a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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A game I have to point to every 2-3 minutes when discussing OHOL griefing is Space Station 13. This game has popped up every now and then, on here, in the Discord, mostly because I like to bring it up every now and then, but also because its gameplay loop is extremely similar to OHOL.
You have as much freedom to do actions in SS13 as you do in OHOL, whether that's being helpful, being an ass, or even being a griefer. Both games involve cooperating with other players to make something you've never seen/experienced before; in OHOL, it's making a town, or a familial relationship; in SS13, it's exploring the depths of your job, or experiencing the interactions with the rest from the latest happenstance.
Here's what really separates SS13 from OHOL, and why SS13 is hands down more enjoyable, while OHOL remains a lesson in frustration:
SS13 moderates when and how griefing happens.
Yes, you heard me right. Griefing has a time and a place. Murder, griefing, conflict in OHOL has a purpose, but only if it is actually moderated.
In SS13, people have to opt-in to become the antagonists of the station. Thus, from the moment the game begins, there is a pre-defined percentage of who is causing 'griefing', who is not, and to what extent they've been allowed to grief.
In OHOL griefing is in general unrestricted, in every single village at every single hour of every life, and that's a problem.
Jason understands that the solution isn't banning them - this should be obvious to a lot more people here, but unfortunately it isn't - but there HAS TO BE A SOLUTION being acted upon!
The way SS13 servers handle antagonist moderation is through the "Antag system" that randomly assigns people antagonizing roles with random objectives, BUT also thru human moderators and admins.
But Jason doesn't have the resources to hire humans! This is a solo project that has a 'hands off' attitude to telling people how/why/where to do things. This isn't even considering the investment and 'trust' needed for those individuals to help, and like SS13 they would also be vulnerable to unequal distribution of moderation.
What Jason DOES have is coding, and that's all that's needed to get this to work - a Karma system that does not directly punish the player, but DOES affect them ingame.
1) Build a system that can track the activities (aka object/transition interactions) each player performs in each life.
2) Assign the system certain 'patterns' that it tracks, and can be wholly deemed as 'griefing' or 'negative' interactions towards building civilization.
3) Give each player's account a value of Positive Karma and Negative Karma - much like Life Tokens.
4) Set a threshold for Negative Karma. Once it reaches a certain amount, or is too different from their Positive Karma, the account's future lives are altered to make it obvious that they are a griefer - like permanently making their face an insidious grin.
With that kind of system working in the background and tracking every player's actions, no, it will not remove griefing. It's not supposed to remove griefing, that's the job of the society. What it does do is gives the server, over time, a Karmic system to to warn anti-griefers AND rational players the info of which townfolk have a history of griefing in previous lives. The anti-griefers are no longer inherently waiting for griefing to occur; they have potential to see who's a griefer and to deal with the problem with the awareness of others.
Can it still be gamed? Yes, it will definitely be gamed. ANYTHING will be gamed if it can be, thus why griefing exists. As such, the system has to be...robust...enough to withstand griefers gaming it to maintain their secrecy.
Can griefers still get around it by buying additional copies? Sure! But in that case, Jason isn't investing time banning them, they are willingly buying more copies of the game to stop whatever visuals the Karmic system puts on them.
Is building the system worth it if it can still be gamed or worked around? Yes without hesitation. Because, in the long run, if such a system gets robust enough to work properly, without tweaking, and without needing moderator intervention, Jason would then be able to use that same system to emulate SS13's Antagonist system; allowing players to 'opt' into the possibility that their next life, the server wants them to grief.
Give a griefer no moderation and no antagonistic system, and they'll make whatever griefing methods they want.
Give a griefer the knowledge their actions are watched, and a mechanic to potentially 'be the bad guy', and they will opt into it as much as they can, and shape their games to match when it happens.
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If you managed to read through this all, please consider commenting and debating it here. This is probably one of the most critical updates OHOL needs for its long-term longevity to be treated seriously and not bogged down by non-stop griefing.
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How would antagonists be relevant to civilization building or parenting in game? I think that needs thought out, before antagonists could get worked into the game as anything but griefers.
How will the antagonists, whatever they do, be involved in a game of civilization building or parenting? If antagonists can't end up involved in civilizaton building or parenting, then I don't see how they fit in the context of this game, and thus they end up as griefers. So again, that needs thought out first.
At present, no, I don't think that such an 'antagonist' system will work, because I don't see how it would fit in with civilization building or parenting. At the very least, the people who were using war swords weren't doing that. It wasn't even PvP, because they were competing for the same goal as normal OHOL players trying to parent or re-build civilization. So, how would an antagonist system fit with OHOL?
Danish Clinch.
Longtime tutorial player.
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How would antagonists be relevant to civilization building or parenting in game?
Civilization-building is not without opposition, just as Space Station 13, at its core, is about working a job on a space station and not dying.
SS13 has tons of content, building capabilities, et cetera, that the game could be entirely focused on just expanding the station and having everyone do their jobs, but that's not what makes it inherently fun. What makes it fun is accomplishing those despite the antagonistic intentions of some of the crew.
If we borrow from IRL, not every person has the same interests as every other person. Not everyone is created equal. Unfortunately, some people end up wanting to see society devolve, or want to see society change for the worse. Some people act or operate in 'evil' manners for their own reasons.
No society has developed without setbacks in some fashion. If the game was devoid of conflict, then not only would it not an interesting game, it wouldn't actually be a civilization-building and parenting simulation.
Edit: Regarding your comments on PvP: As far as I'm concerned, Jason has added content that the game itself does not support Yet. OHOL has laughable "PVP" mechanics both directly and indirectly, that I refuse to accept War exists in OHOL. The fact of how rare Meme Swords get used on a day-to-day basis should be a testament to how much work his spawning system needs (and other systems) before War is even possible.
Last edited by Wuatduhf (2019-12-30 22:49:17)
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Civilization-building is not without opposition, just as Space Station 13, at its core, is about working a job on a space station and not dying.
SS13 has tons of content, building capabilities, et cetera, that the game could be entirely focused on just expanding the station and having everyone do their jobs, but that's not what makes it inherently fun. What makes it fun is accomplishing those despite the antagonistic intentions of some of the crew.
I couldn't disagree more. Plenty of people build towns without opposition in sight and have for a very long time.
OHOL can and does work both as a parenting and civilization building game with two people on a server at a time. The only issue with such that people experience is the loneliness and the smaller scale of such in terms of people around.
Danish Clinch.
Longtime tutorial player.
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I couldn't disagree more. Plenty of people build towns without opposition in sight and have for a very long time.
OHOL can and does work both as a parenting and civilization building game with two people on a server at a time. The only issue with such that people experience is the loneliness and the smaller scale of such in terms of people around.
You are discussing a much more isolated part of the game that - while it exists - is arguably not the target that OHOL is looking to form.
That would be like me saying SS13 is built to be played by 1-2 people, vs. the "ideal round sizes" that end up varying between 10-60 players.
Comparing the orange to the apple doesn't really help the discussion here, however it does let me clarify my point. My point is supporting griefing by validating and moderating its frequency in a larger multiplayer environment is wholly based on what the OHOL servers 'should be', which right now is only seen on Megaserver 2 (and occassionally Server1).
Turn the clock back a year ago, and we had it; several servers that were operating with upwards of 50-60 players on each of them. But, with time and attrition due to frustration over griefing/content, we only have a fraction of them still sticking around.
Last edited by Wuatduhf (2019-12-30 23:49:30)
Avatar by Worth
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I would rather have enviromental oppositions like seasons, pollution or diseases rather than intentionally coding griefers into the game
make bread, no war
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How would antagonists be relevant to civilization building or parenting in game?
Surely griefers existing in this very game is a good enough demonstration that every IRL civilization has to deal with people that do not play by the rules?
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No society has developed without setbacks in some fashion. If the game was devoid of conflict, then not only would it not an interesting game, it wouldn't actually be a civilization-building and parenting simulation.
This is entirely untrue... there are lots of farming/civilization building games out there that do astronomically well that cannot be griefed or ruined by others. And before you reply saying "well I don't want just another city builder", then remind yourself of how the game was advertised... a game about "parenting and civilization building". That's the line that got most people into this game.. not a game about "parenting, civilization building, and drama". Say what you want about the necessity of griefers, but i honestly believe the game would thrive more without them entirely.
That said, I know it will never happen, so a karma system may be the only alternative we could hope for. That or.. well.. just going back to Rimworld, or whatever game we came here from.
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There are a few issues:
Griefing or doing negative actions is often subjective. It's often a very grey area. And the biggest issue is that punishments available to a town being griefed are too limited. All we can do is curse and murder. Curses get used up pretty quickly which is why most conflicts escalate to murder...because we have no alternative. The third alternative that many people (myself included) dont use is to just walk away but that isn't in our nature.
For example, this happened not long ago and both of us considered the other to be "griefing" and ended up in murder because we had no other choice:
I was in bell town, it's a HUGE town that had very few people living it, maybe 6 or so people at the time. It has a large building that was the combined fire/bakery/nursery which means that everyone used that building. The nursery had over a dozen backpacks stored in it and there were another dozen backpacks stored in those boxes out front.
I moved the unneeded backpacks from out front to another location and instead used each box to store tools. One box for adzes, one box for froes, etc, instead of having them hard to find all over town...well some random person was so insulted and angered by this that they undid all my work (even as I was clearly in the middle of working on it). Didnt ask me, didn't explain why, just kept undoing my work. This went back and forth for some time before I realized, there is nothing I can do to stop him except murder. So I ended up killing him.
Was I griefing? I wasn't trying to. Was he griefing? He probably didn't think so. But this is the very common result of when things escalate and you have no alternative to stop others except for murder.
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Karma won't help for the same reasons it couldn't help before, of course. Humans are creative. The karma system will always be one week behind.
The initial idea was not to prevent people from breaking the rules. The idea was to make sure everyone is always vigilant and knows that there are no rules. So that when something does happen, it looks like enemy action, and not like pulling a gun in a chess match.
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There are a few issues:
Griefing or doing negative actions is often subjective. It's often a very grey area. And the biggest issue is that punishments available to a town being griefed are too limited. All we can do is curse and murder. Curses get used up pretty quickly which is why most conflicts escalate to murder...because we have no alternative. The third alternative that many people (myself included) dont use is to just walk away but that isn't in our nature.
For example, this happened not long ago and both of us considered the other to be "griefing" and ended up in murder because we had no other choice:
I was in bell town, it's a HUGE town that had very few people living it, maybe 6 or so people at the time. It has a large building that was the combined fire/bakery/nursery which means that everyone used that building. The nursery had over a dozen backpacks stored in it and there were another dozen backpacks stored in those boxes out front.
I moved the unneeded backpacks from out front to another location and instead used each box to store tools. One box for adzes, one box for froes, etc, instead of having them hard to find all over town...well some random person was so insulted and angered by this that they undid all my work (even as I was clearly in the middle of working on it). Didnt ask me, didn't explain why, just kept undoing my work. This went back and forth for some time before I realized, there is nothing I can do to stop him except murder. So I ended up killing him.
Was I griefing? I wasn't trying to. Was he griefing? He probably didn't think so. But this is the very common result of when things escalate and you have no alternative to stop others except for murder.
Just my $0.02 here, you were the griefer, be it unintentional. You were disrupting the town's already established storage system, and killed the guy who tried to stop you. In hindsight if you wanted to organize the tools you should have put up a tool shed and/or made some new boxes to organize them.
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Antagonist roles are not "griefers".
As I have mentioned repeatedly in other threads, griefing and antagonist roles are NOT the same thing. I would be fine with OHOL developing an antagonist system, but it would not be a "solution" to the griefing problem and, quite frankly, I don't think OHOL is ready for organized antagonism in any serious form. We can barely hold it together as it is.
I have played SS13 and the antagonists provide a challenge for the cooperative players to overcome which keeps things fresh and adds variety to the rounds. It works really well, but SS13 also relies heavily on admin moderation AND banning players who refuse to follow the rules. This helps to prevent players from acting as antagonists when that is NOT their assigned role and it ensures that people at least try to perform their assigned duties when they are supposed to be helping the station. The admins are also responsible for maintaining the delicate power balance between the station and the antagonists. When the antagonists are too weak to be a threat, the station isn't challenged enough, but if they are too strong, they can rip apart the station too quickly to be stopped. In OHOL, this balance is even harder to achieve, since the average village is very fragile and relies on just a couple of key players.
SS13 moderates when and how griefing happens.
This is true, but I think you are abusing the term "griefing" to mean something it doesn't actually mean. Spacestation 13 has Space Law which is enforced within the game. And it also has admins/moderators who enforce server rules. Most servers expect you to do your job and not break Space Law too much ... unless you are an antagonist and breaking the law is required for your role. Antagonists can murder, explode, and steal in pursuit of their objectives without breaking server rules (but they are still subject to Space Law within the game and will be punished by Security if they are caught). But griefing is not allowed or encouraged, even as an antagonist, and getting caught griefing will result in job bans or server bans. True griefers still exist in SS13. They might enjoy playing antagonist roles, but that doesn't mean they stick to ONLY playing as antagonists. And if they can't keep their destructive urges under control, they can and do get banned from playing SS13, because griefing is against the server rules which apply to the PLAYER, not the in-game character.
I'd say the major difference between SS13 and OHOL is not that SS13 has an antagonist system, but rather that it has clearly stated server rules that are actually enforced by moderators. Unless OHOL can provide that, I don't think an antagonist system would do any good.
Last edited by DestinyCall (2019-12-31 01:37:52)
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This is a controversial idea that Jason may consider implementing.
The last few ideas like this caused great harm to the game.
For that reason I would recommend a strongly conservative approach.
Otherwise we may end up with the next tool slots/racism update.
Loco Motion
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This is a controversial idea that Jason may consider implementing.
You are right about that. Highly controversial ideas seem to be his favorite.
If we do get antagonists, I want to put a vote down for "evil geese". Player-controlled devil birds. Goose jails would become meta.
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Antagonist roles are not "griefers".
...
As I have mentioned repeatedly in other threads, griefing and antagonist roles are NOT the same thing.
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SS13 also relies heavily on admin moderation AND banning players who refuse to follow the rules.
...
The admins are also responsible for maintaining the delicate power balance between the station and the antagonists. When the antagonists are too weak to be a threat, the station isn't challenged enough, but if they are too strong, they can rip apart the station too quickly to be stopped. In OHOL, this balance is even harder to achieve, since the average village is very fragile and relies on just a couple of key players.
Wuatduhf wrote:SS13 moderates when and how griefing happens.
This is true, but I think you are abusing the term "griefing" to mean something it doesn't actually mean.
I'd say the major difference between SS13 and OHOL is not that SS13 has an antagonist system, but rather that it has clearly stated server rules that are actually enforced by moderators. Unless OHOL can provide that, I don't think an antagonist system would do any good.
Nothing you said in response is necessarily wrong. Yes, I am oversimplifying the idea of griefing by wrapping up Antag roles into it to get my point across. You are right that Antags can still grief by going outside of their "allowed boundaries" as per their objectives, but that's my point; there's tolerable levels of griefing that can be wrapped into an Antag system that Jason could separate from the less-tolerable methods of griefing, just like how Antagonist involves doing certain things that conflict with other players in order to obtain your objectives.
That's the long-term idea behind introducing such a Karmic system. 'Legalize' griefing similar to SS13 in a way where players who opt-in to trying to play the role of an "OHOL antag" are given an objective and the system doesn't punish SOME of the negative interactions while they're in that life.
In regards to your position of SS13 antags not being griefers, if the Antag system didn't exist, those Antag players would technically be griefing. Like I said in the above paragraph, Antag roles are a justified separation from standard griefing the add chaos to rounds.
I understand that it's the moderators that have to also push a balance of the Station vs. the Antagonists, but keep in mind the environment they're given to "balance" only lasts an hour; any overreaches in either direction are 'wiped' within 30-120 minutes of the action being taken.
OHOL doesn't have that same timeframe, its cities and lineages last between multiple hours to even the span of days. The power balance between players is also VERY in check compared to how much power a player in SS13 can accumulate in a round.
Avatar by Worth
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This is a controversial idea that Jason may consider implementing.
The last few ideas like this caused great harm to the game.
For that reason I would recommend a strongly conservative approach.Otherwise we may end up with the next tool slots/racism update.
I think what I proposed is pretty conservative. The Karmic system would just 'watch' everyone and keep track of the "bad" and "good" things they do. There are a few objective things that everyone can agree are good, and bad.
Killing the last adult domesticated sheep with no other adult sheep 'around' is pretty straight-forward.
Spawning 5-20 bears from their caves in a lifetime while killing none of them is also pretty straight-forward.
Crafting Adobe Kilns out of an oven is a bit more tricky to 'track'; if a person keeps doing it over and over, sure, that's a lot more visible. The same would go for someone pickaxe'ing an adobe Kiln/Oven, but what if they're doing that to excess Kilns/Ovens someone else made?
There's a lot of variables the system would have to track, thus why I would say it'd have to be "Robust" enough to monitor such unique interactions beyond a simple "Who touched this or made that".
Avatar by Worth
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I think what I proposed is pretty conservative.
You may think it's conservative but Jason tends towards radical. A system like this could easily flag players that don't deserve it as griefers. The same way that towns often misunderstand. You kill two griefers in your life and suddenly you're flagged as a griefer too. The sandbox nature of this game really makes it impossible to automate the process. Yesterday someone made every fencepost into a gate to let all the sheep out. I got killed by a naked idiot for chasing them off. You'd see this constantly with a karma system, but automated and unavoidable. Undoing a griefer's work would count as griefing.
Loco Motion
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we had curse marks, they didn't work, each life I had to kill some idiots, then each life other idiots thougt that given a reason, they can freely kill me then they were butthurt that they lacked the skill for it
did I deserve it? yeah for the first part but then people didn't let me get off of it, cause they killed AND cursed me if they could
basically they couldn't kill me, they tried, and they still thought that a curse is deserved cause I didn't let them kill me
the most pathetic people are the ones who think they are always right, always pleasant to play with, always good and they could never ever harm anyone, while the things they don't do harms others every single game, then they go on and on about it for "years and decades"
the griefing is because:
-people are bored
-there is no other goal to reach
-there is no other pvp element than killing, no fights or duels just straight up kills
I mean there is a lot of things that would change griefing into some more honourable fights.
First off I think, you need skill-based duel and hp system and death a little harder.
Secondly, you need something to fight for, like more expensive resources and just ability to create stuff that is cool and gets cooler each hour.
Third, we need some partially fixed groups, like team A can be any of the 4 colours, team B can be any of the 4 colours, team A can never be on peace with team B and team B will automatically be at peace with team B members. Now you can pledge allegiance for the day, this means you will be born back to the chosen team and his allies. While you can once a day "betray" the team and go the other one. Too much movement would be bad.
At least 4 teams would be fun, but we can't really split into more than 2 groups.
To make it balanced, people should want it to be balanced. So joining the underdog would give you more rewards (like life tokens or meme points?)
Maybe it go a little longer, like 3 days. You need a life in bot sides then you can choose a side. You can swap once if you got a good reason.
You need to be invested in your team.
Then it would be more actual war than self sabotage.
https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=7986 livestock pens 4.0
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Playing OHOL optimally is like cosplaying a cactus: stand still and don't waste the water.
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My point is supporting griefing by validating and moderating its frequency in a larger multiplayer environment is wholly based on what the OHOL servers 'should be', which right now is only seen on Megaserver 2 (and occassionally Server1).
No. Griefing by definition goes against game design. Validating griefing is not an appropriate response to it. Moderating it though sounds fine.
Turn the clock back a year ago, and we had it; several servers that were operating with upwards of 50-60 players on each of them. But, with time and attrition due to frustration over griefing/content, we only have a fraction of them still sticking around.
Alright, so here's Jason's graphic for a reminder: https://i.imgur.com/djVG3FJ.png
Do you see the positive upticks on the graphic? There's about a month long positive uptick from July to August of '08 and then another one from the end of December to the end of January. There's another significant positive uptick from the start of February to near the end of February of '09, but it's not quite as long as the other two upticks. Here's the catch... the bigserver system happened at the end of January: https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5110 Anyways, I'm mentioning this since you mentioned several servers. It looks like the bigserver system didn't do anything for the game in terms of numbers.
Danish Clinch.
Longtime tutorial player.
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Wuatduhf wrote:No society has developed without setbacks in some fashion. If the game was devoid of conflict, then not only would it not an interesting game, it wouldn't actually be a civilization-building and parenting simulation.
This is entirely untrue... there are lots of farming/civilization building games out there that do astronomically well that cannot be griefed or ruined by others. And before you reply saying "well I don't want just another city builder", then remind yourself of how the game was advertised... a game about "parenting and civilization building". That's the line that got most people into this game.. not a game about "parenting, civilization building, and drama". Say what you want about the necessity of griefers, but i honestly believe the game would thrive more without them entirely.
That said, I know it will never happen, so a karma system may be the only alternative we could hope for. That or.. well.. just going back to Rimworld, or whatever game we came here from.
In Rimworld there's always the raiders.
I think a better example is Oxygen Not Included (Terra type though or maybe even Rime type... Oassise type sounds like it would be too much for new players), since there don't exist AI characters looking to mess your stuff up.
Also, we're just talking about the civilization building aspects of those games. They don't have parenting aspects in them, at least not without mods.
I also second the part about environmental challenges, though they shouldn't overwhelm new players to OHOL, and I have a feeling that this game overwhelms new players all too often.
Danish Clinch.
Longtime tutorial player.
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There are a few issues:
Griefing or doing negative actions is often subjective. It's often a very grey area. And the biggest issue is that punishments available to a town being griefed are too limited. All we can do is curse and murder. Curses get used up pretty quickly which is why most conflicts escalate to murder...because we have no alternative. The third alternative that many people (myself included) dont use is to just walk away but that isn't in our nature.
For example, this happened not long ago and both of us considered the other to be "griefing" and ended up in murder because we had no other choice:
I was in bell town, it's a HUGE town that had very few people living it, maybe 6 or so people at the time. It has a large building that was the combined fire/bakery/nursery which means that everyone used that building. The nursery had over a dozen backpacks stored in it and there were another dozen backpacks stored in those boxes out front.
I moved the unneeded backpacks from out front to another location and instead used each box to store tools. One box for adzes, one box for froes, etc, instead of having them hard to find all over town...well some random person was so insulted and angered by this that they undid all my work (even as I was clearly in the middle of working on it). Didnt ask me, didn't explain why, just kept undoing my work. This went back and forth for some time before I realized, there is nothing I can do to stop him except murder. So I ended up killing him.
Was I griefing? I wasn't trying to. Was he griefing? He probably didn't think so. But this is the very common result of when things escalate and you have no alternative to stop others except for murder.
Both of you might have left town and tried to live in another place. So, I don't agree that no other choice than murder existed.
Danish Clinch.
Longtime tutorial player.
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First of all, I really don't want to be assigned a "job" every life that I have to do. If your little system can be used to track curses so if you get enough I can see you are "marked" from life to life, them I'm all for it.
If you want to assign people orders to grief in addition to all the regular griefing in hopes that some code can tell the difference between helpful actions and non helpful actions and properly assign or take away "karma" points, then you have lost your damn mind, and I'll invite you to GTFO and go play whatever game you find more fun than OHOL.
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In Rimworld there's always the raiders.
I do love ONI, it's an amazing game.. but in Rimworld the raiders are nothing like OHOL griefers. You get plenty of warning, and have plenty of ways to deal with them. If anything in Rimworld were to be compared to OHOL griefers, it would be colonists who go on murderous rages... and you can easy "perma-ban" them with a shot to the head. They can't respawn back in to harrass your colony some more. Either way, the point still remains.. you don't need griefers to make a game fun.
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Seems you are looking for black and white in a very grey world....honestly the game is less fun without griefers / antagonists, it becomes mine craft without them imo.
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Seems you are looking for black and white in a very grey world....honestly the game is less fun without griefers / antagonists, it becomes mine craft without them imo.
Minecraft has over 100million players... using it as an insult is not very logical. I feel like people who bash on minecraft have never actually played it.. it's fun as all hell.
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