End conditions for the rift...

jasonrohrer · 2019-08-20 23:48:59

I'm still stumped about end conditions.

Here's a graph showing a bunch of data for the 8-day bad rift:

8 days was a long time, and yes, griefing was a factor, but there's no obvious pattern in that data that screams RESET NOW.

The Eve input keeps feeding things, and people keep scraping by. Worse, families keep dying out due to not enough babies, as players filter down and become Eves.

Before that, we tried an Eve window, where Eves would only spawn for the first 2 hours (could be longer, maybe the first 24 hours or something). During that trial, we got down to just one family very quickly, and things stagnated.

But maybe that should be the end condition?

Maybe if we bet below X families surviving, it should end. Sure, that one time, it got down to one family fast, but maybe players could learn to balance things better.

What if it was 5 families minimum? How long could you keep all 5 alive to prevent a collapse? I mean, assuming no new Eves were entering the rift after 24 hours or whatever... (so it would at least run 24 hours, and then settle down into 5+ families for the rest of the time.)

That would at least allow it to end before it stagnated into just a few families....

Thaulos · 2019-08-21 00:17:37

When the rift was created and eve window introduced there was immetiately a plan among players on discord to purposedly kill as many families as possible after those 2 houurs as to make rift one family only, thus allowing cursing to be effective and allowing the comnunity to send griefers away to donkey town.

I would guess this had an impact on how fast families were removed from the game. On one hand griefers were killing people for the lulz and on the other "good players" were killing people on the short term to stop the griefers on the long term.

Having this end condition would amount to taunting griefers to end the rift. They were already bragging from triggering a rift reset following one of their raids in which many people died and were born at the same time triggering the children % condition.

Last edited by Thaulos (2019-08-21 00:18:57)

BladeWoods · 2019-08-21 00:20:46

I think we need an eve window. Otherwise there's no punishment to dying, just get reborn as an uncursable eve and go grief again.

How was the average lineage depth over the 8 days?

Keeping a minimum number of families alive might work.

Doing checks for resource exhaustion/destruction could work:
If there's no fire, reset
If there's no sheep or mouflon left, reset
If there's no maple trees left, reset
If there's no oil left, reset
If there's no milkweed left, reset

Last edited by BladeWoods (2019-08-21 00:36:36)

Thaulos · 2019-08-21 00:31:31

I quite like the idea of resetting after any number of X time since Y. Fire, sheep, milkweed, steel tools, etc.

jasonrohrer · 2019-08-21 01:19:17

All those map-wide conditions are non-trivial to monitor. There are 500,000 map tiles to look at. Can't examine them all in one server timestep....

So for the time being, I'm hoping for a player stat to look at.

Unfortunately, I don't have average lineage depth as a stat. Of course, that stat would be low at the beginning, especially right after the Eve window closes. It would likely grow over time, then stabilize, then drop later.... maybe it's a good one?

jasonrohrer · 2019-08-21 01:27:39

For reference, the really long arc ran between these unix timestamps:
1564791904
1565477514

JackTreehorn · 2019-08-21 01:57:18

Perhaps setting it to if no family line older than 12 hours exist then reset the rift. That way you could leave the eve window open.

Last edited by JackTreehorn (2019-08-21 02:43:47)

jasonrohrer · 2019-08-21 02:03:23

Okay, here's the graph of average lineage depth (moving average of last 100 babies born) during the 8-day disaster arc:

Seems like it rises gradually for the first three days, and then has a sudden drop right at the beginning of day 4, from which it never fully recovers.

jasonrohrer · 2019-08-21 02:16:24

Here's the max lineage depth (seen over the past hour) during that same arc run:

Here we see that, even 7 days in, we had a family live for 45 generations.

DestinyCall · 2019-08-21 03:44:28

So ... the idea is that you are looking for a particular "fail condition" to kick in when the Rift becomes exhausted to the point of being unplayable, right?

But even at the very end of eight days of non-stop griefing, there were still a few small hold-out settlements that were managing to survive while the majority of the map was a desolate wasteland. And even when the map is in good condition, the server population naturally fluctuates up and down with the time of day a huge amount. We only need a few functioning villages to keep a semi-stable population and even when the map is ridiculously broken and largely unplayable, concentrated effort can keep a few families alive and functional in the face of extreme scarcity. Frankly, I don't think playing toward a failure condition is actually enjoyable and would rather have more renewable options unlocked via tech-tree advancement, but that's a topic for another thread. As for this thread, I don't think the answer lies in the statistics.

Why not add in a voting mechanic and if enough people vote for a reset, the server will reset?

Base it on average server population and set it high enough so that a small group can't trigger the apocalypse on their own. Then when we are tired of playing, we can just vote for the end to come.

Last edited by DestinyCall (2019-08-21 03:45:52)

Dodge · 2019-08-21 04:27:14

The graph isn't showing anything interesting because there are unlimited foods (wild berry bushes and cactus mainly) and you cant fail no matter what you do.

If these foods would run out at some point the graph would be very different and only player made food would count for survival in the long run and it would be possible to fail.

Eve's out of the original window should spawn in old abandonned towns and maybe have something like 5 minutes where their food pips dont drop even if feeding a baby, this would be their time to try to revive the town (plant new crops, make more food etc)

If enough Eve's fail to revive old towns, their lineages cant survive and players keep dying game is over.

BladeWoods · 2019-08-21 04:58:07

I fully agree with Dodge, removing unlimited berries and cacti fruit could be the solution to produce declining stats overtime. To making civilization matter in order to survive. Without unlimited wild foods, you would at the very least need a berry bush farm, carrot farm, wheat farm, sheep pen, water, and iron to continually survive.

And lineage depth while spiky if you look at the average over a period of time it seems to have a better rise and fall than the other factors. But that could all change if eve window is added back and unlimited wild foods removed.

Last edited by BladeWoods (2019-08-21 05:14:33)

DestinyCall · 2019-08-21 05:42:58

Removing unlimited wild food would have a lot of painful side effects. I worry that it would make the game really unpleasant and not fun to explore outside of town. Not only for experienced players who know how to stay alive on wild berries, but also for newer players who don't know the ropes yet. Right now, it is possible to travel long distances on foot with minimal supplies by surviving off the land. Trying to keep yourself alive is (relatively) easy, as long as you keep moving from place to place. The real challenge is in keeping a group of people alive in one spot - civilization building.

But if the goal is to make the game become completely unplayable so the whole server collapses, removing the food safety net would certainly accomplish that objective, for better or worse.

pein · 2019-08-21 05:51:32

i think most people just make up excuses to grief
it was a point where people told there is no iron left, and i was kinda agreed upon, having a few lifes i had info about each old and new town and the resources within it, when you popped in to forum and asked opinion (but then you went offline for a while)
so i decided to prove them wrong and used up all the scrap from multiple towns ( i was killed once as a kid but still got some steel in my pack and died behind tree)
then went back, took it back, took a timing shaft, made new engine from scraps, and we made new oil spot
and refilled the world with like 90 iron within the next hours
was fun for once, wouldn't do it each time. combined resources from 5 towns to make new iron source and had control over it for more than a day.

that just brought more griefers and other sorts of problems, like ruining the town with most trees

i guess it's boring to be on same map forever and a time based reset can be better

the family based is easily ruined cause people think that killing everyone is a solution to end it
but as i seen on streams, lot of people got no clue where are they in the rift and what can they do
so rather be a win condition than a lose condition, even if they want to end it should be building toward it not destroying or anything that motivates that.

family depth doesn't really have an impact, Dobbie family, which i moved from one corner to other, survived a day, and some adopted kid took over the name. also the families like Ricoto and Elderio were famous but some people didn't experienced some towns at all as they didn't played in them
and actually it was more focus on viable places, than families. and some multi cultural towns (which should be the goal eventually?) end up losing a family but gaining others
there is still no logical mechanics that would make it keeping alive a family meaningful enough.

otherwise i would say partial resets would be ok
like apoc style resetting quarter of map by controlling 4 checkpoints
if you would have a way to reseed some parts of map and intersect a new biome style, while keeping other parts the same that could work endlessly

eventually we would need to go down in family numbers and limit eves. not to one, maybe to two or three, then some other challenge they need to win against each other.

or maybe moving out of new rifts when met certain conditions, i think that would solve the issue with the new map, and would motivate people to do stuff instead of griefing.
this would mean that people can move out and born in new areas and the ones who left are in worst condition until they get the "pass"
this would need some sort of system, where the starting rift is smaller or worse in some sort and people would need to earn some points, like living to old age, having a kid reach 20, etc. then maybe some sort of one time passage to a new rift with a transporting device (a door opens for you to cross, a vessel, a plane)
then the players who crossed, would start all over in new area with the other passed people
and the rest of rift would be left behind
that area would reset in timely manner or if all players pass trough it (or maybe some percentage, lets say if new rift has 100 unique people, a new starting rift opens)
this wouldn't guarantee that griefers wont stay, but at least they would need to make a permanent choice.

this could be like even more different, starter rift would be small, no pvp allowed, but it would get ruined fast by griefers, and it would reset often, next up it would be a choice to pass trough a pvp rift, and win it, or get eough points for the next one ( pvp rift would have higher eve spawn rate or only eve spawn rate), no cursing allowed, killing would be the goal. would even be fun with a combat system.

the other option would be some sort of harder challenge if people don't want to pvp then again a no pvp zone with a quest like goal where they need to amass x amount of resources or similar
this could be exploration
food production
animal production etc.

just throwing some ideas
but the bottom lien is that we need an ending trough creating something, organized, not destroying it
even griefers agree that when it looks a mess it should end
but it would need some cooperation, work and time

and you should start playing with the idea of multiple rifts , maybe multiple rulesets for them, people like to escape from the box

Dodge · 2019-08-21 05:55:26

DestinyCall wrote:

Removing unlimited wild food would have a lot of painful side effects. I worry that it would make the game really unpleasant and not fun to explore outside of town. Not only for experienced players who know how to stay alive on wild berries, but also for newer players who don't know the ropes yet. Right now, it is possible to travel long distances on foot with minimal supplies by surviving off the land. Trying to keep yourself alive is (relatively) easy, as long as you keep moving from place to place. The real challenge is in keeping a group of people alive in one spot - civilization building.
But if the goal is to make the game become completely unplayable so the whole server collapses, removing the food safety net would certainly accomplish that objective, for better or worse.

Well yeah if you dont make food, tools etc the game should be unplayable and end.

If you want to travel long distances you should have to take food with you.

Maybe completely nerfing all unlimited wild foods wouldn't be necessary, what if they would still renew but each time they are picked they take longer to regrow.

You pick a berry and the next one takes 5% more time to regrow, you would still have wild foods in case of extreme necessity but you couldn't rely on them to really survive.

BladeWoods · 2019-08-21 06:05:31

DestinyCall wrote:

Removing unlimited wild food would have a lot of painful side effects. I worry that it would make the game really unpleasant and not fun to explore outside of town. Not only for experienced players who know how to stay alive on wild berries, but also for newer players who don't know the ropes yet. Right now, it is possible to travel long distances on foot with minimal supplies by surviving off the land. Trying to keep yourself alive is (relatively) easy, as long as you keep moving from place to place. The real challenge is in keeping a group of people alive in one spot - civilization building.
But if the goal is to make the game become completely unplayable so the whole server collapses, removing the food safety net would certainly accomplish that objective, for better or worse.

I don't think it's a bad thing at all to actually need to bring a backpack and pie if you want to explore far outside town. Right now it indeed is possible to travel long distances with no supplies.

A side effect I think might need to be handled is the difficulty of starting civilization at the beginning. If bushes are just made to never regrow, then we would need fairly more starting food (onions, burdock, etc) or else the difficulty of getting a fresh town started will be made much harder.

CatX · 2019-08-21 06:18:38

With two seasons, there could be a winter season where no wild foods regrow... And if conditions are bad enough, families won't be able to survive winter. If enough families do surive, fine, the world is not reset yet.

But I agree that a poll after each life would be nice as well, as a safeguard. Perhaps the poll could run during winter, so that we are safe from a reset during summer.

DestinyCall · 2019-08-21 06:35:45

BladeWoods wrote:

I don't think it's a bad thing at all to actually need to bring a backpack and pie if you want to explore far outside town. Right now it indeed is possible to travel long distances with no supplies.
A side effect I think might need to be handled is the difficulty of starting civilization at the beginning. If bushes are just made to never regrow, then we would need fairly more starting food (onions, burdock, etc) or else the difficulty of getting a fresh town started will be made much harder.

All I'm thinking is that it would really suck to be effectively trapped inside of a shitty town I don't like while it slowly dies of low resources, random murder, and constant griefing, because I can't leave without food and the whole town is already on the brink of starvation. Starvation is already a big part of this game. I'm not really loving the idea of making it an even bigger part. It's not very fun to run out of food without any options to prevent it. Lack of wild food will put a huge strain on the village food supply and, that will put an even greater burden on water production and compost production to sustain farming.

I'm not saying it isn't possible or that we can't make it work if we have no other choice. I'm not just not convinced it will make for more engaging game-play. My gut feeling is that it will make the active game space a lot smaller and more grindy.

Dodge · 2019-08-21 07:09:36

DestinyCall wrote:

BladeWoods wrote:
I don't think it's a bad thing at all to actually need to bring a backpack and pie if you want to explore far outside town. Right now it indeed is possible to travel long distances with no supplies.
A side effect I think might need to be handled is the difficulty of starting civilization at the beginning. If bushes are just made to never regrow, then we would need fairly more starting food (onions, burdock, etc) or else the difficulty of getting a fresh town started will be made much harder.
All I'm thinking is that it would really suck to be effectively trapped inside of a shitty town I don't like while it slowly dies of low resources, random murder, and constant griefing, because I can't leave without food and the whole town is already on the brink of starvation. Starvation is already a big part of this game. I'm not really loving the idea of making it an even bigger part. It's not very fun to run out of food without any options to prevent it. Lack of wild food will put a huge strain on the village food supply and, that will put an even greater burden on water production and compost production to sustain farming.
I'm not saying it isn't possible or that we can't make it work if we have no other choice. I'm not just not convinced it will make for more engaging game-play. My gut feeling is that it will make the active game space a lot smaller and more grindy.

I mean that's what should happen if a town doesn't make it, chaos and starvation how else should the game end?

But it think i know where you're getting at, currently even if a town does very well they can never make food reserves, it always seems like even if you make large ammounts of pies, stew etc it all gets eaten in the same generation.

The food grind is too high and even if a town does very well and is prosperous it could still easily die out because people dont continuously grind for food and reserves dont last long.

If wild foods are nerfed i think it's fair to reduce the food drain at least for naked and lightly clothed.

Also there is way too much waste of food, you can eat a bowl of stew or a pie even to fill only one food pip, so even if you make a stock of food it gets eaten to fill 2-3 food pips and a lot is wasted.

There should be something to prevent that or maybe make people fat if they constantly overeat (could be a use for the pregnant belly https://onetech.info/3046-Pregnant-Belly )

CatX · 2019-08-21 07:59:39

Dodge wrote:

Also there is way too much waste of food, you can eat a bowl of stew or a pie even to fill only one food pip, so even if you make a stock of food it gets eaten to fill 2-3 food pips and a lot is wasted.

What if a bowl of stew didn't have two uses, instead it had X pips? If you lack two pips, then after eating from the bowl it would contain X-2 pips. This might work with pies as well. If less than 1/4 of the pie's pips have been eaten, it could display as a full pie. Of course, this way it would be possible to eat more than one slice of pie in one bite if you were hungry enough...

RodneyC86 · 2019-08-21 08:34:07

CatX wrote:

Dodge wrote:
Also there is way too much waste of food, you can eat a bowl of stew or a pie even to fill only one food pip, so even if you make a stock of food it gets eaten to fill 2-3 food pips and a lot is wasted.
What if a bowl of stew didn't have two uses, instead it had X pips? If you lack two pips, then after eating from the bowl it would contain X-2 pips. This might work with pies as well. If less than 1/4 of the pie's pips have been eaten, it could display as a full pie. Of course, this way it would be possible to eat more than one slice of pie in one bite if you were hungry enough...

Something tells me that won't work with the code. Even though I only dabbled in programming for a couple months

Why not just not let people eat anything if they are not at least 25 percent hungry or something? No more one pip berry carrot munch griefers

Potjeh · 2019-08-21 09:00:42

Eve window pls. And I don't really see why we have to have multiple families.

Dodge · 2019-08-21 09:03:56

CatX wrote:

Dodge wrote:
Also there is way too much waste of food, you can eat a bowl of stew or a pie even to fill only one food pip, so even if you make a stock of food it gets eaten to fill 2-3 food pips and a lot is wasted.
What if a bowl of stew didn't have two uses, instead it had X pips? If you lack two pips, then after eating from the bowl it would contain X-2 pips. This might work with pies as well. If less than 1/4 of the pie's pips have been eaten, it could display as a full pie. Of course, this way it would be possible to eat more than one slice of pie in one bite if you were hungry enough...

Yeah only eating what you need would be great and would make more sense but in terms of coding with the current engine it's probably not doable or would require a big overall and weeks of work to be implemented.

Something more simple like not being allowed to eat a food if it wastes more than 2-3+ pips would be easier to do, and would have the same effect.

Thaulos · 2019-08-21 09:30:23

jasonrohrer wrote:

All those map-wide conditions are non-trivial to monitor. There are 500,000 map tiles to look at. Can't examine them all in one server timestep....
So for the time being, I'm hoping for a player stat to look at.
Unfortunately, I don't have average lineage depth as a stat. Of course, that stat would be low at the beginning, especially right after the Eve window closes. It would likely grow over time, then stabilize, then drop later.... maybe it's a good one?

You don't really need to track what is on the entire world.

Just make a table of timestamps where you save the last time someone:
1) created or fed wood to a fire;
2) forged something
3) fed, killed or sheared a sheep.
4) created rope

Then run a job every X time to check on those timestamps. If any are too old, chances are society collapsed since.

Twisted · 2019-08-21 09:58:01

Full disclosure, I initially liked the idea of a limited playspace and the possiblities it could create, but after playing inside the rift for a few weeks I think it was a bad idea, and no matter how much work you put into it it's still going to be less enjoyable that an unlimited map.

A problem that I see with the rift is that the game stops being as enjoyable long before any of the previous end conditions trigger.

If it goes on until there's no more resources on the map, it's going to stop being fun long before the last hidden oil spot is depleted.

If it goes on until people are dying en masse, players are going to stop playing once they realize it's impossible to survive.

Griefing is only part of the reason while the long rift was bad, it was also not enjoyable because of the lack of progression for most of its duration. We reached technological peak within a few hours, and there's not much to do after that point. Towns also quickly became a massive mess with various hard to use bowl items scattered everywhere. And if you spawned in as an Eve, the person who is supposed to start a new civilization, the only thing you could do is go to an existing town and live there. And going to an existing town is easy - since the map is so small, you only need to walk in a random direction for a minute or two and you'll find a settlement.

These things led to each life after the 24 hour mark feeling incredibly samey, at least for me. Every time I'd spawn into a big town with a big fence around it, we'd have plenty of food despite griefers attacking us from the inside and wild Eves wielding swords on the outside. The town would have all the technology it needs, and the only thing left to do is to either deal with griefers which is very dull work, try to clean the place up which is almost impossible, or make pies and other foods which is kind of unnecessary since everyone else is already doing it.

When the rift comes back, along with a new end condition, we need a bigger map (not infinitely big, but something that takes more than two minutes to run across on horseback), and ideally some kind of progression system for civilizations so that we don't reach endgame within hours. I still find it very weird that you can go from nothing to a town with Newcomen Engines during the Eve's lifespan.

As for the end condition, I think it should be something that can be influenced by players so that the world ends while it's still enjoyable and leaves you wanting for more. The world should fail because the players failed to keep it going, not because it's so bad that it can't support life any more.

I saw the suggestion of photographs taken extending the life of the rift - a world that is worth taking pictures of is worth saving, after all. I kind of like this idea, but I do think it's a bit unintuitive.

I also had the idea of counting the bones laying on the ground. If there's ever X bones in the world, the apocalypse triggers. This would encourage people to bury their family, something that I always thought was super weird that we don't do. If the world turns to war and too many people die and there's no one to bury them, that world might not be worth saving. Bones decay on their own (and they decay more quickly when buried), so it's kind of a dynamic timer. If people start dying too young there's a higher chance of the fail condition happening.

One Hour One Life Forums

#1 2019-08-20 23:48:59

End conditions for the rift...

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Re: End conditions for the rift...

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