Property and Inherritance Tear Apart Towns

OminousBladeBlank · 2019-04-23 01:50:32

So I kinda like the property system. It's great if you know the game.

It's not great if you don't.

People get really angry when you have a really nice, fenced in home with the good fixings - large tract of land, an actual building, a small farm, and the general means for nursing and development.

In fact, eventually, you can make your place so nice over generations of hard work that you are practically self sufficient, returning to the town only to craft what you need to keep up with your baby factory. You keep a few kids with ownership around, and send the rest out to the town to work.

A perfect system right? You take from the plenty of the city or large village (obviously it's bad to all out steal when there isn't much around), and you produce a labor force for them. The problem is that people who can't open the gate think you are hoarding something from them.

The truth is, you are. The game has ownership now, and people don't like it. Even a very large property with fair guidelines and a lot of population generation will anger people outside the property. But if what you have isn't straining the town's economy, shouldn't it not matter?

I was recently in such a situation. My mother handed down a very large estate to me on the outskirts of a city that had been around for at least a generation before her, probably more.

There were probably twelve baskets of pies, several bows, many arrows, and plenty of tools IN THE TOWN. Next to nothing other than a berry farm and a building inside the property. We did have a couple ponds we turned into wells, but there was no shortage of water in the city.

I worked hard to maintain the property fence, patch holes that had been worn into it, and upkeep the farm until I had children. My kids helped me, and we collected a knife and a bow for defense, took a basket of pies, made some stew at the massive stew farm, and pumped out a bunch of babies.

One of the children we sent out to work did nothing but spread a story that we were hoarders. We really weren't hoarding much, though we were the richest property. We had only about a sixth of the wealth from the town on the property, I'd say, for around 1/4 of the population of the city residing in the property.

ANyway, the city turned against us, and due to the huge discrepancy in resources, they were able to murder me and at least one of my two guards (the guards were just my eldest children I had given weapons to). We had three knives by the end of it, because I crafted them when people started getting unsettled with us, but the town had more weapons and more people. We asked it be resolved peacefully, but due to our stone house being exposed to the outside, they would continuously mine in and trash the place - again, with us having little in the grand scheme of things - only one box full of a bow, some pies, and some drugs.

I don't know what they got out of it, other than a lot of death and some extra weapons plus a couple shrooms. We were just trying to create a self sufficient property with a sheep and farm, but they got angry at it for some reason.

Is this not the experience others have with it? People get real jealous of properties, almost for no real reason.

Last edited by OminousBladeBlank (2019-04-23 01:50:48)

jasonrohrer · 2019-04-23 16:18:32

Wow, yeah, that's a great story.... sounds like it's working?

You were the kulaks, and your jealous neighbors eventually decided to chop off your heads.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kulak

Spoonwood · 2019-04-23 16:52:47

jasonrohrer wrote:

Wow, yeah, that's a great story.... sounds like it's working?

OmniousBladeBlank wrote:

ANyway, the city turned against us, and due to the huge discrepancy in resources, they were able to murder me and at least one of my two guards (the guards were just my eldest children I had given weapons to). We had three knives by the end of it, because I crafted them when people started getting unsettled with us, but the town had more weapons and more people. We asked it be resolved peacefully, but due to our stone house being exposed to the outside, they would continuously mine in and trash the place - again, with us having little in the grand scheme of things - only one box full of a bow, some pies, and some drugs.
I don't know what they got out of it, other than a lot of death and some extra weapons plus a couple shrooms.

jasonrohrer wrote:

As I've said many times, I want your decisions in the game to matter, at all levels. I want running a successful village to be hard, and I want you to care enough to get good at handling that challenge. I want town leadership to be necessary, because the challenge is so difficult, and I want disagreements and politics to unfold around that leadership. I want the survival of your family to really matter to you.

It sounds like the property system encouraged more murder to happen. That's probably more murder of fertile women. Murder is also a cause of people choosing sudden infant death out of a family, or deciding to commit more murder. So, NO, it does NOT sounds like it's working. It sounds like it's FAILING. It's FAILING to get people to feel that the survival of their lineage (cousins are family... anyway in one's lineage is family) matters all that much. It sounds like it's encouraging people to actually hate their family and want to kill them as you Jason said you wanted to do to your own sister after playing with this update.

jasonrohrer · 2019-04-23 16:58:17

Drama and interesting stories, Spoonwood. That's what this game is about.

You don't watch Game of Thrones to see a bunch of people cooperate together and get along for 70 generations.

(I don't watch Game of Thrones, but it's the most popular TV show on the planet right now, and I've heard there's some conflict in it.)

I have NEVER been trying to reduce or eliminate murder in this game, just for the sake of reducing murder. I'm looking for ways to motivate murder, though, so that murder becomes real. Currently, it's just for griefer lols.

Amon · 2019-04-23 17:16:47

jasonrohrer wrote:

Drama and interesting stories, Spoonwood. That's what this game is about.
You don't watch Game of Thrones to see a bunch of people cooperate together and get along for 70 generations.
(I don't watch Game of Thrones, but it's the most popular TV show on the planet right now, and I've heard there's some conflict in it.)
I have NEVER been trying to reduce or eliminate murder in this game, just for the sake of reducing murder. I'm looking for ways to motivate murder, though, so that murder becomes real. Currently, it's just for griefer lols.

Well I men, in game of thrones, it's not you who is getting killed ^^" You are an observer of the actions and in this game the only people whom benefit from drama are the observers/survivors with their game enriched in some way or other from the more unique display of brutality.

But unlike the observers, you cannot be your own observer. Your story effectively ENDED once you're dead, like a book torn away in front of you before you could finish the gripping chapter.
You are not an observer of your own tragedy, and that is tragic... and not fun.
You are essentially a sacrifice for the amusement of others.
That's why some propper drama is not all that effective over here for both ends than say, text roleplays where you can, once offed keep reading what the others are doing and get some observer's benefit.

Once a girl swore to kill me for wooing a guy she liked, that was fun, that was exciting. Some post death research once led me to realize that in one life, in which I was recruited into the police forse very early in, I swore an oath to protect the village and then the elders wanted to proclaim me queen, but most disagreed since we already had a queen and I refused the position and swore loyalty to the queen as well. Well anyway the queen ran off with some men instead of recruiting us armed policemen as bodyguards and she dissapeared. I later noticed my OWN son killed her. RIP... Some good storytelling possibilities there, but again it happens for griefing cause dying is not fun.

Maybe if a person got murdered and they could -observe- the village for a good bit, that might make, getting murdered a less so -end- story sort of deal and let them take some enjoyment from their own death by seeing what happens -after- . But would that be in the spirit of OHOL? I don't know, once you're dead you're dead. But feelings of bitterness do persist into other lives regardless.

Last edited by Amon (2019-04-23 17:18:12)

futurebird · 2019-04-23 17:38:51

I still think the family tree could be more... rich and expressive than just names cause of death and last words. Someone mentioned the idea of a camera you could build in game it might take like 5 photos and those would be stored with the person who took them's family tree...

Beyond just images it could be a place to leave a kudos for someone who was really helpful or just cool in a life people already do this thing where one kills the other just so they can get the link on the family tree. I think that's a sign that there is desire for more content along those line.

A good story isn't just over when you put it down. You think about it for days after. You talk about it (the forums are good for this, how many reconnect threads are there here?) I don't think I'd play nearly as much if it were not for the tree and the forums.

I agree just getting killed mostly isn't fun. The lives where I was killed for no reason never understood what happened are my least favorite.

jasonrohrer · 2019-04-23 18:22:28

Photos are interesting... I'm having trouble thinking of a secure way to implement it, because there's no graphical rendering engine server-side (and implementing a headless graphical rendering engine server-side would be a pretty insane undertaking). I can't trust the client to submit photos, for obvious reasons.

I mean... maybe there could be some kind of crowd-source photo approval thing, to filter photos submitted by the client. But that seems pretty fragile to me, and also would expose end-users to all kinds of nonsense photos, and generally waste their time.

I mean, unless submitting a hacked photo was an offense that resulted in an account ban. Photos can easily be signed by the player account that submits them, so we know who's photo-hacking.

But I really don't want to get into a whole report-review-warn-ban cycle, and dealing with false revenge reports, etc. I don't envy Discord Inc.

I have thought about more details about people's lives in the family tree, or other ways to interact with the "story" of your descendants after you die. Obviously, ancestor ghost mode is very tempting, but also undercuts the reality of death.

Spoonwood · 2019-04-23 19:28:54

jasonrohrer wrote:

Drama and interesting stories, Spoonwood. That's what this game is about.
You don't watch Game of Thrones to see a bunch of people cooperate together and get along for 70 generations.
(I don't watch Game of Thrones, but it's the most popular TV show on the planet right now, and I've heard there's some conflict in it.)
I have NEVER been trying to reduce or eliminate murder in this game, just for the sake of reducing murder. I'm looking for ways to motivate murder, though, so that murder becomes real. Currently, it's just for griefer lols.

Alright, let me spell the following out for you then.

The more people want to murder the LESS that people they will care about their lineages. The more that people will care about their lineages, the less they will want to murder (murder comes as a last resort to protect the children). Exceptions may exist, but that as a rule will hold. More murders also means more sudden infant deaths, and people care less about their lineages with more sudden infant deaths (other people have said 'why should I care about my lineage, with all of the SIDs?").

With your game design changes it seems that you aren't prioritizing encouraging people to care about their lineages. That contradicts what you've said elsewhere with your emphasis of getting people to "REALLY" care about their lineages. Your actions don't seem to line up with stated intent.

It's one thing to keep some wasteful things in the game for amusement purposes. It's another to actually change game design to encourage waste, selfish play, (or murder) in a consistent pattern and then claim that your primary focus lies in getting people to care about their lineages.

Seriously, if you primary goal lies in encouraging people to care about lineages, then you just can't make a bunch of updates (which you have already by the way, the radio updates, the car update, the black gold update, the new clothing update (Tarr contests this, but the new snazzy looking clothes aren't the most insulating), the apocalypse update, and now the property fence updates) which work contrary to that goal. It has to be rare that such an update occurs. It just won't work to make an update thinking "I LIKE this idea. It will make the game more fun. Let's put that in the game." without first considering whether or not that makes people more likely to care about lineages. Not if you want to encourage people to care about lineages more. The clothing one could have worked, had those clothes been more insulating than other clothes, but since they aren't, and people wear clothes for fashion over function often enough, it only has worked if more fertile females have ended up with more clothing, because fertile females aren't clothed better in the new clothes than if clothed rabbit fur clothes, with a wolf hat and sealskin coat possibly also.

Solbusaur · 2019-04-23 19:35:46

'Beheading the queen unlocks the castle'
This is exactly the kind of stuff Jason wanted to happen. Great story content! Just be happy that your family had a flourishing plot to begin with!

Solbusaur · 2019-04-23 19:38:07

Now I realise Jason already said this further up, glad he got to see it

One Hour One Life Forums

#1 2019-04-23 01:50:32

Property and Inherritance Tear Apart Towns

#2 2019-04-23 16:18:32

Re: Property and Inherritance Tear Apart Towns

#3 2019-04-23 16:52:47

Re: Property and Inherritance Tear Apart Towns

#4 2019-04-23 16:58:17

Re: Property and Inherritance Tear Apart Towns

#5 2019-04-23 17:16:47

Re: Property and Inherritance Tear Apart Towns

#6 2019-04-23 17:38:51

Re: Property and Inherritance Tear Apart Towns

#7 2019-04-23 18:22:28

Re: Property and Inherritance Tear Apart Towns

#8 2019-04-23 19:28:54

Re: Property and Inherritance Tear Apart Towns

#9 2019-04-23 19:35:46

Re: Property and Inherritance Tear Apart Towns

#10 2019-04-23 19:38:07

Re: Property and Inherritance Tear Apart Towns

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