a single lifetime.

I like the Yum mechanic and would appreciate another incentive for using it. In towns I do simple chains too, like pein explained. That would be more than enough for my idea to work.

At this point I don't see Jason doing a major rework of the food and temp mechanics. He seems focused on expanding content and balancing what is there, which seems more than reasonable to me given that the game is out on Steam and the player base has grown quite a bit. It's a one man operation after all. So while I find many of the suggestions out there, like pein's here, interesting, I'm afraid it's not realistic for them to be implemented. That's why I'd vote for a simpler mechanic that is more in line with what's already there.

Good point. Balancing between reducing fertility for berry munchers and not making it harder for Eves is crucial.

But I'm not sure it would be that bad for Eves. You would have reduced fertility in the very beginning, until you get your first Yum. I'd be fine with 50% less kids in the very beginning when I'm running around looking for a spot.

After that I'm not so sure. A single point of yum should be very easy to gain with wild food or the berry/bowl combo a bit later. And you could actively avoid it, if you don't want more kids, because maybe you already have two teenage daughters and food is still low. It might be too easy to forget though.