Jason's Murder Problem Thread

jasonrohrer · 2018-04-15 18:07:17

Ah, the "murder problem."

Good old Joriom, busily trying to break the game, just to prove his point.

Obviously, police exist in the real world for a reason. It sounds like people are trying various forms of policing in this game, which is good. You have blue clothes for a reason.

However, there's a big difference between this game and the real world, at least I believe so, and that difference is reincarnation with preserved memory. Joriom can respawn over and over, hopping from village to village, until his heinous task is complete. He's like Krampus making his rounds.

So in the real world, you could punish Joriom by physically imprisoning him or killing him, and that would put an end to his plans forever, you can't really deal with him long-term in this game.

We know how much he has murdered, though. The server can track that. The question is: what can we actually do with this information? Karma system? Marking system (baby born with the mark?) A PVP spawn area for people who have murdered a lot in past lives?

It's hard to see how these things don't also punish/hurt/limit the "good guys" who are doing legit police work.

And you could say that only unjustified murder gets counted, but if we need an entire court and jury system to make that determination in the real world, how do you expect me to solve that fairly with a piece of code? If you can only murder those who have already murdered, is killing a police officer justified? What about a griefer who isn't murdering at all, but just stealing repeatedly? The code cannot detect that.

Murder could require two people, either to commit in the first place, or to survive through. For example, you could get hungry afterward, but be unable to feed yourself because you're holding the bloody weapon. You can only be saved if a friend feeds you.

But what about the lone farmer defending her farm from a griefer or an attacker?

Still, even making murder slower, or grief-murder a once-per-life proposition, wouldn't help too much. It would just slow the likes of Joriom down. Maybe it would be enough to make him too bored to see it through. But he could kill everyone eventually. Actually, maybe slowing him down is enough?

If he can only kill one person per life, and he needs to grow up before killing again each time, then the village population will be able to recover "in between" his murders and he'd never be able to finish the job.

Still, this seems to eliminate the need for police work, which is not great. I don't want the game to deal with this problem for you.... I don't want to make it automatic.

Potjeh · 2018-04-15 18:13:04

I liked the idea of auto bans on respawning on official servers. If you kill one guy and you're reasonably young, you should be able to respawn by the time you die of old age. But the more people you kill in a short timeframe (regardless if it's same or new life for you), the longer the ban gets, and it grows exponentially, so by the time you've wiped out a village you're looking at like a month. Repeated long bans get you a permaban. They can only buy so many accounts before their wallet hurts too much.

Shialac · 2018-04-15 18:16:46

I dont really see murder being such a big problem since the last Update, where the victim gets the chance to expose his or her murderer.

The bigger problem is people killing a whole village by destroying the food chain and the reluctance of many people to just "dispose" of them.

teanah · 2018-04-15 18:17:45

How about a teardrop face tattoo after a third kill? It would give players a heads up if there’s a serial killer in town and wouldn’t effect anyone who only kills a rare Greifer.
Policing and protecting the village would still be up to the players

Maybe a karma thing where after getting murder tattoos several times you’d only spawn as an eve until you make it to old age in one life?

TrustyWay · 2018-04-15 18:41:26

Murders aren't a problem but destroying food chain is and cannot be detected, It was like joriom was really bad player who did every mistakes possible, very fast because he knows the game. Bad players could do the same not even knowing they do wrong. Nobody knows what to do because solutions such as banning him would be great but cannot be used.

Wat do. Karma system is not viable if it gives points when you make kids and they survive until you die of oldness. But people would start killing all other families and cousins.

I thought that if we could have iron handcuffes and when we catch a griefer, if 5 or 6 players burn his forehead. He is marked for hours, a day ?

Last edited by TrustyWay (2018-04-15 18:50:32)

Jorge · 2018-04-15 19:07:19

I don't think any changes are needed on a player level -- it's One Hour, One Life after all. However, it should be easier to stop murderers. Right now murderers and tyrants have a vast power advantage, because the only way to stop them is to kill them, which is hard to do if they're the only one with a weapon.

We can club seals over the head with a long shaft. Why not players? A mining pick or an axe would be deadly if you whacked a player over the head with them. Why not in the game? Also, it would reduce the paranoia around someone making a knife if it's not the only deadly weapon.

If everything is deadly, then it becomes too easy to accidentally kill other players. Maybe that could be adjusted by having a basic health system -- getting whacked with a long shaft or a shovel drops your food by some points, while getting hit by an axe would still kill you after the 20 seconds. Some food for thought?

Thexus · 2018-04-15 19:20:40

Jason is trying to fix bad game design without redesigning the game.

10/10

Why not just remove the whole murder system? Or better, make semi-realistic status-based combat system. But the game is not trying to be realistic, so a basic HP system would be more than sufficent. It could be either a hit-based system, like in Binding of Isaac, or a more complicated system with 2500+ hp, like in every MMO.

And I don't even understand the problem with killing people. Why is it bad? Why should we punish people for doing something that the dev added as a feature? If the game trying to be realistic, then why would we remove it/make it harder? If the game isn't trying to be realistic, then why do we have this unenjoyable system in the first place? Why can't a 5 years old pick up a knife and hurt other people, when the youngest serial killer is 4 years old irl?

Joriom is not "busily trying to break the game", he is just using the game's features.

This whole conversation is unnecessary, stupid and even retarded, considering the game's development. Is Jason trying to balance? Why did he ignore it for 5 patches? What is this "police" thing? Jason is really ignoring all of the conversations about city guards? Why is he trying to balance the game around the 111 gens, and Joriom? The playerbase is bigger than the 10 people on discord who had some fun with pushing the boundries. Why does Jason thinks every family lasts for 111 gens? Why can't he see that 90% of families are dead by the fourth gen? Actually, with the increased server capacity, a family can last for FIVE generations now, wonderful.

And why does he trying to remove the late-game completely? I thought the soil in real life doesnt disappear into nothingness, and you can farm in the same place for thousands of years. Nomad lifestyle is not supported by the game's engine, please don't push it.

I'm really confused, Jason should play his own game and then balance it by his own experience, or just ask some random people about their opinions.

And to answer your question, karma is not a bad thing to add, if you created your game around reborning.

Last edited by Thexus (2018-04-15 19:21:07)

Drakulon · 2018-04-15 19:28:48

How about adding a health bar? So we have a health and hunger indicator.
That way different weapons/animals could do different amounts of damage.
If a knife only does half the damage, but still slows the attacker down, you could just run away and heal (with food or something)
This way several people can still kill one person but its way harder for one person to kill several.

Edit:
If you do the above, pls also add poison to the game:
When poisond your hunger bar gets green/purple and you lose much faster hunger for some time.
If you step on a rattle snake you dont die but get poisoned.
You can use a needle on a rattle snake to get a poisenous needle.
You can use it to poison people (this will not slow you down like the murder effect)
You can also use it to poison food

Last edited by Drakulon (2018-04-15 19:46:10)

Kinrany · 2018-04-15 19:31:10

Perhaps you could fix this problem and some of the spawn-related problems simultaneously, by making spawn rules more deterministic.

For example, you could spawn players with better karma in rich towns. Policemen will have to sacrifice their own karma to keep their towns safe.

Kailes · 2018-04-15 19:32:55

Jorge wrote:

We can club seals over the head with a long shaft. Why not players? A mining pick or an axe would be deadly if you whacked a player over the head with them. Why not in the game? Also, it would reduce the paranoia around someone making a knife if it's not the only deadly weapon.

A good solution could be that many tools can be used to kill/subdue a player flagged as murderer, while knife and arrow are the - for the time being - only tools to kill a non-flagged player.

With regards to other forms of griefing: To some degree players must police those, but the problem is, that most forms are too hard to detect and revert or not reversible at all. Some ways to grief will always exist, but if players can undo the griefing with roughly the same effort the griefer invested, it should no longer be a big problem, merely annoying. I think the way digging bushes works now was a great way to do so.

Food should probably be consumable only if the player would gain a good portion of its food value. Rabbits and trees could regrow, this should probably take quite a bit of effort though, otherwise you don't have to think about it. Another way could be to limit the use of axes to a certain amount.

The most difficult part will be limiting stealing. To an extent players can do so by placing boxes instead of carts, but that is obviously not ideal either.

nategate2020 · 2018-04-15 19:36:58

Drakulon wrote:

If a knife only does half the damage, but still slows the attacker down, you could just run away and heal (with food or something)
This way several people can still kill one person but its way harder for one person to kill several.

This sounds like a phenomenal solution to the issue. Ideally, if the game grew to city-states, this system wouldn't inhibit warlike behavior anyway, since everyone will be charging one another anyway.

Kinrany · 2018-04-15 19:48:50

This reminds me a little of MotionTwin's Die2Nite and Mush.

Mush is basically Werewolf on Starship Enterprise, and Die2Nite is a game for ~40 players who have to cooperate to defend their town against zombie hordes, which attack every day at 23:00.

Both games have similar problems with inexperienced players and griefers, amplified by the fact that some players are in-game traitors: evil humanoid mushrooms in Mush and half-zombie ghouls in Die2Nite.

Both games use the concept of a soul: something that accumulates points between games and gives the players access to special roles or game modes. It provides a system of incentives that aren't limited to the current game.

This also reminds me of the idea I mentioned earlier elsewhere [1, 2]: that players in 1H1L have more freedom that humans IRL, because humans are affected by the evolution and the environment they're raised in.

Last edited by Kinrany (2018-04-15 19:53:15)

Zwilnik · 2018-04-15 19:49:13

Kinrany wrote:

Perhaps you could fix this problem and some of the spawn-related problems simultaneously, by making spawn rules more deterministic.
For example, you could spawn players with better karma in rich towns. Policemen will have to sacrifice their own karma to keep their towns safe.

Or simply use it to spawn serial killers/griefers on their own as males, far, far from civilisation for a fixed period of real time (say 24 hours or more) or until they complete a monument or similar task that shows they can play the game constructively (or just until they’ve broken 100 rocks )

Determining the rules of who is a ‘bad’ murderer is a fun coding challenge but again, killing multiple people without creating something in a village is a good trigger.

The problem with player killing btw is because what’s in the game isn’t a combat system per-se but a kill system. It’s designed more like tool use for hunting animals (and potentially executing bad or excess players) but it isn’t a combat system where it’s balanced in such a way that both players have the capability to attack ad defend while fighting. There are a lot of elements needed to make this work though, not just being limited to how you actually attack. There’s the oft mentioned visibility problem as well as the attack button also being the drop button. Then there’s the option to balance things by letting players defend themselves with whatever is at hand (axe, hatchet, sharp rock, fists, etc. So in a scenario where someone comes in murdering an angry mob armed with the equivalent of pitchforks can dispose of them)

fragilityh14 · 2018-04-15 19:57:40

the attitude of a few people on here absolutely amazes me. Like, are you just the type of person who wants to do every bad thing because it is possible to do so?

And it seems clear to me that Jason is saying major aspects of this are broadly working, as murder is difficult to deal with in real life.

OxPower · 2018-04-15 20:19:07

TrustyWay wrote:

[...]I thought that if we could have iron handcuffes and when we catch a griefer, if 5 or 6 players burn his forehead. He is marked for hours, a day ?

I think we should expand on this because I feel this could be the solution.
It's in the hands of the players, the game doesn't do anything for us.

A steel handcuff for the prisoner, the marking tool should be something like a steel rod plus a steel marking symbol. The whole combo should take 5 steel ingots, 3 for the handcuffs, 2 for the rod.
5 to 6 would be too many, most small towns don't have that many people. I'm thinking 3. Extra marking could make the mark last longer or make it bigger.
In order to cuff someone they either need to be dying, slowed down from killing or get stunned.
If they are dying you have to be real quick with the cuffing and the marking.
If they are slowed down, that would make it so you can talk to them and figure out if they are a murderer or are helping the town.
Stunning should work similarly to the slowdown effect, have the stun victim be vulnerable to cuffing. Long shaft, hammers both smiting and hatchet, a special stunning tool for police work. In the future maybe stun darts, from swamp frogs. Essentially they need to be easy to make and they should be at hand so that anyone can stun until the handcuffs are brought.
Once the person is cuffed you have to make sure they don't starve to death, after that the marking should be heated in some way and then the marking happens. Have it last 24 on the players IP/account.
If the player disconnects during while they are handcuffed they are immediately marked, something similar should happen if they DCs during death, stun and killing slowdown. That would prevent players from quickly disconnecting when everything goes tits up for them.

That's all I can think of for now. I'd like something thats up to the players instead of the code, and banning/permabanning is no fun. Griefing and murder should still be part of the game for those that prefer that playstyle.

powa · 2018-04-15 20:27:32

Thexus wrote:

And I don't even understand the problem with killing people. Why is it bad? Why should we punish people for doing something that the dev added as a feature? If the game trying to be realistic, then why would we remove it/make it harder? If the game isn't trying to be realistic, then why do we have this unenjoyable system in the first place? Why can't a 5 years old pick up a knife and hurt other people, when the youngest serial killer is 4 years old irl?

Because this game is complex.

This is a super important concept to the whole project.

In complex systems, like multiplayer games, you can't prevent everything you don't like and guarantee everything that you do. You usually don't even want to. Most of the wonder of the game is experiencing things not explicitly programmed.

So when Jason is trying his best to keep destruction and murder in the game, he is hoping we can have enough collective maturity to not abuse these features.

Ultimately, if enough people can't control themselves so that the environment is sufficiently toxic, those features will probably be removed.

And that would be to the detriment of the game and us all.

Thexus wrote:

Is Jason trying to balance? Why did he ignore it for 5 patches?

He's obviously been working very hard but can't have the exact same order of priorities that everyone else does. Fixing the server data saving and retrieving issues, for example, was extremely important.

Thexus wrote:

What is this "police" thing? Jason is really ignoring all of the conversations about city guards? Why is he trying to balance the game around the 111 gens, and Joriom? The playerbase is bigger than the 10 people on discord who had some fun with pushing the boundries. Why does Jason thinks every family lasts for 111 gens? Why can't he see that 90% of families are dead by the fourth gen? Actually, with the increased server capacity, a family can last for FIVE generations now, wonderful.

Well, I was personally disappointed with the glorification of the 111 gen in the update notes, since their actions seemed to be very much against the spirit of the game. Though it was still an impressive accomplishment so I sympathize with choosing to acknowledge it.

But he has been actively trying to make the game easier for the early gens. Hopefully he's thinking about improving the situation for the fourth or so gen, but we have to have some patience. He's just one person.

Thexus wrote:

And to answer your question, karma is not a bad thing to add, if you created your game around reborning.

Yeah, I also like the idea of karma attached to player accounts.

jasonrohrer · 2018-04-15 20:36:02

Some stats:

Number of people killed by others so far: 17,456

That's almost 2% of the lives lived.

Number of people killed by Joriom: 100

powa · 2018-04-15 20:37:49

jasonrohrer wrote:

Some stats:
Number of people killed by others so far: 17,456
That's almost 2% of the lives lived.

Number of people killed by Joriom: 100

Thank you. Valuable information.

Is any timing information readily available?

jasonrohrer · 2018-04-15 20:38:01

Also, hit points don't change anything.

They make it harder to murder, but also harder to kill griefers.

Same with armor or whatever. And how would more weapons help? Or making every tool deadly?

All those things would help murderers as much as town guards.

Lexyvil · 2018-04-15 20:45:29

An idea I have for murderers is that, if they had committed a crime by killing at least one person, then they could be unable to rebirth for maybe the next 30 minutes or an hour as form of consequence? It could prevent them from forcing themselves into a specific server right away each time they die to fully destroy a populous town of their choice. However now that I think about it, it may be too much.

It would be unfair to actually prevent a player from playing the game that they had paid for when they commit a crime, so I like the idea of marking a baby for a certain amount of time to show the townspeople that the baby has been a murderer in a past life, like that we could tell if the killer had spawned back to cause more trouble on purpose. It could be the decisions of innocent players to decide the fate of such a reincarnation.

Last edited by Lexyvil (2018-04-15 20:58:09)

OxPower · 2018-04-15 20:50:20

Also Jason, on a similar note, bell tower blocks are going to get used in the same way oven bases where used. I'm not sure if the first layer can be removed but it should. Something that requires multiple people. I've already said my piece on this so i won't repeat myself.

Zwilnik · 2018-04-15 20:54:02

jasonrohrer wrote:

Also, hit points don't change anything.
They make it harder to murder, but also harder to kill griefers.
Same with armor or whatever. And how would more weapons help? Or making every tool deadly?
All those things would help murderers as much as town guards.

Only if there are the same number of murderers as townsfolk. You might get away with the odd solo killing but anyone going on a rampage or trying to mess with a large town is inevitably going to be killed by the angry mob.

Avalikia · 2018-04-15 20:57:26

In general, I like the idea that a group of players who are upset with one player can do something about that one player, and for it to not be significantly more difficult than whatever the griefer is doing. Like if you can kill someone with one click, you should be able to stop them with one click. I agree that the players should be the ones who figure out who is good and who is bad, but they need the tools to do so.

The main current problem in my mind is that a serial killer doesn't need to be picky about who they kill, while someone trying to stop them are looking for one particular person, who can easily run off screen, and who looks just like everyone else in town. Names help, but you need to be able to hover over them to even see it, and if they're running around... The playing field needs to be leveled somehow. I personally think a combination of making weapons not insta-kill, but more things can be used as weapons would help (Seriously, why can't I hurt someone with an axe? Why can't I punch them?) but I don't know - I'm not a game designer.

Last edited by Avalikia (2018-04-15 20:58:24)

powa · 2018-04-15 20:57:44

jasonrohrer wrote:

Also, hit points don't change anything.
They make it harder to murder, but also harder to kill griefers.
Same with armor or whatever. And how would more weapons help? Or making every tool deadly?
All those things would help murderers as much as town guards.

The basic natural advantage a town should have over an outsider is numbers. But an organized group should be capable of overrunning a town. So the solution should focus on the power of numbers.

I think a vulnerability system, not a wounds system, could solve the current problem. It would keep the ability to one-shot people if they are not prepared, but disable one person from unrealistically rampaging a town. Crucially, a fight between multiple prepared people favors the group with the larger number. See my post from a month ago: https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=480

A more drastic measure would be some kind of karma system. Since you've admitted that there is an intrinsic lack of realism in people having memory between lives, why not fight fire with fire?

Last edited by powa (2018-04-15 20:58:25)

Potjeh · 2018-04-15 20:58:25

Karma system, each kill you lose a point. *Zero* passive karma regeneration. To get a karma point another player has to use an item on you, something like a medal. It should be an item that requires moderate effort to make, but is accessible to low tech so Eve can reward her kids. The point is that it shouldn't be easily spammable, so not only is regaining it hard for griefers, but it also makes it possible to meaningfully thank someone who has been of great help. Maybe also a negative karma item, to punish bad kids without resorting to murder. Karma would be visible to anyone, so if you get low karma by being an ass you'll be doomed to play as Eve forever because nobody will raise you. Conversely, good karma will get you prioritized over other babies, because everyone wants a helpful player in town.

Last edited by Potjeh (2018-04-15 20:58:39)

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