Is genetic fitness based on luck more than on skill?

Kaveh · 2019-10-29 14:45:32

So this is something that has bothered me for a little while now, but now genetic fitness has become more important it's grown to become more of an issue. I don't know if genetic fitness was supposed to be a luck-based thing to begin with, but I always felt like it should show how skilled a certain player is. That's why you have a leaderboard.
With that in mind, genetic fitness being tied to foodbars / skills makes sense to me. It's a reward for your success in the game, and, since higher fitness should mean being a 'better' player, you can put these rewards to good use while doing some of the higher tech work. All good.

Now where it gets iffy is the way genetic score works in practice. A few thoughts:

1. I don't feel like I was responsible for my highest/lowest ever scores:
The highest I've been on the leaderboard was #4 with a score of just below 50. Why? For a few lives in a row, none of my kids and grandkids were new and therefore most made it to old age. My score went back to rock bottom in the next life because of my kids forgetting to eat while I was teaching them how to farm (I fed/reminded them to eat a few times, but eventually stopped because I don't think force-feeding my kids is the best way for them to learn to watch their food meter).
The lowest (I remember) was a rank near the bottom of the leaderboard with a score of around 15. Why? Someone killed me & almost all of my kids after me.
In neither of these cases I felt responsible for my score. It completely had to do with the players I was dealing with, not with my skills as a player/mother. Of course, these are the extremes, but it does make me feel my genetic fitness score is something very heavily influenced by luck. The only thing I could come up with to SOMEWHAT alter this is the next point.

2. A lot of the points added/deducted happen AFTER your death, i.e. AFTER being able to influence anything at all:
'Your granddaughter died at age 4 a few minutes after you died? Well, you should've prevented that somehow. -2.18'.
'Your daughter made it to age 60? Great job, +1.06'.
IMO, a good fix for this would be adding a score for 'still-living' descendants instead of for whatever happens after you can't influence it anymore. A few points for small children, more for adults. This also fixes a issue that kinda came up with the tool slots where I tend to wait before playing a new game until most my descendants have died, just so I have an extra slot (the score tends to go up after death, because most that happened during your life is - and most after is +).

Less important things (without easy fixes I'm aware of but I still want to mention):

3. Babies running away instead of /die-ing causes a crazy big penalty I can't control:
I understand getting a penalty for a kid dying at a young age, but if my kid decides to run off and starve instead of /die-ing it feels really bad to get 4 points deducted when I barely get enough points added to make up for it even if all of my other kids survive. What am I supposed to do, force that kid to stay until they're older when they obviously don't want to play in this town? I've convinced some to /die instead, but this still happens more often than I'd like. Again something to do with another player instead of with me.

4. The moment I play affects my score because of family size:
In peak hours, I tend to get a lot of kids which automatically means a few of them will _probably_ die because I can't keep track of all of them at the same time and food tends to run out faster (I see way more of my kids die around age 10 or so than when it's quiet). When it's quiet, I get smaller families but they generally all survive. I.e., when it's quiet, my score goes up faster.

Thoughts? Do you feel in control of your genetic fitness score? If not: do you think the end-of-life scores would help somewhat compared to the after-death scores? Other ideas?

fug · 2019-10-29 15:56:27

It's not called meme score for no reason. Play as Eve on a server reset without map wipe? Easiest first place you will ever get in the game (I've done this two or three times now.) It's mostly luck based on whether or not your kids are smart and how willing they are to live in whatever scenario you've given them.

jasonrohrer · 2019-10-29 16:08:58

Yes, this is something that I'm concerned about to.

The runner babies (3) is REALLY tough, because there's no good way to detect that. How to tell the difference between a runner baby and an abandoned baby?

/die is easy and clear. The baby chose it. Definitely not your fault.

Maybe I need to try to code something up where we detect the bb moving away from the mom, vs the mom moving away from the bb. Maybe mark the birth location, and then at time of bb death, look at death location vs mom location. Maybe there's some way....

(4) is also tough to handle. I mean, yeah, sometimes you have lots of babies, sometimes few. Each one should be special and a crushing loss if it dies. That's the point (to close the gap between thematics and player behavior).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzVHjg3AqIQ

And (3) is the entire point. How do you have influence after your own death? How do you set your kids and family up to be safe and all live until old age?

People do this in real life all the time, through trusts, inheritance, etc.

How did someone murder all your kids after you died? Did they not have a safe house to live in? Did they have no security systems in place? Did they have no weapons and medical supplies? Did they have a nice food store? Did they have instructions about what to do in case of an emergency?

Yeah, I know, it's a big ask, and it sounds kinda crazy. But having the highest score on the leaderboard consistently SHOULD be a big ask and involve a crazy amount of dedication.

In real life, if I was away from home and my house burned down with my kids in it, I wouldn't say, "Oh, I wasn't there, not my fault!" It's my job to tell my kids what they should do in case of a fire when I'm not home, right?

The real problem is (1), where people can get to the top by random chance. That generally shouldn't be possible.... Though maybe that's hard to prevent. But I don't think anyone can get to #1 and stay there by random chance.

Dodge · 2019-10-29 16:14:00

Babies only run or /die because they do it for a reason, if there was no reason/no gain to do it then nobody would run away.

Should you be able to choose your life? Where you are born, who you are born etc

jasonrohrer · 2019-10-29 16:15:26

Yes, but how to completely prevent that?

I mean, if a baby can die, then it can die, right?

And we do need to let them be reborn. They could be force-reborn to the same mother, but that's also tough to enforce, especially if they wait a bit and some other baby is born to that mother instead of them...

Dodge · 2019-10-29 16:34:31

Yes but why does the baby want to die?

What are the top reasons?

To be:

Born in another village
Born as a different sex
What else?

I dont think any player cares to actively be born to another mother if it means he's in the same village and the same sex

Why can babys run btw?

It's a funny part of the game but i think something else could be as well and not enable the possibility to just run away from the mother.

Also currently a baby can just follow you while you carry on with your activities, dont need to choose between that basket of clay and the baby when you can have both right?

"HI BABY"
"FOLLOW ME"

Then having some tech that makes you able to carry a baby could be something valid, since a baby couldn't follow you but at the same time you still have to make that piece of cloth/tech or wathever.

So a mother that has it would have a clear advantage on her score over another mother that doesn't.

So you could enforce being born to the same area and same sex plus other reasons players actively die to choose their life so they dont anymore.

But then you wouldn't care about the baby since it will be reborn in the same fam anyway hmmm

I guess since you get bad points for letting a baby die, you might not do it.

Maybe letting babies die (if they cant run away) would lower by a lot your genetic score.

The less they are self sufficient (age) the more you lose points.

CatX · 2019-10-29 16:37:29

So what if there's no /die, but you can trade your genetic score for a say in where to be born through a birth screen.
Let babies run slower than adults, so that if a mother wants to keep you, you're stuck.
That way, if you're in a life you don't want to be in, by living to 60 you're earning points that you can use to choose your next life.

Coconut Fruit · 2019-10-29 17:16:29

I don't consider baby runners as an issue, just curse them whenever they do it.

/die thing is an issue, but I think the issue is that people don't care to /die, they have little to lose when they do that. There should be something more than only genetic fitness to encourage people surviving to old age. To make them feel that it's not worth dying at young age.
Idk, maybe another stat that would count only your lives, your average age past 10 lives, maybe additional skill slots for people who live long on average?.
Or maybe dying young would give some penalty, decreasing skill slots?

Also I think people shouldn't lose their genetic score if their mum decides to not keep them and stops feeding them. This may be often scenario in ending arcs where there is very little food and water. Baby spam will happen and everyone playing will lose their genetics drastically, just like it happened last time.

jasonrohrer · 2019-10-29 17:28:38

Yes, I am concerned about that for sure. If your mother doesn't want you....

If I manage to write code that detects runner babies, I could also maybe work in some code to detect babies that didn't run away and were never picked up at all.

arkajalka · 2019-10-29 18:34:06

Funniest thing in this is that the less you have babies the higher your score will be.

Just be a man and instant gain.

If you have the missfortune of being a woman never go high on yum and if extreme just wander naked.

Think there should be some extra bonus for having many kids survive.

luckynmd · 2019-10-29 19:23:35

jasonrohrer wrote:

Yes, but how to completely prevent that?

What if you would lower the number of skill slot of the running baby's next life?

With the correct numbers, this would be a great incentive not to run or to learn to use the /die command.

Kaveh · 2019-10-29 19:24:04

jasonrohrer wrote:

How do you have influence after your own death? How do you set your kids and family up to be safe and all live until old age?
People do this in real life all the time, through trusts, inheritance, etc.
How did someone murder all your kids after you died? Did they not have a safe house to live in? Did they have no security systems in place? Did they have no weapons and medical supplies? Did they have a nice food store? Did they have instructions about what to do in case of an emergency?
Yeah, I know, it's a big ask, and it sounds kinda crazy. But having the highest score on the leaderboard consistently SHOULD be a big ask and involve a crazy amount of dedication.
In real life, if I was away from home and my house burned down with my kids in it, I wouldn't say, "Oh, I wasn't there, not my fault!" It's my job to tell my kids what they should do in case of a fire when I'm not home, right?

I agree that this is an interesting question and perhaps what the game is/should be about. I personally love RP and feeling close to my family/offspring, and especially when I just started playing I would constantly check the family trees to see if my descendants were still alive. Indeed I try to set them up as well as I can, but tbh I care more about the player learning to eat by themselves than force feeding them to make sure my kid survives at least until I die. Technically I could even build a house, lock my kids inside and feed them there without ever letting them out so there's no risk of losing them, but I don't think that's fun for anybody.
I have about 3 minutes to make sure my kids are wearing clothes, know where to find food (starvation still being a major cause of death) and perhaps what they need to do or how they can help me. Most kids don't actually want to stay near their mother for longer than that, and I'm not gonna kidnap my own kids to make sure they listen to all the wise lessons I have to share.

Also important: I do think there's a few differences between the game and real life, with one simply being that direct family isn't as big of a deal. The question generally isn't 'How do I set up my kids to be safe/live until old age' but 'How do I set up this TOWN so everyone (including my kids) is safe/lives until old age'.
If my daughter leaves town to search for oil and then abandons any kids she has because she has a horse/cart and a mission, this might be better for the town in the long run, but not for my genes. She doesn't do this because she doesn't care about her family, but because there's MORE people (usually also family) affected in the long run than just those few kids that had to restart before even really starting their lives (if lucky they even /die'd). Priorities. By doing something like this I may have thrown my (and my mothers & brothers) genetic fitness score into the garbage, but at least I know the town will last a bit longer.
(Leaving the oil search to a male player instead? It's generally hard to trust people to actually do those kind of things, because a lot of others won't know how or simply don't feel like doing it. There isn't much time to build a trusting relationship like that anyway.)

To put simply: if the trolley problem would be applied to OHOL, a lot of people would pull the lever EVEN if it's their own kid. The genetic fitness score changes some of that, but in general it just isn't important enough. Why would my offspring have to survive over all these others? As it stands, there is no difference between my kid or someone else's kid besides them pushing down my score. That's why mothers dump their kids next to the fire so other women take care of them. You could see it as a daycare situation, but I feel it's more similar to foundlings. A point system doesn't seem to be enough to incentivize taking care of your own. It seems a lot of people don't even know it exists or what it is.

As for that last point: sometimes I wonder what would happen if you'd get a notification every time someone important to you dies, perhaps even with the 'penalty' on screen. 'Your little sister Emily just starved, Genetic Fitness -1.5'. 'Your grandson Alex was just killed by a bear, Genetic Fitness -0.8'. Maybe it could even show up as a ! on screen so you can find/bury their body. Would people care more if it's more in their face? Or would they still feel helpless and not do anything to prevent it in the future? More often than not I won't realise one of my kids died until after I died too (it's not like they can come and tell me and if they're not around I won't immediately assume they're dead, they might just be out hunting rabbits or something). If family/offspring and your heritage should be so important, why is mourning so rare?

Are there other ways to incentivize taking care of your babies? As I mentioned over here in a topic w/ a very different subject, there can be no "us" if there is no "others", perhaps even within the same family. Why would I want MY offspring to survive over my 2nd cousin's (besides the points, we lookin for other incentives here)? It's not like I chose to have this kid, and even though they say ILY because I gave them a backpack, that doesn't mean they'll do more for me than the other kid would (unless they really like RP which a lot of players apparently don't, sadly, so there isn't much of an emotional bond).

pein · 2019-10-30 01:57:12

well, babies could be slower a bit, i can generally pick them up but if you got lag then good luck with that

if you feed them once it shouldn't be your fault
it's hard to compare to real life as you got some control when you get pregnant and if you are you won't ride a horse and kill bears, but in the game, you just don't know
other than the few cases when you got no control over it (bitten or murder cooldown which doesn't always mean you are guilty) and some obvious occasions when the baby sees a total crap situation, you should be able to feed it once

if the distance between the mom and baby grows, and the orientation is not the same (maybe the baby gets lost but still should be able to have his angle like +-45% to mothers direction) then is the babies fault
if the baby is able to follow direction but the distance is growing or stays same then moms fault
when some mothers got bad intentions and the baby escapes then it's hard to tell
death grip was bad, especially if the mom is old and doesn't realize
if you don't want to stay you need to /die but that not obvious to all, and some people spend 5-15 minutes when they decide to suicide and it's still a negative impact on parents

all in all is a bad mechanic which is out of players control, you should basically force feed people to have control over it. Tool slots are kinda important to be controlled by such a random variable.

Gomez · 2019-10-30 15:12:56

Certainly a luck factor involved however my high score involved me personally saving my children via first aid and killing the would be murderer. MY low scores also resulted from inciting war and excessive baby deaths. I've also spawned been ignored and lived from persistence following mother or finding someone to feed me or maintaining warmth on fire to buy time.

Without doubt my score would be lower with less skill...however a lot of intangibles and luck plays a big factor too.

Definitely been tempted to force feed zombie babies however I refuse to waste food on such.

Last edited by Gomez (2019-10-30 15:14:50)

Saolin · 2019-10-30 17:54:15

It's a mix of luck and skill, even what happens after you die. It's about making decisions that marginally increase the chance of your family living, like getting clothes to your babies, making batches of pies or compost, and in general doing what you can to improve and stabilize the basic resources that are necessary for survival. It won't guarantee anything but on average your family will have a better chance of survival in a village if you keep it well maintained than if you don't. Things like runner babies and new players balance out in the long run, so while they're annoying at the time, everyone gets that about equally.

This would all be perfect if every starting scenario was about the same - those who were better at providing would build up a larger score on average. The issue is every scenario is not the same, eve camps are tougher to survive in so playing at that stage will tend to be detrimental to life score, while a developed town is probably more beneficial to gene score on average. Some dynamics of the game contradict the gene score dynamic as well. For example two days ago I was in a nice starting camp with a well and one other person. Things were coming along nicely but then I started to have babies, around six in 5 or 10 minutes. I had no yum chain and no clothing. We didn't have the food supply to support more than probably one ideally, maybe two. So at that point the correct decision to avoid exhausting the village of resources so that it can continue would be to let four or five of those babies starve and tank my gene score. Two of these were new players too. Now I have a hard time bringing myself to leave any babies to starve, so I fed them all. The other player I had been peacefully working with cursed me, and the food supply was exhausted shortly after and we all starved. I understand I was cursed because I had too many babies and tried to keep them all. And I guess this type of scenario also balances out.. is it a desirable dynamic though? And I think it illustrates too how much better for gene score developed towns are, here I was forced into a scenario where my gene score was going to go way down regardless of what I did, which is ok, but gene score treats all scenarios as the same, and a developed town you don't really have this dilemma. I don't like also how the correct move can be to starve your babies, especially new players being the best choice to starve, but I'm not sure what can realistically be done about that.

jcwilk · 2019-10-30 18:06:27

Saolin wrote:

It's a mix of luck and skill, even what happens after you die. It's about making decisions that marginally increase the chance of your family living, like getting clothes to your babies, making batches of pies or compost, and in general doing what you can to improve and stabilize the basic resources that are necessary for survival. It won't guarantee anything but on average your family will have a better chance of survival in a village if you keep it well maintained than if you don't. Things like runner babies and new players balance out in the long run, so while they're annoying at the time, everyone gets that about equally.
This would all be perfect if every starting scenario was about the same - those who were better at providing would build up a larger score on average. The issue is every scenario is not the same, eve camps are tougher to survive in so playing at that stage will tend to be detrimental to life score, while a developed town is probably more beneficial to gene score on average. Some dynamics of the game contradict the gene score dynamic as well. For example two days ago I was in a nice starting camp with a well and one other person. Things were coming along nicely but then I started to have babies, around six in 5 or 10 minutes. I had no yum chain and no clothing. We didn't have the food supply to support more than probably one ideally, maybe two. So at that point the correct decision to avoid exhausting the village of resources so that it can continue would be to let four or five of those babies starve and tank my gene score. Two of these were new players too. Now I have a hard time bringing myself to leave any babies to starve, so I fed them all. The other player I had been peacefully working with cursed me, and the food supply was exhausted shortly after and we all starved. I understand I was cursed because I had too many babies and tried to keep them all. And I guess this type of scenario also balances out.. is it a desirable dynamic though? And I think it illustrates too how much better for gene score developed towns are, here I was forced into a scenario where my gene score was going to go way down regardless of what I did, which is ok, but gene score treats all scenarios as the same, and a developed town you don't really have this dilemma. I don't like also how the correct move can be to starve your babies, especially new players being the best choice to starve, but I'm not sure what can realistically be done about that.

Good example. I wonder if there's some way to take the context into which you're born into account, like if you come from a long line of low scoring moms but you knock it out of the park and keep 4 babies alive that should be wildly rewarded. Likewise if you come from a line of moms that all kept 3 or 4 babies alive but you can't even keep one alive then you should be penalized pretty severely.

Kaveh · 2019-10-30 18:13:01

Scores being different for early towns/late towns or based on your (recent) ancestors' scores would def be interesting. Just to account for the luck-part in spawning early/late in an arc and the state the town is in at birth.

Toxolotl · 2019-10-30 18:22:50

When i run as a baby its because i want to /die out of the way so my mom doesnt have to deal with my bones. Teasing the mom and making them chase you is another matter all together. When i see a baby run i let them.

Ilka · 2019-10-30 20:20:31

This fitness depends only on luck.
Unless someone is playing only to increase this skill.
There was already some good advice here on how to do it.
Some grief wrote something like, "Kill your mother, you won't have younger siblings."
Now, unfortunately, it's so that life at Eve's camp always ends with a , bad place on the list, and life in boring cities is conducive to achieving a good place.
Despite the fact that, for example, at Eve camp I do something really important for my family and I don't even remember living in the city.
Maybe it should be scored differently depending on the generation we live in?
Although ... I wonder where in the table are the last two mothers of the completed arc?
Each had several dozen children who all died.
What's the fault of these two players?

jasonrohrer · 2019-10-30 21:26:41

The kill your mother thing is a problem... hmm...

Coconut Fruit · 2019-10-30 21:41:42

jasonrohrer wrote:

The kill your mother thing is a problem... hmm...

Not rly, it's not easy to do this without being cursed and also killed. Also the 6 seconds timer to inflict a wound makes it even harder.

One Hour One Life Forums

#1 2019-10-29 14:45:32

Is genetic fitness based on luck more than on skill?

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Re: Is genetic fitness based on luck more than on skill?

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