a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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I don't think it was a bad idea since rails also came with roads and right after cows, which was a good update.
Oh ya, roads and cows were ok. Cows were meh, but roads were definitely nice. Item stacking was probably all-around best. Rails are complete waste, but at least they didn't come with enhanced griefing capability, unlike butter knives, bloody notes/bloody note arrows (I still have no idea what non-griefing purpose he had in mind for those), paper (wasting curses), and now dogs. If he can't implement a complete feature, he should just save it for when he can. Not put it out half-baked. Much less half-baked, right before vacation, with bugs that allow uber-griefing.
Ya, implementing such a useless system before his vacation was pretty bad planning on Jason's part. But now that he's back he's not even doing anything to improve them. Apparently Jason's never played minecraft because it's a prime example of why useful railcarts are extremely difficult to implement well in this sort of game. The only way they're going to become useful is when we get a tier 2 mine, which outputs large lumps of iron/stone/whatever, that the player can only carry extremely slowly - like boulders, but slower. They won't fit in carts. This makes minecarts then required to continue to have iron, and move into more steel intensive technology. Similarly slow to move constructs and tools like drill presses and punches might help a bit, if you need to move them in town. But high tier mine extraction is the main thing.
Dogs are probably going to be useless at best - another griefer tool at worst.
Nailed it!
I would have hope that we were going to get some usefulness next update, but minecarts have been useless for weeks now, sooooo...
Agree with op. The last couple upates have been disappointing. Useless minecarts, all but useless paper. Dogs are probably going to be useless at best - another griefer tool at worst. Makes me wonder if Jason is at a loss as to how to advance the tech tree.
I just think thematically who wants to build elaborate temples to asshats?
Yes, thematically quite true. I was also wanting to propose the opposite - reliquaries - which would increase your chance of respawning in town, but that'd just cause huge fights most likely. Ultimately it seems like pettiness means we can't have nice things.
My problem with daisies and water is, it's just more farming. The game really has enough farming already, and enough pressure on water resources. It'd be nice if there were some other jobs, and more uses for marginal resources like limestone and gold, imo.
As to jason's proposal btw, long overdue. I didn't realize till recently you couldn't curse anyone above 10 points, which is ludicrous. Piling curses onto griefers should have always been possible.
the ossuary wont work
while most griefers are in towns, i seen plenty in eve camps and on gen 3-6 when you dont have tools or pen but people already destroy the progressthe other problem is with bones
once someone dead, you can just take any bone and put inside it, even the eves bones
someone will put all the bones there just because he can
or if its small someone will remove the bones to put someone else there
or a kid will put your bones there cause once you hurt his feelings
As far as eve camps, that's just the nature of the mechanic. It's for more advanced towns. Until then you've just got curses. To me it's part of the tradeoff. Banning someone from a region for a long period is pretty powerful. I mean we're talking banning that player's account form the region. It shouldn't be easy. I think variety of effects, durations, and availability makes for interesting diversity.
I was envisioning the ossuary as holding only 1 person's bones. Basically like an urn or chest. Not an entire crypt. There's no penalty just for putting bones in it. You have to add the 'special sauce' or whatever. So a lot of work to do it for a lot of people. Have your kids bury your bones if you don't want them put in an ossuary. But yes, you can switch out the bones. Ideally ossuarys would be a hard to make/maintain, maybe limited quantity item, so the town might decide they want to keep out a newer griefer. They risk letting the old one back in that way, and you have to renew the sauce. It doesn't carry over to new bones. Switching can be a calculated risk, or an ignorant act. That's life. But, in order to make it more difficult, it can be made a two-person act to open an ossuary. One person uses a long shaft to pry open the lid, the other person has 1 second to get it the rest of the way off. After one second the lid goes back on. Possibly using a second tool like an adze, to make it harder for one person to do. This reduces the ease of griefers emptying ossuaries. They can still smooth-talk people into helping them. Again, more interesting than pie chases, to me. You can use the same thing for moving the ossuary itself. And it should slow you like a boulder, to make griefing it harder.
All issues are solvable. You just have to approach it from the angle of trying to make it work, rather than trying to discount it.
As for people having pride in having ossuaries everywhere, so what? If they're all active then that person can have that pride while they're eveing or griefing small camps on the margins of society. It's not like they don't already take pride in their acts, and it's not like they'll all have the same name on them. Nobody other than them will know. But ya it can be other methods. Cursed plants or whatever. It's mainly the idea 'ban from region with investment of time and material' I thought ossuaries would tie nicely in with rare resources, and would be another cool thing to have in buildings. It really saddens me that the game doesn't really encourage buildings at all right now.
I get the notion of not trying to eliminate griefers. Humans are the most dangerous and exciting prey after all, the game would probably be pretty boring without human challenge. But I don't get a lot of the rationalizations I see.
Curses make up for the fact you're can't reincarnate irl? And what do the weapon being glued to your hand, and the slowdown make up for? Those are entirely artificial mechanics. They're there to give players a chance against murderers - who otherwise could kill ten people huddled around a fire in seconds - pure and simple.
Not going to address specific grief vectors because there's others? Yes, yes everyone knows problems get better - certainly don't get worse - when you ignore them. There's some pretty simple solutions to a lot of the single-issue problems, and regardless if the griefers can do other things, you're helping the regular players because they have fewer vectors to have to monitor. You reduce their stress. The idea of having a few 'ancient' oaks and other useful trees here and there is very good. It solves that grief vector and doesn't cause any other problems that cacti don't already cause. It's not like it's an entire tech tree or something. 1 art asset. Way better for the game than bloody notes and useless railroads.
But ok, Jason doesn't want to solve the problems for us. That's good, a laudible idea, and fitting with the game. But give us more tools to solve the problem ourselves. Weave the tools into the game better. You'll get way more "interesting" mileage than you will from a Benny-Hill-esque pie chase.
I've proposed this elsewhere, but I'll do it again here: give players the ability to lock a specific griefer out of their town's vicinity. But it requires preparations, and requires vigilance and tradition. You can make an ossuary (rare materials - limestone or gold). You can put a player's bones in it. You sprinkle something on it. 'consecrating' it or whatever. Now that specific player cannot spawn within X000 tiles of that ossuary. But you have to regenerate the power every so often. Maybe every 100 years or whatever - sprinkle it again with the special sauce. This is different from cursing in that the target isn't affected in a visual way. So they can be born elsewhere and stealth grief, so long as they did not also get cursed. It's a specific solution for a specific town. Make it hard, and reward the town by letting them keep *that 1 griefer* out as long as they can maintain the replenishment of the ossuary. If they fail for too long, the bones turn to dust and the griefer can return.
What you've created here is another job, more use for resources (lets face it, gold's uses are lame), and a path for lore and legend to be passed down. Is this not more interesting than a pie chase? More interesting than more stabbing? It's a different kind of punishment from a curse, and it helps to nerf the ability for griefers to keep coming back to target that one town. It doesn't keep them from playing any other part of the game, or even mark them. That's a separate function that curses perform. Also ossurarys should be something only obtainable up the tech tree. Imagine a building full of the ossuraries of the damned! Imagine stories of corrupt Deacon's who inter the bones of the innocent! Can he convince following generations to maintain the curse on the poor innocents? (who btw, rather than being black-speeched and having to suffer through that everywhere they go for awhile simply have to play other towns for awhile) It's not Jason solving the problem, it's giving people another tool that they have to master to help address (not eradicate) the problem. They can use it well, or use it poorly, no different from a knife. If a griefer gets ossuaried in too many cities, they may end up only spawning on the margins of society.
Might also be interesting if cursed peoples' murdered corpses had black blood. And this black blood can be used on an ossuary to fuel it for an extra-long time (1000 years?). Taking the blood makes the bones not able to be placed in an ossuary though. You can't extra-damn a cursed person with their own blood. That may get into a weird scenario of people intentionally being cursed so their favorite town can use their blood. But I'm not really sure that'd be worth it just for a few extra hours. There's a lot of griefers out there after all.
Just, think outside the box. Curses is not the only/best idea out there. Curses is a across-the-board short-term visible-to-everyone thing, ossuary would be location-specific maybe-long-term no-visible consequences thing. Different tools. A 100% increase in available tools. Which should help.
flint+steel = flint & steel. Which you can use on tinder directly, and has many uses. Basically obviates fire bow, straight shaft, and leaf when making fire.
Also the leather from this post: https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewt … 624#p28624
Then uses for that leather:
- backpack that lasts much longer
- leather pants make you immune to snake bites
- leather jacket + wolf or boar attack = shredded leather jacket, rather than being injured.
- leather horse blinders - makes horses not wander all over if you're not riding them (no need to tie to fence)
- leather+tongs+planks = improved blacksmith bellows - makes forge fire last longer
- knife + leather = 3 piles of leather straps, which are functionally equivalent to rope, except cannot be used for lasso
Suggested complex process: take raw hide, place in crock full of quicklime&water. Wait a while. Remove limed hide. use knife to scrape hair off - result scraped hide. Place in crock of water to wash off lime. Wait awhile. Remove washed hide. Fill crock with pine needles and water. Wait awhile - result crock of tannin water. Place hide inside crock of tannin water. Wait awhile - result tanned hide. Stretch tanned hide on a wall of any kind. Wait awhile for it to dry. Result leather. That's a pretty good approximation of the rl process, and I think would take a pretty long time to complete. Also gives an actual use for pine needles. Also lime is a limited resource.
Shortened process might be use quicklime on hide to get limed hide, place in crock full of tannin water, wait, stretch, wait = leather.
Omit quicklime to make renewable. Or just add limestone mines.
*sigh* look- just some general advice to life- no one on this earth needs help over-thinking things.
Lol, that's the exact opposite of my professional experience. Overthinking things is basically what I'm hired to do. Regardless, the ideas I presented are simple enough in the context of this game. If a given player can't remember or doesn't know the process, then they're probably not who you want being monarch or priest anyway.
Perhaps if a locked door is not used for a certain irl number of hours it becomes an 'aged' door? And at that point an axe can be used to destroy it. Surely after a number of lifetimes pass and the door has not been used, it could be assumed the key is lost?
As for everything else- I like your thoughts- but is there anyway you could maybe re-think them to be more newb-friendly and easier to implement?
Well, the complexity was kind of part of it, but it's easy to simplify things. I tend to present the most complex version I have, let the devs simplify if they want. The idea was the curse system is 0 cost, and doable from eve day 1, but has disadvantages including newbs not knowing they need to type the entire name included numerals. Also it has no concrete consequences. I was intending monarchs and priests to be different in that they would be a single-point source of authority - so avoiding the newb problem (unless the person themselves are a newb of course) - and that could dispense real consequences, but the infrastructure cost being very high. Complication is kind of part and parcel of this game. Frankly the game needs more goals to work towards aside from bells, imo. As for 'healer' role, I wasn't actually thinking of the priest having that role specifically. They could adopt that role as well of course, but I think the current mode where all you need to be a healer is pads and thread, with apron as a helpful bonus, is quite good.
As for specific realigions, ya, you'd definitely want to avoid specific symbolism - crosses, crescents, stars, etc. The game already has racists, no need to introduce additional friction points. But some things, just the terminology is potentially loaded - altar, baptism, perhaps certain accoutrements? It'd be useful to get opinions from players of other religions than christianity, in that regard. But certain simple things - candelabras, urns, silk tapestries/robes, should be generic enough that nobody would object.
@Mad_Villager - The percent of family votes, could work, but what if your family is fractured? Someone decided to leave the town and start their own elsewhere? It could be impossible to gain that percentage of the lineage. And what of towns with more than one lineage? A family in decline could have a king with a small subject pool, relative to the town population. That does make the monarch ripe for murder and replacement by the other family, which is a good story the first time, but would probably do more to encourage murder.
Throne claiming could require a minimum number of subjects pledge first - Otherwise griefers could claim the throne and prevent anyone else from being monarch. Or, if you have competing monarchs, simply the one with more subjects can override the claim of the other. But again, more conflict possibility.
I do think a minimum subjects to be a monarch at all is good, to try and keep greifers from becoming monarch with just a couple subjects. I feel like 5 or so might be a good minimum. Less than six people, are you really a city even? Also provides another reason to keep male children - more subjects to keep the monarch powered.
You could also possibly 'register' citizens to the throne. Either at birth, or of their own volition as adult. So then you have a list associated with the throne, that the monarch must have a certain percentage of (minimum X). That deals with diaspora and dual lineages both. Though it could encourage some gamey registration schemes I suppose.
As far as gold being rare, that's just a balance issue. Increase gold spawns if necessary. Or add silver as a resource, if one wants to not have accoutrements competing with bells and thrones for gold. But personally, I think it's good to make the players choose how to spend limited resources. Do they want a bell for the random chance they might gain a citizen or two? or do they want a monarch that might actually protect the town?
I think it'd be good if further anti-griefing methods should support other aspects of the game as well, and be similar to the curse system, in that they require collective participation from the community. This supports the community nature of the game. I like how the curse system is available to anyone anytime - speech limits aside. An eve can curse just as easily as 50th generation city member. The effect follows the target in every life. But what if there were other options with varying costs/requirements/effects?
BANISHMENT
So right now kings and queens are just an rp thing. What if they were more? The townspeople swear allegiance to a monarch, and once the monarch has X subjects, they gain the power of banishment. The monarch is the sole figure required to bestow a banishment. So this becomes powerful in that you don't have to coral a ton of people and get them all to fully type out a name, etc. It bypasses many of the problems with newbs not knowing how to curse properly. But there are also material costs. You must have a throne, and you must have a crown. The throne must be in an enclosed building. The monarch claims a throne while wearing the crown. This changes the name of the throne to "The Throne of monarchsname" rather than "an empty throne". After claiming the throne people can declare "monarchname is my liege". Once the monarch has enough subjects, they gain the power of banishment. Maybe just once in their life. Maybe once per X subjects. Or whatever. The effect of banishment might be that the subject is forced to drop any weapons, and cannot pick up any items at all within X tiles of the throne (except maybe harvesting wild gooseberries and onions, so they can leave perhaps). The banishment lasts for life of target, regardless of what happens to monarch.
This creates a dynamic where a monarch actually means something. The people are bestowing protective power on someone who (hopefully) can use it well. A pretender monarch will not get the support of enough subjects to do anything. The power is powerful because it is an executive power, not a diffuse one. But it is also costly in that it requires some advanced infrastructure. This is a mechanic of advanced towns. The throne is of course gold, so another use for gold. And I am a huge fan of anything that encourages enclosed buildings. You could even have accoutrements for the throne room, that count as additional fractions of a subject, perhaps at a matched ratio. A bearskin rug counts as .2. A silk tapestry .5. Etc. For every one subject you have, you can gain a bonus subject if you have enough accoutrements. So you can't get power solely from accoutrements, but you they do enhance your power.
EXORCISM/EXCOMMUNICATION
Along the lines of the monarch, exorcism is performed by priests, or whatever. I'm from a christian background so my example will refer to that kind of stuff because that's what I'm familiar with, but the system could be whatever. Shamanistic, egyptian, whatever. So ya, similar to monarch, you have a priest. This priest distributes blessings of some sort on the flock. Holy water, or wafers, special food, whatever. Maybe baptism of the baby in it's first year counts double. This is only required once in the life of each citizen. With a minimum number of blessed flock, the priest gains power, but only as long as that minimum flock number are alive. So they need to keep up with births to keep their power. Their power is EXORCISM. It could also be EXCOMMUNICATION, or both. The fundmental power is to prevent the griefer from being reborn in that town. So this doesn't help with the greifer you have, but it helps prevent them from showing up again in your town (at least for a time). The radius might depend on the power level of the priest, or it might be a flat 1000 tiles or something. No impossible for the griefer to overcome, but pretty hard. The priest can excommunicate while the griefer is alive. This requires their (golden) holy sceptre. Upon a successful strike, the griefer drops their weapon and is staggered. They can recover from this if not killed by someone else. it also breaks the priest's sceptre. Which can be reforged, but this prevents them from klonking the guy again if he recovers. Once they griefer has been struck by the sceptre (and presuming the priest has enough power) they cannot be reborn there anymore, eve or otherwise.
If the greifer dies without being Excommunicated, their bones can be EXCORCISED. Exorcising requires a ritual maybe with sacrifice (animal or material?) and some infrastructure. An alter perhaps, and of course reciting the target's name. The bones are placed on the alter, the rites performed, and the griefer is, just as with excommunication, no longer able to be reborn there. This is, similar to the monarch, an act executed solely by the priest, but again, with the participation of the community. They are effectively giving their trust to the priest that he will execute his role with honor.
Now, you could enhance this mechanic somewhat by requiring a refreshing of the EXwhatever. The griefer's bones must be placed in an urn or other costly vessel, and their time of forbiddance can be extended by future priests performing another sacrifice or rite. This requires ongoing effort by (and existence of) the priesthood, but can extend the EXwhatever indefinitely. The priests powers and tools - the alter, baptismal font, urns, etc. All must be in an enclosed building, with appropriate accoutrements to make it a church. This is potentially a huge gold sink. If each griefer requires an urn, you potentially have very large churches.
ANTI-ANTI-GRIEFER-GRIEFING
Obviously these buildings and accoutrements would be targets for greifers. So thrones, urns, etc *can* be moved, but only very slowly, like a stone. It'll be a very suspicious act if you're donig this an are not the monarch/priest themselves, or in their presence. None of them can be thrown in trash pits. As for the walls, griefing the walls or other structure does not immediately negate all they contain. It does prevent the throne from accepting new monarchs, and the alter from accepting new priests, baptismal font from working, urns from having their EXwhatever refreshed, etc.
Also obviously, the monarch and priest are potent targets. But, at the same time, if they are male or older women they are very replaceable. So the griefer must choose whether to go directly for fertile females and risk the focused wrath of these officials of the city, or despatch them first, then go for the women. The griefer's life is more complicated now.
SUMMARY
So, sorry for the wall of text, but I think that furhter anti-griefing measures could be fun, interesting, encourage more resource use (especially gold), encourage enclosed buildings, and create actual structure for roles such as monarch and priest. I think it would be a great enhancement to the tech progression, and human community, of the game.