a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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Always carry a hatched, they fit in bags.
Break all shaky fences, or at least make some holes.
Fence twigs dont despawn, people might spam for griefing, so Jason will have to work on that
don't let access be deniedd by these.
Last edited by Booklat1 (2019-04-18 09:51:06)
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Why dont we all chill and see how they actually work out before activly trying to destroy them
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Why dont we all chill and see how they actually work out before activly trying to destroy them
Because anything they could be potentially useful for comes with incredibly large drawbacks.
Fence the berry field so it can't grow? Now you end up with two giant berry fields. Enjoy.
Block people from going in the smithy? Enjoy being at the mercy of someone else to make you a tool head when you could do it in like thirty seconds.
The only thing fences will be good for are griefing and cheap Eve pens you remake later when you get the chance. Ever since he suggested the idea I could see the type of issues coming up a mile away. He's going to spend three days putting this in game and spend three weeks trying to perfect it but the idea basically can only exist as dead content or griefer material.
Smash all fences, curse all gate owners.
fug it’s Tarr.
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Is there an easy way to add all my kids sisters and brothers? I'm dreading keeping track of who can go in and who can't. Really any fence that won't let a person in will probably be trashed by that person. So, the only way to use them is to let everyone in, and use them for exclusion of bad actors and protection from outsiders.
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omnem cibum costis
tantum baca, non facies opus
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Is there an easy way to add all my kids sisters and brothers? I'm dreading keeping track of who can go in and who can't. Really any fence that won't let a person in will probably be trashed by that person. So, the only way to use them is to let everyone in, and use them for exclusion of bad actors and protection from outsiders.
You either leave the gate open at all times (defeating the use of a gate) or sit at the gate and name everyone who can use the gate individually so that they can open it. Baby born? Got to walk over to all the town gates to grant it access or it's not able to open them.
fug it’s Tarr.
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Guppy wrote:Why dont we all chill and see how they actually work out before activly trying to destroy them
Because anything they could be potentially useful for comes with incredibly large drawbacks.
Fence the berry field so it can't grow? Now you end up with two giant berry fields. Enjoy.
Block people from going in the smithy? Enjoy being at the mercy of someone else to make you a tool head when you could do it in like thirty seconds.
The only thing fences will be good for are griefing and cheap Eve pens you remake later when you get the chance. Ever since he suggested the idea I could see the type of issues coming up a mile away. He's going to spend three days putting this in game and spend three weeks trying to perfect it but the idea basically can only exist as dead content or griefer material.
Smash all fences, curse all gate owners.
Only if he doesn't change the current system, but what if he changes the eve spiral and the way area/lineage ban works
We could have villages that dont die off every 2 days and actually have large cities in which gates and fences/walls make sense, since the other villages would be relatively close and the ressources run low at some point, that would inevitably lead to war/trades/cooperation etc.
Since he's adding a way to have property my bet is he's going to change how the game works so property actually makes sense
But i agree that there should be a different gate to protect valuable goods like iron etc and another gate for family that automatically adds family members to list then an elder could revoke permission if someone in family does bad stuff
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So, can we expect babies to /die if you can't add them to enough of the cool places in a town?
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omnem cibum costis
tantum baca, non facies opus
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The only thing fences will be good for are griefing and cheap Eve pens you remake later when you get the chance. Ever since he suggested the idea I could see the type of issues coming up a mile away. He's going to spend three days putting this in game and spend three weeks trying to perfect it but the idea basically can only exist as dead content or griefer material.
In fact even cheap pens is an atrocious idea balance-wise as early composting brings the top of the techtree much closer to the bottom. People might start using gates with actual walls so even those will end up having to be breached. This system is a mess as a design, why have hopes for it's development?
Jason completely ignores that we do already have ways to ensure property but lack the needs to do it. Everything fences do can be done with locks and we only ever use them for griefing.
He even mentioned kin selection, selfish genes, without realizing that differencial survivability is needed for these phenomena. Thing is, as far as resources are concerned, there's enough for everyone. No one will fence ponds to ensure their kids have water because pumps exist. No one will have personal sheep because everyone could get a mufflon. Property starts to matter when people need it for their survival/wellbeing.
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From my perspective, the guy running around smashing everyone's fences would be the griefer. If i saw someone running around smashing everyone's fences, my first instinct would be to assume them a griefer and move to resolved the problem. (I'm obviously referring to someone who has gets no approval for fence smashing, and just does it unilaterally).
But I believe this fence stuff might raise a possible issue when it comes to curses.
As long as the threat of donkey town exists, people will just curse those that don't share. Then we're back where we started. Property would just be an illusion because if you spend a life or two not sharing with the whole world, you might very soon find yourself in DT.
Believe you're right, but don't believe you can't be wrong.
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Days peppers/onions/tomatoes left unfixed: 120
Do your part and remind Jason to fix these damn vegetables.
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So, can we expect babies to /die if you can't add them to enough of the cool places in a town?
People already have a million reasons to /die, why would one more petty reason be something to consider. I feel like it'd be just a drop in the bucket.
Believe you're right, but don't believe you can't be wrong.
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Days peppers/onions/tomatoes left unfixed: 120
Do your part and remind Jason to fix these damn vegetables.
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From my perspective, the guy running around smashing everyone's fences would be the griefer. If i saw someone running around smashing everyone's fences, my first instinct would be to assume them a griefer and move to resolved the problem. (I'm obviously referring to someone who has gets no approval for fence smashing, and just does it unilaterally).
But I believe this fence stuff might raise a possible issue when it comes to curses.
As long as the threat of donkey town exists, people will just curse those that don't share. Then we're back where we started. Property would just be an illusion because if you spend a life or two not sharing with the whole world, you might very soon find yourself in DT.
no one OWNS a fence or land just because they decided to infinitely multiply twigs into a fence. This aside, the issue is more with gates as the only way to overpower them is with murder.
this mechanic is spammable, hard to counter after set up and incentives hoarding. Any decent player can build a chest offtown or hide personal tools behind trees if needed, only to give back later. Now any dumb queen can claim a bakery if pop is low enough for it to pass.
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Since he's adding a way to have property my bet is he's going to change how the game works so property actually makes sense
How? How would he do that? He's already stated in another topic that we're not going to get extended life, because one hour is 'what's on the can'. There are two fundamental issues: You only have one hour, and nothing is limited but iron. He can only address the one hour thing by allowing people to chain back into town. That will STILL require that your decendants grant you access.
The resource situation is fixable but frankly Jason has so far displayed a pretty terrible grasp of resource tree setups in survival games. Just think of all the dead (at best - when it's not griefing tool) content that exists in this game - cards, dogs, dice, fish, pine panels, pork, potatoes, on and on. Do you see people growing tomatoes and onions much anymore now that the 'new content' sheen is gone? How about radios and cars? Built for any other reason than boredom? He's continually favored marginal to useless content vs the actually useful stuff that people ask for. Your faith that Jason is going to 'fix property' is kind of a long shot. If he knew how to do that, I think he would have made the property first, then fences. It's pretty apparent he's just tossing this into the wind and seeing where it blows.
Last edited by Redram (2019-04-18 15:53:43)
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The sad thing is that the property gates and fences won't achieve what Jason wants. And they won't ever ever ever go away.
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If you don't want fences, don't allow them in your town. Because they are so easy to break, they are a collective decision. Do you want property rights, or don't you?
And I do imagine a lot of juicy griefing and counter-griefing around fences. Is the guy building fences the griefer? Or the guy destroying fences?
This game is a huge experiment, exploring various ways of organizing society, and also an experiment in "group selection," which is a controversial topic (though individual natural selection is not controversial at all). Question: do cultures compete at the group level? Are cultures subject to selection pressures? Furthermore, do individual heritable characteristics affect this group selection process?
The idea here is that villages will discover the most efficient and effective ways of running themselves. In real life, we discovered property rights, and that seems to smooth a lot of things out, and make things more efficient. The most productive folks have and maintain access to the materials and equipment that they need to remain productive, and they are motivated to be as productive as possible, which seems to result in increased productivity overall, and times of plenty (and more "plenty," it seems, than produced by any other attempted means of organizing society).
A lot of people claim that property rights in the game will just be a burden. That there's no time for it, and it will result in inefficiency. Maybe they're right. If so, the most successful villages will ban property rights. It definitely seems like many of the most successful villages have eschewed locks, so that might be a sign (or it might be a sing that locks are too much of a pain to use efficiently).
All that said, I don't think the group selection thing is currently working as well as I'd like it to work. Villages do compete for incoming babies, so that's good. But it doesn't feel like there's any real long-term competition, or that there's any real reason to keep a village going as long as possible. We discussed that in a few other threads, and it's still something that I'm thinking about.
In real life, we each only get one shot, and the future is all there is after that.... so we REALLY care that our village doesn't die out.
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Question: do cultures compete at the group level? Are cultures subject to selection pressures? Furthermore, do individual heritable characteristics affect this group selection process?
Yes and yes, civilizations destroy others for resources, people get coherced into wars for patriotism and spread the ideas forward.
But one can always overpower others and this mechanic is a total disbalance of powers. We cant have easy signs because "you have to commit to leave a message", yet with a branch and flint you can make pens, digital doors, walls...
this mechanic wouldnt be half as busted if you gave up on magical gates and gave fences a cost.
To be clear, i AM against hoarding, but i also think this is a poorly designed rushed idea since its inception. We have property in bags, pants, chests.
We NEED competition. For water, animals, babies, trees, everything. Why is it that everyone has acess to iron? To rubber? Copper, alumn? Why is it that composting + any pump + nursery fire is an absolute meta covering all our needs for survival?
I think this hasnt been a population survival game so applying darwinism to it is not that useful.We miss the essential, the struggle to survive.
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We need a way to build real surplus, not competition (unless this is a famine simulator). If this is about building more advanced tech and more specialization, even within the jobs that we have in the game now we need better ways to store more food and resources so that people don't have to switch jobs many times to advert a crisis.
Every town is unstable and teetering on major disaster. That won't change until we can create buffers of the needed goods and you just can't fit enough on a single tile to make that happen right now. It's all about mass storage. Storage issues are why no one focuses on just making rubber or glass, you can't really do that because if you don't pay attention to *everything* your town will fall apart. For the early game this is fine and mirrors early human settlements. But, there is no later game because you never really get out of that stage of being on the verge of a food crisis. This means we don't really see other kinds of more interesting crisis.
This combined with the high rate of babies /dieing means that towns don't last long.
I think that there is some potential for the fences to help with this, they could better protect town resources from people griefing or just accidentally taking things (like the round stone in the stew farm). But, it seems oblique to the real issues in the game. I'm looking forward to trying it, new content is fun. But, I still think there are two major looming issues that prevent more complexity from happening:
-too many babies /die and populations drop
-not enough storage options, so there is no surplus of any significance of most items
Maybe (some) people want the whole game to just be like running a Eve camp, in many ways that's what it is now only players in towns aren't really aware of the danger. People are the most valuable resource in the game. The worst thing you can do to a town in most cases is to die or suicide because without people there is no town, no story to tell. The /die issue is probably the greater issue, and I think I talk more about storage because it seems easier to solve. Will fences help?
You have seen many posts with people trying to come up with ways of better organizing towns, making storage zones, making lists of what goes where. We are doing our best to make the low-level of storage tech work. We will use fences to aid in this goal if possible.
I hope the new update *is* positive. I think it could lead to some interesting gameplay. But civilizations have towers filled with grain, masses of every resource that is what lets art, culture, technology develop. And most of all civilizations have millions of people, all working independently and yet together to keep the vast super organism that is humanity alive. There are moments, flashes, where OHOL captures this energy, they are some of my favorite moments in the game, and I hope future changes will bring us more of that excitement and struggle.
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omnem cibum costis
tantum baca, non facies opus
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...
no towns die to lack of resources, you dont see dead cities devoid of iron and food, only players
This IS a survival game and Jason does seem interested in applying some measure of darwinism to it, competition seems unavoidable.
And yes, human experience was 'work so you dont starve' for long after agriculture, I may not want a grind simulator but at least the threat of death in a survival game. Just enough so i can either starve or suceed in bettering my village.
Honestly, we can already mass produce most things, your entire accessment seems like attempted deviation from the survival aspect of the game.
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So just another survival game? Well if that's the future I'm probably in the wrong place. Right now this game is radically different from most other survival games because you care for other players much more often than you look at them as resources to be mined. You care for your kids, for your parents. You NEED them to get anything interesting done. Playing this game solo is totally pointless. People rarely kill someone to take their stuff, people seem to kill more often to protect the town from a bad player who isn't being efficient. That's a really interesting and new dynamic in a survival game.
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omnem cibum costis
tantum baca, non facies opus
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Do you want property rights, or don't you?
Since you asked ... no, I really don't. But obviously, not having property rights isn't really a choice right now. The fences and gates will exist in the game and people will build them, so I will be born into villages that already have gates and fences in places that don't need gates or fences. I won't have the option to opt out of fences that were put up before I was born and unless I want to spend my life destroying other people's fences, I won't be able to completely prevent them from being built during my lifetime.
You are working from the idea that property rights are good in the "real world" so they should be good in OHOL, but the fact that our villages actively discourage individual property ownership and encourage communal sharing instead, would suggest a different conclusion. Without getting too deep into the political side of life, the way that modern society is organized is just one of many options that have been explored across the span of human history. The fact that OHOL didn't happen to land on capitalism out of all the possibly options for social organization is not necessarily a failing in your program. There are many societies that value cooperation and group survival over individual success and self-egotism.
You say this game is an experiment in "group selection". Why not appreciate the culture of sharing that has developed within your game instead of trying to dismantled it because it isn't the answer you expected? If the goal is to give people more ways to interact with the world, I'd rather it was approached in a less heavy-handed way. Instead of giving us magic soul-bound gateways that die with their masters, give us more ways to personalize our equipment, so I can feel a greater sense of ownership over the cart that I just built with my own hands or the basket that I wove myself. Instead of focusing on personal property, look into ways to allow people to invest more deeply in their village/lineage.
If you were to change the lineage ban to use real time rather than game time, there would be an actual chance that I could come back to the same village and see how it has changed over the course of two or three generations. Not only will this allow me to help keep the village alive and growing, but it will let me see how my actions in one life carry over to help the lives of my descendants. I can actually get excited about multi-generational projects, because I know that the foundation that I build in this life will have a decent chance of being continued, if not in someone else's life, then in one of my future lives, the next time I visit that town. And when a town that I have lived in several times ceases to exist ... I will know it and care about it, because I've invested multiple lives into its development. That is the kind of town where I would consider building myself an actual house and maybe storing some things for later use. A little place to call my own .... a home or a workshop where I could spend my time when I come back to this place.
I think a lot of people would welcome that kind of a "personal property" update. It fills a need that people have been requesting for a very long time AND increases the value of personal ownership.
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no towns die to lack of resources, you dont see dead cities devoid of iron and food, only players
This IS a survival game and Jason does seem interested in applying some measure of darwinism to it, competition seems unavoidable.And yes, human experience was 'work so you dont starve' for long after agriculture, I may not want a grind simulator but at least the threat of death in a survival game. Just enough so i can either starve or suceed in bettering my village.
Honestly, we can already mass produce most things, your entire accessment seems like attempted deviation from the survival aspect of the game.
I think the problem with competition is on a local level you'll just screw yourself by trying to hoard a bunch of stuff from your village whether it be pies, berries, or just tools. If a woman from a second village walks over to your own area it's best for you to work with her rather than against her because more babies = more chance for the town to survive for a long period of time. Competition on a global scale is probably fine but it's not exactly like you know who you're dealing with since they're so far away most of the time.
The biggest issue of working to make the game more difficult is what do you nerf and how do you do it reasonably?
We've talked about food decay and that's one of the better in my opinion (start soft decay on wheat/meats with other foods later)
Nerfing iron leads to people screeching about shovel usage due to composting and thus the game becomes revolved around yelling at people trying to have fun with the shovel (even if potatoes and graves are actually wastes.)
Nerfing composting soil certainly makes for a real limit on how long an area is viable but how long should a place realistically last? A few days? A week? What should be the actual limit of a towns usage before leaving for greener fields?
Nerfing water just leads to a meta of moving towards a bunch of ponds which seems silly.
We've seen the game broken with any and every real item being unlimited food is realistically the only problematic item to be unlimited due to it being our only need in game. Unlimited iron leads to people being able to do whatever project they want, unlimited water basically does nothing (you can see this effectively now), unlimited soil just allows problems to be fixed easier, and unlimited food means people stand around doing nothing.
fug it’s Tarr.
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You say this game is an experiment in "group selection". Why not appreciate the culture of sharing that has developed within your game instead of trying to dismantled it because it isn't the answer you expected? If the goal is to give people more ways to interact with the world, I'd rather it was approached in a less heavy-handed way. Instead of giving us magic soul-bound gateways that die with their masters, give us more ways to personalize our equipment, so I can feel a greater sense of ownership over the cart that I just built with my own hands or the basket that I wove myself. Instead of focusing on personal property, look into ways to allow people to invest more deeply in their village/lineage.
Thank you for saying this. I think people hear these kinds of things as eliminating conflict in the game, but really the fences seems like a way to eliminate (good interesting) conflict that could be more dynamically solved by players with more personalization of items. The combination of helping players but also the possibility of violence in OHOL is really unique in gaming. Most of the time you work to help others most of the time you don't take a item someone is using. But you CAN. And that gives that choice meaning.
I feel real joy when I see a little stew farm with all the proper tools and no one has ruined it. It makes me really happy, because I know that every person had another choice.
Now when I see an organized stew farm it will have a fence around it. And if there isn't a fence maybe people will treat it as a free for all. So that joy could vanish from that game. Though, I do think there will still be the joy of knowing that your family the people who are allowed to use a space have worked together to make it functional and nice. So, maybe it won't be too bad. I'm very ambivalent about this change it does kind of feel like I'm being *forced* in to a new more selfish play style. And if it works out that way I don't know how long I'll be around. This game is unique and I hope that won't change.
But, lets see what the impact is. I like the game too much to give up on it just because it *might* turn in to every other boring survival game that I avoid.
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omnem cibum costis
tantum baca, non facies opus
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So just another survival game?
oh ffs, if you think you cant keep survival and family simulator together you're missing the best this game has to offer.
try eveing a bit and see how struggle makes you care for your kids.
This game is nothing like others because its both very family focused and survival focused. At least it is when eveing and has been at times it got harder. If you arent rushing carrots to feed kids those might as well be just another drop in a nursery
property only exists for need or greed, rather design the needs than let people do it for alone for greed
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Unlimited food means people stand around doing nothing.
To be fair they aren't doing nothing. They are often talking, building relationships and stories. They have kids and some of those kids may build or improve the town. I never feel like there is enough time to stop and say more than one or two words when playing. I would like to be able to teach more often in-game. I would like to ask for help on my projects or help others. Some people just do this even though there isn't really enough food for it to be safe or stable for next generation. But, I don't see how it hurts me directly if people spend more time interacting.
Other than resenting people for not recognizing there is work to be done what is the issue with people standing around talking and building culture?
This is how you get more complexity. I mean what if you talked about where to put the sheep pen instead of just plopping it down? Talked about how to lay out the town and where to build roads?
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omnem cibum costis
tantum baca, non facies opus
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Tarr wrote:Unlimited food means people stand around doing nothing.
To be fair they aren't doing nothing. They are often talking, building relationships and stories. They have kids and some of those kids may build or improve the town. I never feel like there is enough time to stop and say more than one or two words when playing. I would like to be able to teach more often in-game. I would like to ask for help on my projects or help others. Some people just do this even though there isn't really enough food for it to be safe or stable for next generation. But, I don't see how it hurts me directly if people spend more time interacting.
Other than resenting people for not recognizing there is work to be done what is the issue with people standing around talking and building culture?
This is how you get more complexity. I mean what if you talked about where to put the sheep pen instead of just plopping it down? Talked about how to lay out the town and where to build roads?
Don't get me wrong, I didn't mean that in a rude tone like it's wrong for them to stand around but it's just something I've noticed. You aren't hurting me in this situation ever since obviously they're having their own sort of fun and that's perfectly fine in my opinion. If people want to chill out and eat stacked carrots that's okay, I like to have a chilled life too every now and then myself. I just meant it in the sense when food is essentially free there's a lot less things you need to worry about which opens up to these sort of situations.
If the game is 90% cooking/eating then when food is essentially free people don't have a lot of work to do besides passion projects or weird gimmick stuff which leads to what I was trying to get at. Working for food doesn't have to be mind numbing or incredibly difficult, but it also shouldn't be completely free. Think something like stew where you work for a few minutes then have a few minutes of chill time while you cook the stuff.
fug it’s Tarr.
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I think the problem with competition is on a local level you'll just screw yourself by trying to hoard a bunch of stuff from your village whether it be pies, berries, or just tools. If a woman from a second village walks over to your own area it's best for you to work with her rather than against her because more babies = more chance for the town to survive for a long period of time. Competition on a global scale is probably fine but it's not exactly like you know who you're dealing with since they're so far away most of the time.
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We've seen the game broken with any and every real item being unlimited food is realistically the only problematic item to be unlimited due to it being our only need in game. Unlimited iron leads to people being able to do whatever project they want, unlimited water basically does nothing (you can see this effectively now), unlimited soil just allows problems to be fixed easier, and unlimited food means people stand around doing nothing.
I dont know what pressures should be dominant but so far its safe to say:
1 there should not be only one important resource at any moment
2 needs should effectively change as civs develop
to me sheep break 1 since it gives everything we need for food stability and oil doesnt function as 2.
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