a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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jasonrohrer wrote:Regarding property fences, are you experiencing a bunch of major problems with hoarding?
no
omg haha xD
Regarding property fences, are you experiencing a bunch of major problems with hoarding?
Well, the second day I ever played OHOL (~2 weeks ago), a griefer lured me into their property fence, shut it, and the shot me with a bow. xD
A could write extensively on property fences, although I kind of disagree with Tarr's evaluation of them. My opinion about them is that they're just non-functional, mostly because there's no strong incentives to use them. That doesn't necessarily make it a "bad" update. Sometimes, things just don't work the way we want them to.
I personally haven't experienced many hoarding issues with property fences -- it's a very very fine line regarding hoarding vs. griefing (somebody farming milkweed and locking a hoe inside the property fence........), it's natural for many players to feel frustrated about them because a majority of us have had far more negative experiences with them than positive.
It's very common for people to jump to the conclusion: "It's a griefers tool!"
...that kind of thing.
Is it just me or is this problem a lot more complicated than it should be?
My suggestion:
1. Living to old age produces the preferences menu as a reward (although no guarantees on anything)
2. It’s impossible to play eve or in a previous lineage if you did not live to age 60 in the last life
3. You can /die or run away as a baby as much as you want but you’ll never end back in an old town or get eve. You’ll just cycle through towns you haven’t played much in.
Wow, that is absolutely unacceptable -- the doxing, everything.
Jason, you've done so much for OHOL and I want you to know that I really admire you for everything that you do.
I can tell how much that you care about OHOL, and I really hope that you continue to have the fire to pursue your vision. I think you've made something powerful, evocative, and really original -- and I respect your every right as the content creator to steer this game in the direction that you see it going best.
And I still have a lot of faith that you have a lot of great things in store.
The personal attacks, the name calling, the insults -- all of that shouldn't be happening. It's unacceptable.
All of us should be more mature than that.
And importantly, to the entire community, we should recognize that everyone here (except the griefers), Jason more than anyone, wants their best for this game.
Keep that in mind, please.
I think psykout's sandcastle analogy is a good starting point.
No matter what you do, OHOL is a game, and it's like making sandcastles in the sand.
How do you make people care about their sandcastles?
That's a really, really, really, really hard question.
I think something very important to consider is that players /die for a reason. They die because they're not really interested in playing in the current spawning location, and already from the beginning they're not really at 100% motivation. Is it really a good idea to force people to play for an hour when they weren't really interested in playing?
Most casual people don't have a lot of a lot of time to game every day, and lots of people have said that they /die because they want to make their 1 hour of gaming count. They might think that maybe a settlement at a certain technology level is "boring" or they're not in the mood to play a certain way on a certain day.
You can't force motivation into people when they didn't have that motivation to play to begin with.
People will literally disconnect.
Some days I'm not really feeling totally up for OHOL, and I'll get to age 40 or something -- and I'll feel like there's really not much that I want to do today. Like sure, I could make compost, plant carrots, or go fetch sheep -- but today I just don't feel like it, because I've done this exact same thing dozens of times already. It's nice weather outside and I don't really need to be sitting at my computer right now.
And yeah, I've basically taken off my clothes (in game hahaha) and just run into the trees to starve.
And then go off to do something else because I wasn't really really up for OHOL today.
That's just sort of an inevitable thing, as much as I like OHOL -- because this is what it's like for everyone. Some days we're really hyped to play and other days we're not. People are fickle, and in the end the way that we spend our time is up to us. Social MMORPGs get a lot of this effect; in that I used to play MapleStory and a good fraction of the playerbase wouldn't really *feel* like grinding/bossing today, and instead everyone would sit "hoeing" around the Free Market and socialize -- and peopled LOVED that (and they still loved the game even if they didn't really want to grind every day).
...so sandcastles.
How do you make people care about sandcastles?
You've got to catch people when they're at their 100%.
If a player wanted to /die to begin with, they're not going to give OHOL their 100%.
I think is really important to recognize and accept that.
It's not something that can be forced -- and if it were brute-forced, I think a lot of people would hate it.
Instead, focus on the positive content. Make ways for every life to surprise you -- for every life to be unique and irreplaceable in your memories (since we can't go back). This way, even if you didn't think anything interesting would happen today in a particular life -- maybe something interesting does. Usually, for me, it's my kids who make every life in OHOL unique and special (because every kid is different), and it's the *people* who are giving me the surprises and mixing up the tedium of doing virtual chores (I mean, that's what composting is, right?) after dozens of hours of playtime.
I would love to see you make more ways for the playerbase to make memories with each other.
Examples:
- Random easter eggs with low probability of occurring
- Like consider Don't Starve with like those ridiculous seasonal bosses -- what if there was a 1% chance that something ridiculous like that appears to challenge a given town/village?
- More opportunities for players to interact with each other, whether through marriage, altars, funerals, burials, gifts -- and incentives for why all these things would be worthwhile to pursue
Give us purpose. Don't let any ending to a town ever be the same.
I hate seeing towns/villages die from underpopulation and no more fertile girls.
That should be the absolute worst reason why a town ever goes. I want to see a town die from 100 different reasons.
I want to see my child spend a lifetime attempting to converse with a foreigner, become fluent at translating it, have a cute marriage, and then have bilingual babies. I want to see paper airplanes tossed around, my son crash a car (and be unable to fix it), and my house to catch on fire.
More content! Lots and lots and wonderful and unique and sparkling content and everyone will love you for it.
There is the curse system and other people killing you. So, I wouldn't quite say that.
Fair enough, although you can't curse outside of the families now. TwT
I would personally say not to risk it -- in the first place, it's hard enough to make a popular game to begin with -- and OHOL having a steady stream of players (especially the "casuals", which often get ignored here on the forums) is critical for its well-being.
OHOL doesn't really work when you have a total playerbase of only 100 people. You need thousands (which really only comes out to only a hundred of them online at once) to sustain this kind of game where one generation creates the next.
It's a tempting idea from an intellectual perspective, but I kinda doubt if it's really a commercially viable one.
However I don't find it very fair that you wiped out the Pu's last women. You should have left them alive at least, so the Pu family can still get back on their feet. You would've been safe too, as the children would most likely not know what had happened, nor retain the stories their mothers would've told them
Well, technically there is no morality, fairness, or really anything in this game.
You can do what you want -- and that's what happens, isn't it?
Would be nice to have, although I'm not sure how much people would make it.
Clothes are pretty hard to come by, and people tend to prioritize furs for either BP for actual warmth. The convenience of having a baby carrier for the off chance you're traveling with a baby isn't too common of a situation.
Usually I just put down my babies when my doing something inside the village, and it's fine to have them wait and occasionally run to pick them up again.
The number of lives you get per hour can start very high and then decrease the longer you play the game.
Even for veteran players, they could be abandoned 3x in a row sometimes, so that's a problem. Detecting "real abandonment" in a way that's not subject to exploits/griefing is hard if not impossible. Mother picks you up and feeds you to wolf. Does that "eat" one of your three lives for the hour?
I'm not sure limiting the number lives you get in an hour is the right call.
I need to think about it more to develop a really comprehensive opinion, but my gut reaction would be that I would hate to be locked out of the game for reasons like that, especially if I were a new player who genuinely died more than average because I sucked.
Maybe there should be a trial period where you have unlimited "lives", and when you've lived to old age a couple times, then a soft limit gets added.
I think 3 lives is on the harsher side. If it were 4-5 lives, I think that's a limit that most people wouldn't hit unless they were repeatedly using /die.
Yup! I'm overall happy with what Jason is doing with the game!
I'm vocal on the forums because I worry a little bit about the long-term prospects of OHOL developing a griefer PvP gamer culture, but aside from that most games (except for an occasional bad apple) that I play right now are fun and great.
I had a bad dream yesterday re: racism, massacres, and wars. I guess ultimately I'm also afraid that OHOL might end up drawing out the worst of us, rather than the best of us -- because the thing about simulations is that you never exactly know the outcome -- and if the outcome turns out to be this ugly thing that glorifies racism, murder, violence, rape, abuse -- I would be sad. That's all, really. And it's entirely possible that an unbiased simulation of human nature might come to that kind of conclusion.
So I'm not sure how I feel about people who say OHOL should be a close simulation of reality, because reality can get very ugly.
So in a sense I'd rather trust Jason's artistic vision and his sense of expression -- not "there should be mass-murder and racism and slavery and rape because it's more realistic that way."
I want to play a game that makes me feel something positive about life, not really be filled with hopelessness/powerlessness/despair.
Most kids won't stay in the smaller town. They will run to the biggest town they can find.
Why is this the case?
Why do people not like early gen settlements?
Just curious about people's insights.
I still think there should be fertility rituals lol.
Do a strange dance to pray for more babies!
Eat some weird foods!
Active things would be fun, I think.
EDIT: I guess contraception medicine would be interesting if you decided your town had too many babies and you really didn't want to deal with babies today.
I would love it if there was some way to make each life precious, really precious. That way, you wouldn't want to waste it, even if you found yourself in some less-desirable situation.
I'll keep thinking about it... but overall I think you've done a lot of great things here, Jason. There's not a lot of things I can think of to help improve it.
But I'll keep thinking...
...maybe the screen doesn't pop up until after the player's first five lives?
Ah, I think that would work. Play a few times and then it unlocks, I guess.
It's also interesting that the "last fertile female" situation makes the problem even worse.
In the game as it stands, all mothers are equal, and they get weighted by YUM and warmth. But they are all in the pool of consideration for an incoming baby, as individual mothers.
Thus, a village with 5 fertile mothers has a 5x chance of having a baby compared to the village with only one mother left.
There's a kind of feast-or-famine dynamic here. As a family has more and more babies, they tend to have even more. As they have less and less babies, they tend to have even less.
This is probably correct, to treat mothers as individuals. An alternative would be to treat family lines as units, and give each family a weight, and then pick a destination family for a baby first (and pick a mother from that family second).
Even if it's more accurate to treat mothers as individuals, I think there's a lot of dramatic value when you're the last fertile female.
It's actually a pretty exciting time in the game -- desperate to get kids.
In contrast it's boring to be a mother in a town with 10 fertile women a crazy nursery with kids everywhere.
Maybe just have an option in the settings that goes:
- I would like to spawn as Eve
- I would like to spawn in a small village (low gen)
- I would like to spawn in a medium town (mid gen)
- I would like to spawn in an advanced city (high gen)
Give it sliders for preferences and don't explain anything more.
Preferences are preferences, so it's easier to match people to what they want.
People might still /die if they don't like a start, but if you let people pick, maybe give them a menu setting (or a hidden preferences menu with a .ini file).
Dying to unlock the menu still has that initial /die associated with it....
Shrine is interesting.
The problem is, it would take a while for people to build it, and then you get born elsewhere in the mean time.
Yup! I don't think there should be immediate reincarnations back to the same village, so it's fine if it takes a while for people to build it.
The main point of it would be that it introduces the *possibility* that they might come back... even if it's several generations down the line. During spawning time, the algorithm could first select a location (ignoring lineage ban), then check if there's a shrine for the player, and if there isn't the apply the lineage ban.
They must really have to care about you if they want to give you the chance to come back.
It doesn't have to be like an enormous stone altar or anything -- something simple (but costs something) like a marked grave + lapis lazui + bowl (could be anything) -- would take effort to make but not wholly unreasonable. Would be kind of amusing if people could take away the bowl/offering and that completely disables the shrine, so you'd have to watch over your ancestor's graves and shout at anyone who tries to take the offerings.
xD did you get any babies?
Dont really like the list thing, couldnt it be made by an algorithm without the player seeing it?
I'm also not too fond the list thing either.
I think it's cool that there's some element of serendipity when you play this game -- you don't control which family you're born into -- and I really don't think that should be an obvious feature of the game.
It's fine if experienced players figure out exploits on how to do it, but I don't think you should be making it any easier.
I think any solution that decreases the amount of /dies and /running will be satisfactory. If you have kids that try to knife their moms, build airplanes, or really anything -- at least they're doing something interesting with the game.
If you have to /die once to unlock the list, then pretty soon at least 50% of everybody (everyone who knows about the /die feature... which will probably be as many people who know about /emotes) is going to /die on their first birth because it's now an official feature to pick the kind of game you want. Mathematically, this means that 25% of all births will still be SIDs babies.
lychee wrote:What if there's an increasing wait time each time you /die.
The first time you /die (or die within the 5 minutes of the game), you can get reborn quickly.
The second time you /die in a row (or die within the 5 minutes of the game), the screen goes grey and there's a 5 sec countdown timer before the game releases you.
The third time you /die in a row (or die within the 5 minutes of the game), the screen goes grey and there's a 15 sec cooldown.
You the see pattern? If you start to /die an extraordinary amount of times in a row, the freeze cooldown starts to get pretty long and is more of a hassle.
Then people start running again instead of using the /die command. When you make /die look less appealing you start getting a bunch of runner babies which are worse overall. You don't get your birth cooldown back if a baby runs off into the wilderness unlike /die where if you picked the baby up at least once the /die will take you off cooldown.
When /die is weak people grief either by just straight running or poking bear caves and the like.
I tried to account for that by saying that dying within the first 5 minutes has the same cooldown effect as /die, so to get around it you would have to go those first 5 minutes at least. Of course, it's bad if people kill themselves after the first 5 minutes, but I also think it's important to have a slight deterrent to /die as well.
Something as simple as a 15 second wait I think is really fair.
If discourages repeatedly /die spamming (no instant gratification) if you have to wait 15 seconds between each die command staring at the screen. It's enough to be annoying to the SID baby (if they try to chain 10 in a row), but reasonable enough to someone who just wants to /die once.
What if there's an increasing wait time each time you /die.
The first time you /die (or die within the 5 minutes of the game), you can get reborn quickly.
The second time you /die in a row (or die within the 5 minutes of the game), the screen goes grey and there's a 5 sec countdown timer before the game releases you.
The third time you /die in a row (or die within the 5 minutes of the game), the screen goes grey and there's a 15 sec cooldown.
You the see pattern? If you start to /die an extraordinary amount of times in a row, the freeze cooldown starts to get pretty long and is more of a hassle.
For me personally, I think a lot of the problems here could be addressed by simply changing all the PvP to PvE.
All this stuff about fences, walls, if Jason wants them, it's easy enough to do the Dwarf Fortress/Rimworld/Don't Starve thing where you have hounds and other NPCs that start attacking a settlement with increased frequency as the settlement gets larger.
People won't blame NPCs for griefing -- and instead the community has a strong motivation to figure out ways to deal with threats, confront them, etc.
The outcome is about the same if Jason desires this kind of fence/battle/thrill mechanic.
I don't think there's a huge problem with lots of Eves, as long as they're not bothering other people. They are competing with everyone else for babies, but so what? Villages should have a huge advantage there, because of warmth and YUM. Villages have a disadvantage because of lineage area ban.
There is a SIDs annoyance factor. For these 33% of players who rely on SIDs, I have an idea about how to make it work. I'll post that idea in another thread.
I'm wondering if there's a way to balance the fertility of large cities and smaller villages.
Like sometimes in large cities I see babies popping everywhere (huge advantage for the warmth yum), but the smaller villages the most common reason of dying out is not enough kids.
So what if there was a tendency for the spawning to pick mom's that were in drastic situations? For instance -- last fertile woman in the area -- item survey shows fairly advanced tech around -- something like that?
I like dodge's suggestion with regards to an exponential amount of waiting time the longer you spend in a certain place!