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They are basically only cheating themselves by making the game way easier than it is meant to be.
True enough, just as it's probably true that relying on external sources of knowledge somewhat cheapens the "organic learning" aspect of the game (and this coming from someone who contributed a few pages to the wiki!). Still, I do believe the achievement was well-earned. From the sidelines it did sound like it involved quite a bit of sleep deprivation and, if nothing else, their mutton storage room was a sight to see (unless you're particularly fond of sheep, I suppose).
While I don't know if it's currently (or will ever be) feasible, I'd like to see the reddit suggestion implemented of one day having a more detailed list of family bloodlines, how long they survived, how many members they had, etc. That would take the focus off a single "winning" and anonymous team and allow every individual to have their personal efforts recorded.
Discord: weasel_bread#2656
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Lily wrote:I am not too upset about it, but it is definitely cheating to use voice chat. I am sure Jason doesn't care too much, because it is basically a harmless form of cheating. They are basically only cheating themselves by making the game way easier than it is meant to be. Which is probably why they got bored fairly quickly.
Wait. did you say that is why we got bored fairly quickly? You do realise setting this record did take more than 40 hours in a row right?
I mean if you wanna keep going after going for that long with 5-6 hour sleep break in between and push ot further to 200 be my guest
Yeah but one person doesn't have to go 40 hours in a row hehe. If they were doing it the normal way rather than relying on voice chat and a specific group of people, you wouldn't need to rely on the same people over and over for hours on end.
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jord1990 wrote:Lily wrote:I am not too upset about it, but it is definitely cheating to use voice chat. I am sure Jason doesn't care too much, because it is basically a harmless form of cheating. They are basically only cheating themselves by making the game way easier than it is meant to be. Which is probably why they got bored fairly quickly.
Wait. did you say that is why we got bored fairly quickly? You do realise setting this record did take more than 40 hours in a row right?
I mean if you wanna keep going after going for that long with 5-6 hour sleep break in between and push ot further to 200 be my guest
Yeah but one person doesn't have to go 40 hours in a row hehe. If they were doing it the normal way rather than relying on voice chat and a specific group of people, you wouldn't need to rely on the same people over and over for hours on end.
We still had over 22 people involved. Even with that number and perfect voice coordination and baby selection we almost got wiped 2 or 3 times. Those that I'm sure of and remember well:
Once grieffer slipped up somehow when everyone was to tired and we by a mistake allowed one single random child in. One slip-up and you get a grieffer. Try that without VC.
Other time grief tried to mark us all as "bad mothers" by spamming: login, be born, die. After enough of your kids die you get harsh penalties to the fertility and can't have more kids. It took combined effort of 5 people spamming the same way to be born to the last fertile female in town! And this grieffer tried that for over two hours If I'm correct.
Doing that "normal" way is impossibile. No - not because people can't organize that well. I've seen people without VC organizing very nicely with just text chat. Not knowing souroundings was always harsh but not game breaking... We've prooven its possible. Even if people screw up often, most of the mistakes are not end of the world. What makes it impossible is... one single motivated grieffer can kill any town. You can't avoid that as of now. And trust me - we have way more than one motivated grieffer online AT ANY POINT of time.
[Download] Zoomed Out FOV Mod || [Tutorial] Compile Win32 client in Linux VirtualBox || OHOL TOS/EULA explained
OHOL official Discord || My private discord: discord.joriom.pl || Crafting Reference: onetech.info
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stop arguing nerds. play the game. who gives a shit.
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stop arguing nerds. play the game. who gives a shit.
Apparently you do and quite a lot at that. Otherwise you would not have read this thread nor posted a reply.
Last edited by Joriom (2018-04-12 10:16:27)
[Download] Zoomed Out FOV Mod || [Tutorial] Compile Win32 client in Linux VirtualBox || OHOL TOS/EULA explained
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bread_lord wrote:Re: oppositional posts, I assume the argument is that in order to be considered legitimate, a family line would have had to consist only of unrelated players coordinating exclusively in-game. It is not an unfair argument, but it does boil down to differing opinions on styles of gameplay. Since the game's creator has never expressed opposition to voice chat, it then falls to players to define what is and is not within the spirit of the game and, of course, it is unlikely everyone will agree (for instance, to a purist, all forms of external communication violate the spirit of the game -- including these forums). Once upon a time, the fact that raiding in MMOs was facilitated by external addons and voip was something that also inspired bitter debate.
A statement like this comes across as either insincere or ignorant.
For starters, OHOL has a very specific system that limits communication based on age. Voice chat completely circumvents this. I'd say that very much goes against the spirit of the game and you're fooling yourself if you think that's up for debate.
Next you have the external organizational effort to force a closed group of players to keep spawning with each other. Again, the spirit of the game isn't to play with a pre-organized group of people. Jason (the game's creator) has publicly expressed his opinion on this in the past (playing with friends), and while it seems he's toyed with the idea, ultimately it sounds like he's come to the conclusion that it's not within his core vision of the game and is something better left for private servers. See this topic for his posts: https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=138 - I'll quote a few of the relevant lines below.
jasonrohrer wrote:There is a chance that you will be born along with your friends, but babies also get spread out randomly. There is no built-in friend feature. That's not really what this game is about... it's about different situations in every life.
jasonrohrer wrote:This game isn't about playing with friends. You're right about the alienation issue too, with cliques of people who are on voice chat, but who never speak/chat in the game. A bunch of silent, well-organized people who seem to be telepathic.
I agree that it would make the game worse, probably.
So is it a legitimate, "within the spirit of the game" strategy? Evidence points towards "no".
In the end, is it a big deal that's ruining my game play experience? Probably not.
But why not do it on a private server? That's effectively what's been accomplished on a public server in this case with the active player vouching. Just with the added potential of souring other players' experiences and skewing some game stats that could otherwise provide some interesting data on the state of the player base.
Why not on a private server? Private servers aren't as hard as vanilla gets. Also, the record doesn't count in a vanilla server, lol.
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Forgive me if it was not your intent, but you are reading as very hostile and I would point out that I have never concretely defined my own stance on this matter.
It was not, so apologies if it came off that way. Text can be notorious like that.
Neutral was what I was aiming for. Like I mentioned at the end of my post - the act itself isn't really a big deal to me. What I saw was a statement concerning the "spirit of the game" which flew in the face of what time in game and time on these forums has taught me. My goal was to point that out.
What about players who live together and can speak to each other outside of the game? How do we handle "real life" voice chat?...It was perhaps Jason's intent that players teach each other, yet he also acknowledged the value of external information...
Some things you can't solve. Voice chat and external organization is one of those things. Nor do I really think it's worthwhile to come up with measures to handle these. But I do think in a conversation about the "spirit of the game", we can talk about them and how they impact it. Alternatively, I don't see external information such as guides as the same. This information is freely available inside the game and doesn't circumvent any of the built in features to violate the "spirit of the game".
What about baby codes, such as the one currently proposed to identify "forum readers"? Would that sort of thing not also represent a pre-organized group of people should it result in the widespread abandonment of "F babies"?
To an extent, maybe, but I'd only say it's a detriment to the "spirit of the game" if it leads to effectively griefing non-forum goers, instead of teaching them. Honestly, "baby code" almost feels like a sort of natural evolution to human instinct. How did "F" catch on? Babies have certain tells IRL to communicate their needs to their mothers. In game, those tells are taught from mother to child allowing the baby language to organically evolve.
It's also fair to point out that Jason has also changed his mind on certain topics.
Which is great. It's necessary for a game to grow and evolve if it's to survive and be successful. I should point out that in the thread I linked, Jason was actually originally open to the concept of making it easy to play with specific people but changed his mind and came to the decision that it would be detrimental to the game. But of course, that's not to say he won't change his mind again in the future.
In the quote you provided, Jason mentions keeping things interesting. So could there be a way to make playing with friends continue to be interesting? Currently, I think it'd be fun at first, but would get boring after a few lives. Maybe down the road that could change though.
On the subject of strategies, I would argue that it's quite difficult to define what is and isn't a "legitimate strategy" in this game because OHOL is and has always been in a constant state of flux.
But all those "illegitimate" strategies you mention are game features that Jason felt ended up stagnating the game experience, rather than keeping things interesting, so they ended up changing and forcing a new strategy. I think it'd be pretty safe to draw a line between "game feature" and "3rd party tool to circumvent game feature".
One of your more recent posts where you play devil's advocate does a spectacular job of summing up any concerns I could see arising from this event. If new game features and systems start to get developed with what a well organized group of players can achieve in mind, what does that mean for players who want a more "pure" experience? Honestly, I'm not too concerned about it happening - I don't think it will. But it's a slippery slope argument for sure. It's also why I view the achievement itself as impressive, but not really interesting.
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The difficulty of the game stems from having to work with strangers with competing priorities and various experience levels.
A mediocre player on their own can build a decent settlement capable of supporting multiple generations, but when you add in people who don't quite understand the mechanics of sustainable trapping, or a guy who really values snakeskin boots above a working carrot farm, that's when things get difficult...and interesting.
When you strip all of that away, when there are no longer interesting choices and your time in a particular village is in essence infinite, what's the point? The whole theme of this game revolves around the idea that your life is limited, and what you do with that time is important. Do you spend the last few years of your life putting the finishing touches on that sheep pen you've been building since you were old enough to pull a cart or do you spend it sitting around the fire and passing down knowledge to the kids? When you're part of an infanticidal hivemind, it doesn't matter, you just respawn and keep working on that pen.
The record of 111 generations just feels cheap. You guys circumvented the inherent difficulty of the game, which exists because of the game mechanics reflecting the theme of the game.
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So I'd like to say that any opinions people have about whether working together while being able to talk to each other is cheating or not, are not final deciders on what is 'legit' in this game.
The developer of the game, Jason, has heard many of our methods and only showed concern with a few of the real bugs, unintended features, and unbalanced mechanics that were in the game. He didn't really pay much mind to the communication aspect of it.
In regards to the idea of verbal communication being cheating, I'd like to give the following scenario:
You and your friends get your Laptops, or even move your Desktops, and all meet up somewhere to play One Hour One Life. In this scenario, you are able to talk to each other, and you might recognize this scenario if you ever do get together with your friends to play games, or go to a game store to setup and play. I know I've done it in many games, ranging from Team Fortress 2, to Minecraft, to Command and Conquer, to Quake. These games facilitate Teamwork, and there is a trend that highly skilled players tend to communicate using their voices, rather than stopping to text. You might be surprised to know that the text in game was still used, quite extensively by a few, however if you argue that it is only 'legitimate' to communicate using only the Text, or by being able to verbally communicate with only the Air as your medium, then you set up your own arbitrary limit which does not exist outside those who agree on it.
If you are okay with being in the same room and daring to talk to each other while you play, then why should my ability to chat with my voice be considered 'cheating' if it were transmitted as electricity instead of vibrations in the air? Would a Stringed Can Network also be 'cheating'?
Last edited by BlueRock (2018-04-12 22:55:56)
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...
You might be surprised to know that the text in game was still used, quite extensively by a few, however if you argue that it is only 'legitimate' to communicate using only the Text, or by being able to verbally communicate with only the Air as your medium, then you set up your own arbitrary limit which does not exist outside those who agree on it.
...
Very true. A large portion (majority?) of the VOIP was vetting newborns to prevent griefing.
Overall, we definitely did circumvent the way the game was played (playing in a basement next to a friend would be the same). Was it cheating? No, but it was definitely cheeky. I'd like more depth added to the longest generation. My preferred solution would be the longest extant generation. Others have suggested maybe it links to a top 10 list.
"Words build bridges into unexplored regions"
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I don't have a problem with the voice chat at all, it's smart and makes the game more fun when friendly people are there.
I do however think that going to an idle server and letting anyone born who wasn't part of the group die was a violation of the spirit of the game. You're not supposed to have control over who you spawn to or continually spawn to the same family. The hardest part of the game is the unexpected challenges and you completely eliminated those by letting everyone die.
I think the record is not a true record and should be reset in addition to not letting people select specific servers that are part of the official server pool.
Edit / P.S.
The new challenge someone is starting to keep a server going with anyone that want's to join would be a legit challenge, even if you use voice chat and a specific server (although that still degrades the significance).
P.S.S.
Yes, I am butt hurt that I tried to join and was denied but I would still think the record deserves an asterisks next to it.
Last edited by Gederian (2018-04-12 23:11:31)
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I just want to make it clear that I don't really think this is "cheating", especially because all you're gaining is anonymous (if not for the forum) recognition of a big generation. I just think that because of how this was achieved, you bypassed the inherent difficulty of the game by specifically undermining the built in game mechanics.
In this scenario, you are able to talk to each other, and you might recognize this scenario if you ever do get together with your friends to play games, or go to a game store to setup and play. I know I've done it in many games, ranging from Team Fortress 2, to Minecraft, to Command and Conquer, to Quake. These games facilitate Teamwork, and there is a trend that highly skilled players tend to communicate using their voices, rather than stopping to text.
I think this is a bit of a leap. You're talking about games with built in voice chat, and features that enable and encourage team play. And that is reflected in the theme and the goals of the games, as well. Can you imagine if you could only type one letter in TF2? The whole point of that game is to work together as a team and respond quickly, so the voice chat really helps in being agile.
There are numerous indications of OHOL not being such a game, least of which comes from Jason himself. These include: you spawn randomly, you can barely talk for the first few minutes, there are no maps/locations for you to readily find others, no in-game voice chat, etc. These are all features that enhance the difficulty of the game, and help build on the theme.
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I don't have a problem with the voice chat at all, it's smart and makes the game more fun when friendly people are there.
I do however think that going to an idle server and letting anyone born who wasn't part of the group die was a violation of the spirit of the game. You're not supposed to have control over who you spawn to or continually spawn to the same family. The hardest part of the game is the unexpected challenges and you completely eliminated those by letting everyone die.
I think the record is not a true record and should be reset in addition to not letting people select specific servers that are part of the official server pool.
Edit / P.S.
The new challenge someone is starting to keep a server going with anyone that want's to join would be a legit challenge, even if you use voice chat and a specific server (although that still degrades the significance).
It's already been mentioned before that it only takes one Griefer to ruin the Run, which took over 40 Hours. It has always been a complete choice in the game for a mother to raise a baby for whatever reason they have. We needed good devoted females, and accepted no alternatives, and we were able to ensure this by using Verbal Communication to verify that a baby being born into our village constructed wholly by us was coming in with the intent to assist us.
Joining was about as easy as not being a known Griefer, and chatting with us for a bit before established members of the tribe vouched for your involvement with their name on the line. It was a method that came about naturally through many collective hours of play in order to prevent the very public act of record breaking from being a wide open opportunity for those who enjoy destroying people's work in this game.
Your idea of 'legit' being the factor of 'going with anyone that want's to join' would be its own special category of rules of play, which is arbitrarily set by you.
I am sorry that the existence of Griefers might have prevented a few legitimate players from joining the World Record Run, but unfortunately our ends justified the means, and shortly after we dropped the verification, griefing followed.
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It was not, so apologies if it came off that way. Text can be notorious like that. Neutral was what I was aiming for. Like I mentioned at the end of my post - the act itself isn't really a big deal to me. What I saw was a statement concerning the "spirit of the game" which flew in the face of what time in game and time on these forums has taught me. My goal was to point that out.
No worries, you raised some good points and I absolutely understand about text and tone -- I was also aiming for neutral, as I really am quite interested in the back-and-forth! I confess that much of my original post was an excuse to overthink some of the points being made here and in the discord chat and in hindsight I probably came across as quite a bit more argumentative than intended.
Alternatively, I don't see external information such as guides as the same. This information is freely available inside the game and doesn't circumvent any of the built in features to violate the "spirit of the game".
Yes, I concede that a list of recipes or set of starting instructions substitute for in-game systems without necessarily superseding them. It may be that we will lose the ability to spawn on specific public servers one day which would probably have the side effect of pushing organized team efforts (with or without voice chat) to private servers, perhaps even servers that are tuned to be more difficult than the public ones (it could happen!).
So could there be a way to make playing with friends continue to be interesting? Currently, I think it'd be fun at first, but would get boring after a few lives. Maybe down the road that could change though.
If this group's endeavour demonstrates anything it's that a decided chunk of the current challenge comes from the possibility that the child you're raising is the same player that just killed all your sheep and suicided on a farm plot with your best clothes. Without those concerns, players are free to attempt greater feats of crafting and organizing (as in the case of the server 6 city which held the wealth of kings) but the game is still new and lacks content. At this point a group of friends looking to play together for any length of time would have to be very interested in expanding adobe structures. As you say, hopefully down the road as more content is introduced this will change (and today's update looks ready to shake things up quite a bit with regards to sedentary farming cities -- combined with the changes to Eve spawn locations it may be a very long time before we see the megacities of server 3 again).
Discord: weasel_bread#2656
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Joining was about as easy as not being a known Griefer, and chatting with us for a bit before established members of the tribe vouched for your involvement with their name on the line.
You denied lots of people simply because you didn't know them. Nobody would vouch for anyone unless they specifically played with them before so in a sense, it was impossible to join outside your pre-established group.
Your idea of 'legit' being the factor of 'going with anyone that want's to join' would be its own special category of rules of play, which is arbitrarily set by you.
It's not my rules, it's the way Jason intended the game to be played. That's why you spawn to random eves and are expected to raise children or your civilization dies. Your rules of play were the arbitrary ones.
I am sorry that the existence of Griefers might have prevented a few legitimate players from joining the World Record Run, but unfortunately our ends justified the means, and shortly after we dropped the verification, griefing followed.
Griefing is an intended part of the game which was eliminated to achieve the record.
I'm not trying to devalue your accomplishments, it's just my personal opinion that the spirit of the game was circumvented to accomplish it. I'm sure it was lots of fun and I even think you should do it again with more trusted people to see if you can keep it going for several days. I would however still think the accomplishment should have asterisks.
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BlueRock wrote:Joining was about as easy as not being a known Griefer, and chatting with us for a bit before established members of the tribe vouched for your involvement with their name on the line.
You denied lots of people simply because you didn't know them. Nobody would vouch for anyone unless they specifically played with them before so in a sense, it was impossible to join outside your pre-established group.
If I remember correctly Antichthon and Aleria joined. They both werent vouched for/let in from the start but had a chat with us and were let in after a while. Later Weasel_Bread was also let in. We didn't know him and he didn't even have a mic. When you joined stuff was hectic and we were trying to figure out what to do with you. When you throw 9 random people in a voice chat stuff takes a while to get worked out and you left before we could do that. You were in and out in 3-4 min. As people have said before the vetting thing is the only thing that has kept people from griefing us, Because the second "random" person that we let in killed 2 people. and we had people intentionally spawning on us and killing themselves to try and give us a bad mother status.
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If I remember correctly Antichthon and Aleria joined. They both werent vouched for/let in from the start but had a chat with us and were let in after a while. Later Weasel_Bread was also let in. We didn't know him and he didn't even have a mic. When you joined stuff was hectic and we were trying to figure out what to do with you. When you throw 9 random people in a voice chat stuff takes a while to get worked out and you left before we could do that. You were in and out in 3-4 min. As people have said before the vetting thing is the only thing that has kept people from griefing us, Because the second "random" person that we let in killed 2 people. and we had people intentionally spawning on us and killing themselves to try and give us a bad mother status.
Antichton was actually person already running with us during Apocalypse run.
But yeah - just as stated. All you needed to do is have some patience, stay with us, talk with us or get someone who knows us and you to vouch for you.
You denied lots of people simply because you didn't know them. Nobody would vouch for anyone unless they specifically played with them before so in a sense, it was impossible to join outside your pre-established group.
Thats not actually true. Our group was not pre-established. It was collection of smaller cliques. Some people who joined were friends of friends. Some of they played with us before so we knew they're not trolls. Others were simply known from constructive stuff on Discord or forums. Some people like jord or Chard were allowed simply because of their status in the community - that was proof enouch they're not going to troll the group effort. Some of well know modders would be allowed on the spot as well - Sammoh, TyrantNomad. All you had to do to join was basically - set enough of a mark in the community for us to recognize you.
[Download] Zoomed Out FOV Mod || [Tutorial] Compile Win32 client in Linux VirtualBox || OHOL TOS/EULA explained
OHOL official Discord || My private discord: discord.joriom.pl || Crafting Reference: onetech.info
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Good effort on perseverance of pure hours you had to commit to achieve this however it would have been so much more impressive if you did this without Discord and if it just ran 'naturally'. That said, I don't think it would even be possible to achieve anything like this without doing it the way you guys did.
Cudos.
I used to have an open mind but my brain kept falling out.
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