How do you feel with the game nowdays

Amon · 2019-12-21 16:52:13

An honest question.

A lot of things have changed since the removal of the rift. Maybe not all that great, some sound exciting on paper.
But reflecting back on all of it. How would you guys say... in what position is the game now compared the rift, and how is the game now compared to right before the pre-rift situation.

Kinrany · 2019-12-21 16:56:53

I really like that there's a long-ass road, and most settlements sooner or later come in contact with it. And you can loot dead towns.

Cantface · 2019-12-21 17:23:13

I love most of the changes! Yay for edible tomatoes+onions and yay also for feast table/wine and some neat decorative stuff to play with! I love that the rift went away, not so much keen on hierarchy stuff but I hear it is rarely used so it's not a big deal. Tool slots I can live with but honestly I wish it wasn't a thing as I always get caught short by it. The soil thing still bugs me and I'm sure a few others but it again is not a massive issue. the one update I wish we didn't have at all; Biome specialties. Although I have adapted to it, I find I have been trying to choose my play style a lot more because my favourite things to make require that I not be white. Some people dislike that this happens but I'm not the only one doing it for sure. I don't like having to run around looking for water, oil spots and rubber for seals etc. all the time so I do other stuff to keep the fun alive!

I can't wait for the newer players to finally start climbing the tech tree. I always mention onetech if there are a few peeps asking to be taught and I even include onetech in my final words often just in case. Once you know how to navigate it's not super hard to write things down step by step like I did. I think there's too many new players still that vets/regulars are struggling to keep everything tip top shape, however with time (and directing them to the website in game) hopefully we'll get more progress and easier, sustainable villages/towns.

Last edited by Cantface (2019-12-21 17:24:11)

karltown_veteran · 2019-12-21 19:08:28

Its nice. I feel like most aspects of the game aren't really used. Tattoos aren't used any more, they were used a bit when the update came but not any more. Same with fries and ice cream, et cetera. Idk.

sigmen4020 · 2019-12-21 20:06:14

karltown_veteran wrote:

Its nice. I feel like most aspects of the game aren't really used. Tattoos aren't used any more, they were used a bit when the update came but not any more. Same with fries and ice cream, et cetera. Idk.

One of the reasons these things aren't being, I would claim is due to the recent racial restrictions, especially for ice cream and tattoos (wouldn't include french fries for the reasons I'm about to present). Ice cream and tattoos are niche things that both require two specific races to make, ginger and brown. For ice cream: Need ginger for salt and snow, need brown for sugar. For tattoos: Need ginger for salt water for production of black dye, need brown because the process can only be performed in the jungle and also requires a mango tree.

Why go through the effort of having a brown and ginger cooperate just for ice cream or tattoos, since they in the most likelihood can't even understand each other. The effort to make these things are for too big for the reward and therefore noone really bothers. And it's also the fact that it's the minority of the player base that knows how to make these things, since they are all niche content not needed for a towns survival.

Now onto my feelings about the game recently. I have to say that all the restrictions being put on us (racial and tool restrictions, mostly racial restrictions) are making the game less enjoyable to me, and is also making end game towns more boring. Before the restrictions I had some niche tasks I loved to do. Dying clothes and making niche foods (primarily tortilla chips), both of these tasks have been slapped with a racial restriction. There's just even less to do when you spawn in a town that has everything now. It might take longer to get there because of these restrictions, but life in those towns are more boring than ever.

My biggest contention are the racial restrictions, but I have annoyances with tool restrictions too. I'll first say what I like about them. I like that I have more of a reason to communicate with others when I need a task done. Say I need some discs, but don't want to waste one of my precious tool slots, I'll ask someone else to do it. I like those interactions. What I don't like about tool restrictions are two main things, the inconsistencies in the entire system as a whole. Like why does putting kindling on hot coals take up a tool slot, or why are hatchets and axes considered different tools when an axe is just a hands-down better hatchet. Stuff like that. The other thing is that once I'm done with a project I don't have any idea what I need to do, since at this point all my tool slots have been used and can't very well just start a different task with all the slots used up.

When I play currently I usually only play one life in a day, I don't really have the patience for these restrictions to be playing multiple lives a day. Imo these restrictions are making the game less and I don't like the direction Jason is going where he instead of expanding the tech tree just tries to extend the one we've been playing with for over a year now. It's honestly getting stale, and I fear that the diesel well will still be the highest tech we have when Jason stops the weekly updates.

Btw sry for the rant, this post went on for longer than I expected it to.

Last edited by sigmen4020 (2019-12-21 20:06:46)

Toxolotl · 2019-12-21 21:17:46

Game is unplayable for me atm. Between tool slots, biome restrictions, and pumping restrictions any excitement has been extinguished. I used to love hitting the benchmarks to progress, now thats not up to me. I have to be lucky enough to be the right race in the right town. Its beyond boring. Play a few lives on low pop without those restrictions and you'll see how the game was meant to be played.

ollj · 2019-12-21 21:31:23

Kinrany wrote:

I really like that there's a long-ass road, and most settlements sooner or later come in contact with it. And you can loot dead towns.

4 months ago the rift had a 2 week vacation, and i ended up building a huge portion of a 5600 tile long road (90% of it at least), it was one circle and many branches, with bells and theft and lots of murder all around.

---

I paused playing ohol for 4 months, could not care less due to rift being a sadism simulator.

its gonna be a 5500 tile long road again, but this time its already 2000 long by the time i joined and its straight east-to-west, with very little diagonal zigzagging within 500 tiles northSouth, zigzagging to get it closer to larger nearby ruins and to make it easier to catch road segments under construction.

the town east of the most active bell alongside that road with LOTS of wild berries east and bananas east of that, it just had a silly boom, within 4 hours it got 2 buildings and an airport and up to 20 ppl in it at the same time, where there was just a road before, and tools laying around, till i gave birth to some girls in te berry field, and they boomed.

i regularily revive ruins along the road, and its a mutual benefit of city+road, some male children build that road with me till death, placing almost 200ish tiles per hour without a horse (graveyards that noone woould ever see again are goot sources of flat rocks)

Last edited by ollj (2019-12-21 21:34:35)

fug · 2019-12-21 22:15:32

I really dislike how the correct move for Eves is to move into a town. I always feel like this is a design fail when the game moves into the direction when the best style of play for early game is to just not do it.

Race specialization is also a fail in my book as I dislike essentially having to kill myself to the proper race to do things I like to. Universal translator is nice but basically worthless if there aren't other races around. Blacks are great if you want to help out other towns as horses speed up travel and are basically needed anywhere. Tans are boring as sin and I actively avoid them like whites. Gingers are my favorite but even with 18 skill slots I'm not going to touch the oil grind because fuck that.

Really wish we could have had a return to the infinite map without the strings attached. I also wish lineages worked in the rift where there would only be a few but really strong lineages to prevent all the <1 day lineages we're seeing again. You would have reasons to have roads as towns would mostly be known even if still abandoned often.

The game isn't bad but it isn't exactly good for anyone who has played. We're still fundamentally on the same level we've been on since the game start just with more gimmicks added.

Cantface · 2019-12-21 23:21:49

Sounds like a lot of us want similar things, wonder if it will have any significance or not.

Keyin · 2019-12-21 23:47:45

So many arbitrary things are being put in place to balance OHOL.
-Cursing
-Ancient things to prevent grief
-Misc unbreakable objects
-Race restrictions
-Weapon restrictions
etc.

but I firmly believe that OHOL should reinforce the old maxim of "Life isn't fair". Balance isn't important as long as everything makes sense and feels non-arbitrary.

On a positive note I really deeply enjoy languages. I wish they were a bit easier to decipher, as I enjoy spending lives trying and failing to do so.

FulmenTheFinn · 2019-12-22 00:03:07

Still noob paradise; experienced players basically have to do all the work, same as always. If Jason admitted not having zoom or hotkeys in the base game is a terrible idea, and actually added them to vanilla, the average player might stay long enough to actually get good at the game, and not quit before they even reach the 50h mark, as is the case now.

Also getting to Eve is extremely rare and luck-based now, which is a major bummer for an Eve player like me, which in turn means I get even less out of the game than before.

Some of the changes in the past few months have been interesting, but none of them have fixed OHOL from haemorrhaging players, which is the single biggest problem the game has.

jcwilk · 2019-12-22 01:22:54

It does seem strange that he doesn't add zoom and hotkeys and such at least to vanilla... Why give modded players such an obvious advantage. Can't be bothered to code the server better so it's not possible, can't be bothered to add zoom to vanilla. Doesn't make a lot of sense

Spoonwood · 2019-12-22 01:55:47

I didn't play during The Rift nor did I even consider playing during then. Why would I? The game couldn't grow in its playerbase. And griefers had more power than ever before. So, I can't answer that question. But, I will say the following:

Overall, this game was better a year ago than it is today. There have existed improvements like maps, slot boxes, milkweed seeds fitting in a bowl, bug fixes, improved temperature inside of buildings, and the like. The overflow for food system makes for another example in the positive direction. But overall, the game was better last year to the date than it is today. Eve chaining could happen in the high population context. There was no incentive to civilization destroyers like Apocalypse 2.0. The game was less mono-textual. Towns often looked different from others. Some were in jungles, some were in grass, some were desert edges with a swamp. On top of that, instead of this boring static temperature system where characters are cold, we had a much more dynamic temperature system. It wasn't like your character was the same temperature all the time if wearing the same clothing and wasn't near fire. More like your temperature changed everytime you moved. And more of the map had different biomes. On top of that, one could get near perfect temperature in many spots by nature. There were no weapons like swords a year ago. There were no race restrictions. There were no tool slots. Tarry spots could also be in more than one biome. And towns like San-Cal either existed or would soon come into existence.

And also, the water supply of towns was a lot less fragile to griefing. I mean these past few days we've seen or heard about blocked off tarry spots and wells. I saw this happen at almost the same time as I'm writing this as wondible's town had waystones around the well. Even if waystones get fixed, it's not like other means of blocking wells don't exist. Springs have advantages in that the grid system makes finding towns easier via stakes. But, I see no good reason as to why players couldn't have both ponds which can get dug up into wells and springs. And such a system would be less fragile to water griefing.

Alright, I can answer how I feel the game compared to the short period after the effects of the Come Together Disaster had gotten weakened and the start of The Rift. There were no tool handicaps. There were no biome restrictions. The game was better overall. But, it was still a biome and temperature system that was mono-textual and boring. It was still a system fragile to water griefing. And swords which have had nothing to do with parenting or civilization building in OHOL to my knowledge, worse they are anti-parenting and anti-civilization building tools, were still in the game. And more. So, the game was better a year ago to the date.

Edit: Also 2-soil tilling was possible, what... less than a month ago?

Last edited by Spoonwood (2019-12-22 02:14:07)

happynova · 2019-12-22 02:02:20

I feel like the game can be more frustrating these days, compared to pre-rift times, but that overall it's also much more interesting, and I think I'm happy with that tradeoff.

DarkDrak · 2019-12-22 06:30:11

Personally, i really enjoyed the pre-rift state, with the three-town meta that would let a lineage survive for a long time. Compared to now, there was so much more freedom to explore the possibilities that this game had to offer.

The rift had its upsides. Being able to continue last life projects easly for example. And being able to find every town pretty easly.
The downsides were a lot more, sadly. Everything done would be for naught 'cause reset every couple of days. Early game just ceased to exist.
Overall it ended up feeling permanently the same.

Now the game feels like you get freedom, but you get to enjoy it with broken legs.
Every life I end up not being able to do what has to be done 'cause specialization.
Right now this game is in a much more fixed state than before and it has much more complex player interactions than what we had before (which was not that much tbh.) It did get better in some perspective. I don't dislike the limited oil nor the tool slots all that much. But the frustration that the family specialization is forcing is just too much.

I'd say that overall this game feels slightly pretty much as it felt in the last days of the rift. It's playable and it can be enjoyable too. But lives start feeling the same. You see your town deing out due to limitations and you can't do much about it.

Psykout · 2019-12-22 08:32:57

Facing an obstacle for the first time or for a small few times = interesting and engaging.

Facing an obstacle every time you play the game = Frustration

A year ago it felt rewarding to rise above the challenge and simply just know what needed to be done communally to get past the obstacle. What it sounds like now is, you can see and understand the obstacle in the way, but are limited in your interactions to address the problem. That limitation can very well breed interactions that are the holy grail of online gaming, but if its only hitting a small percentage of the general lives lived, its no longer interesting and engaging, but just down right frustrating.

What I have always felt is that Jason wants a quilt of interesting unique stories to be stitched together inside of the engine he built. It's not a far out thing with the structure of the game, but its so hard from a user standpoint to even achieve because of how many limitations are there. With everyone so limited in what they can do, if you are at the level that you know all the steps to everything, you inevitably get put into a mono task job because others either don't know how to do, or can not do because of slots and racial barriers.

I really enjoyed the lives that I had that I would look around and say, I can spend my whole 60 minutes and just build a cool bakery. I enjoyed the lives that I got all the parts for a newcomen well assembled ready to go right before the well went dry. I enjoyed the lives that I was a servant essentially. Fed the nursery fire and gathered firewood, made charcoal for the smith, did a couple cycles of compost and stood in as shepherd on the sheep. Made a couple big batches of pies before doing a cycle of rabbits for packs, right before gathering an extra horse for the town.

After all I have gone through and learned, I really loved being the swiss army knife to a village to get them to a town. Being shoehorned into specifics KILLED my growth as a player and therefore took away a lot of enjoyment from learning the game. When I look at it now, I ask out loud, why in the world would anyone attempt to learn all these steps if it came down to RNG if you could even do them or not.

It's even more maddening because months ago Jason skirted around specializations because he did not want to isolate players from not being able to do things if they "knew" how to do them. Well we are now in that boat and there is absolutely no choice or actions you can go through to get around it. If you have used your slots, the best you can do to help the smith is pile branches. If your town really needs a pump, the best you can do is leave town and use up most of your hour finding someone and convincing them to join you in the desperate hope of mutual survival.

There is much less you can offer as an experienced player these days that matters. From ash to ash, from dust to dust. Lets think about that a little bit. When starting the game you are faced with an learning curve that takes a little bit of work to become self sufficient. It then steepens on your first couple in depth tasks, requiring knowledge of accumulating end products from other curves. It then steepens even more when you know what interactions are needed to even begin your own progress, and if someone is even going through said steps. You are suddenly now faced with a difficult and rewarding choice - do I push past this and make an end product that will be needed 30-120+ minutes after I die, or do I try to stave off extinction in the moment. That choice was something that motivated people to desire to learn the game well enough to be in that group of players.

Obviously there was a huge difference between having a 6 person startup town of players that were near the top versus 6 players that were new. Some eve camps struggled with having a fire going all the time, and some eve camps were already cultivating sheep and making compost (My personal definition of Eve camp is a new camp, and either the founder is alive or died within 45-60 minutes of the current time) Thats a huge difference in levels of advancement. The attempt to manipulate that curve seemed to attempt to take power away from the know-it-all users and push them back down into the collective of players. It might have achieved its end goal slightly, but also created a new problem... Why are you motivated to succeed at the game as a player (gotta have that realplay) if you can not use that success regularly. Who in the fucking world thinks S.O.L (Shit outta luck) mechanics create interesting gameplay, that only works the first time and when you can see through hindsight that you put yourself there with the chance to course correct apparent.

YannaChan · 2019-12-22 08:35:46

its not good enough until optional marriage is added

pein · 2019-12-22 11:05:01

I suicide a lot more often and die at an early age more often.
Used to play daily, nowadays I had time but I either play multiple lives or not at all.

Generally, I just skip lives when I'm one of the useless races, skip big ugly towns, skip lives where I feel useless.
I try to make a project that is long-standing and useful, cow pens, a grape field, a room, a sheep pen. Then I try to go back there and build it up.

Often ends up being scavenged, ruined, griefed, then I give up on it and make a new camp somewhere.
I mapped out the spiral the other day, ended up with huge roads backwards and things stolen to help the ancient big ugly towns.

Then you pop up in the middle of nowhere, you might know that a town is 2000 away, you don't know if anyone near you could help or not, ost of times won't worth staying or building cause there is no point starting over, already ruined, too close to main cities to stand for a long time. I hardly enjoy low tech lives or high tech lives and hard to find a low to medium city which I can return to.

Also, I feel that my work has no real meaning as everything gets abandoned and we just go more and more west, doing nothing longstanding.

DiscardedSlinky · 2019-12-22 13:32:37

I seriously dislike the game nowdays. I can't bring myself to play it because everytime I log in my town needs something, but I was born the wrong color and can't fix it.

I absolutely hate feeling helpless and useless. It just makes me want to give up, which I basically have.

To make matters worse, I could be born the right skin color but I'll run out of tool slots before I can actually help.

So I just don't play anymore. It makes me really sad. I love the community and my ohol friends, but I can't stand it anymore. I WANT TO HELP. It makes me feel good when I do something the town really needs. What am I supposed to do when I'm born white in a town that needs rubber? Go try and find people? So I spend 95% of my life wandering the wilderness and even if I do find someone why should they return to my town? What if it's extremely far? What if they die on the way? I just feel so helpless. The best I can do is leave a map and try to convince people to come back with me. It's even worse when you're not white. You're just some random dude in town screaming words they can't understand.

The updates are frustrating the hell out of me too. Towns are hardly surviving past the deep well stage and Jason is spending a week to fix ice holes and geese stuck on stumps? Come the fuck on.Jason is trying to stretch out the current tech to it's limit because he doesn't want to make more. SO he makes reaching that phase harder and harder. I can see your laziness, and I'm tired of it.

Cantface · 2019-12-22 15:55:53

Reading all this it seems no one likes the biome/race specialties but everything else like tool slots and oil shortage is okay, so there's ONE thing stopping us regulars from playing consistently again. I haven't played in almost a week or two and I agree with the opinions expressed here. The limitations are not fun.

DestinyCall · 2019-12-22 16:13:07

Cantface wrote:

Reading all this it seems no one likes the biome/race specialties but everything else like tool slots and oil shortage is okay, so there's ONE thing stopping us regulars from playing consistently again. I haven't played in almost a week or two and I agree with the opinions expressed here. The limitations are not fun.

I don't find any of the hard limits enjoyable. The tool slots are more tolerable, because they are easier to avoid. I don't think they add anything positive. Most people who "like" tool slots have more tool slots than they need - in another words, they are not being restricted by them. There's nothing fun or interesting about running out of slots and being forced to give up on doing what you want or need to do because of an arbitrary limitation.

Spoonwood · 2019-12-22 16:56:30

I agree with Destiny. Not sure about oil rigs breaking. Actually, I'm sure I don't like them, because they limit cars and planes too much.

Potjeh · 2019-12-22 17:53:12

I feel like I can't accomplish shit because you need partners for projects and finding someone willing to cooperate on a project takes like 30-45 minutes. So yeah, haven't been playing lately.

Last edited by Potjeh (2019-12-22 17:53:45)

pein · 2019-12-22 18:37:41

Tool slots are tolerable for the ones who are slow, they wouldn't do any of it anyway.

I saw towns with 9 scraps sitting in baskets, cause they couldn't afford a pencil to recycle, and roleplayers who make paper didn't know that they really should mark some bowls for the smiths. If you are any of like me, you fix issues or move on. Tool slots just made impossible to make floors, remove floors, remove bad items. Heck, I dig up fences instead of making new ones, cause I rather use a shovel and mallet than an adze. Cut the shirt on me so I don't use the tool. Ask people to drill and put kindling on fire. If nobody can do that for me I just waste a slot on it. In the end, I don't even remember my slots. Can't make aprons most of my lives cause a knitting needle is a tool.

It becomes better after 9-10 slots, which needs you to play a lot.

arkajalka · 2019-12-22 18:53:05

Too ez. No danger, just towns full of soft millenials who get offended super easily no matter how hard you work. Think the game is at its best state ever, but something is lacking.

Really like the new building content (snow walls, pine walls) and overall updates. Auto-orient REEEEEEEE. Also people spam this fugly pine floor to everywhere even when theres all the capabilities to do better looking and better statted things and never upgrade the shitty pine structures(decay timer on pine pls 10 generations?). Towns get huge fast and wither as fast as they came up.

Imo food drain should be bumped up whilst water reserves bumped up. So it would be harder to get big towns going, but they would last longer with their locational resources.

Some foods sources are totally broken and kill all the difficulty in that aspect.

Milk costs 1 soil/water for 560pip worth(4buckets x 10bowls x 14 pip) of milk.

Mutton, part of compost cycle and super high pip.

Turkeys, all you need is knife and you can feed whole town for centuries. Been hunting turkeys on some camps and can get something around 20 in single life ez with a basic cart.

Kraut, super broken, but needs gingers and is rarely abused cause people rather have 50 knifes for cutting bread than make one kraut board.

PVP sysytem is still really broken, so we need to have this carebear mechanic where killing is basically impossible if you dont mess up big time or be hunted by grieffing twins.

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How do you feel with the game nowdays

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