a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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How about you autoscream some insult on the person you're attacking so you know you picked the right target? Like literally you right click close to James Johnson and you get a speech bubble with "<randomized insult> JAMES JOHNSON". Just a silly idea.
I would love this haha xD
This is a silly suggestion by lychee (so you can ignore it), but I've always thought it would be cool for players had a greater incentive to build their own little private huts or tents or teepees.
It would reflect civilization better because the three essentials of survival are food, water, and shelter (shelter against the elements, such as frigid night temperatures); consequently, all humans have need to build/use some form of shelter through all of history. In this sense, I recognize and support Jason's desire for there to be buildings and houses in the game.
The major reasons why houses don't exist in OHOL is because (1) there's no weather or cold nights, (2) no need for sleep/privacy, and (3) no dangers like wild animals that might come when a person sleeps.
Consequently, we can either give up on individual tents/huts/homes entirely and settle for communal kitchens/nurseries/bakeries, or some artificial incentive needs to exist to promote private residences.
Here are a series of major suggestions that could promote private residences:
- A low-tech residence (e.g. a hut or lean-to shelter) needs to be very cheap, but restricted in its size
- Immediate family (e.g. mother, siblings, children) should have automatic access to a personal residence
- Allow the placement of special indoor objects that would be considered private property
- A residence could have a better temperature even in the absence of a fire
- A bed, for instance, could delay hunger or delay injuries
- A hearth, for instance, could allow for a longer-lasting fire
- S T O R A G E (haha xD)
- Fertility could increase in a private residence
- Allow the inheriting of a house to one's children -- to promote the continued upgrades to a house.
- Include a leaderboard on the website for the most lavish houses and potentially include pictures.
Some nerfs that could be done to favor private residences:
- Limit the maximum size of buildings based on the material type. IRL there are structural limitations.
- Early tech = cheap small huts
I'm written extensively on this topic in my mega suggestion thread, but to summarize the major points:
There needs to be more incentives for players to build buildings. Currently, they are typically built for cosmetic reasons. Most people consider the temperature benefit to be negligible (in comparison to the opportunity cost of being outside), doors are a hassle to click on, and there's a fear that we'll be blocked inside (it's currently recommended to have at least two doors to every building).
Here are some ways that buildings could be incentivized:
- Add food decay, which can be prevented if food is stored indoors
- Add wild animals that eat food that is left outdoors, which can be prevented if it is stored indoors
- Nerf outdoor fires so that indoor fires are the only way to get a perfect temperature
- Fire burns for longer indoors
- Add certain objects that can only be built inside buildings
These issues must be resolved before buildings become more widespread:
- Players should not be able to get locked/blocked inside by a malicious player
- Doors are a hassle (the clicking), so fixing automatic pathing and auto-door opening/closing would be highly appreciated. In many towns I've been in, people like to remove the doors entirely because they're too much of a trouble.
Suggestions regarding property:
- It would be nice if direct family (e.g. mother, sister, brother, children) have automatic access to property.
- A default inheritance scheme to property (e.g. oldest child > oldest sibling?)
- An easy way to mass-grant ownership/access, particularly by last name.
My only concern about the emote thing is that it's not exactly intuitive.
If you're a new player, it would be bizarre if the sword doesn't work when you try clicking the regular way.
The effect of this would be that only experienced players would know how to use swords... which may end up backfiring because generally speaking I think(?) newbies are disproportionately the victims of swords and veterans are more commonly the aggressors.
What about the griefer who steals your food and tools, but just runs around to avoid being killed? You have the exact same problem there, right? Tarr could run into your village, steal your cart, and then run back and steal another one.
Yup, it is absolutely easier to "steal" than "trade".
So far, I haven't seen too much stealing (it seems like most people raid for the fun of killing), but of the instances that I've heard of, in most situations people don't react to a potential thief until they're basically gone. For instance, right now it's perfectly normal for an outsider to go to a bakery and just eat the food there. Most people don't keep a close eye on what direction a cart is coming -- someone running with a cart of iron has historically only been people returning with from iron hauls -- stealing just isn't even that common yet.
And most of us are usually too engrossed on our current task.
And most people in a village aren't constantly armed.
So if you see a "thief" that's running away, by the time you've gone and picked up a bow, the "thief" is already long gone.
So it's not weapons that are the problem, or that they are too powerful. It's actually, strangely, that they aren't powerful enough in the face of someone who is dancing around.
Personally... I would hesitate before jumping to that conclusion... I don't think weapons are an effective way to handle "thieves" because most people in a village aren't armed.
I think the easiest solution with regards to thieves is to:
1. A player's walking speed relates to the amount that they're carrying. The more they carry, the slower they are (if only by a tiny amount it's hardly noticeable).
2. Implement a way to tackle/punch/restrain people with your bare hands.
I think (2) -- nonlethal subjugation method -- is important long-term in OHOL, because if you want a police force, you need a nonlethal method of subjugating people. Currently, in OHOL, "police" are basically walking executioners. There's no way to "arrest" people or incapacitate them nonlethally, so the only form of justice available is the execution-style kind.
It would be pretty dramatic/controversial if in real life, the police shot/killed every shoplifting kid or delinquent.
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I think that adding a slight slowdown after using swords could successfully patch the current issues with them.
EDIT: If you add a constant global slowdown to carrying swords, you still have to deal with the chasing problem because both parties will be equally slow. You need the slowdown after killing to allow the non-killer to catch up.
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I am also concerned with the usage of zoom mods like awbz or hetwu.
It's incredibly unfair for some players to use zoom mods during "combat" and other players to not use them and consequently have no visibility. The players who don't use zoom have no warning when an aggressor suddenly appears out of nowhere, and this effect contributes to the negative feeling of being "helpless" during a massacre.
Adding a sound effect like automatic panicked "screaming" (off-screen) whenever a nearby outsider has a sword drawn in their hands and is witnessed by a family member can help alert people that a hostile is nearby.
This whole business of running around and dodging four people who are trying to get you is obviously nonsense gameplay.
I don't have any immediate solutions, but thank you for recognizing this.
I spent 20 minutes of my last game running back and forth around a raider. Neither of us can stop moving or else you risk getting stabbed, and it gets really dull spending a third of your life chasing one hostile person around a village in circles. If both people know what they're doing, it's an endless stalemate and a game of tag when the pursuing party can never catch up (although the raider can easily stab anyone else in your village who's oblivious and standing still).
Regarding natural resources, I’m inclined to agree with Whatduhf.
The fundamental basis of trade is an uneven distribution of *something*. The *something* can be natural resources, manufactured goods, services, or even abstract entities like financial instruments that represent futures.
Adam Smith is noteworthy in part for his formulation of the “production function.”
Specifically, F = land + labor + capital.
The point of the production function (and Smith’s criticism of mercantilism) is that it’s useless to hoard an abundance of resources (which he terms “land”) without the labor and capital to process it. Therefore, according to him, labor (people) is the most critical part of an economy.
However, something critical to understand about Smith’s argument is that he takes “land” (natural resources) to be effectively infinite. Regardless if you are in England, France, China, or Indonesia, you can raise sheep or aquire iron — if not by catching wild sheep or mining ore, then at least by importing it. In a sophisticated modern society with established trade/transport infrastructure, you can obtain virtually unlimited resources (people weren’t that concerned with environmental sustainability in the 1700s — “cut as many trees as you want”) anywhere — and therefore he argues labor is most important.
However this sort of view of the world assumes that at the minimum your society is sophisticated enough to bring access of all goods anywhere (and that you won’t run out of resources), which is absolutely not true for early human cultures, since the distribution of resources on Earth are actually incredibly lopsided. In fact, these societies are characterized by long-distance trade of rare materials such as obsidian, malachite, and other materials.
Applying Adam Smith’s production function to OHOL also has two other major pitfalls.
The first is that in OHOL, the “labor” force is equivalent everywhere. The spawning algorithm is random, so every settlement has approximately the same number of veteran and newbie players. You can’t have a village that only knows how to make Diesel Engines and a different village that only knows how to make paper, because the player base is equivalent in all locations if you average across time.
I’ve seen some people suggest that maybe some races could be better at some tasks than other races — and as much as I dislike this kind of idea, these types of interventions are required to produce a difference in the “labor force” in village A and village B. Personally, I much prefer a Blueprints system where not all players start with knowledge of how to craft everything, and you have to be taught by your ancestors your Grandma’s secret pie recipe (or else attempt to research a prototype).
The second major issue is that there is very little value to Capital in OHOL. In the real world, capital (e.g. factories) are infrastructure that increase the efficiency that something is done. A car factory, for instance is able to produce a car in fewer man-hours than an artisan mechanic.
OHOL’s problem is that the crafting system is already instantaneous. A rope factory doesn’t make sense in OHOL because the process of making rope from 4 milkweed is near instantaneous. It’s hardly possible to reduce the crafting time any further, which puts into the question what is the point of having a factory?
Of course, you can always #magic and break conservation of matter and say that a Rope factory can produce 2 rope from 6 milkweed, but the real world doesn’t quite work in that way. Crafting is instantaneous in OHOL, so there’s little value to most capital infrastructure.
I like Wuatduhf’s point that actually production/crafting reduces the value of goods in most circumstances in OHOL (largely as a factor of instanrous crafting). A steel bar is more valuable than a hoe, because the potential associated with the steel bar is greater than the hoe, and the crafting effort/time is negligible.
Consequently, when you take F = land + labor + capital and set labor an capital as constants, the only variable that you have left to manipulate is land (natural resources). People are most vocal about natural resources because Earth itself has an uneven distribution of resources, and it’s the most intuitive/simple way to incentivize trade.
You could also produce trade by modulating labor or capital, but those questions are far more delicate and complicated to answer.
lychee wrote:So maybe it’s time to add a core system: Happiness.
Not sure about the materialism part, but a while back WomanWizard did mention having a food drain bonus for being around your close family, to simulate the mental health benefits for having close relationships. Perhaps killing could have an opposite stress effect.
I think those are all great ideas and I would be enthusiastic about any of them!
For me, my main point is that having a core system that’s not hardwired to starvation is fairly critical to incentivizing the higher levels of Maslow’s needs.
When we have a game that all we care about is food — we end up with mono-diets, an excessive focus on efficiency, and all those toys are ignored because they’re worthless in the context of the game. The role players aside, it’s easy to approach this game as if the avatar we control is an emotionless robot. Our characters don’t get stressed and they don’t *need* time to relax or decompress as real people do. Where is the music and cave art that has existed as part of human culture since the Neolithic era? Why isn’t this seen in OHOL?
Consider the fact that arts and entertainment make up 4% of the US GDP, whereas agriculture makes up 1% (real estate is top rank at 14%). Why would we spend so much money making and consuming entertainment when clearly it has nothing to do with the food that we eat?
If this is an aspect that Jason wants in OHOL, it might be necessary to consider some other systems other than food to reflect real human society’s hunger for entertainment and social interaction (and the corollary of mental illness and depression).
PROPOSAL 20: MATERIALISM MAKES YOU HAPPY
This suggestion is part of a series to help incentivize property, and help set the groundwork for why property could be a good thing.
Currently, in OHOL there is little to no incentive for property, as it provides no real benefits to an individual or a town. Consequently, most players are averse to taking personal ownership of anything (except clothing). However, this does not appear to emulate materialistic western society well.
To better simulate this, my suggestion is to emulate the concept that “materialism makes you happy”. Getting a new television or new phone or game generally makes people happy, although none of these things generally assist with the procurement of food (which is currently the only player incentive in OHOL).
So maybe it’s time to add a core system: Happiness.
Actually, a multitude of games have experimented with this core system in the past. In don’t starve, it is sanity. In dwarf fortress/rim world, characters can go mad if their needs are not met. These strategies are the most common solution to the fact that a low-tier system (e.g. hunger) on Maslow hierarchy of needs will never simulate complex human behavior. If all we care about is food and survival, we are nothing more than monkeys. We don’t need to care about entertainment or social capital.
A “happiness” meter would be the easiest way for a developer to incentivize players to do something that isn’t necessarily “efficient” for survival.
For instance, the more unique items you own in your personal dwelling, the happier you get. Eating luxurious foods like ice cream could make you happy. Giving or receiving gifts could make you happy.
Why should players care about happiness?
If their happiness goes to zero, they could go insane (clicks sometimes error/drop things/nonresponsive) or get depressed. Being depressed could drastically slow down a player’s movement speed. Being happy could accelerate a players movement speed or have pleiotropic effects on temperature or food. A lot of possibilities.
Adding third core system like this could be a critical answer that might provide answers for subjects that the player base has been looking for for a long time.
PROPOSAL 19: SQUIRRELS ARE ANNOYING
This suggestion is part of a series to help incentivize the construction of buildings, and help set the groundwork for why property could be a good thing.
In real life, nature is swimming with animals. If you went outside and put a piece of bread on the ground, chances are high that tomorrow it will be gone — because some animal ate it. Actually, growing up, my mom always struggled with her vegetable garden because deer would eat basically everything she’d plant (except onions). Our neighbor, however had a fence around their garden and that helped them a lot.
Idea: Small wild animals (bird, squirrels, things that are hard to catch) will eat food left outside. Store food indoors to prevent this effect.
Extending this to domestic crops is optional. It would give use to having “scarecrows”. Furthermore, the role of cats in village life was to catch and eat vermin that might otherwise snack on stored grains.
Lots of potential things to work with.
The game forces new players to do the tutorial at least once, right?
I’m thinking of using that data to track outcomes/statistics for new players.
Inb4 locked property fence around the spring site.......
Also is there a server reset log with reset times?
The eve spawning sites recycle immediately so when you die, it’s pretty likely the next one will spawn close to the same place.
Like Tarr said, you can try to get yourself area banned, or build a shallow well on the spawning site to kill it forever.
Hey everyone!
If I wanted to track tutorial spawns, any advice on what coordinate ranges/servers I should be looking at?
I actually wonder I it's more viable over a longer term for everyone to just wear straw hats, sheep/seal skin, reed skirts and wooden shoes ( I believe none of these decay)
If a family were to last 100 generations like the recent Bada family did, they would probably have gone through 15 cycles of rabbit furs for everyone, assuming at any give time 10-15 family members are resent , counting BP and full fur set sans seal coat. It's nearly 150 furs need to be caught every 8-9 generations plus 15 seal skins. So I guess it doesnt sound so bad? Or is it really?
Or we could have a town that sanctions a non decaying uniform as above and no one worries about making new clothes , almost ever, barring missing clothes due to people dying far away.
I find the biggest drop in food pip use is in the first few percentage of insulation anyway. I.e, I think being named is double worse than wearing just a loin cloth and boots but it's in turn not quite double worse compared to fully clothed
So the non decay set really already insulates quite well and is more practical over many generations
There's a few different school of thoughts -- one is that a majority of settlements aren't going to last 100 generations, so rather than counting your eggs before they hatch, maybe it's better to focus on keeping your chickens alive as best as possible.
I think this is the idea of why sealskins are usually made into coats -- the extra insulation is better in the short term, and given that most villages don't last 24 hours, staying alive right now is the bigger priority in many people's minds.
Of course, on the other hand, if you feel like your village is going to die and be abandoned, maybe it's better to make the non-perishables -- because it might be 100 years before another eve stumbles upon your abandoned village. Having some non-decayed clothing might be nice for them.
Some time ago I also suggested a Blueprints system for advanced technologies.
The rationale for Blueprints is that it's a little silly that a five-year-old can walk out the nursery and magically know how to build a Newcomen Atmosphere Engine from scratch. In real life, I don't know how to make a Diesel Engine (and I doubt most people here do) -- however, if I had an instruction manual (a "Blueprint") with a step-by-step guide on how to make one, I might have better luck at constructing a Diesel Engine.
BLUEPRINTS SYSTEM:
In a Blueprints system, certain advanced technologies will require a Blueprint to manufacture. Players are not born with the inherent ability to create complex items like Radios or Cars -- they would have to read a Blueprint once in their lifetime before they unlock the ability to craft an advanced technology.
There could be Newcomen Atmospheric Engine Blueprint, Diesel Engine Blueprint -- these would be physical items that are crafted from paper.
The only way to make a Blueprint for an item, is if someone who already knows how to craft it records the recipe on a sheet of paper. Perhaps, one day in the distant future, Blueprints could be duplicated in printing presses and distributed en mass... even uploaded to computers and put on the Internet... but I'm getting ahead of myself.
Getting the first Blueprint is the hardest. It's like researching a new technology, and it's very time consuming and laborious.
In the absence of a Blueprint, players can attempt to build a "Prototype" for something like a Newcomen Atmospheric Engine, but this process will take multiple generations (kind of like the apoc tower timers), special rare ingredients that may require extensive exploration, and simply just be very tedious. After all, inventing a new technology is bound to be tedious. However, the rewards are tremendous after a "Prototype" is made and the first Blueprints are produced. A new invention is likely to spread like wildfire among the neighboring villages. Perhaps we might even want to trade Blueprints?
As long as the Blueprints are kept safe (Grandma's secret recipe? Libraries? Museums?), the technology of civilization can continue to advance.
Beware of griefers -- they may try to burn books and rewind the technological advancement of civilization back to the stone age -- but it's up to your family and descendants to keep the treasure of knowledge safe for perpetuity!
I would like to see don't starve style deerclopalypse (bosses that are attracted to large towns/cities).
And maybe occasionally lightening strikes that start fires.
Or maybe the ability to drill deeper into exhausted mines -- but the higher you go up the tech tree there's a chance you'll dig your way into hell and all these evil devil creatures start pouring out (Dwarf Fortress).
Honestly, there should be an iron tech tree for iron sustainability just like there's a water tech tree.
The problem here is that a random walk would not be guaranteed to encounter greener pastures. Only by moving in a regular pattern can we guarantee this.
Can you maintain a secondary array tracking where the walk has gone? Like an array that tracks which areas have been used as part of the spawning box.
The implement a random walk, but try again if the random direction lands in a place that the walk has already gone?
Coming at this from the perspective of a newer player, I personally would have a really hard time judging what is a “liveable” spot or not. I don’t have that kind of experience.
My first reaction is to (panic) and walk around a bit, even if the location I spawned in would be considered “liveable” by more experienced players.
If I happen to stumble upon an existing village, the most tempting solution to everything is to join the other village as an eve. I keep seeing this on YouTube videos including those by twisted — there’s all these eve’s that are walking around in other people’s villages (even despite the language barrier).
My point for saying this is that the closer villages are pushed together, the more likely it is that Eve’s will attempt to merge into existing villages. This is the most natural response for players that don’t feel too comfortable with their Eve meta. This probably contributes to why it looks like there are all these natural spring locations near villages that aren’t taken by eve’s.
Dumping some lifelog ideas (on more accurately using this post as a scratchpad lol)
Planning to put together some analyses on LifeLog data. If anyone has suggestions on particular questions they'd like asked, let me know and I might be able to account for it.
Questions I'm interested in:
* Is there any relation between SIDs and current family size?
* Is there any relation between starvation and current family size/generation length?
* Typical number of play-sessions/play-time per unique player
* Compute some kind of "likelihood to survive 5 generations" as a function of current family size and generation length.
* Is it possible to detect famines? E.g. large number of starvation events in proximity in a short period of time?
I'm considering a DBSCAN type clustering algorithm for newer data (since multiple families can be in a village), although in prior versions it would probably be fine to assume each family = one settlement.
Would love to see the wildlife deaths separated from the starvation deaths too — would help the log parsing.
I actually share the opinion that difficulty should be added to the late game.
I agree that the early game is difficult enough already — I thought in the last thread you showed that out of ~9000 eve spawns, only 14 villages remained? Isn’t that a sign that the difficulty is plenty enough already for the early game?
Personally, I would like to see more challenges for large settlements — random events maybe? Sudden appearance of an evil velociraptor? Settlement catches on fire? The large towns get pretty boring so it’d be nice to see something new. XD
Glad to see you still energetic with the ideas! I know this week has been hard but stay strong and I look forward to whatever you come up with!
Tarr wrote:It's clear the Joriom approach doesn't make you wince but I potentially ruined the experiences of 40 odd players since the update and I don't enjoy that at all. I just want to see the sword made fair, war isn't something fought by one man against fifteen; all that ends up being is a complete and utter massacre.
It sucks that it took all that to get the problem any attention at all. What would it be like to be a new player that weekend?
Honesty, a pretty miserable/upsetting experience. You can see from the last words on the lineage trees.
But not just that, there's a lot of negative experiences being shared and circulated around the community this week, and a lot of people are /hurting/ or feeling betrayed. Those are real feelings that people are having, and it's part of the reason so many people are being so loud.
As for positive experiences... well, there's these kinds of threads and other people about how awesome it is to do this kind of stuff -- a lot of us feel a lot of emotional pain seeing this.
I see your position Jason; I'm not totally sure that I share exactly the same confidence/optimism on the inevitability of good guys outnumbering/beating the bad guys, but I respect what you want with the game.
There was an interesting post made by RedComb yesterday (part two), and I'm not sure if you saw it. In that post, @RedComb discusses some experiences and cites a few articles/interviews/books by the MMO designer Raph Koster had during his work with Ultima Online regarding pvp.
It was a really cool article, so if you get a chance, it might be interesting to take a look at.