To make the game even harder, it needs to be made easier.

Greep · 2018-12-16 04:39:46

Right now, early civilization is quite difficult. Two experienced players can keep afloat a village of 8 people or so, but usually there is one and it is you.

Unfortunately, if you have any experience with the game, nine times out of ten your job isn't smithing, it isn't baking, it isn't composting, it isn't defending. It's farming carrots and wheat. And more carrots and wheat. Sometimes milkweed. And telling people to do it doesn't help so you're doing it. Oh and sometimes you dump some of the dozens of completely untouched fertile soil mounds because people rushed to compost when they have soil sitting virtually in front of them. And telling people to do THAT doesn't help. Or hauling straight branches in carts. Most intermediate players try to do a job that's complex and sit around yelling at people to get them resources when what they need to be doing is making those resources.

Thus: because the early game is so hard, it is in fact extremely easy: You have one or two very basic things to do that must be done to keep your town afloat and since you are the only one doing it you have to constantly do that. Occasionally you build a well or a cistern or build your city's first axe. Those games are precious and rare.

I think the solution most people use is to just chain /die out of it until they reach a city for their rest of the time playing OHOL: After farming carrots and wheat for the 1,000,000 time they are just done. The more experienced you are, the less interested in the "hard" life you are. Which ironically makes it worse as the early game is even more newbie dense.

Contrast this with the city life: Most of the time, people are actually having fun. People are setting up silly religions, making absurd traditions, doing mass smithing, etc and every life I've lived in a populated city has been fun and unique.

Right now, I think a lot of griefers and roleplayers do not mess with early civs for this reason. They know even a stiff breeze can destroy a town full of newbies or even one with one person with experience. And so this become even more monotonous and dull.

I think the solution is to have more finite resources on hand and somehow making predators not kill off all your newbie girls so easily. Things like slightly more regeneration of food and branches, making hot coals not require kindling, maybe fire scares off animals etc. This way, as your city grows, you are forced to go up the tech tree, but the pressure is not quite so absurd. Or just making it not so easy for newbies to disrupt the wheat and carrot seed process.

Last edited by Greep (2018-12-16 05:41:47)

Glassius · 2018-12-16 05:06:37

Unfortunately, it seems Jason is now pushing the technology tree towards, because he promised to develop this game only for 2 years. He may not find time to apply changes to early tech tree. It saddens me a much

Last edited by Glassius (2018-12-16 05:11:32)

itzzgarrett · 2018-12-16 05:08:26

i second this motion

pein · 2018-12-16 07:32:04

teaching doesn't really work when people don't want to learn or they think they know a lot

worst this week was the girl who wanted to waste my kindling to make herself a pack, before we had bowls or/and pouch

and the guy who tossing my stone blocks out of the jungle, not knowing that mosquitoes cant enter a pen, totally ignoring when i asked, warned him, but runs around like headless chicken yelling griefer for not letting him ruin my work

better communication, and bigger FOV might work, cause you cant really expect much from newbies, fuck composting and firewood, they just want to make pies from rabbits, overwater carrots and leave it and extend and empty a berry field, cause all that they know

Greep · 2018-12-16 07:37:58

Glassius wrote:

Unfortunately, it seems Jason is now pushing the technology tree towards, because he promised to develop this game only for 2 years. He may not find time to apply changes to early tech tree. It saddens me a much

Well, this isn't a feature issue, so much as a tuning issue. Engineering-wise it's a 5 minute task, maybe a few days if you want a lengthy change. It's the designing here that needs to be thought out and resolved.

lionon · 2018-12-16 08:15:13

pein wrote:

better communication, and bigger FOV might work

I agree.

Psykout · 2018-12-16 09:17:31

This is a two fold problem honestly. Devoting an hour to playing a game, ignoring ALL distractions to maximize this hour, is starting to not become the norm. Cloud saves and multiplayer jump in at any time has conditioned us to believe that every shred of time spent should be progressive. To have an event that very well might take a steamy number two on the hour or so you just put it into the game has become a negative to be changed, rather than part of the game that is enjoyable. This double knife scenario is prevalent here because a margin will never be happy with " Guess I am the baker this life because no one else is doing it" and will always want to say " We failed because person XYZ wasn't doing ___ while I was doing what I wanted to do"

The imposed difficulty of eve camps as mentioned is pretty minor. I myself have felt triggered during times when I am going ham, my one and only child at the time is watching me work instead of doing stuff. Like really, standing there watching me holding an adobe was more productive than letting me solo fire 12 pieces of pottery and getting the charcoal afterwards, instead of putting down soil to start berries. Doubling up on basic tasks usually is a time sink, one that eve camps can't push past if too many occur.

As Pein said, better communication would help, but shit, I have to come out and say, instead of people telling you what to do, how about you teach yourself more. Know what to do when you scan the town and see berries and carrots going down, and just go get some stone or adobe and make the pen real quick. Instead of hauling the tenth basket of banana's go make a damn rope, attach it to a stake and get the rabbit fur we need to make a bellows. Communication is key only when the end goal exceeds the common place view of the situation. The game is not complex enough for the expectation that a larger amount of the player base can be productive without a play by play.

I of course would LOVE (LOVELOVELOVE) to see some base tech branched out a bit. Since when did people skip over iron tools going from stone to steel, umm never it is actually a landmark for industry to conquer that gap. Am I sad that is glossed over, yes. Am I happy with needing less levels of tools overall, YES.

The biggest hurdle right now is that there is a core group of people willing to devote enough time that any time something new is added it is explored top to bottom immediately. In less than a calendar year, over 650,000 hours have been invested into the game. Lets break that down a bit. In a year there is 365 days at 24 hours a day totaling to 8760 hours in a year. So we as humans have invested 74.41 years of playtime in roughly 11 months of acutal time into this game. No one man can provide that much to curb the easiness that comes from mastering a subject.

When there is more to do, the game will naturally become harder. When advancing tasks are conquered, the workforce (if productive members that will take a bullet), will shift into sustaining tasks, lessening the difficulty curve. Latex lords, taco kings and Stew masters are carved out in minutes rather than through a legacy. Once you have made enough tires to make 6+ carts and you still have 25 minutes left of your life, what the heck else are you going to do? If you care, you'll make sure there is enough pie for 1000 children to feast, or you go poke a bear and see how many people you can stab before someone finds the bow you hid in the forest. To me, both problems are solved when there is more tech, so therefore whether it be deep or wide, anything is welcome.

Greep · 2018-12-16 09:36:17

Well my thoughts are more that less people should have to take that bullet, ya know? Games are supposed to be fun. It's nice to want to make a game that's "hard because survival is hard" but difficulty doesn't translate well into multiplayer cooperative games. It usually just ends up making it more difficult in the "office guy who does the work his coworkers won't do" way. It's worse here, because lack of experience in a very complex game means a lot of people don't even realize they're forcing another player to do all of the boring work to keep a town running.

Yeah, advances to early age tech could help, but honestly just making it easier so we can have more fun with the early tech era would be great. How many early games have you seen where people have had little tribal wars with bow and arrows or people having fun making less meta food, like burritos? Almost zero. You can only do that if you have at least two or three good maintainers.

Edit: To be clear here, I'm not annoyed by having to fill a variety of roles. I'm annoyed by having to fill the core foundation exclusively (carrots, wheat, soil fetcher, branch fetcher) resulting in extreme monotony, if I care about the town survival. And it's only just until recently that I've realized I used to be one of those dudes that wasn't doing what was needed to keep the town running, the town just "mysteriously" dies out while I'm working on the next tech level like carts or pumps, doing something like baking or smithing because I (mistakenly) think I'm the only one who can do it, or just having fun. Which as I've said, mostly just makes me want to /die out of there so I can experience the better parts of the game, as higher tech that already have horse carts and pumps are more efficient and already require less foundation work. Just straight up having a less hardcore game would mean less "maintainers" which would mean you would only have to pick up these roles occasionally.

Last edited by Greep (2018-12-16 10:10:33)

Psykout · 2018-12-16 10:32:49

I am a firm believer in trickle down balance, almost reganomics in a way. That by having the top end of the spectrum balanced and engaging, all tiers beneath it will also be that. If you make the lower end of the bell curve easier, players at the higher end experience no challenge at all. Trying to reign in ways to exploit this curve just leave plays feeling awkwardly constrained and penalized. In a game based off leaving things behind, imploring those invested to teach, you want you playerbase to surpass the median. Its not a competitive ladder that you want 35-45% of your playerbase to be at this rank, and the top rank is 1% if the playerbase. Jason wants us to all be that 1% but it will take a lot of community help to get there. We are also one step above the coworker example. People are paid to be at work, people paid to be here. Granted they paid for a luxury item, and may not want to take it seriously, but I think more side of wanting to care and be productive.

Ending side thought...I wonder... if the playerbase shrank because the game became to trivial and the game didn't change to compensate, would you inevitably have to pick those roles more often?

CrazyEddie · 2018-12-16 15:25:11

pein wrote:

and the guy who tossing my stone blocks out of the jungle, not knowing that mosquitoes cant enter a pen, totally ignoring when i asked, warned him, but runs around like headless chicken yelling griefer for not letting him ruin my work

... after you stabbed him, I presume.

It's true, you're not a griefer, just an asshole.

better communication, and bigger FOV might work, cause you cant really expect much from newbies, fuck composting and firewood, they just want to make pies from rabbits, overwater carrots and leave it and extend and empty a berry field, cause all that they know

NEWSFLASH: People who are new to the game don't know how to play it very well.

CrazyEddie · 2018-12-16 15:29:29

Greep wrote:

I think the solution most people use is to just chain /die out of it until they reach a city for their rest of the time playing OHOL

Perhaps, but that's certainly not true for me. I actually greatly prefer the challenge of getting early settlements running, and right now I'm very bored in big cities.

To each their own.

CrazyEddie · 2018-12-16 15:38:12

Psykout wrote:

As Pein said, better communication would help, but shit, I have to come out and say, instead of people telling you what to do, how about you teach yourself more. Know what to do when you scan the town and see berries and carrots going down, and just go get some stone or adobe and make the pen real quick. Instead of hauling the tenth basket of banana's go make a damn rope, attach it to a stake and get the rabbit fur we need to make a bellows.

New players simply aren't capable of this. But almost every new player will become an experienced player and will start doing all of those things on their own.

... assuming they have an enjoyable initial experience and don't just quit the game because some asshole yelled at them and then stabbed them.

Dodge · 2018-12-16 16:14:33

CrazyEddie wrote:

Psykout wrote:
As Pein said, better communication would help, but shit, I have to come out and say, instead of people telling you what to do, how about you teach yourself more. Know what to do when you scan the town and see berries and carrots going down, and just go get some stone or adobe and make the pen real quick. Instead of hauling the tenth basket of banana's go make a damn rope, attach it to a stake and get the rabbit fur we need to make a bellows.
New players simply aren't capable of this. But almost every new player will become an experienced player and will start doing all of those things on their own.
... assuming they have an enjoyable initial experience and don't just quit the game because some asshole yelled at them and then stabbed them.

Quitting the game because you get yelled at and stabbed , that's some snowflake shit

They will eventually get better and be able to contribute more to the village/early camp, it's already much more manageable than after steam release, it was chaos at that time XD

Greep · 2018-12-16 20:43:04

CrazyEddie wrote:

Greep wrote:
I think the solution most people use is to just chain /die out of it until they reach a city for their rest of the time playing OHOL
Perhaps, but that's certainly not true for me. I actually greatly prefer the challenge of getting early settlements running, and right now I'm very bored in big cities.
To each their own.

Well like, I said, for me as the game gets harder it just gets easier. It's a full time task getting the branches, soil, carrots, and wheat that your partners will not do. And it's not enough to get enough ingredients for a few tools and compost, a town doesn't really thrive until it has a dozen compost piles so it can have milkweed or a few redudandant tools so people aren't running around yelling "where's the hoe?" This is mostly a small village issue. Gen 2/3-10.

Eve and to some degree offspring of eve is slightly different and in a decent spot. You have a lot of tough decisions, # of babies, spot choice, etc and a lot of them are settlement specific. Like sometimes you wanna go for iron straight away like if there's 10,000 bananas nearby, other times you wanna focus on bushes, etc. And you can fail, you're making a lot of decisions and doing a lot of different tasks at least.

Glassius · 2018-12-16 21:56:43

lionon wrote:

pein wrote:
better communication, and bigger FOV might work
I agree.

Communication, communication, communication!

So, there are two types of players: efficient and RPG. Efficient are sparing their time for settlement development and neglect teaching, as early settlement is constantly on the edge of survival. They finish game when face high tech city with plenty of resources and nothing to do. They continue playing only for game mastering (pein) or to check new updates (me). Other players cannot learn from them, as they are only working.

RPG players are griefers, newbies, religious members and so on. The most memorable example is Aurora. They contribute a little or nothing to the settlement, why they contribute a much to the relations and drama. They are the masters of communication, but in terms of learning the game, they have few to say. Sadly, many of them believe the fairytale this is a game about civilization building and parenthood. At this point this is not true, because of lack of communication from efficients.

They get angry at each other, as efficient do not tolerate playing and tech experiments, as this is using out necessary resources. RPGs are getting lost and confused and often leave the game for others with better story tell.

The solution is communication, but how to enforce it? Introduce day/night cycle! Jason may make a night much colder, which will force players to build shelters, in which they need to stay to keep warm. Maybe even beds and tents, to make chit-chats during night with perfect temperature. To counter this shorter time window for work, days may be much warmer, so people are easier at keeping temp balance and working. This would put more time for communication, drama and teaching.

I will make a comprehensive suggestion about it. Please consider supporting it!

pein · 2018-12-17 05:30:12

CrazyEddie wrote:

pein wrote:
and the guy who tossing my stone blocks out of the jungle, not knowing that mosquitoes cant enter a pen, totally ignoring when i asked, warned him, but runs around like headless chicken yelling griefer for not letting him ruin my work
... after you stabbed him, I presume.
It's true, you're not a griefer, just an asshole.

he wasted 10 minutes of my life
and he refused communication
certainly lacked the knowledge of why stuff is there or what is the right course of action
and wasted 1.5 lifetime of work of 2 people, and because i made it out of newcomen foundations partly, it looked so weird i dot think mst people realize what it is, if it would be complete they would know it works and that would have been enough
but hey, lets just kill the advancement of civilization and act like nothing happened
i didn't kil him, i should of

whatever makes you sleep at night

if you think you already know enough, you limit yourself on a stage which might not be the optimal stage
if you refuse communication it's the same thing like doing it intentionally

WalrusesConquer · 2018-12-17 06:44:37

Glassius wrote:

lionon wrote:
pein wrote:
better communication, and bigger FOV might work
I agree.
Communication, communication, communication!
So, there are two types of players: efficient and RPG. Efficient are sparing their time for settlement development and neglect teaching, as early settlement is constantly on the edge of survival. They finish game when face high tech city with plenty of resources and nothing to do. They continue playing only for game mastering (pein) or to check new updates (me). Other players cannot learn from them, as they are only working.
RPG players are griefers, newbies, religious members and so on. The most memorable example is Aurora. They contribute a little or nothing to the settlement, why they contribute a much to the relations and drama. They are the masters of communication, but in terms of learning the game, they have few to say. Sadly, many of them believe the fairytale this is a game about civilization building and parenthood. At this point this is not true, because of lack of communication from efficients.
They get angry at each other, as efficient do not tolerate playing and tech experiments, as this is using out necessary resources. RPGs are getting lost and confused and often leave the game for others with better story tell.
The solution is communication, but how to enforce it? Introduce day/night cycle! Jason may make a night much colder, which will force players to build shelters, in which they need to stay to keep warm. Maybe even beds and tents, to make chit-chats during night with perfect temperature. To counter this shorter time window for work, days may be much warmer, so people are easier at keeping temp balance and working. This would put more time for communication, drama and teaching.
I will make a comprehensive suggestion about it. Please consider supporting it!

Every minute is an year. As much as I would also like a day and night cycle I'm not sure how it could implemented.

MultiLife · 2018-12-17 07:13:21

WalrusesConquer wrote:

Every minute is an year. As much as I would also like a day and night cycle I'm not sure how it could implemented.

Yeah. If we need people to communicate more we need...
1. No limitations to speech for kids to elders (babies can have like 4 letter limit, everyone else gets max)

2. Time. There's never enough though as the game is based on hunger. All time wasted on chasing a guy who doesn't know their name could've been used to make one more set of compost.

3. Identification system: being able to set a title for yourself as your profession so others can see it and talk about it, ask about it, bring apprentice to you etc.

4. Town info board/job list/sign. Just something to at least list professions even if it doesn't show names who is doing what. Players can check themselves who they are lacking.

Day and night cycle shouldn't be implemented in hopes of more communication. That's not what it would be giving us, while also adding more restrictions and forced demands.
So simply put, day/night cycle is not the best or most ideal way to incite more communication between players in this game. Don't force people to sit together, but rather reward people sitting together or talking - even the most effecient worker will pay a visit to a pub if the pub would give them a x2 yum bonus to keep working.

MultiLife · 2018-12-17 07:41:13

Greep wrote:

Unfortunately, if you have any experience with the game, nine times out of ten your job isn't smithing, it isn't baking, it isn't composting, it isn't defending. It's farming carrots and wheat. And more carrots and wheat. Sometimes milkweed. And telling people to do it doesn't help so you're doing it.

Haven't been a wheat/carrot farmer since Steam launch - no, ever. If I farm wheat and carrot I'm also hauling soil, making a hoe and feeding sheep/shearing them. I cannot recall a life of only planting and harvesting without using my harvest. I always take a slice of the harvest to do compost/pies/sheep breeding and plant again. Sure some of it disappears to baskets and baby food but that's usually not the majority.
I was a milkweed farmer once, as a hobby. Made sure I had all I needed and kept planting 8 rows of milkweed. While they grew, I did other things such as hauled firewood or soil. If nobody harvested the milkweed, I did, and planted again. Didn't take my whole life.

Greep wrote:

Thus: because the early game is so hard, it is in fact extremely easy: You have one or two very basic things to do that must be done to keep your town afloat and since you are the only one doing it you have to constantly do that. Occasionally you build a well or a cistern or build your city's first axe. Those games are precious and rare.
I think the solution most people use is to just chain /die out of it until they reach a city for their rest of the time playing OHOL: After farming carrots and wheat for the 1,000,000 time they are just done. The more experienced you are, the less interested in the "hard" life you are. Which ironically makes it worse as the early game is even more newbie dense.

Sure, but people will always get picky and /die no matter how the game functions. I don't think it's an issue if /die is the solution, to me that's not a symptom of a problem. If you are done farming carrot and wheat, then you are. Nobody is forcing you to do it but you yourself. I've left berry fields unattended because I didn't deplete them - I fed myself with wild foods far from town so I wasn't taking the responsibility of it. But I'm the kind of player who doesn't give a rat's bum over how long a lineage lasts so I had zero guilt about it. If you rely on berries, take care of them.

Greep wrote:

I think the solution is to have more finite resources on hand and somehow making predators not kill off all your newbie girls so easily.
... Or just making it not so easy for newbies to disrupt the wheat and carrot seed process.

I don't see how the wild animal thing is a problem, I go kill every nearby wolf and boar when I hit menopause or am an older male.
But yeah I think we should be able to make compost with different items. Is there a reason it magically needs berries and carrot in it?

Last edited by MultiLife (2018-12-17 15:33:10)

lionon · 2018-12-17 07:42:06

MultiLife wrote:

Yeah. If we need people to communicate more we need...
1. No limitations to speech for kids to elders (babies can have like 4 letter limit, everyone else gets max)

If only the max could be increased somewhat for grown ups. Even as elder I often cannot write a full sentence beyond trivial in one bubble, but have to split it up...

And yes kids communication limit could grow somewhat faster. IRL 3-4 year olds have already all the grammar of their mother tongue, the rest is just vocabulary.

Last edited by lionon (2018-12-17 07:42:40)

startafight · 2018-12-17 07:42:42

in regards to your original comment about early civs i honestly think the eve set up is pretty easy and i find it more fun than town playthroughs... i like trying to find the best spot for a town n trying to beat my lineage record. ive also had lives with religious grandmas at 3 gens down the line but that was a lil while ago i suppose (all hail the rabbit gods) and it tends to be the newer players who like to rp in early civs

so i dont think its the early game mechanics thats the problem.... its the distribution of kids. maybe some effort should be made in distributing kids with more or less hours in the game a lil more evenly throughout lineages cos it really just feels like a roulette. idk how that would work tho, maybe players with less than hours in the game would get higher priority in being born into a lineage thats 5+ generations in? while still controlling for the amount of ppl born to longer lineages?

not sure how programming works but i dont think changing the early game mechanics is the way to go on this problem

Glassius · 2018-12-17 23:52:10

MultiLife wrote:

3. Identification system: being able to set a title for yourself as your profession so others can see it and talk about it, ask about it, bring apprentice to you etc.
4. Town info board/job list/sign. Just something to at least list professions even if it doesn't show names who is doing what. Players can check themselves who they are lacking.

About professions, they are already here Blue wool hat, wolf hat, aprons, red cross aprons, straw hats... The only problem is crafting them

Gabby · 2018-12-18 11:14:12

Dodge wrote:

Quitting the game because you get yelled at and stabbed , that's some snowflake shit
They will eventually get better and be able to contribute more to the village/early camp, it's already much more manageable than after steam release, it was chaos at that time XD

It's a multiplayer game, so the community and interaction with other players matters a lot. If people think the community is so shit that they are unable to work at anything because they are stabbed when still learning, of course they will leave. A game is supposed to be enjoyable, and being unable to play because other people won't let you isn't enjoyable.

Sometimes people won't respond to you even if you are trying to tell them what to do because they are paying attention to something else, like trying to learn a recipe or simply not starving.

It is concerning that you think leaving a game because people don't let you play it is "some snowflake shit".

Last edited by Gabby (2018-12-18 11:14:30)

Sylverone · 2018-12-18 12:07:33

Gabby wrote:

Dodge wrote:
Quitting the game because you get yelled at and stabbed , that's some snowflake shit
They will eventually get better and be able to contribute more to the village/early camp, it's already much more manageable than after steam release, it was chaos at that time XD
It's a multiplayer game, so the community and interaction with other players matters a lot. If people think the community is so shit that they are unable to work at anything because they are stabbed when still learning, of course they will leave. A game is supposed to be enjoyable, and being unable to play because other people won't let you isn't enjoyable.
Sometimes people won't respond to you even if you are trying to tell them what to do because they are paying attention to something else, like trying to learn a recipe or simply not starving.
It is concerning that you think leaving a game because people don't let you play it is "some snowflake shit".

I think it comes down to how many times it happens to you, and how many similar experiences you have. If someone overreacts and leaves due to one experience then they are immature and not really capable of giving the game a fair chance, and they will probably have the same experience with other games and maybe even in real life until they grow up more. On the other hand the community of the game has some responsibility for its success in the form of striking a compromise between their personal enjoyment and that of learners. And of course not all learners are the same. And of course it need not always be a compromise, sometimes cool moments come together or someone gets matched to the right person and interesting stuff happens.

From what I've seen there's an ongoing debate regarding what the game is "about", centering around the fact that different players enjoy different aspects of the game, and the fact that it is very hard to reconcile the approaches these players enjoy. The RP vs skillplay debate. I think these two sides are bound to have disagreements because these orientations are largely hardwired in a person's personality, and personality changes (to the degree it does at all) over years, not one-hour-one-lives, and doesn't necessarily change in the way YOU would like anyway (whatever camp you happen to be in). It's a very hard problem, but usually it's much more functional for both sides to engage in some sort of dialogue and debate, and hopefully with the shared knowledge that this communication is useful in the long run if it doesn't break down and need not be mere bickering. Compulsively hard workers also do an unequal part of the work in real life, some of which allows for the incredibly reliable infrastructure that gives creative types room to flourish (and also to be ungrateful).

I think actually that this clash may be part of Rohrer's design intent. After all, he's the one who made the game force players into a social relationship AND a survival challenge at the same time. In part I'm sure he just wanted to see what would happen, maybe learn something. It's part social experiment, much like The Castle Doctrine appeared to be (I haven't played that though, so this is just my impression).

I might make a post laying out my thoughts in more detail sometime. Not that I'm sure they're super important or insigtful, but may as well throw them out there.

Last edited by Sylverone (2018-12-18 12:19:16)

Gabby · 2018-12-18 12:28:07

Sylverone wrote:

I think it comes down to how many times it happens to you, and how many similar experiences you have. If someone overreacts and leaves due to one experience then they are immature and not really capable of giving the game a fair chance, and they will probably have the same experience with other games and maybe even in real life until they grow up more. On the other hand the community of the game has some responsibility for its success in the form of striking a compromise between their personal enjoyment and that of learners. And of course not all learners are the same. And of course it need not always be a compromise, sometimes cool moments come together or someone gets matched to the right person and interesting stuff happens.

I can agree with that, which is why I tell people that yes, sometimes we have really bad days in the game, but that in my experience it is mostly good or at least ok lives. But you never know if that person had a series of bad lives when they are born into your village, so I just try to not be a dick to people. And when people just started, their first few lives can be really frustrating, either because they find it hard to even keep themselves from starving on their first years of life or because someone kills them if they seem new. I prefer to not add to that because I want people to stay, I don't want them to leave bad reviews on Steam because of the community, and I want them to feel that they can reveal that they are new players without being killed for it. Because this game can't thrive without a healthy population, and I want this game to thrive.

Sylverone wrote:

From what I've seen there's an ongoing debate regarding what the game is "about", centering around the fact that different players enjoy different aspects of the game, and the fact that it is very hard to reconcile the approaches these players enjoy. The RP vs skillplay debate. I think these two sides are bound to have disagreements because these orientations are largely hardwired in a person's personality, and personality changes (to the degree it does at all) over years, not one-hour-one-lives, and doesn't necessarily change in the way YOU would like anyway (whatever camp you happen to be in). It's a very hard problem, but usually it's much more functional for both sides to engage in some sort of dialogue and debate, and hopefully with the shared knowledge that this communication is useful and need not be mere bickering.
I think actually that this clash may be part of Rohrer's design intent. After all, he's the one who made the game force players into a social relationship AND a survival challenge at the same time. In part I'm sure he just wanted to see what would happen, maybe learn something. It's part social experiment, much like The Castle Doctrine appeared to be (I haven't played it though, so this is just my impression).
I might make a post laying out my thoughts in more detail sometime. Not that I'm sure they're super important or insigtful, but may as well throw them out there.

We can always be "in the middle". You can be useful to the village and also act like a decent person when someone obviously doesn't know what they are doing, it doesn't have to be one or the other. And if you actually show people what to do instead of killing them for making mistakes, maybe they will be more useful to the village afterwards.

I do think that this clash can be part of Jason's intention, although he already told us what the game is about. "Parenting and civilization building". I feel like too many people forget the "parenting" part.

One Hour One Life Forums

#1 2018-12-16 04:39:46

To make the game even harder, it needs to be made easier.

#2 2018-12-16 05:06:37

Re: To make the game even harder, it needs to be made easier.

#3 2018-12-16 05:08:26

Re: To make the game even harder, it needs to be made easier.

#4 2018-12-16 07:32:04

Re: To make the game even harder, it needs to be made easier.

#5 2018-12-16 07:37:58

Re: To make the game even harder, it needs to be made easier.

#6 2018-12-16 08:15:13

Re: To make the game even harder, it needs to be made easier.

#7 2018-12-16 09:17:31

Re: To make the game even harder, it needs to be made easier.

#8 2018-12-16 09:36:17

Re: To make the game even harder, it needs to be made easier.

#9 2018-12-16 10:32:49

Re: To make the game even harder, it needs to be made easier.

#10 2018-12-16 15:25:11

Re: To make the game even harder, it needs to be made easier.

#11 2018-12-16 15:29:29

Re: To make the game even harder, it needs to be made easier.

#12 2018-12-16 15:38:12

Re: To make the game even harder, it needs to be made easier.

#13 2018-12-16 16:14:33

Re: To make the game even harder, it needs to be made easier.

#14 2018-12-16 20:43:04

Re: To make the game even harder, it needs to be made easier.

#15 2018-12-16 21:56:43

Re: To make the game even harder, it needs to be made easier.

#16 2018-12-17 05:30:12

Re: To make the game even harder, it needs to be made easier.

#17 2018-12-17 06:44:37

Re: To make the game even harder, it needs to be made easier.

#18 2018-12-17 07:13:21

Re: To make the game even harder, it needs to be made easier.

#19 2018-12-17 07:41:13

Re: To make the game even harder, it needs to be made easier.

#20 2018-12-17 07:42:06

Re: To make the game even harder, it needs to be made easier.

#21 2018-12-17 07:42:42

Re: To make the game even harder, it needs to be made easier.

#22 2018-12-17 23:52:10

Re: To make the game even harder, it needs to be made easier.

#23 2018-12-18 11:14:12

Re: To make the game even harder, it needs to be made easier.

#24 2018-12-18 12:07:33

Re: To make the game even harder, it needs to be made easier.

#25 2018-12-18 12:28:07

Re: To make the game even harder, it needs to be made easier.

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