Jason might as well go quiet again

BerrypickerAF · 2019-04-24 21:21:55

I know this probably will just fall on deaf ears, and at worst I will get banned - but let's be real here - Jason doesn't care about us at all, and I just want to tell you why I feel this way.

First, let me just show you a couple examples of how he treats his community:

jasonrohrer wrote:

You already experienced personal trouble with the curse changes, Tarr?
Oh, that's right, they're not even live yet...

(very professional)

jasonrohrer wrote:

Did you watch the video?

(snappy reply to a user asking for clarification)

Okay so we established that he isn't exactly gifted in the field of community management, no big deal, few can be good at doing everything.

However, over the past month or so I have seen a drastic increase in activity by him here, but it never feels like he actually listens. How often have we gotten a late-night post with a wild idea from him met with lots of confusion by the community, only to be implemented in less than a week in his original conception?

The fence thing really is a prime example. To sum it up in case someone missed it:

Players:
Jason: Why are you not trading?
Players: Wait, we're supposed to trade?
Jason: I will give you fences so you can have property
Players: Pls no
Jason: Here's your fences

This pattern has repeated a few times now, and it's just the latest example. It's as if he invents problems to fix with drastic changes, instead of focusing on polishing the game. I almost feel like a fool for wasting time by trying to communicate with him, it falls on deaf ears anyway.

Why pretend to care about what we think and want when he's just going to do whatever he wants anyway?

Turnipseed · 2019-04-24 21:38:43

Jason isnt known for acting professional and thats why i love watching this game grow.

I feel like he reads more of our feedback than he lets on but if the man did everything (or even just some) of what we suggest he wouldn't have time to eat or sleep.

I was mad at changes when i bought the game loved it then it changed but over time ive come to see this is as much a video game as it is a work of art.

Its jasons vision we didnt pay for the game we paid for server access, and to watch the game develop.

Im 100% certain he sees most of our feedback, but he is a one man squad. Just community management is a tough job for one. Let alone the coding, drawing, server maintinece, ect.

Alot of times he just throws shizz at the wall to see what works and i think thats fun to watch personally.

Solbusaur · 2019-04-24 21:44:59

With the second quote, it seems unfair to assume it's a snappy tone

Tarr · 2019-04-24 21:50:53

I mean I don't mind Jason being snappy as I'm actively questioning whether or not something he thinks is a good idea. Sure he might make me do a 180 and see things from his view but with the only changes I've seen this week being a nerf to punishing griefers I'm doubtful. Funny enough though it now means walking someone from one family to another makes for the perfect police officer however, people have to both not abuse the power, and actually want to protect a place (and not just grief it.)

Jason just has a different view of the game than we do as players. Jason sees fences as something that could solve problems and I on the other hand see them something that cause problems. At the end of the day it's his game to do with what he pleases but I will always speak up if I think he is doing something silly.

Léonard · 2019-04-24 23:21:34

I wholeheartedly agree with the OP.

Though there is even another aspect I'd like to add.
The fact that Jason often shows contempt towards the community when we oppose him.
Like when he changed the lineage ban to the area ban and people told him it was absolutely horrible because of the distance (which it was) and he simply told us "you guys liked going back to the same villages and I suspect you just want to do that again without telling me".
Or back when he decided to change the biome temperatures and people told him the fact that certain places had perfect temperature wasn't such a big deal and he simply said "you guys want everything to be easy".
Yeah. That's contempt. Arrogantly assuming our true intentions while completely discarding our arguments.
That's unbearable for me.
Do you really think we just want to play a pie baking simulator or something?

Tarr wrote:

Jason just has a different view of the game than we do as players.

The problem with this is that there's an actual reason behind such a disconnect and that reason is none other than Jason himself.

This is something I wanted to post about but I figured it wouldn't matter anyways, I got fed up.
I came here and bought the game because Jason communicated a vision to me, through his trailer.
The problem though is that the trailer is immutable whereas Jason's vision is constantly shifting.
From what I could tell in the trailer, I saw people being a small contribution in the rebuilding of civilization up to the point where we have modern cars or even atomically powered bases.
He even stated he'd be "one step ahead" of said civilization by adding new content every week.
This vision sold me immediately. Rebuilding civilization up to such a point sounded like the most exciting thing ever (reminded me of the industrial modded mc experience which I talked about in one of my very first posts).

The reality however is so much more different.
And I mean it. Just watch the trailer and compare that to the last few months of update and tell me it's the same thing.
It's not.
Now instead Jason seems to be completely focused on enforcing a certain playstyle in his game and that simply because "there is not enough drama" and "you don't want to kill each other enough".
It's ridiculous and honestly I'm sick and tired of it. Where's the new content?
When can we get back to rebuilding civilization, Jason?

jasonrohrer wrote:

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

That's what made me want to reply to Jason.
Him suddenly deciding the game was about useless drama rather than rebuilding civilization like the vision of his trailer promised me.
That's not what I signed up for. I'm tired of it.

His vision simply seems to shift according to what he thinks we should be doing rather than making a fun game given the initial premise of rebuilding civilization.
And that disconnect between what the people think they're playing and what Jason wants can be further explained by him simply barely playing his own game.
A lot of people are starting to suspect this. He must be playing another game, how come is his vision SO MUCH different from what people play?
He played one life with fences and had thoughts about killing his own blood and decided, based on that one life, that the fences are working as intended.
How convenient.
No wonder since he seems to want drama at all costs, when griefers come and tell their dramatic stories (because that's what they're here for, mind you), he bows down to them and does as they please.

I registered and started posting in this forum because I am passionate about this game, because I recognized that it had an enormous potential.
I wanted to keep rebuilding civilization and advancing in the tech tree.
But no, instead, we should be his lab testing rats.
Instead we should fight each other because of contrived reasons simply because Jason all of the sudden decided we weren't telling enough stories.
And, forgive me but, fuck that.

Bob 101 · 2019-04-24 23:46:20

I don't I'd be much different in his shoes, Same people always giving him shit all the time. And people do like to bash things before trying them.

And people do tend to exploit stuff without telling him for months. Desert edge and cows for example. If we don't respect him, Why should he listen to us.

And the curse new system dosn't change regular game play much. The majority of curses hit the griefer while he is alive, Most curse what they see.

It is rare for families to live together and people are too accepting of outsiders. You just walk in from a distant town and nobody questions you, You're immediately welcome to join their society.

But now that they cannot be cursed things may change. You now have cause to deny outsiders, You don't wanna have uncursables in your town. It creates more tensions between families.

Last edited by Bob 101 (2019-04-25 00:09:53)

honikker · 2019-04-25 00:07:51

The way I see it, if you don't like how he's running things/his servers you can create your own or find a private server being run in a way that you do like.

Astelon · 2019-04-25 00:39:18

Léonard wrote:

(lots of text)

To be honest, I'm with you on the vision of the game. I showed some videos to my girlfriend about the game and she got it for both of us for my birthday to play. The idea of rebuilding civilization that way was pretty unique and we both wanted to try it out. She played a few games alone and didn't do too well as she knew nothing and people weren't very helpful. I played my first game alone, and that was pretty much the best life I had. Since we were both new, I decided to make ourselves a server where to learn how to do stuff. I found out later that we could play together, but she didn't play on the main servers as she still wanted to learn. I did play on them alone, but things weren't too remarkable (other than my last life where I was the only female left in a large town and basically all but one child used /die or were afk). I did join the discord and the forum in the meantime, but the more I stayed there, the less I was excited about playing with my girlfriend on the main servers. Apart from griefers and people being obsessed with playing perfectly to the point of calling you a griefer or killing you for not doing the same, turns out that people also aren't really fond of twins. Not really the idea I had of the game, but hey, it was still rebuilding civilization and people were actually working together towards that, and I still had my server which is really enjoyable.

Meanwhile, Jason decides to post that topic about war in the game a few days after I got it. At first, I thought it was an april fools joke, especially since it was on 2 april. Sure, war and trade are what happens in real life, and I was curious what he'd do to make these possible. Maps or ways to reach other people would've been nice. Or maybe more restricted resources that could be traded. Instead we get the idea of private property, which I honestly don't think makes much sense in the scope of the game. I was hoping he'd ditch it, but it eventually got implemented.

Apart from the fancy clothes update (which is the first update since I got the game), the direction is pretty much moving from rebuilding civilization to destroying it. Drama does make interesting stories, but most of the time, it destroys instead of create. And I'm not much of a gossiper myself either. I wanted the game on the premise that I'm gonna be able to contribute to settlements and leave something behind. I'd rather not have it destroyed by griefers or war or some conflict arisen within the family over petty stuff. If I wanted to fight people, I'd have played a game that's about fighting people. If I wanted war, there are grand strategy games that I love that of course allow you to go to war. It's been a while since I played on the main servers, and I'm curious how the new update is, but I'm not that keen on inheriting some property that I don't have what to do with and getting killed by theoretically my own family for it. The people who do talk about the game don't leave that great of an impression about it, and I haven't seen many positive stories about the new property fences. Up until now, making that private server was the best decision I made regarding the game.

Tarr · 2019-04-25 00:56:38

Bob 101 wrote:

I don't I'd be much different in his shoes, Same people always giving him shit all the time. And people do like to bash things before trying them.

And people do tend to exploit stuff without telling him for months. Desert edge and cows for example. If we don't respect him, Why should he listen to us.

And the curse new system dosn't change regular game play much. The majority of curses hit the griefer while he is alive, Most curse what they see.
It is rare for families to live together and people are too accepting of outsiders. You just walk in from a distant town and nobody questions you, You're immediately welcome to join their society.
But now that they cannot be cursed things may change. You now have cause to deny outsiders, You don't wanna have uncursables in your town. It creates more tensions between families.

You know the cow not degrading into a normal cow was reported in the actual bugs section of the forums where Jason didn't care to look right? I had that posted for over two months for him to fix and had to specifically bring it up to him when talking about item duplication for him to fix the bug.

https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=3572

People are much less likely to give something a chance if they see glaring issues with the concept. Things Jason rushes are generally some of the most broken pieces of content we get in game. Butter knives, arrow-notes, DOGS. Jason basically said he came up for the idea for fences at like 3 in the morning in the middle of the week and from that alone people were flipping and tossing. No, they don't increase efficiency like he said they would. No, they don't encourage actual trade they encourage hoarding of communal resources. People could see this coming from a mile away and everyone knew fences were a bad idea.

The curse thing is problematic because you either kill the troll and can't curse them because of the time limit placed on after death OR you let them fuck up the town which lets you have a CHANCE to send them to donkey town. You're not guaranteed you have enough tokens in a village of people, nor are you that the people will be old enough to curse before they're dead for too long. Sure, changing cursing out of lineage can make sense but the second change absolutely doesn't and that's the problem. He wants to change something before giving us the actual tools to deal with the person on our own.

Give me a nonlethal weapon and handcuffs and I can play my own personal police at which point donkey town is less needed, but until then there actually has to be a way to get asshats out of the general populace instead of me shoving dicks all over everyone else.

Spoonwood · 2019-04-25 02:00:09

I agree with the original post and a lot of the comments here.

Leonard wrote:

He played one life with fences and had thoughts about killing his own blood and decided

To speak more precisely Jason wanted to kill his own sister.

Since Jason has emphasized that he wants to care about the survival of our lineage (NOT of towns), one might even be forgiven for believing that Jason has been dishonest with what he wants for the game. I'm not inclined to make that move, since his general response to multiple people telling him that certain things are not good ideas on multiple occasions and him just ignoring them, and other updates like the radio updates which clearly lead people away from thinking about family survival (tech has an attractiveness to it even if useless), it seems more likely to me that Jason just hasn't realized that he made changes contrary to his primary goal. But you know what? It's not clear that Jason comes as all that inclined to listen. In the temperature overhaul thread he said:

jasonrohrer wrote:

I mean, people always complain when something changes, and tell me that the sky is falling. Where's the evidence?

https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewt … d=5304&p=3

The problem though comes as that he doesn't seem to realize that people saying things repeatedly comes as a form of evidence that the playerbase isn't happy with something, or that something that he wants the playerbase to do (like playing for lineage survival) becomes even less likely to happen because of one of his changes.

Oh, and if you're reading this Jason you might want to know this. Tarr said on discord that he was suiciding out of families where property fences were getting built (I don't think he was doing that for property fence sheep pens). I think I did that once, and feel inclined to do that in the future. It's THAT bad. I literally want to disown my family completely as a baby if they start up with that hoarding property fence nonsense. That's rather contrary to people playing the sake of their lineage.

futurebird · 2019-04-25 03:05:08

I think the tone in this thread is kinda mean but there are some decent point being made here. It must be hard to separate the noise of constant complaints and suggestions from a general trend. But when Spoonwood, Tarr and I all agree on something the planets must have aligned funny. The fence update didn't help the goal of "building civilization" and it didn't make me care more. That said I'm finding it easy to ignore, fences don't last long and you don't have to interact with them and people are making them less and less. Take this image:

On the right is all the iron I gathered in a life. On the left a fence another player built in a life. Both of these were our major project and I know we both did other things too (like I planted a ton of milkweed and made 8 buckets)

But these were the things we both worked on most. What will be the impact of these additions to the town? If the guy can't find a good heir his fence is gone. If I can't find a kid who wants to smith for days, someone else will step up and do it. Fences take a long time to make leaving little time for other gameplay and they make people kinda cranky in some cases.

I've said before I don't think having some content that is used less is bad. I think that is the future of fences. Beyond early sheep pens, and a few edge cases we will see them less and less, but we live with the problems like the inconsistency of what you can put in a cart every time we play. I hope to see an update that speaks to the concerns that players keep mentioning: area ban, storage, too much /die etc.

Again I trust you to choose the best path for the game this isn't a democracy, you can't do anything creative and good totally by committee. And in this whirlwind of criticism I'll mention again that you've made a great game and we are just trying to reach you, don't let the more negative and cross comments get you down.

jasonrohrer · 2019-04-25 04:16:32

Not sure about the bug discussion area. As a rule, I never look there. I do eventually get around to each and every bug posted on Github, though. There's a huge backlog to go through right now, but I'm busy with other things. I will get around to fixing each and every bug eventually. Not sure what's going on with Cows degrading, but if there's still an issue, please post it on Github.

Also, people have been posting glaring balance issues on Github too, and that's been super helpful. Like, "Did you know that Milk is a more efficient food than anything else by a factor of 100?" Actually, no one posted that (yet), but I wasn't aware of it until I saw a food chart here in passing. I mean, if the balance difference is intentional, I'll comment and close the issue. But most likely, it's something that I haven't realized before.

Keep in mind that this is already one of the most complicated games ever made. 2600 objects, 3100 transitions. 1997 hand-drawn sprites.

It's hard, if not impossible, to stay on top of absolutely everything, or get everything perfect. This game will never be perfect. It is simply too big and too complicated. It's more of a "beautiful mess" type of game than a perfectly-crafted jewel of a game. There will be content dead-ends (like dogs), and there's a lot more of those coming in the future.

It's also impossible to stay completely on top of everything that goes on in the forums. I don't read every thread. How could I? That's an 8-hour-a-day job by itself.

But regarding ideas presented here, there are some good ones, and some bad ones. Or maybe some that I simply don't like, or ideas that don't match my vision or sensibilities or capacity to implement.

I am looking for feedback on the ideas that I come up with. I get feedback here, and also from my personal designer friends. I certainly did not ignore feedback in the property discussion, which lead up to fences. Fences ended up being totally different than the initial idea (achitect's hat? elder stone?) based on feedback.

But players saying "No, don't change the game, we like it the way it is!" That's pretty meaningless feedback. Of course some people like it the way it is, and don't want it to change. I've seen that with every game I've ever worked on.

Do you all remember how MAD everyone was when I got rid of infinite carrots in week 3 or whatever? How many people said the game was ruined, and even asked for refunds?

But clearly, they were wrong. The game is so much better now than it was back then. It took time to get there, but if we went back to infinite carrots right now, you would all instantly see how terrible it is by comparison.

Same when I fixed the desert boundary exploit. Oh god, game is ruined! This isn't the game we love to play. But clearly, a few months later, the game is way better now than it was back then.

And it's not just my game. This happens for EVERY game that is in active development. I saw it happening with Rust over and over. The devs were working hard, improving the game, and changing core things along the way. The game was getting better and better over time. But everyone was complaining with each and every major change. The game is ruined!

After 19 games, I know better than to get too worked up over that kind of feedback.

Now, fences have ruined the game!

So get ready, folks. The only constant in this game is going to be change. When we finally reach the light at the end of the tunnel, it will be a totally different and better game than it is right now.

And that's the dirty secret, really: even if you love the core of the game the way it is... even if you've played it for 100s or 1000s of hours, you're in a small minority. The game is not nearly as successful or popular as it should or could be. And there's only one reason for that: the core of the game just isn't good enough yet! It's my job to figure out why, and make it better.

And finally, yes, it is my job to "make you" do certain things in the game. That's what a game designer does. In LOL, if they add a new Jungle monster to the game, but they find that no one is bothering to slay it, that's a problem. They keep reworking that jungle monster, and its reward, until players start slaying it. They are "making" the players slay it. Players who want to play the game well simply have no choice but to slay that monster in certain situations. Never slaying the monster, ever ever, is a losing strategy.

As a simple example, it is currently impossible to get a fixed-location Eve camp off the ground without building a fire. In order to farm, you need either clay bowls, or water pouches, and both require fire. And sure enough, visit any Eve camp, and at some point, they are trying to make fire. That's a pretty obvious example, where progress is impossible otherwise. But there are more subtle examples. I haven't seen a dog in the game in months. I'm currently "making" you avoid breeding dogs, because of the way they are structured. I made those choices, and my choices are manifested by your behavior in the game. Same with your preference for oven bases over real fences. I made you do that, based on the costs that I authored.

So I look at the game as it stands, and notice that you never trade. You should be trading. That would be interesting. So I need to figure out how to restructure the game so that you'll trade. To make you trade. To make you depend on leadership. To make you develop village laws and enforcement. To make you have occasional intra- and inter-village conflicts.

Regarding "broken" updates and things that are rushed in, yes, that's the way it works, and will continue to work. I've promised you weekly updates, and so far, except for a few vacations, I've delivered non-trivial improvements to the game every single week.

In order to make this happen, I need to act fast, decide on something, and put it in the game. I can't spend weeks deliberating.

Now, it should be pretty obvious to you all that I'm barely keeping on top of all this stuff. It's hit and miss, because I'm only one person, and there's simply too much to do for one person. Heck, I haven't so much as looked at the Steam forums in more than a month!

So, duh, idiot dev, hire someone!

But I don't think you'd like that either. Then, instead of me answering you in the forums occasionally, you'd have some hired, glad-handing bozo answering you in the forums every single day. It would feel fake. It would be fake. That person would be hired to never get irritated at your pestering. To always say "yes sir" an "the customer is always right" and so on. But I don't think you want that. You wouldn't be pestering me so much unless you wanted a reaction from me, at least sometimes. There are several people in the forums who are clearly, directly trolling me! A hired customer-service representative cannot be trolled.

In other words, part of what you bought for your $20 is a personal relationship with me, warts and all. You can troll me directly, and I can troll you right back.

BerrypickerAF · 2019-04-25 05:05:47

jasonrohrer wrote:

[...redacted excuses...]
So, duh, idiot dev, hire someone!
But I don't think you'd like that either. Then, instead of me answering you in the forums occasionally, you'd have some hired, glad-handing bozo answering you in the forums every single day. It would feel fake. It would be fake. That person would be hired to never get irritated at your pestering. To always say "yes sir" an "the customer is always right" and so on. But I don't think you want that. You wouldn't be pestering me so much unless you wanted a reaction from me, at least sometimes. There are several people in the forums who are clearly, directly trolling me! A hired customer-service representative cannot be trolled.

For someone who is so eager to 'throw shit at the wall to see what sticks', you just can't seem wrap your head around entertaining the idea of outsourcing work in a positive way, it's almost ironic.

Why are you so vehemently against even trying to accept help, even just to see what happens? You seem so convinced of what would happen if you did, how you would react negatively, how the community would react negatively, everything crashes down, fears, anxieties etc..

If you can't do that, at the very least work on getting better at managing your time so you don't get so overwhelmed, and quit prioritizing random 'fixes' to non-issues over stuff that is much more vital to game play.

Last edited by BerrypickerAF (2019-04-25 05:24:08)

Tarr · 2019-04-25 05:51:54

At the end of the day, yes the game does need change to different mechanics just like League does every season or else the game would get stale. Sure, you're right people did get annoyed when stuff like the desert meta got shook up and you're more than correct to say the game is overall better for that sort of change. The thing is though, not all changes are good. I don't like fences in their current state but I can just /die out of any town where I see them up but now with the new curse change whether I kill the griefer instantly or let them wreck havoc it's a lose-lose.

Going back to your league example: If you have someone in champ select taking Nunu mid with cleanse/ghost with the plan of running it down do you dodge or stay in lobby? If you dodge you let the troll go on to ruin someone else's game (if you kill a griefer) or do you just go through and lose in hopes your reports do something (letting a troll fuck up the town in hopes of cursing). Neither league or ohol are ever going to have perfect systems to deal with trolls but I do know one thing: Having someone run it down doesn't make my great games feel better, it makes me question why I am even playing in the first place.

No one expects you to come to the forums and be our yes man, and I certainly don't want someone making fake promises about what you think or want this game to be like but people are vocal about stuff for a reason. No one wants to see you accidentally copy paste a regular knives code into a butter knife and forget a transition, no one wants to see the same thing happen a week later with an arrow-note. When you rush an idea is when you make the biggest flubs and as such. Worst off, do you remember the nightmare of problems that were dogs? Was it three weeks of different fixes before they finally all decayed? Shit breaks and that's okay because you fix it in a reasonable time. It sure can make playing annoying at times when it's super janky but you know what? We still play the game because people who play your game are just as passionate about it as you Jason, it's why we invest our time into playing it instead of anything else.

In relation to the cow thing that's been fixed forever at this point, but the post was back when you were actively looking at the bugs section of the forums. When it comes to stuff like milk being much much more efficient than every other food I sort of figured you knew this kind of thing. You've explained in the past that you've got a spreadsheet with all the food data which you balance around so I at least figured you would know when foods are on either of the extremes (milk efficiency vs potato efficiency). People also don't know whether something is supposed to be one way or another, for example: Jason are baskets supposed to launch their contents out an empty basket is stacked on top of a filled one? Is that a bug or is that an intended feature of stacking baskets? This is a real thing that has existed in the game since basket stacking has been in game (right click the empty tile a filled basket is on and watch) I even showed this off during the anniversary stream but is that something that should be happening?

Swinging back to the curse thing people are upset because you're prematurely gutting the system without either laying out the ground work to replace it yet or giving us the tools to do something other than just curse out idiots. If you were releasing handcuffs or some sort of baton at the same time as the curse change sure people wouldn't be as upset but you're making every server reset until then a real bitch.

pein · 2019-04-25 05:53:55

i like jason for being direct and honest
i don't like fake people
he is hot headed sometimes and wants to enforce things that nobody likes

he wanted a solution for the people who just do a project for multiple lifes, he took the only persons advice who said he doesn't like the same place (which is very easy to be fixed: die) instead he made everyone else die multiple times

and even new people hate that they never get back to towns they made

so i don't like this choices which are preferring the 10% in favor against the 90%

sure, people don't know what they want, they just want buffs, they don't realize that doesn't make a good game balance

but just nerfing iron cause veterans can get iron, is bad, nerfing compost cause veterans make compost is bad
parenting is one thing but serving others each life is other thing

he designed jungles as perfect biome with a catch, it was a minigame to get rid of squitoes, then to make water source and transport system, but then was something that worth the work
temp update made 2 biomes obsolete, yeah jungle rooms are ok but we never gonna make it meta

he also tries to slow us down in progress, i like to make complex stuff, fast, so when people see it, cant believe one person did that under one life
slowing us down wont make gameplay better

tech? no techtree in the normal sense of the word
some things arent a choice just a dead end
90% of games i would do the same thing, the rare occasion is a weird map or that i already done something

but i had ideas incorporated 1 on 1: the disassemble of chests and sledges instead the destroying of it ( wasn't originally mine but extended upon and repeated several times)
buckets- that was mostly my idea exactly just he limited wells on the ponds, which is kinda nice, maybe the ponds shouldn't be biome limited

flat rock roads: i was using things for alternative uses, i placed flat rocks trough deserts to help people cross it without stepping on animals
same for the cactus shoes bug, when he implemented snake boots with cacti fruit, this two were bugs converted to features and loved it

so we do have some sort of effect on game

i just see a lot of dead ends he doesn't want to address, like food become really easy
once everyone realized the importance of sheep and we got dedicated bakers, we do a lot more pies in lot less time
meanwhile building materials became lot worse, due to people knowing how to build but he even nerfed some of them

i think reviving some dead content would make the game better
butchering cow and making burgers
decaying food and assembling pieces to compost cleaning up the town in meantime
more pressure to individual work, instead of "sharing"
dogs having purpose
rp things like letters should be cheaper
bury people shouldn't cost so much iron
potatoes still very bad
this things fixed would create some good content

bigger biomes and some actual choices: make at least one more biome liveable.
temp update was abd, because removed a nice feature
i seen a lot of jungle/swamp towns where people used adobe and grass used stone instead of it
just by letting soil and some form of water in every biome, would create much different gameplay and scenarios

actual choices on food supply of the village
like lack of one resource but a lot of other resources so people actually need to adapt to map instead of generic gameplay

i think some community enforced updates were bad, when he listened to people who wanted something easier
curses arent the best solution, sure it fixed some thing but allows griefing with curses at the same time

not sure if he even checks reddit ideas at all
we got many, and he has some of his own, some is bad but, if you keep the good part just modify it until has a balanced and fun mechanic then we can go somewhere from them

Grim_Arbiter · 2019-04-25 06:06:54

I usually have faith in you jason, but you gotta understand how it can look to someone who buys this game and see something like this

This was actually one of my first times ever playing this game. My mom handed me this and said "well I guess the games broken.." Thankfully I checked the fourms and saw that it would be fixed the next day or so, but some people would see something like that and get turned off.

Sure it was unlucky timing to start and not everyone had an experience like that, but not everyone who plays this game knows its ONLY you working with all this stuff.

BladeWoods · 2019-04-25 08:35:14

I don't think most people understand how much work it is that Jason has and manages to do.

breezeknight · 2019-04-25 08:49:31

darn

yeah, one person & a community between admirers & haters
& everybody is screaming to be heard

i don't envy Jason
it's hard to be a dev, but it's even harder to be a sole dev

yeah, it's his choice to be a sole dev, but it's always a choice, no matter what

Hail Jason !
he does a hell of a job !!!

- - -

Spoonwood · 2019-04-25 11:12:21

jasonrohrer wrote:

Same when I fixed the desert boundary exploit. Oh god, game is ruined! This isn't the game we love to play. But clearly, a few months later, the game is way better now than it was back then.

No, it is NOT better Jason. Maybe you missed me saying this in another thread. Back before with temperature averaging, which was the old system to speak more precisely on what it was, a smart mom could place their child down on an edge close to her. She could do a task and only occasionally pick her child up. The result? The child had more resources or food, because the mom could work and watch her child. Now the mom has to take her child over to the main fire. The nurses being some of the weaker players in terms of understanding game mechanics, and getting confused by all of the SIDs, pick the children up rather frequently. 1 year olds and 2 years get fed when having only 1 white bar or 2 white bars, instead of when having just 1 black bar and the rest white bars. The result? Your children end up with fewer resources and food than before sans temperature changes. How is that worse for the game? It means that people can't effectively play for their lineages as well as they could before.

Also, the temperature changes destroyed the variety of nature in the game. The temperature system also makes no sense with instantaneous temperature change instead of gradual temperature change when changing biome. I still maintain that the temperature changes made the game worse. LostScholar is another person who agrees with me.

jasonrohrer wrote:

To make you have occasional intra- and inter-village conflicts.

Intra- conflicts would NOT be the players playing for family survival. It would NOT involve them playing for the lineage, because with intra- conflict, more of the women get killed and murder sprees of women is often what dooms lineages.

Finally, I'm not engaged in some silly exercise of 'trolling'. If you are, that shows your lack of professionalism Jason.

Twisted · 2019-04-25 11:30:49

Spoonwood wrote:

jasonrohrer wrote:
Same when I fixed the desert boundary exploit. Oh god, game is ruined! This isn't the game we love to play. But clearly, a few months later, the game is way better now than it was back then.
No, it is NOT better Jason.

It is ten times better. The only bad thing about that update is that it didn't come six months earlier.

Spoonwood · 2019-04-25 14:28:50

Twisted wrote:

Spoonwood wrote:
jasonrohrer wrote:
Same when I fixed the desert boundary exploit. Oh god, game is ruined! This isn't the game we love to play. But clearly, a few months later, the game is way better now than it was back then.
No, it is NOT better Jason.

It is ten times better. The only bad thing about that update is that it didn't come six months earlier.

It is not better, since as I explained it has resulted in people not playing to provision for their children as much as before.

Additionally, pein said this:

pein wrote:

he designed jungles as perfect biome with a catch, it was a minigame to get rid of squitoes, then to make water source and transport system, but then was something that worth the work
temp update made 2 biomes obsolete, yeah jungle rooms are ok but we never gonna make it meta

It is NOT better to no longer effectively have that "mini-game" of trapping and eventually entombing mosquitoes. That was something worth the work. Thus again, the update did not make the game better.

The worst thing comes as that Jason has displayed his arrogance and lack of ability to hear others when he said "clearly" when there still exist people who do NOT think that the temperature overhaul improved the game, and some reason to believe that it lessened people playing to enhance their lineages, because of the resulting nursing system while people just use to have responsibility for their own children.

jasonrohrer wrote:

Same with your preference for oven bases over real fences.

Pein has already correctly pointed out half-bell tower base pens. Sugar can pens exist also. My preferred pen type is a tree and box pen. Additionally, I see people build fence pens on low population servers, and a family building a fence pen not too long on the big server. It was in Wasabi_Tonic's stream.

Last edited by Spoonwood (2019-04-25 14:29:49)

Booklat1 · 2019-04-25 15:16:13

Spoonwood wrote:

Twisted wrote:
Spoonwood wrote:
No, it is NOT better Jason.

It is ten times better. The only bad thing about that update is that it didn't come six months earlier.
It is not better, since as I explained it has resulted in people not playing to provision for their children as much as before.

but that was a horrible explanation, you havent even proved SIDs increased, let alone show why that is more important than actually balancing biomes and clothes, making an entire meta appear with tailoring.

Oh yeah, fertility, keepin lines going... Guess what? There's absolutely no reason to do it in a game that is sit and eat simulator

heat update was the absolute best, you were wrong before when saying it made the game unplayable, you still are.

Booklat1 · 2019-04-25 15:18:34

Also, pein, dont you get bored that tryhards like ourselves can feed a billion mouths with just some minutes of work?

more nerfs = more challenges and more tech

jasonrohrer · 2019-04-25 15:42:35

Well, please don't feel sorry for me. This is a dream job, and I'm supporting my family very well doing it. I'm one of the luckiest people alive. I get to come in here each day and dream up crazy things to try in the game. I get to keep working on this thing for years until it becomes the very best version of the idea that it will become. I've been doing it for four years now, and I'm not even sick of it yet! And I still love playing it myself, which is pretty rare for me, this far into the dev process. In fact, I wish I had more time to just play it. I wish I had more time for a lot of things, though, like flying kites, and playing chess with my kids, and surfing, and flying drones, and picking strawberries, and watching Pulp Fiction with my screenwriter 16-year-old (who would love it, but my spouse still thinks he's not old enough yet).

Life is full to the brim right now.

I just got invited on an all-expense-paid trip to Taiwan to speak at a conference. Never been to Taiwan. Never been to Asia. Haven't flown across the ocean at all since I was 10. But I'm still on the fence about going, mostly because I don't really have the time to go....

And finally, one other point:

This game was "done" in terms of core mechanics back in February 2018, when it launched. I had been working on it in private for 3 years, and then 6 months with a skeleton crew of alpha testers.

But this kind of game is impossible to get right without loads of people playing it, at least for me. I can't fully envision how a large group of people will behave inside a complex system. This was true for The Castle Doctrine and Cordial Minuet as well. It took a long time, after launch, to get it right, or at least as right as I could get it.

As a quick example, I did not predict how important naming your baby would be to players, nor how important family relationships would be. So explicit support for those things was not in the game at launch. Then I saw so many people naming their babies, and so many people telling stories in the forums about their aunts and cousins... When I added those things as explicit features, it just clicked. It seems obvious now, but it wasn't obvious to me until people got in there and started playing with it.

Also, I am really tempted to set up a Feb 2018 client and server for people to try, just so they can remember what it was like back then. No bears, even! The cart was the highest tech available. There were only five foods in the game.

Booklat1 · 2019-04-25 15:55:43

jasonrohrer wrote:

But I'm still on the fence about going, mostly because I don't really have the time to go....

And you say fences aren't bad

Do you think having a person to review your code for bugs could help?

One Hour One Life Forums

#1 2019-04-24 21:21:55

Jason might as well go quiet again

#2 2019-04-24 21:38:43

Re: Jason might as well go quiet again

#3 2019-04-24 21:44:59

Re: Jason might as well go quiet again

#4 2019-04-24 21:50:53

Re: Jason might as well go quiet again

#5 2019-04-24 23:21:34

Re: Jason might as well go quiet again

#6 2019-04-24 23:46:20

Re: Jason might as well go quiet again

#7 2019-04-25 00:07:51

Re: Jason might as well go quiet again

#8 2019-04-25 00:39:18

Re: Jason might as well go quiet again

#9 2019-04-25 00:56:38

Re: Jason might as well go quiet again

#10 2019-04-25 02:00:09

Re: Jason might as well go quiet again

#11 2019-04-25 03:05:08

Re: Jason might as well go quiet again

#12 2019-04-25 04:16:32

Re: Jason might as well go quiet again

#13 2019-04-25 05:05:47

Re: Jason might as well go quiet again

#14 2019-04-25 05:51:54

Re: Jason might as well go quiet again

#15 2019-04-25 05:53:55

Re: Jason might as well go quiet again

#16 2019-04-25 06:06:54

Re: Jason might as well go quiet again

#17 2019-04-25 08:35:14

Re: Jason might as well go quiet again

#18 2019-04-25 08:49:31

Re: Jason might as well go quiet again

#19 2019-04-25 11:12:21

Re: Jason might as well go quiet again

#20 2019-04-25 11:30:49

Re: Jason might as well go quiet again

#21 2019-04-25 14:28:50

Re: Jason might as well go quiet again

#22 2019-04-25 15:16:13

Re: Jason might as well go quiet again

#23 2019-04-25 15:18:34

Re: Jason might as well go quiet again

#24 2019-04-25 15:42:35

Re: Jason might as well go quiet again

#25 2019-04-25 15:55:43

Re: Jason might as well go quiet again

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