Finding other towns/experts is STILL a pain, and how I'm fixing it

jasonrohrer · 2020-04-02 19:36:48

Last week, I doubled the expert way stone placement, which definitely improves things.

But today, I sampled three lives, and I could never find another village before I gave up and got back to work. It still involves quite a bit of luck and quite a bit of boring wandering around. Once you find the way stone that you're looking for, you then have 60 seconds to track down the person, even if they are more than 60 seconds away from you. Once the arrow expires, you're back to hunting around for another way stone. Furthermore, if the person is far away from you, you don't get updates about their position as they move, so you get an arrow to where they were at the moment you touched the way stone. By the time you get to that spot, they will be gone.

It's interesting to me that people complain about some feature or constraint, as if it's the problem, but if you actually get them to unpack it a bit more, there's a different problem lurking underneath. Interacting with another family to get them to help you (via trade, gift, theft, etc.) isn't actually annoying. But wandering around randomly for half your life to find them is horrible.

So, we could tear out the biome expert stuff.... OR we could fix the fundamental problem of wandering around half your life to find another village. That problem exists anyway, with or without the biome expert stuff.

But without the biome expert stuff in place, we'd never pinpoint this problem (because you could always get by without finding another village).

Fixes coming this week:

--Expert way stones are doubled yet again (now placed between ley lines as well as on them, every 20 tiles both horizontally and vertically).

--Expert arrow takes 240 seconds to expire, instead of 60.

--Expert arrow now points you to the well site of a populated homeland of experts, if there's no expert closer than 32 tiles from you. Point to the guy, if the guy is in your neighborhood already, but point to the village otherwise.

--The Eve grid has been shrunk by a factor of 4 (jumping by 50 instead of 200), which means villages will be more likely to be close together in general.

Dodge · 2020-04-02 19:42:22

If the spawn keeps getting further and further away inevitably villages will be far away, old villages stay, eves die, new villages are further.

What if we used the tile decay to reclaim unvisited places (for x time) close to existing player activity and spawn new Eves there, instead of constantly going further and further?

jasonrohrer · 2020-04-02 19:45:59

Well, there's still code in the server that can reclaim unseen places after a while.

There used to be an Eve spiral, and the center would eventually get reclaimed, and the whole thing would start over.

Problem with a spiral is that it's a long way across from edge to edge, and also you don't know which way to walk to find people.

I guess that problem has been solved in other ways now, so maybe it's time to revisit the spiral.

But people also really hated the idea of reclamation.

Coconut Fruit · 2020-04-02 19:55:24

How do other races get kerosene tho? Every race needs oil, especially after the recent iron changes. Oil became too valuable to share it or trade it.

Do you really want us to thief such a valuable item? Isn't it griefing?

Tho I see a very big problem... Only gingers can make oil. Making oil pumpjack isn't an enjoyable thing to do and often takes whole life if not more. Ideally you would want to make it only for your family, because there is nothing worth trading it. When I play as any other race and I see no kerosene and no iron it's depressing. I won't go to gingers and ask them for oil because there is nothing I could offer them in return. I don't want to steal it either, getting oil costs too much time and work to just steal it... It would be a very bad griefing to do so. Yeah, I could go to them and trade something for some iron. But having only a few iron ores is also depressing when you also need kerosene for water.
I like iron changes, but I hate race specializations update that is ruining many good things in this game. It's just a depressing update that is ruining my overall feeling about this game, and not only mine, I often see people complaining in discord about many things that are actually caused by this one shitty update.

Dodge · 2020-04-02 19:55:26

Not being able to find ruins Vs living villages being too far from each other.

It's a tough call, islands/wasteland would solve that issue since you could keep a high reclaim time, the islands/patches close to it would be less visited since less easily accessible and enough of them would eventually be reclaimed, you would have the possiblity to find ruins for a decent ammount of time but also have fresh wilderness close to existing living players.

Last edited by Dodge (2020-04-02 19:58:07)

Coconut Fruit · 2020-04-02 19:58:15

jasonrohrer wrote:

So, we could tear out the biome expert stuff.... OR we could fix the fundamental problem of wandering around half your life to find another village.

Aww, that was so close making this game so enjoyable, even more than ever before. You choosed the another solution sadly :P

Last edited by Coconut Fruit (2020-04-02 22:46:52)

DestinyCall · 2020-04-02 20:01:12

Coconut Fruit wrote:

jasonrohrer wrote:
So, we could tear out the biome expert stuff.... OR we could fix the fundamental problem of wandering around half your life to find another village.
Aww, that was so close making this game so enjoyable, even more than even before. You choosed the another solution sadly

We should definitely tear out the biome expert stuff. I'd love to see the idea revisited with a better foundation - like actually livable biomes that encourage Eves to settle and grow in different starting biomes. But the current implementation is fundamentally broken. Trying to get the rest of the game to work properly with racial specialization is just breaking more of the game.

bpskotch · 2020-04-02 20:03:34

I think it’s a good call but the problem coconut fruit mentions still stands. Trade is still heavily unbalanced to a point that gingers still have no reason to trade oil as it’s value is too high compared to any other commodity.

fug · 2020-04-02 20:05:51

DestinyCall wrote:

Coconut Fruit wrote:
jasonrohrer wrote:
So, we could tear out the biome expert stuff.... OR we could fix the fundamental problem of wandering around half your life to find another village.
Aww, that was so close making this game so enjoyable, even more than even before. You choosed the another solution sadly
We should definitely tear out the biome expert stuff. I'd love to see the idea revisited with a better foundation - like actually livable biomes that encourage Eves to settle and grow in different starting biomes. But the current implementation is fundamentally broken. Trying to get the rest of the game to work properly with racial specialization is just breaking more of the game.

Keep racial specialization and continue to have zero reason to not have conflict or drama as Jason lives.

OR

Remove racial specialization and have a somewhat reason to remove/kill/raid your neighbors for contested land.

Best answer is always to rip out crappy restrictions.

Dodge · 2020-04-02 20:12:32

fug wrote:

...

contested land???

wtf are you talking about, you want infinite veins/iron/oil, no specialization, no restriction, so why the fuck would you care about contesting land? dumb

You want to go back to every village being isolated and 10k appart with no reason to meet each other...

fug · 2020-04-02 20:15:49

You have contended resources if you're spawning 50 tiles apart from each other or are you too dumb to read?

Oh wait, most of us in the forums already knew that. Please continue to post ideas about islands/wastelands or whatever nonsense you're on about. Thanks.

Dodge · 2020-04-02 20:19:32

You dont have contended ressources if you can take a horsecart and get more, dummy...

Whatever · 2020-04-02 20:30:52

jasonrohrer wrote:

It's interesting to me that people complain about some feature or constraint, as if it's the problem, but if you actually get them to unpack it a bit more, there's a different problem lurking underneath. Interacting with another family to get them to help you (via trade, gift, theft, etc.) isn't actually annoying. But wandering around randomly for half your life to find them is horrible.

Constraints are the main problem, reading this reminds of when you saw tarr running around with a war sword killing people and you "realized" the actual problem is not the war sword but that there is no automatic kill mechanic.

jasonrohrer · 2020-04-02 20:54:20

Constraints are the game.

Constraints are what differentiate a game from everything else that is not that particular game.

Would monopoly be way cool if you could move as far as you want each turn or what?

OHOL was originally pretty doughy and formless. Eventually, it will be carved out of wood.

And the argument here is what? That oil is so valuable that gingers will never trade it?

Evidenced by what? By only ginger villages having water pumps?

VOG survey says brown and black villages also have water pumps currently.

Whatever · 2020-04-02 20:59:47

jasonrohrer wrote:

Would monopoly be way cool if you could move as far as you want each turn or what?

Would monopoly be way cool if you could only move one field each turn?

constraints are important yes, but it depends on what kind of constraints,
and it needs the right balance, not to few, not to many

DestinyCall · 2020-04-02 21:00:07

As a lover of board games, I can tell you that Monopoly is terrible, out-dated game. In gaming communities it is pretty notoriously known as a game to play with people you hate.

If I'm stuck in quarantine with my four best friends, I'm pulling out Dead of Winter, not Monopoly. I still want to have friends tomorrow.

And who doesn't love shooting zombies and back-stabbing your friends at the same time?

Last edited by DestinyCall (2020-04-02 21:05:01)

Coconut Fruit · 2020-04-02 21:01:58

They have water pumps because making an engine doesn't require having oil.
But seriously, if you would be playing sometimes as other races than gingers, you would realize how depressing it is not having oil when also there is no iron to make tools. What would you do?

It's up to some altruists who play as ginger only to feed oil to other races, this is not how the game should be played.

And Tarr who just made lots of iron for other races just by playing as Eve a few times and unlocking iron veins close to towns.

Last edited by Coconut Fruit (2020-04-02 21:04:13)

Coconut Fruit · 2020-04-02 21:12:22

I like iron changes, I like most of the updates, but race specializations is just a mistake that is ruining too many aspects of this game... For what?
To get sulfur you make a paper and a pencil and write than you need sulfur, pls help, you get a cart with 4/8 bowls and go to black people, you will always find someone wanting to help you getting sulfur, especially if you have found a desert close to them before.
Same with getting palm oil and latex.

We got these 2 things in cost of many things ruined. Race specialization update should have never been made, at least not in a way that it was made.

Last edited by Coconut Fruit (2020-04-02 21:24:29)

bpskotch · 2020-04-02 21:22:52

jasonrohrer wrote:

And the argument here is what? That oil is so valuable that gingers will never trade it?
Evidenced by what? By only ginger villages having water pumps?

VOG survey says brown and black villages also have water pumps currently.

My argument for trade being unbalanced has nothing to do with their argument about contstraints in the game.

Also, having a pump is completely irrelevant to having oil to run said pump. Browns/blacks alone can easily build all the infrastructure to support oil consumption, this doesn't mean they can easily negotiate for said oil.

Let me do some math here.

Let's start with the fundamental principle that towns require two main resources to maintain life, both of which are eventually bottlenecked to kerosene:
1. Water
2. Iron

One could argue that rubber is also needed however the main purpose of rubber is to provide water in the end (newcomen pump or newcomen rig), so i left it out.

It takes a single rubber tire per run on a working oil rig to get 1x tank of oil.

An average rig can give you roughly 11 tanks before exhausting, after which you must scout another distant tarry to repeat the process.

11 tanks = 11 tires which roughly comes out to:
3x Bucket of Latex
3x Palm Oil
3x Sulfur
All of which are readily available, and easily renewable.

11 tanks of oil can yield either:
2,640 units of water OR
330 units of iron (after subtracting the steel chisel per run cost)

That much water and iron, even if split up, is enough to pretty much guarantee the survival of a town for at least a day or two IRL time. It's security, knowing your town will flourish (aside bad baby RNG/griefers/other uncontrollable factors)

With that being said, knowing that this kerosene will keep my town alive for a long time, I don't want to trade it. So maybe I'll trade 1-2 tanks to a town for bulk rubber to fund further rigs. But here's the thing:

The effort taken to gather rubber supplies and produce is minuscule compared to the effort of oil; oil cannot be produced in your backyard (except maybe once if you have nearby tarry). You have to actively seek new tarries that will become more distant as time goes on, making oil acquisition harder.

Palm RESPAWNS NATURALLY.
Sulfur RESPAWNS NATURALLY.
Rubber trees can be farmed and regrown in same location.

So one might argue, oh since oil is worth so much more why not trade for bulk rubber? Simple. I don't need bulk rubber. Suppose I traded 3-4 tanks of oil/kero for 8+ buckets of Oiled/Sulfured latex. Guess what? I don't need rubber again for the next few rigs. That's a few days IRL time. Meanwhile the whites, browns and blacks will dry up without more oil, and quickly.

In summary, the people in game who are trading oil for small quantities of rubber (or gifting, which is a lot of it) are doing it because we like helping each other thrive, NOT because its balanced. This isn't "trade", this is "goodwill".

pein · 2020-04-02 21:32:55

constraints that can be overcome are good, the ones that are not are bad
if the main tech tree needs oil even for making outpost, it's weird that the upper limit of a town is the lower limit of an outpost

nobody trades nothing cause there is no currency and nothing to buy for that currency when the most valuable thing is water and therefore oil

today I saw the brown town had his engine stolen
and yesterday had a half kerosene tank only
even having their engine, still won't mean they produce oil or trade for it, someone gets them oil out of charity

actual trading would mean that you still work and do stuff when you don't need it, for the profit it makes
also actually owning things, not like now that anyone can step anything, and no, fences aren't a good option cause restricting yourself in movement is a bigger problem than occasional raiders. tried in an eve run, I spent too much time locking up the place and one open door and someone shot my girl, the other simply starved cause getting out for wild food was too slow

having things that are different in category and value to be the specialized items is bad, makes early or late game unviable for certain families
and the main tech tree is cut in parts, it can be easier to find others but it's still dumb luck that they help you or not

you are going the wrong way around with the restrictions

your restrictions just punish people for not doing stuff

you should reward them for doing stuff

also don't forget that by having iron engine they don't actually help the cities, they just doing it cause you tell them to
it's still more optimal to exchange kerosene for water and get the iron elsewhere

btw, Jason, you removed the "grave bugs" where you could find some grave locations in stdout. that took quite a long time to do while playing the game. But now going 60 tiles to look at an expert way stone is way to hard? Tarr told me and I used a few tools to make it faster, maybe 4-5 people used it and weren't game-breaking. You fixed that cause Tarr did it so needs to be fixed. I liked to map out cities and was interesting that 40 generations did find the town near them 300 tiles away. But since the homelands are 100x100 and wells block out 200x200 there is no good reason for Eves to start any closer than 100 tiles.

What about smoke signals? we could have a different colour smoke signal, you can make it in your homeland (so people don't troll with it)
and shows up for a short time for others (red/brown/black smoke at the edge of screen) leading to their well. So people could signal their location to others.

Also would be fun to have a minimap with all locations as dots and the travel options could get you there right away. Maybe build a hot air balloon to activate.

Also, we could have 2 teams of 3 families (black, brown, ginger) and white only if we got enough players (6x8=48 so we got enough per hour).
People would be daily/weekly team locked so killing the other team would benefit them and helping allies would benefit them. You could only be reborn in your own team so spies couldn't be a thing (or swap daily once). The players would be auto-assigned to teams or by choice and maybe swap once a day. But we would need skill-based combat between them. Then we could see the same team families and the others would need to be found. The underdog team would receive more recruits to increase the balance between the teams, once it changes the other team would get the next babies. Not sure how many unique players we got daily and what is the average or highest time people play but I think we could sustain 3 families on both sides.

Gogo · 2020-04-02 22:46:39

I'm very glad about Eve spiral and lesser spawn distance.

Tristan379 · 2020-04-02 23:05:46

It will definitely be interesting to see how village life changes in a world where it doesn't take 10 minutes to walk to the nearest town and 10 lives to get a functional road between them. Really though it does feel like the race specialization mechanic is in a weird middle ground where you're forced to get resources from other families but there's not enough tied to the mechanic to really set the races apart and create unique demands worth trading over. At best with the current system *most* of the races have a single valuable resource tied to their biome.

Why not give black families snake farms and better snake clothes so they can have a long-lasting specializations and jobs that other families desire other than "go grab sulphur/horses for me really quick pls". Why not give tan families a larger rare variety of fruit trees(and associated foods) to encourage exploration&farming for a truly superior yum chain, so they have something other families will always be interested in acquiring and potentially willing to trade for. I can see why people say the solution is to *remove* family specialization; But if it's gonna stay I really do hope it becomes a much more central game mechanic that encourages families to actually interact with their biome long-term.

Last edited by Tristan379 (2020-04-02 23:06:13)

Spoonwood · 2020-04-03 01:05:23

jasonrohrer wrote:

Constraints are the game.

False. Rules that limit players are not the game.

jasonrohrer wrote:

Constraints are what differentiate a game from everything else that is not that particular game.

False. Rules that inhibit players can get transferred to other contexts. The same rules for players could exist in MoeLife or 2HOL or You are Hope. And those games have different craftable objects or systems for water.

jasonrohrer wrote:

Would monopoly be way cool if you could move as far as you want each turn or what?

Monopoly can get approached as a strategy game... as some game about having more money than the other player(s) at the end of it or being the last player in the game with money. Monopoly would be more strategic if players could move less tiles in a turn than what they rolled. The overly restrictive nature of the rules makes it less interesting as a strategy game. But the overly restrictive rules were probably there, because the game wasn't about making an interesting product for people in the first place:

wikipedia wrote:

Monopoly is derived from The Landlord's Game created by Lizzie Magie in the United States in 1903 as a way to demonstrate that an economy which rewards wealth creation is better than one where monopolists work under few constraints,[1] and to promote the economic theories of Henry George—in particular his ideas about taxation.

The game thus misleads with it's title, since it's more a game about anti-monopolistic practices as better. It's also rather flawed as a design product, since players start with money, gain properties, and do not create something resembling wealth so far as I recall. And since wealth doesn't get created, demonstrating that an economy which rewards wealth creation as better than a more monopolistic system isn't possible.

The game that Jason designed is not a strategy game. It is not a survival game and he has consistently lied to people calling such a survival game, since no players survive, nor do any families survive.

Even under the original game concept, the title of the game does not end in truth. Given only one game, one would NOT have life at the end of one hour if one lived to 60 minutes. One would have death. For in real life, a man who dies at sixty does not have life, but death. Thus, had the game designer had the courage to speaker honestly, or ability to speak truthfully, he would called the game One Hour One Death or something like Some Play Before Death.

The game is a sandbox game. That's it is and all it will ever be, for there is no greater purpose or perspective guiding it. There is no game goal, and there isn't supposed to be one, because the game designer does NOT value players knowing how to play intelligently in game disvaluing guides and tutorials in other games. And since the game designer has tried to discourage sandbox like thinking in several ways, the game concept has serious contradictions with what it is.

jasonrohrer wrote:

OHOL was originally pretty doughy and formless. Eventually, it will be carved out of wood.

Yawn. It is apparently so easy for a man to lie and say that he can make something beautiful, when he makes a game with a whole culture of male reproductive incels. It is apparently so easy for that man to lie when he doesn't listen to people and appreciate what they think and feel. It is apparently so easy for that man to lie and act as if he is seriously asking a question when he is merely trying to get people to stop thinking about the exposure of serious gaps in his own line of thinking and processes. It is apparently so easy for that man to lie that he has more capability than he has, when he darn well knows that his own product has never come close to his own goal of having all of his servers filled. It is apparently so easy for the game designer to lie and claim that he will one day be like a wood carver, when a wood carver knows that he is dependent on (a) strong, hardworking, and courageous lumberjack(s), yet the game designer has a massive lack of appreciation for men like those who are lumberjacks, working in the relatively safe environment of his home.

And even if what Jason has asserted is false, instead of also being deceptive, this game will be carved out of wood?

But then its advertisements would have to speak the truth about what the game offers, the process of game development, AND the game would have to have greater value for society as a whole.

It has none of those, never did, and I don't foresee that they ever will.

Money be damned.

Jason would do better in his own life to give up developing this game, to reject his vision as ever being a good idea, and people would do better to move on with their lives and accept that they made a mistake by playing and trying to improve this game.

FishRfriendsnotfood · 2020-04-03 02:40:32

How many minutes did it take you to write that spoon

DestinyCall · 2020-04-03 03:29:38

I'm very surprised that rant did not explicitly state that Jason lied about the game being made out of wood.

One Hour One Life Forums

#1 2020-04-02 19:36:48

Finding other towns/experts is STILL a pain, and how I'm fixing it

#2 2020-04-02 19:42:22

Re: Finding other towns/experts is STILL a pain, and how I'm fixing it

#3 2020-04-02 19:45:59

Re: Finding other towns/experts is STILL a pain, and how I'm fixing it

#4 2020-04-02 19:55:24

Re: Finding other towns/experts is STILL a pain, and how I'm fixing it

#5 2020-04-02 19:55:26

Re: Finding other towns/experts is STILL a pain, and how I'm fixing it

#6 2020-04-02 19:58:15

Re: Finding other towns/experts is STILL a pain, and how I'm fixing it

#7 2020-04-02 20:01:12

Re: Finding other towns/experts is STILL a pain, and how I'm fixing it

#8 2020-04-02 20:03:34

Re: Finding other towns/experts is STILL a pain, and how I'm fixing it

#9 2020-04-02 20:05:51

Re: Finding other towns/experts is STILL a pain, and how I'm fixing it

#10 2020-04-02 20:12:32

Re: Finding other towns/experts is STILL a pain, and how I'm fixing it

#11 2020-04-02 20:15:49

Re: Finding other towns/experts is STILL a pain, and how I'm fixing it

#12 2020-04-02 20:19:32

Re: Finding other towns/experts is STILL a pain, and how I'm fixing it

#13 2020-04-02 20:30:52

Re: Finding other towns/experts is STILL a pain, and how I'm fixing it

#14 2020-04-02 20:54:20

Re: Finding other towns/experts is STILL a pain, and how I'm fixing it

#15 2020-04-02 20:59:47

Re: Finding other towns/experts is STILL a pain, and how I'm fixing it

#16 2020-04-02 21:00:07

Re: Finding other towns/experts is STILL a pain, and how I'm fixing it

#17 2020-04-02 21:01:58

Re: Finding other towns/experts is STILL a pain, and how I'm fixing it

#18 2020-04-02 21:12:22

Re: Finding other towns/experts is STILL a pain, and how I'm fixing it

#19 2020-04-02 21:22:52

Re: Finding other towns/experts is STILL a pain, and how I'm fixing it

#20 2020-04-02 21:32:55

Re: Finding other towns/experts is STILL a pain, and how I'm fixing it

#21 2020-04-02 22:46:39

Re: Finding other towns/experts is STILL a pain, and how I'm fixing it

#22 2020-04-02 23:05:46

Re: Finding other towns/experts is STILL a pain, and how I'm fixing it

#23 2020-04-03 01:05:23

Re: Finding other towns/experts is STILL a pain, and how I'm fixing it

#24 2020-04-03 02:40:32

Re: Finding other towns/experts is STILL a pain, and how I'm fixing it

#25 2020-04-03 03:29:38

Re: Finding other towns/experts is STILL a pain, and how I'm fixing it

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