The Guillotine and the Baton; an attempt to answer the Curse problem

Wuatduhf · 2019-04-23 12:35:33

Greetings!

Recently, a certain topic has come to the forefront on what many considered an abuse of the system; cursing. Curse tokens were introduced as a way to combat players negatively impacting the gameplay experience for others. Due to the ambiguity and the purposes that people may use it for, it was built to require a threshold of Curse tokens on an individual in order for it to make the person 'stand out' in future lives; their text box would be altered, and they would be sent to the lands known as "Donkey Town" to spend some amount of time there until they were allowed to play with the general population again. While this system should work in principal, it has been determined by the community to be an incomplete resolution to handling people who play the game in ways they disagree with (griefing, murdering on whim, etc.). The following will be my attempt to propose to us all, namely Jason, on transferring self-policing to the villages and the future of respawning & area/lineage banning.

Let's start with the topic of Self-policing, and the game that had successfully implemented it that gave me the inspiration for the subject.

Prior to discovering One Hour One Life, I used to be involved in a community called 'CivCraft'. Much like OHOL, it was a Minecraft Server built on the idea of being a social experiment, a high scarcity of resources, geographical resource discrimination, and hands-off administration. Players were allowed to establish their own societies/cities, establish their own political/economic systems, and enforce them as they sought. Beyond hacking/duplication, there were no bans. If anyone that chose to 'act out' or perform activities that the community or a political group deemed a problem, they had to be handled by those same players.

Rather than requiring people to download mods, 'Plugins' were incorporated to modify the base game rules to give the above experience. Farming was upgraded from minutes to multiple hours; metals were made scarce in terrain generation so that specific biomes had a higher spawn rate of certain ones, while diamonds remained lucrative. "Factories" were craftable by arranging blocks in a specific fashion, they had an immense investment cost, but greatly increased the efficiency of resource refinement. "Exp", a currency earned from breaking blocks, was removed and could only be made through a Factory.

Finally, Ender Pearls were used as a tool for self-policing. Killing a player while holding onto one would 'imprison' them in The End, with no option of escape. For a daily upkeep cost, the player would continue to be trapped within The End until the pearl itself (with their name on it) was 'broken' and they were freed to rejoin society. It was both a success in dealing with 'criminals' while remaining a political tool for cities/civilizations to set limits on what was/wasn't allowed in their societies.

From this, I believe Curses follow the same principal of individual player responsibility, but it does not adequately match how that system worked. At any given moment, there is a possibility of misinformation, miscommunication, or even a misunderstanding when a knife/bow murder happens. Very rarely will a person have confidence in knowing the true circumstances for any knife, bow, or other-associated murder.

Now, let's talk about the Baton and the Guillotine.

Baton:
- Symbol of law enforcement
- Used for non-lethal subduing of targets

Guillotine:
- State tool most often depicted in the Reign of Terror over France during the French Revolution.
- Used for capital punishment on criminals, 'enemies of the state', those whose actions were
- Considered the more 'humane' method of elimination due to non-perfect execution alternatives prior

Both of these items were tools for self-policing, on the state-wide scale and the individuals who made sure society was 'safe'.

The Baton would be a valuable tool in OHOL to non-lethally subdue a player within a village that was murdering, acting 'violent', etc. The players of a village can ultimately determine how many there should be available, who needs to have it, and what it should be used on. Mofobert even drew representations of what the baton could look like, and what a player would look like when hit by one such.

Baton Held Hit By Baton

While I'm not going to go any further into what the baton can do, since that is up to Jason to fully figure out how he wants to implement it, I will end w/ the suggestion that once a player is hit with it, they should be able to be 'rope'd' or grabbed by another player to be able to be imprisoned, knifed more publicly/privately, or even put on the Guillotine.

The Guillotine was a brutal tool used against society to keep people in line. This tool has been discussed on frequent in the OHOL Discord (and even in the News update most recently! I would be amused if it was Jason lurking on our conversation topics about it that inspired that paragrpah ;D), and it has a place in OHOL for replacing the Curse system, by making player removal much more in the hands of the people playing.

If we want to look to in-game interactivity for policing each other as opposed to a text-based, popularity-based system of policing, I would suggest the following exist for the Knife/Bow, and the Guillotine:

- If a player is murdered by a Bow/Knife, the victim should be subject to a lineage ban for the next 1-3 hours; they are area-banned for a 500 radius from the location they were stabbed for the same 1-3 hours.

- If a player is executed by the Guillotine, the executed are banned from that family's lineage; they are banned from spawning within 5k x 5k of the Guillotine; the bans do not lift until the server is reset via Apocalypse.

My proposal here is that instead of needing to Curse people and depend on others being able to also Curse, the individuals communities are the ones that get to decide, "Is this person, this player, enough of a burden on our society that we never want to see them come back ever again?"

This system removes the worry of seeing a griefer come back for another round, whether by living in your village or traveling from another one. This system removes the dependency on anonymous people from multiple villages to have to Curse the same person enough times that they hit the necessary threshold, which is set higher because of the fear of false positives. Without the Curse system, players who do end up falsely reported (or even positively reported) are not immediately stigmatized in the next village they are in w/ black text; they have a chance to be a normal 'towny', and to change their actions before they get "Guillotine'd" from that village as well.

I believe this adequately touches on my opinions of the Curse system, and where I think the OHOL community could take policing into its own hands, in order to further develop the social experiment that Jason is trying to see. The subject did dip quite a bit into how respawning works, which I believe could also be changed, but to keep things focused, let's just discuss the Baton, the Bow/knife, and the Guillotine here.

Thank you. Comments are appreciated.

Last edited by Wuatduhf (2019-04-23 12:38:36)

Guppy · 2019-04-23 12:52:19

I really like this! and it feels like it would fit right into the police thing jason talked about in toxic's latest bragging post

pein · 2019-04-23 20:26:15

most guards are griefers
or just useless

we might use some disarm mechanic other than snowball

people would use guilottine to spawn as eve or to kill babies for the lullz
if someone is on murder cooldown, a lasso could catch him and brought to guillotine , he shouldn't starve in meantime, maybe a time of 5 min is ok as punishment but people would just quit the game if they locked up more than that

Wuatduhf · 2019-04-23 22:02:53

pein wrote:

most guards are griefers
or just useless
we might use some disarm mechanic other than snowball
people would use guilottine to spawn as eve or to kill babies for the lullz
if someone is on murder cooldown, a lasso could catch him and brought to guillotine , he shouldn't starve in meantime, maybe a time of 5 min is ok as punishment but people would just quit the game if they locked up more than that

I agree that people can be useless (I prefer the term 'braindead') and/or griefers and that's still up to us, as people, to control. Do you just make a single baton, two, three, to protect the village? Are you making sure, like Knives, that they get handed down to people that 'seem' responsible? At the very least, we're dealing with significantly-less lethal tools being handed out to ensure people keep a village 'safe'.

Being able to disarm griefers/murderers is a good goal to have; but at the same time, if the situation were flipped, what if you were trying to kill the griefer/murderer with a knife and they disramed you at range? Having both Baton and Knife be close-range tools to combat others feels like the most balanced approach to it.

The Guillotine should not be controllable by a single person, and should probably have an age restriction on it so that you're not off'ing people way too early in life, but at the same time, that's up to the individual, isn't it? Would you want to live in a village where a group of people managed to coordinately kill you 'for the lulz'? I am certain that if Jason were to consider implementing such a tool, there would be safeguards to make sure it's checking for enough people being involved; you could require the Guillotine needs to be prepped while the griefer/murderer is held via rope, that way at least 2 people are required; you could require them having to be stuck in said Guillotine for a minimum of 3-5 minutes, so that someone is forced to keep them fed while they await their execution, and so that people can see that it's happening. After all, it did draw in crowds when it was first introduced.

Toxic · 2019-04-23 22:11:31

Dude this is actually a good idea. Not saying this from a griefers perspective. This would make griefing harder and more challenging. As of now griefing is way to easy.

One Hour One Life Forums

#1 2019-04-23 12:35:33

The Guillotine and the Baton; an attempt to answer the Curse problem

#2 2019-04-23 12:52:19

Re: The Guillotine and the Baton; an attempt to answer the Curse problem

#3 2019-04-23 20:26:15

Re: The Guillotine and the Baton; an attempt to answer the Curse problem

#4 2019-04-23 22:02:53

Re: The Guillotine and the Baton; an attempt to answer the Curse problem

#5 2019-04-23 22:11:31

Re: The Guillotine and the Baton; an attempt to answer the Curse problem

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