Jason's Murder Problem Thread

jasonrohrer · 2018-04-17 22:41:15

Real life combat rewards action over reaction.

Walk up behind someone and shoot them in the back of the head with a gun. Walk away. Sounds gruesome when it's put in those terms, but that's how easy it is in real life.

I was intentionally trying to get away from "normal game PVP mechanics" in this game. That's why there's no health bars, armor, healing potions, etc. Those kind of mechanics turn any game into a combat game.

Combat is NOT the focus of this game, and it will never be. The networking implementation isn't low-enough latency to support that anyway. If I wanted to make an online combat game, I would want it to be as tight and responsive as Overwatch. It wouldn't be an infinite map game. I would have coded it totally differently.

If you're claiming that murder should be made impossible entirely, you haven't thought it through. The only way to stop someone from doing something, in the end, is to kill them. So killing is necessary if people are going to be able to develop their own legal systems in the game.

Other people have pointed out that murder is the least of our worries, compared to other forms of griefing.

Unfortunately, there is absolutely no way to solve that problem mechanically (there will always be ways to mess things up, even if I make every action non-permanent, and the game would become ridiculous if I did that, where you'd have to be able to un-slaughter a sheep).

And if I take murder away, it will also be impossible for YOU to do anything about griefing.

You do have walls for a reason, to control access. If you're worried about a griefer planting the wrong crop, put walls around the farm fields. Only let the farmer in and out. Post a guard by the door. Tools getting stolen? Do you leave your tools in real life laying on the ground? No. If you did, they would get stolen too! So you put them in a tool shed.

The king always has a wall around his garden in real life.

But walls won't work if you can't threaten someone at the gate with violence to make them go away.

Gates in real life usually have two guards for a reason...

After thinking this over more, I think that most of the tools to solve these problems are in your hands, and a few more (like locks) will come in the future.

And these ARE the problems that civilization needs to solve.

Even modern civilizations are still trying to solve these problems. Lots of murders in real life go unsolved.

I will work on the "can't stab a moving person" issue. Running around shouldn't be a form of defense.

Potjeh · 2018-04-17 22:49:06

Any RL comparisons are moot because when you die IRL you stay dead so people are less inclined to try fighting an entire community. And yeah, there are legitimate reasons to kill someone in the game, but I've never seen a situation where there was legitimate reason to kill over half a dozen people.

Turnspender · 2018-04-18 00:31:37

In real life? That's not the title of this game.

Okay I'm out. Good luck implementing something to encourage players to stand 30 game years around the tools they aren't using.

OxPower · 2018-04-18 00:35:22

jasonrohrer wrote:

[...]The only way to stop someone from doing something, in the end, is to kill them. So killing is necessary if people are going to be able to develop their own legal systems in the game.[...]

Except killing in this game doesn't stop someone it just delays what they were doing by 10 minutes. How can we have a justice system if the "criminal" can just disconnect if caught. Without some meta consequence there can be no justice.

breezeknight · 2018-04-18 01:21:08

jasonrohrer wrote:

...
You do have walls for a reason, to control access. If you're worried about a griefer planting the wrong crop, put walls around the farm fields. Only let the farmer in and out. Post a guard by the door. Tools getting stolen? Do you leave your tools in real life laying on the ground? No. If you did, they would get stolen too! So you put them in a tool shed.
The king always has a wall around his garden in real life.
But walls won't work if you can't threaten someone at the gate with violence to make them go away.
Gates in real life usually have two guards for a reason...

After thinking this over more, I think that most of the tools to solve these problems are in your hands, and a few more (like locks) will come in the future.
And these ARE the problems that civilization needs to solve.
Even modern civilizations are still trying to solve these problems. Lots of murders in real life go unsolved.

I will work on the "can't stab a moving person" issue. Running around shouldn't be a form of defense.

i would be very happy if there were farmers in OHOL, for now those are random people, looking like everybody else, maybe even nameless, how should i know how skilled or trustworthy ?
i really hope some day we'll get actual professions, IRL not everybody can just waltz in & be a farmer where carrots are

similar is with guards
i have still first to see a town in OHOL with actual guards, so far everything is chaos, stuff scattered everywhere because people just try to survive
but i am already happy if there is no murderer running free & killing people

IRL there are options against murder, violence, assault,
in OHOL it's just running away, which might be the same dangerous as just getting killed, because of bears, snakes or lack of food & clothing in a cold biome
i am not against murder in general in OHOL, i just want options for the victims, the kick for killers in OHOL is to kick out other players out of the town, out of the game,
it's power, they shouldn't be that powerful, they are more powerdul than the kings & queens, killers are the most powerful in OHOL, followed by griefers, what civilization can come out of that ?

jasonrohrer · 2018-04-18 01:24:09

Yes, that is also true.

Obviously, this game is not real life.

However, I have to be careful not to build the solution into the game and "solve it for you." Like a karma system would do that automatically. People would no longer have to think about it or come up with their own solutions or have guards.

I want you to solve it, in various ways, because that is interesting. The game is full of problems for you to solve. That is all it is. Problems, and their various solutions, make for interesting stories. Problems are at the heart of drama.

On the other hand, if it's actually impossible for you to solve, that is a huge problem.

Respawning is non-trivial in this game, so we're already way better off than pretty much any game operating in this space.

Hard server assignments would also help. Suppose you are assigned to a server for an hour. If you die before that, you get assigned to a different one. If you live the full hour, you stay on that server.

Potjeh · 2018-04-18 02:08:51

Guards are a terrible solution, though. Standing around all your life is not fun and nobody sane would want to do it.

KucheKlizma · 2018-04-18 04:06:15

It's just a gimmick, does the game really need this? Justifying it as a gaming mechanic just because it's already made is just sunk cost.

If pvp and coop went well together games wouldn't split servers/zones etc into pvp and pve oriented ones. They don't. It would take significant effort to make it mesh well.

Best suggestion is to disable griefing on resources where possible/easy while also disabling pvp. PVP can be re-enabled when it's ready.

Obviously there's a flaw with this and it's that the game lacks content as it is, without removing any more, but I don't think griefing and murder add sufficient value at their current state to make sense to keep them.
There's better ways to add difficulty, and anyway just relying on hunger, the occasional concealed snake and people being assholes doesn't cut it as it is.

Last edited by KucheKlizma (2018-04-18 04:08:11)

Verinon1 · 2018-04-18 04:30:14

All it takes for a civilization in this game to come to a complete end (and thus get wiped automatically hours later when no one sees it ever again), is for a murderer to kill the last remaining fertile female. And if there’s only one left, then all the troll has to do is kill ONE person with ONE hit from a weapon. Doesn’t even matter if you kill the troll afterwards; you might as well just disconnect right then and there. This happened to me three different times last night in three different towns in three different servers. Who knows how much work when into those towns, how many hours, by how many people (including myself), all of them undone by one person with an action that take a split second and has no counter-action.

Jason, if you’re intent on leaving murder in the game, then this is what needs to be fixed: A) you should be able to kill murderers while they’re slow running OR while they’re regular running. Currently, they’re impossible to hit with any weapon as long as they’re moving. B) killers need to have bloody clothes/bodies after a kill (that they CAN’T remove) so that we can easily identify them apart from everyone else. Currently, after someone has been stabbed or shot, they run around screaming about who attacked them, and by the time everyone has come to a consensus about who it was that did the attack, the killler has already run off, hidden the weapon, changed their clothes, and their slow-down timer has work off. C) Players who murder a lot should be put on time out or shifted to another server or spawned as a male far, far away from any other people a bunch of times to prevent them from just respawning at the same town they just trolled.

Last edited by Verinon1 (2018-04-18 04:52:52)

KucheKlizma · 2018-04-18 04:52:08

Killing a town is actually healthy though. It's an organic way of resetting, in the absence of the apocalypse.
From a player perspective you don't really experience anything different than being killed by a random snake unless you're meta-gaming and repeatedly suiciding to get in the same village, since the town's progress is a group effort anyway so nobody feels personal ownership of a town.

If there's a real issue here it has to do with the new eve mechanics. Whereas before most new players were stuck in an endgame wasteland with a lack of early game resources and any way to learn how to build a settlement from scratch, currently new players that don't repeatedly suicide and/or use a 3rd party tool are stuck predominantly in the earliest stage of the game and having to reset to the same stage almost every time. It's kinda partitioning the already limited content and likely hurting player on-boarding.

Murders are just a gimmicky nuisance with unclear purpose for the most part. I'm not sure why they're even an option, but I don't feel it matters too much either way. Even if murders don't end a town, something else will, like the last female randomly dying to mr. snake or forgetting there's hunger.

Last edited by KucheKlizma (2018-04-18 04:56:09)

Verinon1 · 2018-04-18 04:57:35

KucheKlizma wrote:

Killing a town is actually healthy though. It's an organic way of resetting, in the absence of the apocalypse.
From a player perspective you don't really experience anything different than being killed by a random snake unless you're meta-gaming and repeatedly suiciding to get in the same village, since the town's progress is a group effort anyway so nobody feels personal ownership of a town.
If there's a real issue here it has to do with the new eve mechanics. Whereas before most new players were stuck in an endgame wasteland with a lack of early game resources and any way to learn how to build a settlement from scratch, currently new players that don't repeatedly suicide and/or use a 3rd party tool are stuck predominantly in the earliest stage of the game and having to reset to the same stage almost every time. It's kinda partitioning the already limited content and likely hurting player on-boarding.
Murders are just a gimmicky nuisance with unclear purpose for the most part. I'm not sure why they're even an option, but I don't feel it matters too much either way.

Civs collapsing entirely would be fine with me if there was a guarantee that the stuff everyone made would still be there for someone to find someday (even if it was days, weeks, months, or years later), but with the auto map wiping, that just isn’t possible. Which seems weird and unfair to me, since we were told this game would have persistence.

Last edited by Verinon1 (2018-04-18 04:59:15)

Sakkiyn · 2018-04-18 07:44:53

TrustyWay wrote:

Killers are easy to counter while griefers aren't.
People here don't understand that people can kill for any reason, no only griefing, most of the time there is a context behind. While griefing is ... just griefing.

Easy to counter if you are one of those who are not squeamish about carrying a knife or hiding a bow or two. I have run into to many people who just assume a knife is useless except for killing people.

They are fine with you giving them a new pair of snakeskin boots, never wondering how you got them.

Or taking that beautiful new horse for a ride, sometimes without asking, never wondering how you were able to "saddle" it.

They happily eat some mutton when they are starving never imagining how you killed the sheep that just fed their entire family.

If Jason want's us to have a more nomadic existence I think hunting need's to be more able to sustain an entire tribe like it did for ancient nomadic peoples with concomitant animal resources, perhaps the bison of north america?

Hiker170 · 2018-04-18 08:06:34

Other then Joriom I wonder how many others have made a game out of killing towns and villages, I mean most will be small families so they only kill a few people each time, but does that mean much when players can find it relatively easy to develop into later stages in the game and even make weapons. A lot of that time is mainly spent searching for the resources. Yet we have so many tools now to know about a single killer that it almost seems like it shouldn't be much of an issue anymore.

I mean going into the game you should know that most players will be seen as a threat if they come into a farm with a weapon. Yet people aren't aware enough of this, but how would a karma system change that. All of a sudden you see someone evil and you sit their trying to create a weapon before them, like it sounds a bit ridiculous. You have as much ability to kill them as they do you.

Should we just let our kids go expecting them to do what we tell them and strangers walk onto the farm, even real life children don't always listen to their parents. Let alone adult players having to listen to others.

I personally don't see it as a huge problem because of how easy it is to start up a small farm stead given the right area, along with the stats given by Jason. 2% of all deaths caused by other players is better than a combat game, like Rust where most death will be by other players. Even the fact that the map wipes are interesting because why put them there unless players were already not finding the day old ruins of farms previously created, The ruins people actually spawned on tended to be farms they just recently had died, because there was still enough resources there. Older ones tended to be long dead and mostly infertile just mainly taking up space on the map never to be found again.

Artarda · 2018-04-18 08:07:57

jasonrohrer wrote:

Real life combat rewards action over reaction.
Walk up behind someone and shoot them in the back of the head with a gun. Walk away. Sounds gruesome when it's put in those terms, but that's how easy it is in real life.
I was intentionally trying to get away from "normal game PVP mechanics" in this game. That's why there's no health bars, armor, healing potions, etc. Those kind of mechanics turn any game into a combat game.
Combat is NOT the focus of this game, and it will never be. The networking implementation isn't low-enough latency to support that anyway. If I wanted to make an online combat game, I would want it to be as tight and responsive as Overwatch. It wouldn't be an infinite map game. I would have coded it totally differently.

If you're claiming that murder should be made impossible entirely, you haven't thought it through. The only way to stop someone from doing something, in the end, is to kill them. So killing is necessary if people are going to be able to develop their own legal systems in the game.
Other people have pointed out that murder is the least of our worries, compared to other forms of griefing.
Unfortunately, there is absolutely no way to solve that problem mechanically (there will always be ways to mess things up, even if I make every action non-permanent, and the game would become ridiculous if I did that, where you'd have to be able to un-slaughter a sheep).
And if I take murder away, it will also be impossible for YOU to do anything about griefing.
You do have walls for a reason, to control access. If you're worried about a griefer planting the wrong crop, put walls around the farm fields. Only let the farmer in and out. Post a guard by the door. Tools getting stolen? Do you leave your tools in real life laying on the ground? No. If you did, they would get stolen too! So you put them in a tool shed.
The king always has a wall around his garden in real life.
But walls won't work if you can't threaten someone at the gate with violence to make them go away.
Gates in real life usually have two guards for a reason...

After thinking this over more, I think that most of the tools to solve these problems are in your hands, and a few more (like locks) will come in the future.
And these ARE the problems that civilization needs to solve.
Even modern civilizations are still trying to solve these problems. Lots of murders in real life go unsolved.

I will work on the "can't stab a moving person" issue. Running around shouldn't be a form of defense.

Very good points, and I definitely understand the coding situation (been programming for like 10 years myself ). The attacking of an unsuspecting person is also a good point. Perhaps in the future, we could see defensive clothing options implemented up the tech tree? Perhaps an Iron Breastplate that wont keep you warm but will protect you from a flint tipped Arrow shot. It would even make perfect sense if the tech tree had rival Offense vs Defense crafts, much like real life, where technology is created to render pre-existing technology functionally obsolete, like full plate armor did to swords, and military picks did to full plate armor. Much like real life, the successful combatant would be influenced by the tech level of their weaponry or defense.

Or maybe even a Rock Paper Scissors combat interaction system? Where a player wielding a knife for example couldn't get into striking range of a player wielding a spear, as a crude example. This would even further support your "Gates have two guards for a reason" statement, where it would be beneficial to have different weapons on different guards.

I'm grateful for the detailed response though, I wasn't sure my comments would even be read this far down

Edit: After more thinking, I had a (fairly obvious) insight. One of the reasons we don't have a huge numbers of sociopaths running around purging each other in real life is because of the consequences of actions. To a person who wants to accomplish nothing more than create chaos, whether via murder, griefing food supplies purposefully or other less effective yet still annoying means, the consequences of failure in completing their task is virtually null. They could be thwarted again and again, but they only have to succeed once. It's almost like flipping a coin over and over; you might get tails 7 times in a row but statistically speaking, you're eventually bound to get a heads, and that griefer might fail over and over, but he only has to succeed once.

Also, I think experiencing a bit of grief every now and then is fine. In real life, society deals with people that do bad things. Society either deals with that person or fails. The random guy who gets his hands on the bow and arrow and shoots Grandma Hope is bound to happen, and honestly shouldn't be stopped. It's the "Oh, they caught me griefing and killed me. Time to respawn in the same village and wait to grow up and do it again." that I think the majority of people effected by it would like to put a stop to.

I mean come on, I've shot my fair share of grandmas in this game...

Some personally suggested options, if one would want to discourage specifically repetitive grief, would be:
A) Make it easier to thwart a griefer via in game mechanics once those tech items have been established
B) Use some sort of system outside the game mechanics that prevents spawning in the same area over and over in a short period of time.

Last edited by Artarda (2018-04-18 08:27:43)

Uncle Gus · 2018-04-18 10:48:02

powa gets it. This is what I was saying weeks ago until I got tired of wasting my (virtual) breath.

powa wrote:

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.

My suggestion was to have a system for detaining an individual that is only effective when used by more than one person. How many times have you seen more than one griefer at a time?

If there was a readily available action, like hitting someone with a long straight shaft that did nothing by itself but knocked them out when TWO people did it, that would be enough to stop every lone troll. Unless they straight up kill you first, but if they do, fair game to them.

Potjeh · 2018-04-18 14:15:00

So what other exciting and realistic jobs will we have to do besides guard? Accountant? Mid-level manager? Tech support?

jasonrohrer · 2018-04-18 14:45:34

Do you really think that being a police officer and investigating murders would be less exciting than farming carrots?

KucheKlizma · 2018-04-18 14:50:32

Do you really think that's how your game works?

Potjeh · 2018-04-18 14:51:51

There are no tools in the game to actually investigate, tho, you have to witness it. Which means you have to be standing in the risk areas all your life. And you need a lot of people doing it because we can't see or hear anything further than like 15 meters. And with the way combat works, you have to be standing with your weapon drawn, so you can't exactly be doing other stuff while you're guarding. Hence it's basically a mall cop simulation.

KucheKlizma · 2018-04-18 14:53:42

More like an afker in gaming terms.

Potjeh · 2018-04-18 14:56:52

Yeah, basically 95% of the time you're not really playing the game, you're just watching it. Very few actions to do, and even fewer decisions to make. Carrot farming on the other hand involves plenty of actions and strategic decision making (do you seed and if yes how many rows, when and how much you water, when you can squeeze in time for getting more baskets, etc.) so it's a lot more fun.

There's a reason why there's no successful games where you play a realistic guard (no, FNAF doesn't qualify). It just can't be made fun. Security is traditionally done by NPCs for this reason. So, if players are supposed to handle it it has to be done indirectly. For example, a security job could be breeding, training and feeding guard dogs, who then autonomously do the boring part of the job.

Last edited by Potjeh (2018-04-18 15:00:32)

SSDarkMoon · 2018-04-18 15:03:27

I think make the account as a soul system will be a good choose.

Karmic system
0 Karmic is normal, limit +100 Karmic.
Every killing one people, player gain -20 karma.
Dig anything(include mining) or Destroy anything on the world, every hit will gain -1 Karmic.(what ever good or bad mind)
every time player died(not because of killed) gain +5 Karmic.

Karmic will affect the next reborn time.
every -1 karma cost 5 minite banish.
player need to join into the banishment server (the phantom zone), to recover the Karmic.

If player don't want to , he can bring the Karmic with him to reborn.

-20 Karmic====reborn with a bad leg.(walk slower 20%than normal)
-50 Karmic====reborn with bad leg and bad eye.(walk slower 40%than normal, the screen will have 20%blur)

the maths just as an example.

Last edited by SSDarkMoon (2018-04-18 17:04:48)

KucheKlizma · 2018-04-18 15:04:42

Potjeh wrote:

Yeah, basically 95% of the time you're not really playing the game, you're just watching it. Very few actions to do, and even fewer decisions to make. Carrot farming on the other hand involves plenty of actions and strategic decision making (do you seed and if yes how many rows, when and how much you water, when you can squeeze in time for getting more baskets, etc.) so it's a lot more fun.
There's a reason why there's no successful games where you play a realistic guard (no, FNAF doesn't qualify). It just can't be made fun. Security is traditionally done by NPCs for this reason. So, if players are supposed to handle it it has to be done indirectly. For example, a security job could be breeding, training and feeding guard dogs, who then autonomously do the boring part of the job.

Basically you'll be an afk person who eats food and does nothing meaningful with a drawn weapon. All this type of behavior will achieve is either lead your village to starvation or get you killed, as it's basically griefing. While also being the most boring possible activity.

There's little to no dedicated "jobs" in this game. If you want to do it in a correct way, you'd simply have a backpack + knife and reactively kill people if you happen to witness a murder or a griefing, while doing other things.
Nobody controls other players to "post a guard", and nobody afks to guard duty, that's just silly and detached from the game's reality.

I agree that carrot farming is a much more viable as a "dedicated job" and it's also common to see and not at all simple to do.

Last edited by KucheKlizma (2018-04-18 15:08:19)

Jorge · 2018-04-18 15:10:43

Sakkiyn wrote:

TrustyWay wrote:
Killers are easy to counter while griefers aren't.
People here don't understand that people can kill for any reason, no only griefing, most of the time there is a context behind. While griefing is ... just griefing.

Easy to counter if you are one of those who are not squeamish about carrying a knife or hiding a bow or two. I have run into to many people who just assume a knife is useless except for killing people.
They are fine with you giving them a new pair of snakeskin boots, never wondering how you got them.
Or taking that beautiful new horse for a ride, sometimes without asking, never wondering how you were able to "saddle" it.
They happily eat some mutton when they are starving never imagining how you killed the sheep that just fed their entire family.
If Jason want's us to have a more nomadic existence I think hunting need's to be more able to sustain an entire tribe like it did for ancient nomadic peoples with concomitant animal resources, perhaps the bison of north america?

I've been killed more than twice for making a knife or bow in front of power-trippers who want to be the only one with a weapon (or scarred people with a bad memory of a griefer...)

Kinrany · 2018-04-18 15:23:21

Murder being the only way to disable someone is a problem. It's irreversible, and you don't want to kill people for small mistakes.

Maybe there needs to be some kind of grapple move that disables both the attacker and the target.

More generally, an ideal solution would make it possible to spend exactly the same amount of time on undoing damage caused by a griefer. Anything better is impossible, because the game isn't smart enough to know what's moral.

I dislike solutions that rely on exactly two players cooperating. They can make the situation better, but they're inelegant crutches that can easily break when other parts of the game change.
Griefers don't team up now because it's less efficient, not because they can't.

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