a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
You are not logged in.
We want property to exist in OHOL. We want people to own stuff, privately or collectively. We want property to emerge from the game's rules, not just force everyone to pretend.
We expect property to exist in OHOL. We're surprised that it doesn't. Because it exists in the real world, and we don't know what the difference is.
Property is a social technology, and using it is not free for the society. It's easy to imagine situations where stealing is good for the society, as long as we ignore that it undermines ownership.
A classic example is a starving person stealing a loaf of bread from the baker. The thief (and the society, see welfare) values living for another day more than the baker values one of the hundred loafs he made that day.
So there must be a reason why choosing to uphold property is a positive-sum action that benefits the society as a whole. For some reason it's not just a zero-sum action that prevents redistribution.
I think property makes it easy to find stuff.
When you need a tool in OHOL, you can spend a minute searching for it. Either you'll find it, or you'll make one yourself because the town needs one.
But you can't do that IRL. Even if there was a huge warehouse with one tool of each kind, you'd never find the one you need by looking at them one by one.
Realistically, instead of physically walking around and looking at each individual item, you'd ask someone who knows where to find the thing. Amazon, a supermarket employee, or the shop owner.
But how do they know?
Suppose the shop owner saw the item a week ago in the shop's storage room. How do they know it's still there?
Yeah, because they own the item!
Because no one but them is allowed to do anything to it. And someone breaking the law and stealing the item would be extraordinary.
They might not even remember where it is. They might have to consult their notes. But they'll be sure that the notes are not outdated.
They don't just know that they have the item somewhere. They know exactly where to find it. Because taking the item from the shelf and hiding it in the corner is also not allowed.
Corollary: to make property and ownership necessary, Jason needs to make the game more complicated. That is, we need more content :^)
You've assumed, or would have to assume for your argument to work, that everything in an arbitrary necroed thread would be irrelevant.
Nope
The spawn pattern was designed with the assumption that Eves will start new villages more or less near their spawn. This assumption is false because families have to find each other. The goal of spreading out villages in a sensible way is not being reached.
I still think there's a fundamental problem: the conflict between parenting and civilization building. They're different, and everyone prefers civilization building.
Repopulating towns with Eves is a cludge. I wish we had exactly one family per town. We don't have enough players for that though: any town would sooner or later die out due to low player population. So spawning adults is still necessary once everyone is dead.
Being able to find at least something good about the thing is not a good argument. It's like defending your actions by arguing that what you're doing is not literally illegal.
There is only one serious threat: hunger. (Also griefers, but they're super random and not even an official part of the game.)
Hunger is basically a time limit. The town has a few hours to upgrade the well. It's really rare that the threat of running out of food in the next hour is both real and avoidable.
From the perspective of making the game more fun, I wish there were more immediate threats. Natural disasters, actually dangerous animals, actively harmful pollution.
Notes are only useful when paired with old people that can read them aloud. Young players are both the only ones who don't have the information and the only ones who can't get information by reading notes.
It would make notes last longer though: a note on the wall does not waste valuable space.
Tables are useful for storing a few things even when you're not feasting
This should be useful!
Mount and Blade also had a terrific genre of multiplayer mods with persistence. Persistent Kingdom was the first; Persistent Frontier was my favorite. They were also very close to OHOL and SS13: sandbox and simulation with complicated crafting, survival in the free-for-all sense, and enough people and mechanics for temporary bands and clans to form.
Make a good tile inside a bad biome, walk there over the bad tiles while holding an item, click another bad tile while walking over a bad tile?
The idea is to change direction while walking over a bad tile.
Content is trivial, getting the mechanics right is the challenge. I think sandbox pvp mmos are by far the most difficult to design because of how complex all the permutations of play are. OHOL kind of cheats the challenge by making wipes a regular thing and by moving people around and sidestepping the ownership complexities, imagine how much more complex things are when people expect to have some mechanic to hold on to a piece of the world without blocking others from being able to play.
Is content really trivial? OHOL has a custom engine that is often quite limiting, and SS13 is made on top of a MUD engine that was made specifically for this kind of game. Both isolate game logic from networking, both require the game art to be really easy to make compared to other games.
Personally I'm perfectly fine with regular resets in one form or another. It's nice to have some persistence, but it can be very restricted.
One of the great things about SS13 is that they have no idea what they're doing in terms of game design. They're brute-forcing the problem by throwing cool stuff at the game and seeing if it works.
I hope we'll eventually see games like SS13 and OHOL spawn a whole new genre.
I think the main blocker right now is that making such a game is pretty hard. They're multiplayer, but at the same time they need tons of content. So you have to isolate the game logic from the other hard parts like networking.
Karma won't help for the same reasons it couldn't help before, of course. Humans are creative. The karma system will always be one week behind.
The initial idea was not to prevent people from breaking the rules. The idea was to make sure everyone is always vigilant and knows that there are no rules. So that when something does happen, it looks like enemy action, and not like pulling a gun in a chess match.
Are dotted paths or needles easier to build than chains of waystones?
How would antagonists be relevant to civilization building or parenting in game?
Surely griefers existing in this very game is a good enough demonstration that every IRL civilization has to deal with people that do not play by the rules?
A griefer in SS13 would be the Engineer to releases the tesla to destroy the station five minutes into the round or the doctor who intentionally places medical equipment inside his surgery patients for fun.
We must have been playing on different servers because releasing the singulo was totally something a traitor would do, and even non-traitor surgeons would routinely FORGET stuff inside their patients :D
Yeah, the question is how much time does it take for a piece of clothing to get lost by means other than decay.
10 hours would be very optimistic, I think. So at most you need twice as many pieces of rabbit clothing.
But it is important to recognize that antagonists are NOT griefers. In fact, the majority of Spacestation 13 servers are very strict on actual griefing and you can get job-banned or worse if the admins catch you intentionally being a jerk to other players, regardless of role. Like every multiplayer game, some players aren't happy playing within the rules of the game. And antagonists do have their own set of rules that need to be followed, even if it allows for more hostile action compared with a regular player. It is not just "legalized" griefing.
Yeah, true. Point is, defending against antags is similar to defending against griefers, but you know that you have to do it all the time, that it's not something rare that can be ignored.
It's extremely ironic that the lack of private property is both the reason people like backpacks and the reason OP couldn't protect the furs from being turned into backpacks
I'm hoping that the fact that you couldn't understand who these things are used to grief means that you are not a griefer, and not that you actually are a lousy griefer that I helped get better
Please do not personally attack people just because you disagree
stacking ANYTHING in a place with lots of free space.
There's no such thing as lots of free space in OHOL
I still think griefing should be legalized. There's a whole genre of games like Werewolf or Secret Hitler where some players are secretly working against the rest.
Right now griefers are a random event. Dealing with griefers takes preparation and is super boring and frustrating.
If every 20th player was told by the game to be a griefer and given some minor powers, the whole meta would have to adapt to that. Dealing with griefers would be explicitly a part of the game.
New item: a fire with a stake. Burning a witch prevents new witches from being born for 30 years, but burning a regular character just kills them.
Facebook is also just a social network that doesn't do anything. Somehow it's worth almost 100 billion.
The christian church in the US is also just roleplay, according to the rest of the world. 30+ billion.
Harvard, another 30+ billion. Also completely worthless without its reputation and current staff.
Social technology is a thing.
But it is true that at least most of my predictions failed:
1. People will actually have a single hierarchy in most villages after 3 generations
2. People will ask leaders for jobs
3. People will report griefers to leaders
4. Dealing with griefers who aren't leaders will be easier
5. Super-leaders will know more about the state of the village than other people
6. Super-leaders will help people coordinate
7. Super-leaders won't have any time for roleplay
We do have examples where leadership has been useful. Clearly it has some effect. But it's also used for roleplay, and the resulting structures do not survive for long.
Happy New Year too :0
You suggested marking every member of a family with a star, so I was instantly reminded of the members of a certain lineage that were marked with six-pointed stars. It would be totally in line with other flamebait mechanics.
sorry, we cannot also do the fifth thought crime until we get proper gas chambers