Suicide is OP - Should it be nerfed?

Roblor · 2018-10-17 21:05:39

When I first began playing it was thrilling never to know what kind of place I'd be spawned into, although less so now that I can do fine just as long as I'm being fed through infancy.
Therefore getting the chance to be born into a challenging survival situation is often more favorable than a well established settlement.
Other people have other preferences, but most of us in the forum community clearly favor the early stages of the family tree.
Since dying is really easy many people bypass the random spawn system by doing just that.
This is a much discussed topic on the forums which indicate the large amount of players it effects.
Please, Lets discuss it some more; Is it a dick-move? Are we gonna do anything about it? In which case what?

MultiLife · 2018-10-17 21:12:43

Option to Eve and a preference system would be my go-to "solutions".
I see no harm giving players an option to go Eve or set a preference to certain generations.

Tea · 2018-10-17 21:39:12

When I first started to play, I had at least 5 children who survived till adulthood. Even as an Eve I had at least 3 daughters and a couple of sons who stayed and survived. In one life, I had ten kids and only two suicided.

Now, I'm lucky to have at least ONE girl staying and living, while playing as an Eve or in a big city.

I just finished a life, where I was the daughter of Eve West. I was the only kid that stayed, every one else ran away even though we were living in an advanced town with another family. The place was great, but not many kids stayed. The other women were struggling as well, every kid they had suicided as soon as they were born. With my only daughter killed by a bear and the last woman of the town going grey, the town died.

Suiciding as soon as you are born is a dick move, even more if you are a girl. And if you suicide right at the forge, you my friend are a jerk!

I know you really liked the life you had before and you want to go back to that town but there are a lot of great cities that you might like as well. Being born as a kid to an Eve or a mother in a big town, it is your job to stay alive and to keep the place running, doesn't matter if boy or girl. And if that place suck, just find a better spot.

I would ask those suicide kids if they want to be stabbed but most of them don't even stop and just run until they die. And running after them is useless and might get me killed by an idiot. But I have no idea what else to do. You can't force them to stay.

I suggested once to have an option when you start playing :

Either as

- an Eve

- a kid of an Eve

- a kid in an advanced family tree

If you don't want to be reborn in that town over and over again, just ask to be stabbed. And please die far away from town. Those damn bones that those suicide kids are leaving are really annoying and are taking so much space away.

Last edited by Tea (2018-10-17 21:41:14)

Roblor · 2018-10-17 21:47:04

Tea wrote:

I just finished a life, where I was the daughter of Eve West.

I was there.
http://lineage.onehouronelife.com/serve … id=1252066

I remember standing there as a kid while Eve West talked to her daughter and grandson about the iron vein and how to mine it.
Only my son stayed, although he died very young

Nopik · 2018-10-17 22:13:58

I was on a usually-empty server, and had made a start on a camp, when I died. I expected to respawn back at my place, but instead I eved at another place with two players who immediately grabbed the bow and arrow and knife that had been on the ground. I asked them if they were going to kill me, and they replied that they were just being careful. I asked them what they needed, they said “soil”, so I borrowed a cart and baskets and brought 5-6 cartloads of soil and two of each kind of seed while eating wild food. I put the cart back, thanked and complemented the other two, informed them that I was going to suicide, and starved behind a tree a few screens away from their camp.

This is the polite way to suicide.

xclame · 2018-10-17 23:38:29

You had the advantage of being a Eve though, so you could do and say more, it's a bit much to expect a child to wait till they are 4 (and waste food by you having to feed them) so they can say they don't want to stay and suicide. If you are a girl and you don't see any other related girls, then you should stay and at least give the family a girl child before suiciding, but if you are a boy or you see they have plenty of girls suicide away, just don't do it on the forge or oven area, that's just annoying.

Sovietico21 · 2018-10-18 00:45:28

Thats because living in a town sucks, it is boring and unchalenging, even when you try to add color to the town by creating some sort of rol or drama, some of the people there might not like it and curse you until you are banned. So why risk it?
Just suicide until you find a place where you are challenged by the situation.

Last edited by Sovietico21 (2018-10-18 00:45:59)

WalrusesConquer · 2018-10-18 06:46:19

I never suicide. I admit livimg in a town can be a bit dull, especially when no one knows you and all jobs are taken. However if no one Cares about you make them! Ask a kid to be your best friend, go around together gathering recourses it's much more fun in a group.
I do prefer smaller towns but I would never suicide to play in one

sarannwrap · 2018-10-18 06:49:37

Well I *almost* never suicide. Only time I do really is when the people in the town all suck, whether it be from something like constant murder or as simple as disrespecting others' work and efforts (taking a pack I just made, using a rope I set down for a second, etc. - and even then it has to be coming from most of the players). Or ONE time I suicided when you could trade packs with elders, and an evil twin girl stole my knife backpack then proceeded to kill the whole town. I REALLY wanted revenge but I felt bad after a couple suicides and gave up.

If you find your town boring, why not start making an outpost or sister town nearby? It protects families from griefers when they are spread out, prevents overcrowding/overuse of resources, and you are potentially saving the family line by not immediately dying. And since you're essentially starting over it isn't so dull.

PeaGirl · 2018-10-19 07:19:59

Instead of immediately suiciding, just publicly kill someone and get mass cursed. You get in server you always wanted... all alone and at the very beginning of tech tree. I mean... that's what some have done. Or don't be like that, be more efficient and go in custom server
there are 14 other servers you can access in from OHOL, for example server4.onehouronelife.com or something... it's trial and error there, you don't need to listen to anyone, you can run nomad or be overwhelmed with your own arrogance there, or succeed and make your own small farmland and house you always wanted... only to be griefed later on by someone who passed by and ruined everything.
Neat huh? Much better than socializing with others, huh?
You are VERY welcome.

gabal · 2018-10-19 08:01:04

I personally never suicide but I'm not bothered that others do it. People have limited free time and it is up to them how they will use it while playing this game.

Carrot-Seedling · 2018-10-19 13:58:38

@MultiLife

Jason has said many, many times that he wanted the situation you are in to be random. The death cycle will soon bring you back to let you see your great-granddaughters and how much the town has changed. People will abuse this, yes.

But without death, what is life?

Starknight_One · 2018-10-19 14:14:13

Well. I don't like when my children die on me... especially when they don't let me explain the situation. If I can, I'll tell you what's going on; even though I'm naked in the wilderness, it doesn't mean the situation is hopeless. If clothes are scarce, I might have given stuff to the kids and am heading to get more rabbits.

On the other hand, this morning I hit the 'Get Reborn' button out of a desire to see what's next, and then realized I had to go take the kid to school. Sorry... I didn't have time to explain. At least I wasn't a girl. And I had to 'suffer from depression' (i.e., go afk) and later suicide the other night; at least I had a daughter that survived to weaning. I hope I didn't have one while I was afk.

MultiLife · 2018-10-19 17:15:07

Carrot-Seedling wrote:

@MultiLife
Jason has said many, many times that he wanted the situation you are in to be random. The death cycle will soon bring you back to let you see your great-granddaughters and how much the town has changed. People will abuse this, yes.

My only argument to that is that people will not take random if they can affect it (and want to affect it). People disconnect now and kill lineages by being "selfish", like we humans are. No matter how you want your game to be played, people will bend it to fit their playstyle. We should accept that fact and work with it instead of sitting still and saying "You should play like I want you to play!". As someone who is hellbent on getting solutions that satisfy everyone, I can't just sit back with a situation like this.

I love random. That's a big thing for me in this game. But I accept that it is not so fun for others as I've seen how bad the "random" can be.. I understand that Jason would want people to take the life they get, but he can't force that nor expect that to happen. Right now people abuse disconnection and they always will; we could make it less common at least. We have such a colourful community eager to play in different ways, why not support that? There are newbies who want to see big cities, there are old veterans who want to be the heroes the Eve camps need. Why not connect them? Why stick to the randomness, just because it mimics life? I personally wouldn't even use the preference system but would appreciate it immensely to see people born to me who are eager to be born to me.

I understand the beauty of the chaos we have. The crazy stories we make. But the stress and frustration the chaos brings to players is sad; it's a game, for entertainment. Newbies running off from early camps, being overwhelmed by the steep learning curve, feeling worthless and bad because they couldn't help. Meanwhile a lonely, aging veteran mom sits in a city with dead babies, hoping she gets a child, even someone to teach. But no, the randomness doesn't bring them together.

Last edited by MultiLife (2018-10-19 17:32:15)

Carrot-Seedling · 2018-10-19 18:55:44

The stress is a part of the game! You're supposed to feel the heat. Without it, it's less of a fun game with friends you don't know and more of a slow, dragged-out death simulator. To be honest, the lineage ban was a good idea, but it was too long. Only 10 minutes, and we could be back within a reasonably-lengthed life before the family dies.

If you want a safeguard, kids 12 and below could have a "starving to death" state when they hit 1 bar, where they can't move, and they can be fed or let to starve if they really gotta. It should take 2 minutes or so. This way last baby girls are fed and persuaded to stick around, no accidents happen, and you're stuck with a random life, like it or not. But after 12 years, if you forget to eat while catching rabbits, it's all you.

Not looking for a heated argument. I respect you and the opinion you have.

MultiLife · 2018-10-19 19:32:04

Carrot-Seedling wrote:

The stress is a part of the game! You're supposed to feel the heat. Without it, it's less of a fun game with friends you don't know and more of a slow, dragged-out death simulator. To be honest, the lineage ban was a good idea, but it was too long. Only 10 minutes, and we could be back within a reasonably-lengthed life before the family dies.
If you want a safeguard, kids 12 and below could have a "starving to death" state when they hit 1 bar, where they can't move, and they can be fed or let to starve if they really gotta. It should take 2 minutes or so. This way last baby girls are fed and persuaded to stick around, no accidents happen, and you're stuck with a random life, like it or not. But after 12 years, if you forget to eat while catching rabbits, it's all you.
Not looking for a heated argument. I respect you and the opinion you have.

I'm sorry if I came off as heated, I'm absolutely chill (maybe I should use more emojis ). I also respect Jason's choices, and I am personally fine with whatever happens.
Games should thrive with eustress, not distress, and it can be achieved very well in a game. But sadly in OHOL the stress turns out harmful and makes people freeze, or get frustrated with others, or with the game itself. Many of us are good with handling the game, but as we have noted, it's not newbie friendly at all, which frustrates everyone, new and old. Thus I feel like we could improve, as always, but it's all up to Jason. There is a life for everyone in the game, now people just skeleton spam their way to them which is bad for everyone.

UnnoticedShadow · 2018-10-19 21:37:12

What if it was impossible to quit the game when you are below five years old, that might help! Also, if a baby could not leave it's birth mother's arms, that could help some more! As a last resort, make babies slower, but this would cause other problems. Overall something needs to be done about this as the amount of suicides will increase with the release of steam.

Xan · 2018-10-19 22:50:22

Even if there wasn't a Esc+% or close icon in windowed mode there is always a way for you to quit. Just use task manager. If someone doesn't want to live in your town you probably are not going to want for force them to be there. You can wish that they would be productive members of society but they will more likely sponge, kill, or worse destroy structures and natural resources.

I feel that this is a supernatural problem like we had with griefers that was solved with the curse system. We needed a curse system because even if you killed a griefer in one life they would be reborn and at some point so would you and you two would run into each other again and have this forever game of cat and mouse. The curse system removes the griefer from the pool of babies until their time out is over and hopefully they have learned their lesson.

Suiciding is the new griefing now that we have the curse system. I don't feel that even if you were to curse a suicide baby the results aren't the results you want. You wanted that child. It doesn't want to be there for whatever reason. You manage to name the child before it falls dead in your arms, and you curse the dead baby. Your curse sends the player to donkey town. You still have no child, and you might not ever get another one.

The game needs is some form of positive incentive to live every life as long as possible. That way suicide is decreased naturally because every life matters. In this game you can be reborn so easily that each life seems a little less meaningful. In real life you can't open your eyes as a baby and see that your daddy isn't wearing a Rolex in the hospital and say "GG. I didn't get the rich daddy. I'm out of here."

I don't feel that punishing these players will solve anything. It will just alienate them from the game. It needs to be something even something small like a text color change. That players can earn by living and not suiciding. This would be hard to implement though. What is the difference between not being fed by your mother and purposely dying of starvation as a baby by running around so no one can pick you up. Or accidentally stepping on snake vs. purposely stepping on a snake so you can die. If the change was just to try to prevent disconnects then babies will just find other ways to die.

Suiciding hits hardest when our player base is low. The steam release should help because although there may be some increase in suicide but there will also be an increase in total babies being born that it will be more likely that someone will stay. So maybe we won't need positive incentive to life added.

Carrot-Seedling · 2018-10-19 23:19:01

MultiLife wrote:

I'm sorry if I came off as heated, I'm absolutely chill (maybe I should use more emojis ). I also respect Jason's choices, and I am personally fine with whatever happens.
Games should thrive with eustress, not distress, and it can be achieved very well in a game. But sadly in OHOL the stress turns out harmful and makes people freeze, or get frustrated with others, or with the game itself. Many of us are good with handling the game, but as we have noted, it's not newbie friendly at all, which frustrates everyone, new and old. Thus I feel like we could improve, as always, but it's all up to Jason. There is a life for everyone in the game, now people just skeleton spam their way to them which is bad for everyone.

Aye, no hard feelings. The game is distressing sometimes, I'll give you that! I'd be cool with having some way of making early deaths harder, especially with the teeny weeny hunger bar you get. Would make the game a little bit better, in the way we'd like!

Morti · 2018-10-20 00:51:21

Instead of a punishment, how about a reward?
Some kind of incentive, like a blessing, that you carry from life to life.

Before you run with that name, blessing, I'd just like to say I was against the curse system. It just doesn't make sense to me given the nature of the game. I was hoping that we could address the problems outside the game in some, amicable way, say, by reasoning with the streamers and video makers who were suiciding to look for the kind of town they thought would bring views from their audiences. But, stream to stream, video to video, I didn't find anyone speaking out against the behavior and, unfortunately, was not in the mood to 'be that guy' myself.

So, if we are going to have karma for deeds the community finds deplorable, why not have karma for the ones we appreciate.

A child stays in their mothers arms, that mother can then offer them a blessing as a reward.

This could even be extended to other good deeds.
Someone gives you a back pack when you really needed one to gather two soil instead of just one? Give them your blessing.
You leave home during a food shortage, and return to find a few people hard at work, restoring the farm. Give them your blessing.

Just as you cannot curse a person more than once, you can also only bless a person once, or it can have some other sort of limitation, maybe only once fr every ten or twenty years.

The payoffs could be something important, or something very subtle. Say, you receive five blessings, and in your next life, your food meter drops at only 95% the speed or, you move to and from warm 50% faster? Maybe as an eve you appear in a nicer area, or you are more likely to spawn in civilization. It could be an aura, a subtle glow you give off. Maybe people around you, within a certain radius, are also kept warmer in the cold and cooler when things are hot.

Maybe if you build up 100 blessings you get to live an extra 10 years.

Again, I don't know about calling it a blessing. I don't like the idea of karma or curses, or any of that sort of thing, but if curses are here to stay, I don't see why we shouldn't have some sort of alternative for good people.

The only bad scenario I imagine are people just standing around begging for blesses or dishing them out like a buffet. They should be something reserved for special occasions, something people recognize you've earned. Whether it comes from your mother, your children, or that cousin you spent 30 years making compost and farming with. I don't think it should be something we should expect though. People may become resentful if you do not bless them for giving you a gold crown when you really didn't have a use for one, or, say, for not committing suicide immediately after they were born.

This is all really a mess, if I'm to be quite honest. The killing, the cursing, the suicides. These are not things people are this inclined to do in real life, but games are a unique microcosm of real life, and in games, death and rebirth are just two bits away. What we're trying to do here, I guess, is to instill games with the sorts of values we have honed over the lifetime of our species. It's no small task.

I want to do it right.

I don't think adding supernatural elements to the game, such as curses and blessing, heaven or hell, is the right way to go about it. But if the results are the same but it is not conveyed as such, I'm a little more reluctant to play along. The idea of being promoted or demoted up or down a tree-and-root structure would make a lot more sense to me but it is by no means the only type of cost-reward, or, promote-or-punish, system, I would find relevant to a game like this.

I'm not usually around inside of towns long enough to get involved in the drama that leads to murders and curses anyhow. If I maintained that sort of playstyle, I would probably use blessings as much as I uses curses, which is to say, not very often, but on the other hand, I have cried many times IRL for the loss of my mothers and children in this game, and their have been some very personal moments with you folks where I wished I could hug you in real life after you conveyed similar sentiments to me.

I would not be against a greater way of saying thank you, for spending your time with me and my family, in this world.

ksaturn · 2018-10-20 01:01:43

It's pretty clear that the baby-suicide thing is becoming a real problem.

There are actually a lot of things you can do to detect common cases, but it is very hard to catch everything. People will find a way around most solutions.

The aesthetic problem is that they are not 'dealing with a random situation'. But the real problem is they are preventing OTHER people from playing the game in desirable ways, across a wide swath of playstyles. Killing family after family and colony after colony.

There are limits on the number of children you can have and nearly every family with I play now dies out quickly. Not because life is hard, or newbies ignorance, but because endless infant suicides. It feels unnatural and arbitrary, like some kinds of exploit-griefing do. Not like being gored by a boar, or running out of food and supplies.

If the player doesn't want to be there you can't change that. But right now that is costing resources in the form of a limited pool of offspring to the OTHER PEOPLE playing.

A human is born with a survival instinct that is hard to overcome. None of that applies here. We need something more contrived to close the gap.

ksaturn · 2018-10-20 01:13:49

Karma and curses and other supernatural ideas were a huge part of our historical cultures. I see no problem adding them here, ESPECIALLY as they don't change anything visible within the scope of the character's life. It is purely meta, matters beyond the world of your little village, and something we always loved to dabble in despite not understanding how it all worked.

Another detail... it is awkwardly hard to curse infants who suicide. While you CAN name them them chase them down so you can see the name on their bones to curse them... It's just another wound your are letting them cause your family. Wasted food, time, productivity... maybe starvation or an animal attack. Making it possible to more easily curse them could help a little. I don't think it is enough though.

That blessing idea sounds like an unambiguous good thing, if similar to the curse system. I do not see that impacting the psychology of infant suicide significantly though.

MultiLife · 2018-10-20 13:57:24

Xan wrote:

Even if there wasn't a Esc+% or close icon in windowed mode there is always a way for you to quit. Just use task manager. If someone doesn't want to live in your town you probably are not going to want for force them to be there. You can wish that they would be productive members of society but they will more likely sponge, kill, or worse destroy structures and natural resources.
I feel that this is a supernatural problem like we had with griefers that was solved with the curse system. We needed a curse system because even if you killed a griefer in one life they would be reborn and at some point so would you and you two would run into each other again and have this forever game of cat and mouse. The curse system removes the griefer from the pool of babies until their time out is over and hopefully they have learned their lesson.
Suiciding is the new griefing now that we have the curse system. I don't feel that even if you were to curse a suicide baby the results aren't the results you want. You wanted that child. It doesn't want to be there for whatever reason. You manage to name the child before it falls dead in your arms, and you curse the dead baby. Your curse sends the player to donkey town. You still have no child, and you might not ever get another one.
The game needs is some form of positive incentive to live every life as long as possible. That way suicide is decreased naturally because every life matters. In this game you can be reborn so easily that each life seems a little less meaningful. In real life you can't open your eyes as a baby and see that your daddy isn't wearing a Rolex in the hospital and say "GG. I didn't get the rich daddy. I'm out of here."
I don't feel that punishing these players will solve anything. It will just alienate them from the game. It needs to be something even something small like a text color change. That players can earn by living and not suiciding. This would be hard to implement though. What is the difference between not being fed by your mother and purposely dying of starvation as a baby by running around so no one can pick you up. Or accidentally stepping on snake vs. purposely stepping on a snake so you can die. If the change was just to try to prevent disconnects then babies will just find other ways to die.
Suiciding hits hardest when our player base is low. The steam release should help because although there may be some increase in suicide but there will also be an increase in total babies being born that it will be more likely that someone will stay. So maybe we won't need positive incentive to life added.

I agree with everything you said;
- like being reborn, disconnection should be seen as a supernatural issue in the game that causes trouble for other players who DO play the game like they are supposed to
- cursing suiciding babies is not the solution
- you can't force anyone to play a game if they don't want to so let's not go for the punishing approach

I also think that distinguishing intentional death from accidents is impossible or at least ridiculously demanding and not worth going for.
And I think that the best way to make people behave differently is rewarding them for doing the things we want to enforce. We want to make rewards something all players want and make it so they can't bend the rules to get the rewards without complying. Of course no reward will be desirable for everyone but as long as it balances the issues, it's good enough.

The Rolex thing was really funny! "Psh, I'm out, scrubs!"

Anyways I still imagine the preference system would work well with the game, even if it is way too generous for the players. It'd just help connecting people who want to be connected.
It's just a fact that the game's scenarios vary so wildly that it's like playing a different game when you compare big cities and early camps.

Last edited by MultiLife (2018-10-20 14:00:55)

boggers · 2018-10-20 16:23:54

Here is an idea to discourage baby suicides... What if players had a longevity score that accumulates across games which could add or remove minutes from their life expectancy?

The score is limited to a range, lets say -10 to +20 for example and you get a score each life based on the age you died.

Eg:
Under 1 = -2
1 to 20 = -1
21 to 40 = 0
41 and over = +1
Dying of old age = +2

So, if you die 5 times in a row as a baby, your longevity score drops all the way to -10, and in the life you finally choose not to suicide, you die of old age at 50 instead of 60.

Or, if you consistently live to old age, each life would potentially be a couple minutes longer than the last, until you could live up to 80 before old age gets you.

It would put a bit more meaning into death, discourage suicide, and add an element of challenge too... Who can live to the oldest? Who will be the first to make it to 80?

Problem is, it conflicts with the name One Hour One Life, but even so I think it would make for an awesome addition to the game.

edit: To make things a bit more interesting, what if longevity was also genetic, in that in any life your life expectancy is the average of 60 + your longevity and your mother's life expectancy.

Last edited by boggers (2018-10-20 16:56:55)

tana · 2018-10-20 17:20:52

but how do you make the distinction between suiciding babies and abandonned ones ? for the game certainly can't make the difference. Starvation is starvation, doesn't matter if self inflicted or not, same with animal bites.

One Hour One Life Forums

#1 2018-10-17 21:05:39

Suicide is OP - Should it be nerfed?

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Re: Suicide is OP - Should it be nerfed?

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#20 2018-10-20 00:51:21

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#21 2018-10-20 01:01:43

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#22 2018-10-20 01:13:49

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#23 2018-10-20 13:57:24

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