Jason you have an SID Problem

Bremidon · 2019-12-09 08:32:58

This is unfortunately a typical picture of the SID Problem.

The only player to actually play was me and my daughter. (I was off to the left side).

My first suggestion is to lower the number of "lives" down from 24 to 6, and to increase the recharge time to 20 minutes. Even when I was brand spanking new, I never used up more than 3 lives at any one time. I could see a tough situation making 6 lives necessary. 24 *was* necessary when we had the baby boom. I don't think it's needed anymore.

Another possible suggestion would be to have an increasing penalty to SID deaths for the baby. I don't think this would be that helpful, as I think the SID-addicted don't really care about the score anyway.

Yet another suggestion would be to have the number of lives tied to the gene score. The only problem here is the penalty that new players would have is on top of the rather steep learning curve. So maybe not.

Somehow there should be an incentive for players to play the hand they are dealt rather than play the slots by pulling the SID lever over and over again. Additionally, there should be some sort of disincentive to abusing the system rather than using it like a free life dispenser. Even without any of the exploits of the past few weeks, there is a major advantage to avoiding an eve camp and getting born at one of the hubs. You are *much* more likely to survive and have all your kids survive at a hub.

The whole thing feeds on itself as well. If I know as an Eve (or as a daughter of Eve) that I am probably not get any kids that stick around, then I will be tempted to pull the lever as well.

I just threw some ideas out there, mostly on the obvious side, and not really thought through. The problem is real though and should be addressed.

pein · 2019-12-09 12:56:38

other than skin color which is kinda obvious problem (i never wanna play as white and rarely as ginger) we got shitty towns which dont want to participate in
plus the tool slots make us useless after a while so we need to die or we wont be much of a use, especially without a horse

now some people want to go back to previous towns which is understandable, bell towns allow just that, you can find nearby towns based on coords

i don't often suicide but when I do, is for a reason (look at that sentence)

we dont need that many lives, i think around 8 is enough
people could live for like 20-30 minutes for a good score rather than forcing to stay until old

denriguez · 2019-12-09 14:49:22

Aren't tool slots tied to genetic score? There's almost certainly a way to engineer a penalty that results in the immediate loss of a tool slot for each /DIE. Enough of those and you can barely play.

+1 on turning up the difficulty on lives and refresh rate.

wondible · 2019-12-09 15:02:11

Yeah, there were new people running out of tokens during the steam sale, but conditions are pretty much back to normal. Could turn back easy mode, especially on the high end.

miskas · 2019-12-09 15:16:50

why do you think the /die mechanism as a problem?
What is a problem for you?
I think /die more as an indicator that something else is the problem or that there is something that bothers the newborn player so much that he doesnt want to live in this situation.

Keyin · 2019-12-09 15:17:46

Can't make the penalty too high for /DIE, or people will go back to being runner babies.

Also, remember the problem is probably not as bad as it seems. One person spamming /DIE can be born to the same mom many times if a lot of the moms are on cooldown. I think birth cooldown should also be reduced.

EDIT: looking at that picture too, you wouldn't want those kids to stay in the eve camp anyway for the most part. Either they don't want to put in the amount of work it takes to get a camp going, they think it will be really boring life, or they believe themselves unskilled enough to survive living in an Eve camp.

Last edited by Keyin (2019-12-09 15:24:05)

Spoonwood · 2019-12-09 16:52:25

Bremidon wrote:

My first suggestion is to lower the number of "lives" down from 24 to 6, and to increase the recharge time to 20 minutes.

There existed a new player who streamed during the sale and ran out of lives without suiciding a single time. The life limit was 12 lives then. He waited and played again and was shortly out of lives again.

The game sells new copies every week and I'm sure people still see the new player pop up frequently enough. How the life limit affects them now I don't think clear.

Bremidon wrote:

Somehow there should be an incentive for players to play the hand they are dealt rather than play the slots by pulling the SID lever over and over again.

Or alternatively players should have more options about their initial conditions, and the game get rethought from being one of parenting and civilization building to one of civilization building and parenting, placing the emphasis on civilization building more than parenting.

miskas wrote:

I think /die more as an indicator that something else is the problem or that there is something that bothers the newborn player so much that he doesnt want to live in this situation.

Yeah, I'll agree with that.

Keyin wrote:

Can't make the penalty too high for /DIE, or people will go back to being runner babies.

The problem there may have not been with the runner babies, but with the people who insisted that they had to have children that survived.

testo · 2019-12-09 16:53:53

Keyin wrote:

Can't make the penalty too high for /DIE, or people will go back to being runner babies.
Also, remember the problem is probably not as bad as it seems. One person spamming /DIE can be born to the same mom many times if a lot of the moms are on cooldown. I think birth cooldown should also be reduced.
EDIT: looking at that picture too, you wouldn't want those kids to stay in the eve camp anyway for the most part. Either they don't want to put in the amount of work it takes to get a camp going, they think it will be really boring life, or they believe themselves unskilled enough to survive living in an Eve camp.

Lawl you can´t run if you are out of lives. Just make "every life is precious" count. You don´t want to play on a random town? Well you don´t have to play at all. Drop lives to 4/hour or so, nobody is going to mass /die then. And high value players always play wherever they get spawned, it´s the shitty ones that get picky with the place they are born.

Bremidon · 2019-12-09 16:53:57

miskas wrote:

why do you think the /die mechanism as a problem?
What is a problem for you?
I think /die more as an indicator that something else is the problem or that there is something that bothers the newborn player so much that he doesnt want to live in this situation.

Just had a kid who didn't want to be a boy. I'm not even sure they used the "die" command. They just ran from me into the cold biome and starved. I couldn't even force feed him. I know Jason has mentioned he wanted to do something about this, because I end up paying the price for that other player's convenience.

Edit:
On reflection, I think my last sentence sums up my problem with the die command as it is implemented today. There are direct problems: my score takes a hit because the baby player decides he doesn't like the cut of my jib. Or he doesn't like being a boy. Or doesn't like so many trees. Or wants an easier start. I think it's ok to give the player some say in this, but the cost of repeatedly using "die" or deliberately starving to death should be significant. This should be a tough choice: do I *really* want to tank my score so I can have a city start? Right now, others end up paying the price for his choice.

This is not only a problem with the "die" command, but is also a reflection on how the scores are tallied up. I know Jason is searching and grasping at different schemes, trying to find one that encourages proper play without having loads of exploits or being too restrictive. I don't think he's found it just yet. I'm actually a trained (but lapsed) actuary and a developer, so I could probably help him here, but I respect he wants to try to do this on his own.

Last edited by Bremidon (2019-12-09 17:07:05)

testo · 2019-12-09 17:00:35

miskas wrote:

why do you think the /die mechanism as a problem?
What is a problem for you?
I think /die more as an indicator that something else is the problem or that there is something that bothers the newborn player so much that he doesnt want to live in this situation.

The only indicator for /die is a player that wants to go back to some place/race. That has been debunked, pretty sure the 6 baby deaths I got today was the same guy trying to get into some town or trying to get what he wanted as skin color. I just dislike people being picky when suposedly that is not part of the game.

Elsayal · 2019-12-09 18:30:40

Regarding new players, the rate could be 24 lives for them at start and then go down to 6 for everyone. Even with that small amount of 6, you could still use /die 5 times, then play your game.

arkajalka · 2019-12-09 19:29:33

Feel like, everytime im not in a huge bell town or so people just SID in hopes of getting to a town with everything ready. If im nomading stuff from town outskirts-->SID. I damn well can feed my bebe in the wild too, but its just too ez to die and not take the walk.

SIDing is damn too easy. There really should be somekinda penalty on just dying constantly.

Essentially you are killing off eve camps and early promissing towns by just SIDing to a bell town. This also funnels bell town into unnaturaly fast pace of water consumption starving that whole area down too quick.

SIDding counters on everything you are trying to push. Diverse towns, trading, surviving difficult situations etc.

Why do we even have to have /DIE command at all? Guess only positive is that you dont waste food pips on a baby that would just run.

Legs · 2019-12-09 19:41:22

Personally, my infant deaths come from hopelessness. I'm born and I immediately see that this place is doomed. Yesterday I was born to see that everyone's naked and there's no well. Not even a spring site. A primitive camp with a small farm fueled by pond water. Any work I do here is pointless. What alternative do I have to suicide? Wander through bland uninteresting wilderness for an hour? Realistically my absolute best hope would be to find a dead town, and even then I would be alone since I was a boy.

Rather than waste a real time hour of my life I'd rather just die and try to find somewhere better.

Spoonwood · 2019-12-09 20:04:30

testo wrote:

Keyin wrote:
Can't make the penalty too high for /DIE, or people will go back to being runner babies.
Also, remember the problem is probably not as bad as it seems. One person spamming /DIE can be born to the same mom many times if a lot of the moms are on cooldown. I think birth cooldown should also be reduced.
EDIT: looking at that picture too, you wouldn't want those kids to stay in the eve camp anyway for the most part. Either they don't want to put in the amount of work it takes to get a camp going, they think it will be really boring life, or they believe themselves unskilled enough to survive living in an Eve camp.
Lawl you can´t run if you are out of lives. Just make "every life is precious" count. You don´t want to play on a random town? Well you don´t have to play at all. Drop lives to 4/hour or so, nobody is going to mass /die then. And high value players always play wherever they get spawned, it´s the shitty ones that get picky with the place they are born.

I use to suicide out of towns which had a functioning diesel water engine, so I could make roads to tarry spots, or help the town progress technology with respect to water, or so I could do oil.

Before that I would suicide out of towns so I could play as Eve.

I have no pretension that I do everything perfectly or outperform everyone else constantly or am the best overall. But if you think that only unskilled players suicide and there exists reason to believe that players not suiciding suggests them as more skilled, then I think you are mistaken.

Players might also suicide for the sake of lineages overall lasting longer, by trying to get born into families with very few girls on purpose (Awbz mod has some information to help on that, and I think Hetuw does now also). Though, I don't know if there exist people who suicide for that purpose.

miskas · 2019-12-09 20:24:08

Bremidon wrote:

miskas wrote:
why do you think the /die mechanism as a problem?
What is a problem for you?
I think /die more as an indicator that something else is the problem or that there is something that bothers the newborn player so much that he doesnt want to live in this situation.
Just had a kid who didn't want to be a boy. I'm not even sure they used the "die" command. They just ran from me into the cold biome and starved. I couldn't even force feed him. I know Jason has mentioned he wanted to do something about this, because I end up paying the price for that other player's convenience.
Edit:
On reflection, I think my last sentence sums up my problem with the die command as it is implemented today. There are direct problems: my score takes a hit because the baby player decides he doesn't like the cut of my jib. Or he doesn't like being a boy. Or doesn't like so many trees. Or wants an easier start. I think it's ok to give the player some say in this, but the cost of repeatedly using "die" or deliberately starving to death should be significant. This should be a tough choice: do I *really* want to tank my score so I can have a city start? Right now, others end up paying the price for his choice.
This is not only a problem with the "die" command, but is also a reflection on how the scores are tallied up. I know Jason is searching and grasping at different schemes, trying to find one that encourages proper play without having loads of exploits or being too restrictive. I don't think he's found it just yet. I'm actually a trained (but lapsed) actuary and a developer, so I could probably help him here, but I respect he wants to try to do this on his own.

/die makes sure that the score of the mother is not influenced, only if the bb chooses to not /die mom score will be affected.
So the absent of /die will be an actual problem cause moms will get negative scores from suiciding/self starving bbs.

Still dont havent reed anyone states how /die is a problem for mothers. It does even influence birth cooldown I think. Does it?

Last edited by miskas (2019-12-09 20:25:55)

Spoonwood · 2019-12-09 20:31:28

Players clearly want more choice with respect to their lives. The use of the /die suggests this despite repeated attempts to make it so that people use it less.

The reasons that players have gotten expected to accept whatever life they get born into without any choice with respect to their initial condition should get made perfectly clear. That reasoning may well be massively flawed and not fit well with the rest of the game. In the end it is a merely an expectation of players. Some possibilities:

1. Since this supposed to be a game of parenting, there might exist less parenting were it the case that players had more choice with respect to their initial conditions. However, this is also a game of civilization building. Civilization building may well get sacrificed for more players having a parenting opportunity, because of the problems of players choosing to die as babies. Thus, overall the expectation that players have no choice with respect to their initial conditions may be flawed.

2. Jason might expect that the game is more popular and more fun with more people playing it together. The whole expectation of accepting your fate might be a tactic to try to get more people to convince others to buy the game since if they do that, they will have more children on average (multiplayer games might be easier to sell than single player games, because more marketing of the game might happen by one person trying to get another person to play with them). But clearly there exist problems with quality of play due to baby bones and sids. This game has also never had a strong choice screen with respect to initial conditions. Other futuristic, sci-fi games with more choices in them from the start like Rimworld, and Oxygen Not Included are much more popular than OHOL. Such choice thus might do more for popularity of a game than trying to get people to accept their fate.

There's probably more, but until it's fully understand AND evaluated whether or not the expectation that people have no to minimal choice with respect to their initial conditions is good or not, it has been and remains a rush to judgement to say that players should just accept their fate after picking a server. The game might be substantially better with a substantive choice screen. It might be more popular if it did, and attract better quality of players also.

Also, as I said above, the entire emphasis on parenting for OHOL might be severely off. It seems there exist very few players that value parenting over civilization building in OHOL at present. If civilization building should be more important than parenting in OHOL when one must choose between the two, then I see every reason that a thoroughgoing choice screen should get implemented. And were a thoroughgoing choice screen implemented, players who used /die wouldn't have as much reason to say "but I wanted to try to be Eve" or "I wanted to try working an engine" or "I wanted to make milk" or "I wanted to make wine" or "I wanted to make a car" or "I wanted to get born into an advanced town", because they could go to a spot immedateily where they had at least some probability of doing that, or understanding the immediately preceding steps.

The above, of course, assumes that griefers wouldn't have the ability to use a choice screen, so such a choice screen would need something like only being available to players living to 60 (given that most griefers die before 60 due to murder or other causes).

Think lack of choice is a non-issue in this game? Well, you might want to keep in mind that The Rift had plenty of vets leaving the game or griefing The Rift, because it was a confining box without much choice available.

jcwilk · 2019-12-09 20:49:52

Legs wrote:

Personally, my infant deaths come from hopelessness. I'm born and I immediately see that this place is doomed. Yesterday I was born to see that everyone's naked and there's no well. Not even a spring site. A primitive camp with a small farm fueled by pond water. Any work I do here is pointless. What alternative do I have to suicide? Wander through bland uninteresting wilderness for an hour? Realistically my absolute best hope would be to find a dead town, and even then I would be alone since I was a boy.
Rather than waste a real time hour of my life I'd rather just die and try to find somewhere better.

Don't care to find the quote but Jason's pretty explicitly indicated he wants to very harshly de-incentivize this behavior. You're born to a mother somewhere and that's it, you don't get to choose your mother. If you're choosing your mother than you're exploiting broken mechanics that should be fixed. Don't like the town you're born into? Too bad, find a character roleplaying a therapist, get over blaming your parents for everything and improve your village.

jcwilk · 2019-12-09 21:00:31

I'm torn, I want to throw my vote in towards harshly punishing players who try to game the system, but the most obvious punishment is eventually blocking them from playing (ie, lowering the life token limit) but then that punishes mothers too by making it more likely that players run out of tokens and therefore throttling the supply of babies to a degree. OTOH if those players are just going to suicide anyways then they're useless baby stock... So yeah, 24 seems too high.

What if babies could only walk if their mothers put them down rather than squirming out of their arms, or maybe when the mother puts them down the mother has to right click on them or something like that to get them to be able to walk. Point being, if babies can't be runner bbs then the only way they can exploit their way into a different mother is by doing an explicit /die, which means that /die could be made to have very steep penalties to the bb. You want to game the system? Great, lose a few tokens and 3 points from your meme score and no credit for any family members.

DestinyCall · 2019-12-10 00:03:45

If someone wants to die, they can find a way. Short of trapping them in box and force-feeding them for sixty minutes, you can't make someone play the game how you want against their will.

Spoonwood · 2019-12-10 01:25:29

jcwilk wrote:

Don't care to find the quote but Jason's pretty explicitly indicated he wants to very harshly de-incentivize this behavior.

There would exist less of an incentive for such behavior if some sort of meaningful choice screen existed for at least some players, like we could see the generation of families that we could get born into or something like that.

jcwilk wrote:

If you're choosing your mother than you're exploiting broken mechanics that should be fixed.

No, the lack of choice was one reason that people griefed in The Rift such as the locking in of towns with newcomen engine towers or tried to reset the damn arcs (there was an active discord of griefers during some period of The Rift, and others have mentioned that they griefed during The Rift period but aren't any longer... or they were trying to reset an arc). They couldn't get away from the same old towns. So, they tried to end the arc, which wasn't a method of trying to build civilization or make it so they would live longer. The whole imposition of 'you must play this way', thus has been counterproductive to people playing in the spirit of the game. Removing of /die would have the potential to frustrate ordinary players that they might start griefing, having an attitude of 'I'm stuck here? Well, then we shall all fail.'

What's broken is the insistence on trying to force people to play a certain way and Jason's over-reliance on using 'stick' methods instead of 'carrot' methods. And Jason has made this mistake for a very long time and it may have been a substantial contribution to the game's rather continual decline since this February before the sale.

jcwilk wrote:

Too bad, find a character roleplaying a therapist, get over blaming your parents for everything and improve your village.

Taking accountability away from one's ancestors, insofar as they are accountable for something, is like trying to walk through the world with one's eyes shut.

I'm also going to note that shortly before Jason implemented life tokens there existed a baby suicide concern by him and others. He thought about doing a choice screen and said in one post that he was going to do one. Then he implemented life tokens. This suggests that life tokens was the wrong call to make, and suggests that a choice screen would be a better idea. And it would also be a new one, instead of an old idea which has gotten tried and apparently has had multiple problems over and over again (the idea of forcing players to accept their birth status).

Kinrany · 2019-12-10 01:55:08

The life token system could be changed to have six tokens per hour. If you die six times in a row, too bad. Just saying...

It's kind of a problem that there are no other activities.
Maybe an observer mode would help.

testo · 2019-12-10 02:41:33

Spoonwood wrote:

testo wrote:
Keyin wrote:
Can't make the penalty too high for /DIE, or people will go back to being runner babies.
Also, remember the problem is probably not as bad as it seems. One person spamming /DIE can be born to the same mom many times if a lot of the moms are on cooldown. I think birth cooldown should also be reduced.
EDIT: looking at that picture too, you wouldn't want those kids to stay in the eve camp anyway for the most part. Either they don't want to put in the amount of work it takes to get a camp going, they think it will be really boring life, or they believe themselves unskilled enough to survive living in an Eve camp.
Lawl you can´t run if you are out of lives. Just make "every life is precious" count. You don´t want to play on a random town? Well you don´t have to play at all. Drop lives to 4/hour or so, nobody is going to mass /die then. And high value players always play wherever they get spawned, it´s the shitty ones that get picky with the place they are born.
I use to suicide out of towns which had a functioning diesel water engine, so I could make roads to tarry spots, or help the town progress technology with respect to water, or so I could do oil.
Before that I would suicide out of towns so I could play as Eve.
I have no pretension that I do everything perfectly or outperform everyone else constantly or am the best overall. But if you think that only unskilled players suicide and there exists reason to believe that players not suiciding suggests them as more skilled, then I think you are mistaken.
Players might also suicide for the sake of lineages overall lasting longer, by trying to get born into families with very few girls on purpose (Awbz mod has some information to help on that, and I think Hetuw does now also). Though, I don't know if there exist people who suicide for that purpose.

But then again you use (or abuse) a system to your own benefit. If you get 5 lives you can pretty much cycle almost every town in BS2. Maybe i´m just to sold to the "play the hand your dealt everytime".

On the other hand I doubt skill has anything to do in this game, when I think of high value players I think about people that may or may not know how to make an engine but will work and add to the town in whatever way they can. I would be interesting to see how skill can be added into the game, because there are very few instances that differentiate players.

Legs · 2019-12-10 03:06:45

testo wrote:

"play the hand your dealt everytime".

Very often that means folding when you know it's hopeless. You never bet on a losing hand. This analogy only proves that infant suicide is very often the wise choice.

Bremidon · 2019-12-10 06:53:49

miskas wrote:

/die makes sure that the score of the mother is not influenced, only if the bb chooses to not /die mom score will be affected.
So the absent of /die will be an actual problem cause moms will get negative scores from suiciding/self starving bbs.
Still dont havent reed anyone states how /die is a problem for mothers. It does even influence birth cooldown I think. Does it?

When babies are born to a mom, they generally have to drop what they are doing, start taking care of the kid, deal with the bones somehow, and so on. In a game where you only have 60 minutes tops, even losing 30 seconds or a minute is pretty bad. 12 SIDS deaths, even assuming a fairly quick 30 second penalty, is 6 minutes -- that's 10% of total playing time -- committed towards SIDS players.

That lost time can mean the difference between life and death, especially in an Eve camp or a tricky wilderness spot.

Additionally, those SIDS babies are potentially running down the baby clock for that mom, essentially dooming her line to die out.

Also, see my point about the self-enforcing nature of the problem. People know that they are going to get lots of SID babies as an Eve or Eve-daughter, so why even try. This increases the pressure on players to SID out of all less-than-perfect starts.

So yeah, the full SIDS death might not directly influence the mom's score, but it certainly indirectly influences it.

The game is also supposed to be about coming to grips with whatever life gets thrown your way. The present implementation of "die" (and the way the gene scores are calculated for the "starve" babies) gives all the advantages to the baby player and shares the cost with the mother and related players.

Last thing: I'm not advocating for removing "die" altogether. I am saying that 24 lives is way...way...WAY too many lives and that the gene score should more properly penalize overuse of the "die" command.

Last edited by Bremidon (2019-12-10 06:55:22)

testo · 2019-12-10 06:55:50

Legs wrote:

testo wrote:
"play the hand your dealt everytime".
Very often that means folding when you know it's hopeless. You never bet on a losing hand. This analogy only proves that infant suicide is very often the wise choice.

It is ridiculous as analogy but whatever, you are just trying to justify /die has a valid gameplay. I don´t really care in the end, but don´t feel wise because you are choosing to play only "winning hands". Has Jason said, the game is suposed to be hard. I´d be happy if the game had a 3 life/hour limit or even a hardcore 1 life/hour. But relax, that is just too unpopular so you all can be as picky as you want, choosing how to spend your ohol hour gameplay and which towns you want to play in. I can play with a mod and eat cooked beans for my yum, you can /die all you want. That´s the nature of the game.

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Jason you have an SID Problem

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