One Hour One Life Forums

Preambule

With the map rework the game inside the Rift feels a lot more solid. Multiple towns seem to prosper and while there might still be the occasional hunger cycle they no longer seem to be the norm. In my opinion game is much more enjoyable now and the Rift doesn't feel that oppressive anymore. I've seen quite a few people stating that they either don't mind the Rift anymore or that they actually enjoy it now.

A certain percentage of people will always dislike the Rift but my guess is that they now can live with it. Most complains seem to be regarding PvP and Griefing. Terms often used interchangeably (wrongly in my opinion).

Even the main topic on discord today seemed to be more focused on in-game drama (the great Eis-Slinker war), as opposed to the "Rift sucks, curse Jason" that had become normal lately.

Clans

We currently don't have an word for groups of families who lived long enough to understand each other. I'll be calling them "clans" for now.

The language updates and the recent change in the curse rules (you can now curse people from other families assuming you speak their language) means that clans might be maintained in a relatively stable manner. Griefers or inside-PvPers on any of the clan family can now be cursed and sent to donkey town. This effectively creates a soft enforcing of law and order inside the clan. Clan members will understand each other and will function normally as a big family.

The great Eis-Slinker war

Today have witnessed the emergence of a great war arc story. Legend says Eis striked first but it seems Slinkers built better fortified towns and are potentially winning at the moment of writing. Fighting is fierce but discord members talked about a single town where peace and prosperity reined between Eis and Slinkers.

Last I played my mom and other people from our town spent most of our iron on brand new war swords and went to raid. They never come back and I found out later while checking my family tree that they were all killed by Slinkers. No doubt in response to their failed raid, losing us manpower and crucial iron reserves while boosting our enemy's. (by recycling the swords)

I went to my neighbors asking to use their adze. Ours was missing, no doubt the result of a previous raid on our town. My neighbors had a small but very well fortified town. It was actually the first time I saw an airlock in OHOL. Pretty cool stuff.

Diplomacy

While the current war interactions and resulting stories are great, I felt a deep lack of options while dealing with my neighbors. They weren't aggressive and didn't kill me, even let me in to use the adze (I starved inside but I was very old already. Members of their family were also stuck inside which leads me to believe the gate owner was somewhere else taking a nap).

When dealing with strangers an individual can use /love and /happy. Or refrain from carrying any weapons. Or help out here and there. Chances are they will be tolerated, even adopted. This level of interaction might be enough in certain situations but they cannot replace actual diplomacy between towns.

I really feel the ability to do diplomacy is something vital for trading and meaningful war. What if a Eis town wanted a peace treaty with a Slinkers' neighbor? What if the war began because Slinkers had iron that Eis needed at the time? Could war been avoided by trade? What viable options do we have for diplomacy between strangers who can't understand each other?

Options

Currently the radio is one of two options for actual communication between strangers. However the radio feels more like an oddity than an actual tool. Creating takes way too much work and know-how. It's not portable and would requite both a transmitter and a receiver to work. I don't see it as a realistic option for diplomacy.

Written notes is also an alternative, but without a way to recycle paper it only leads to clutter and chances are there will be no empty paper laying around waiting for a foreign envoy to arrive.

I don't have a 100% good answer for this. I'll share a draft of an idea I had bellow as a normal post but this is probably a situation where many heads think better than one. There might a ton of possible options and I'm curious to see what ideas the community at large might have.

So, how would you solve the lack of diplomacy?

The current situation

The Rift right now is an absolute shitshow: dead bodies all around; settlements unable to sustain the player base and going through cycles of starvation over and over again.

Most of us want the Rift gone for good, me included, but one has to admit the idea has some merit. Well implemented it could result in some interesting lives and I actually look forward to living in a resource deprived world where we struggle to survive. A meta that would require us to recycle and be as sustainable as we possibly can, become part of the ecosystem instead of just consuming it. We are very far from such a rich game experience.

Jason current (misguided) focus

In an attempt to determine how long civilization inside should last Jason has been counting iron and oil inside the rift area. His logic seems to be X amount of Iron/Oil = Y amount of days. If that magic ratio is figured out, and a sufficient amount provided to the players, then gameplay-wise everything should be stable during the target time-frame. The situation will become increasingly difficult by the end but that's part of the greater game loop and to be expected. Everything solved, right?

Analysis of the situation

While resource such as iron or oil being depleted is indeed a major issue, they are actually having very little impact on the lives of average players. Chances are if you played inside the rift in the past week or so you never actually died due to lack of Iron or Oil. Anyone who played consistently will quickly witness the emergence of a very strong and obvious pattern.

This pattern isn't necessarily new and has some quite useful scapegoats. Ever blamed your village death on berry munchers? Why are the berries always languishing? why no one ever takes care of them? Why are so many people just hanging around doing nothing? It's very easy to blame random players.

While it is true that there will always be a percentage of players who will contribute nothing or very little, be it for being new to the game or just lazy roleplayers, they are not something new in the game. The game was fine before the Rift. Why would berry munchers suddenly ruin every village and cause multiple starvation cycles to occur? They aren't the cause at all. You can think of them as an environment hazard. They will always be there, but game mechanics are generous enough that it's easy enough to carry them.

So, what actually changed when the Rift appeared? Three things changed!
- Limited resources;
- Higher concentration of player;
- Less viable settlement locations

The actual problem

Last I played today our little settlement was constantly getting babies. We had no food and had so many baby bones laying around it looked like a meme. We were constantly being inundated with babies. If babies were being distributed evenly through the rift you can imagine this happening in every village, over and over again, hours upon hours.

Villages have a bootstrap cost (clay, adobe, milkweed for hatchet, bow drill) and an initial ongoing maintenance cost (natural soil, water from ponds, water from early wells, rabbits, wild food, milkweed for bow, arrows, rope, etc).

There are only so many people an early town can sustain. Villages can eventually grow to sustain many more people but it will take time and infrastructure. A town that sustains its population long enough will get better forges, better wells, better farms and better food production and all these will cause it's population capacity to increase. It can also use up some of it's resources to bootstrap new villages around it. Ever increasing the overall population capacity.

Spamming Eves inside the rift means that in theory all possible settlement locations will eventually get claimed in short order. Two hours of Eve Window should be more than enough for this. Different families or different branches of said families will develop those settlements, and then as resources dwindle trade or war might occur. People will adapt to lack of resources. Life will be more difficult in some areas, maybe even becoming impossible. Civilizations will implode.

However what is happening right now it's entirely different. We have too many people and too few settlement locations. Every single village will get overwhelmed. Most lives will be spent trying to get that extra berry and living that extra ingame-year. We will be forced born in some poor village to a hungry mom along side 10 other babies all begging for food. This would happen even if there were no griefers.

I reckon most players are fine with resource depletion or for long overreaching arcs. What players are not fine with is being thrust into a half baked hunger games ripoff without proper tools to succeed.

The now famous Hammer family was able to survive relatively well inside the Rift. They actually got to experience the game as it was envisioned by Jason (as far as I understand his vision). This however was only possible because most players were actually playing outside the Rift. In the 5 lives or so I played during the last Arc I was never born inside the Rift. The low amount of Hammers was probably ideal for their Rift settlements to sustain. The outside families essentially worked as a pressure safety release valve.

The solution

Depending on how long the Arc is to last (I'll assume more than a couple days), as we are right now, we should already have more than enough Oil but a shortage of Iron. This shortage could be easily solved by making it a bit more common and not that big of a deal.

However, the major issue is actually the lack of locations suitable for towns. While just making the map bigger might be easy and tempting, I don't actually think it would be a good thing. I believe that right now we already have a good balance of space inside the Rift to prosper, meet other families, trade or to wage war. Making the Rift much larger might turn the Rift more into an oddity than a driving force. I would even venture to say that if all major issues were solved one could even shrink the Rift a bit more.

So, how do we get more suitable settlement locations while keeping the same size? We can go at it in three ways:

1) We need a better and improved map generation algorithm. More concentration of green biome/swamp borders. (with guaranteed minimal availability of trees, soil, milkweed, wild food + ponds, clay, tule);
2) Remake green biomes and swamps. Possibly move clay and ponds to green biomes. This could turn every green biome into a potential settlement area (pending local available resources);
3) Change technology necessary to bootstrap town. We saw an attempt to incentivize this with the introduction of springs. Allowing water sources in multiple biomes could potentially allow more types of settlements. But as was stand right now no settlements can be created without soil, branches, milkweed, ponds and clay. Adding a spring on a mountain or savanna biome while keeping the resource requirements is not enough. Alternative ways of sustaining towns based on different resources could allow for a higher concentration of towns and therefore higher concentration of players.

While I'm not holding my breath on 3), I consider 1) or 2) to be of the utmost urgent necessity. I would go as far as ask Jason to put the Rift on hold while he work on any of these points.

The Rift can work and has potential but I don't believe the game is in a state that would allow us to properly experience it.

Final thoughts for Jason

Dear Jason,

While you might ridicule the idea of the game dying after it has been strong for so long, it is a real fear in the back of my mind. The game depends on casual players to sustain server population. "Veterans" will not play on an empty server. If the game isn't fun at all for casuals they will stop coming. Please don't confuse people stopping by to watch the aftermath of an accident with the accident itself being popular. People will eventually move on after they had their fill of misery.

Please remember that people play video games to relax and as a form of escapism, it is something we do on our free time. People don't play games because of "loyalty to the game". The game needs to be fun, at least at times, to keep people playing.

I completely understand your need to make the game even better. The "want" to reach that level of greatness of player experience that would be able retain tens of thousands of players. And I would definitely like to see it. Who wouldn't? The game as it is right now might need to change, possibly even drastically, and that's OK. But if the steps towards greatness aren't fun to play, players will begrudge and quit.

Could you possibly have Rift weeks and non Rift weeks? Or try out Rift from time to time and collect data on the experiment. And while you analyze and act on that data could you leave players to enjoy the already tried and tested rift-less gameplay we all enjoy? Rinse and repeat. The Rift could even become something players would look forward to. With time to plan, discuss ideas and provide feedback, but all while still being able to enjoy the game as a whole.

Please Jason.

Hopefully this didn't kill the game for good.