A Game of Child Abandonment

Spoonwood · 2020-04-18 23:01:08

It's an old problem that recurs every so often that experienced players have rational cause to not feed every child. From what I understand, it happened a lot with the initial Steam release. It happened during The Rift. 15-20 people per Eve with the four family system, suggested if not encouraged child abandonment.

Here's Eve Tarr with plenty of baby abandonment:

http://lineage.onehouronelife.com/serve … id=6131252

No, it wasn't just Eve Tarr:

http://lineage.onehouronelife.com/serve … id=6131252

A game where a player can't do anything at all but move due to how the game works is horrendously flawed, or no more than a walking and/or babbling simulator.

Coconut Fruit · 2020-04-18 23:38:51

I actually like that we leave babies to die if we can't afford them. Even before purchasing this game, I was aware that some moms will abandon me because they can't afford a kid... And it's totally fine, I liked it right from the beginning. I actually doubt it that some people would think "oh, my mom abandoned me, this game sux". This is not a problem...

The problem would start when every family couldn't afford kids. We have too few families with too many kids, it's hard to give your kid attention if you keep giving births over and over again every moment.
I would rather have twice as many families with twice less people playing in every fam.

Last edited by Coconut Fruit (2020-04-18 23:39:39)

Spoonwood · 2020-04-19 00:17:07

Coconut Fruit wrote:

I actually like that we leave babies to die if we can't afford them.

And you call leaving babies to die parenting?

Coconut Fruit wrote:

And it's totally fine, I liked it right from the beginning.

Given the game as intentionally designed so that such situations will occur, does it fit the game's advertisement as one about parenting?

Coconut Fruit wrote:

I actually doubt it that some people would think "oh, my mom abandoned me, this game sux". This is not a problem

The game is advertised to be a game about parenting. Child abandonment isn't a form of parenting. It clearly isn't one with it leading to rational reasons for parents to abandon children and thus NOT parent.

Therefore, that players rationally abandon children is a longstanding problem, or at least a recurring problem.

Coconut Fruit wrote:

I actually doubt it that some people would think "oh, my mom abandoned me, this game sux".

And you really think that they considered judging the game from the perspective of just one life?

The title indicates "One Life". And the original concept was that within the scope of one hour players got one life. Judgments on the basis of one game about the entire game are perfectly valid.

Now, ask yourself, considering just one life where a player got abandoned to judge the entire game, if a player got abandoned as a baby, wouldn't someone conclude that the game sucked?

Also, how the heck does something like the early Tarr family situation where babies got abandoned MASS SCALE (easily less than 50% of babies were fed), make for a game of parenting?

FishRfriendsnotfood · 2020-04-19 00:36:31

people should abandon all babies.

pein · 2020-04-19 01:15:38

I mean its a choice, a hard one
but think this way: if you could choose to have you might not have any
and this is multiplayer so people can't wait for ages to happen

so you should also consider the resource management part of the game, you got limited supplies, you can't just divide it into infinite and think it will be okay

the spawn mechanics could be shifted but the actual problem is that workforce doesn't really matter, low population is better than high
I mean it could be that overpopulating is an issue but low population should be worse than medium and very high should be an issue

that can only be solved if we can get resources easier with more activities so work is the key factor to gathering not random spawn mechanics and gathering limited resources
like some recharge on resources but you need to gather them and that would need 15-20 people to do it so you would want to have kids

also a cap on population by technology so you can't have more kids until you fulfill some conditions, so bad families would be capped on 5 and tech would allow to progress further
the mechanics evolved a lot, it's better than what we started with, Jason actually listened to some wishes, like female boost under 3 females
smaller families

now he tried to block eve spawns with some randomness so that's why we got this I think

Coconut Fruit · 2020-04-19 01:24:52

So what do you actually want? To change advertising to "Game about parenting (except for cases when your mom abandons you), and civilization building"? That wouldn't look good.

I think you have a mild form of autism Spoon. No offense.

Spoonwood · 2020-04-19 02:23:05

pein wrote:

I mean its a choice, a hard one
but think this way: if you could choose to have you might not have any

Sure, that's possible. But, it's not a problem though. A problem is forced reproduction. Another problem is the high rate of players starting as babies. Parenting by one sex only is shallow and stupid and always has been shallow and stupid. Players having the ability to choose to have the possibility of becoming parents would enhance their responsibility to take care of their children.

pein wrote:

so you should also consider the resource management part of the game, you got limited supplies, you can't just divide it into infinite and think it will be okay

No, that would be okay ... having infinite food in particular area would be fine. There would NOT exist any food related reason for players to abandon children, no matter how high the population on a server. And the basics need to be right first, and that means always maintaining a system where players had enough to support their selves and their children. Players could still die and could still die by old age anyways and they could die in other ways also, so the possibility and inevitability of failure could both exist. Some of them might not build? Well, the problem is and has been trying to force building structures by making such necessary for survival. You built buildings, structures, made cars, did oil, LONG before they were in any way necessary for anyone to live to old age Pein. That could all get enhanced by a reward system, such as a point scoring one, for building structures.

Really, infinite food and easily available food would EASILY be better than veteran players finding cause to not parent.

Last edited by Spoonwood (2020-04-19 20:40:45)

Spoonwood · 2020-04-19 02:33:41

Coconut Fruit wrote:

So what do you actually want? To change advertising to "Game about parenting (except for cases when your mom abandons you), and civilization building"? That wouldn't look good.
I think you have a mild form of autism Spoon. No offense.

The rate of players getting born as children is a longstanding problem with the game.

Women get only one child without a male parent.

Every other child needs a male child. And *each* player after the first one only gets born as a child only if Adam and Eve agreed to have the possibility of producing *one* child (every extra child requires a verbal contract between the mother and the father).

That leaves it up to the players to assess whether or not they should have children. It also entails responsibility for parents to care for every particular child, since they made a choice to have a child or not have a child.

Other players get born as an Eve or Adam.

And no race restrictions whatsoever, since groups might end up spread out under such a system.

FishRfriendsnotfood · 2020-04-19 05:15:03

parents can be same sex. to have a child in real life sur eyou must need sperm and egg. but to parent a child, a father is unnecessary. single mothers exist. gay couples exist. a mother isn't necessary either.

Coconut Fruit · 2020-04-19 09:21:33

Spoonwood wrote:

No, that would be okay ... having infinite food in particular area would be fine. There would NOT exist any food related reason for players to abandon children, no matter how high the population on a server.

This can be solved in other way than giving us infinite food. Infinite food is boring.

jinbaili83 · 2020-04-19 10:34:33

@ Spoonwood. Could you study this problem in more scientific fashion.
We have publicly available logs from servers that have lots of basic life data.
You can compare numbers of dead todlers from diferent months so we can see if game is better now or worse in this aspect.

Coconut Fruit · 2020-04-19 10:50:12

jinbaili83 wrote:

You can compare numbers of dead todlers from diferent months so we can see if game is better now or worse in this aspect.

Haven't checked the logs, but definitely more babies are abandoned now.
We have only a few families and new baby distribution system. New families that can't afford babies get the most of them. Towns are overpopulated, water disappears quickly.

pein · 2020-04-19 11:25:30

On the low end, it's a necessity to have automatic joining system without waiting times
on higher-end, I would like some control about pregnancy, doing activities that give you more babies, not full control, some randomness to it would be fine, fatherhood won't happen, not with current mechanics, there are things that will never change and you better accept it
Might need a lot of groundwork to even implement some mechanics that are "realistic" compared tto racist mechanics and force fields

There are many playstyles and you can't just limit it to roleplaying.
He is right about having challenging gameplay, but he should reward player activities more.

Last edited by pein (2020-04-19 11:25:42)

The_Anabaptist · 2020-04-19 11:27:00

Choosing a family's size is most definitely the act of parenting, arguably good parenting even, and even civilization building. Ignoring the historical reasons during times of stress, I will focus on modern times.

Republicans: What are they against? Planned Parenthood and abortion. Have you heard the term "welfare mothers"? Its a derogatory slur that Republicans have used to paint mothers who can't afford to raise all the kids they have born as low class and stupid. While OHOL doesn't have birth control, it definitely has the ability to limit family size. Some people use it to consolidate their meager resources to ensure one or two kids live to sixty, vs a dozen all dying in their teens. Why should one philosophy be shamed over the other?

China: One child policy. While the rule has cause many unintended side effects, without it, China would not be the country it is today. There simply would have been starvation of billions.

Spoonwood, this the most spurious complaint against the game I've seen in ages.

The_Anabaptist

testo · 2020-04-19 12:14:39

Spoonwood and Pein are right imo, the game is poorly designed in the tech tree and population control. The model for how players are assigned to mothers seems to work the same for Eves, starting camps, middle villages and big cities.

That makes absolutely no sense in regards to reality, mothers are forced to leave their kids because the chance of surviving is the same as long as they have food (either there is food and all survive or there is not and all die).

For the Eve and early camps that translates in fast predation of wild food thus making it harder for generations 4/5. Sanitation and tech have no impact on natality (except fire). In our brains we are used to everyone being able to survive but we forget about the full shot of vaccines that makes that possible.

Family size at server level should never be the same for all tech levels for starters. Tech levels should not be force rushed at all (you can survive with a middle sized 4/6 population with 0 iron and water from ponds).

Number of families is poorly related to player numbers. On paper looks fine, in practice is terrible: a linear system assignment of players for an exponential grow model of population its just nonsense.

In the end child abandonment is the result of poor design and lack of understanding on how the game goes at a players level.

Spoonwood · 2020-04-19 13:17:53

Coconut Fruit wrote:

Spoonwood wrote:
No, that would be okay ... having infinite food in particular area would be fine. There would NOT exist any food related reason for players to abandon children, no matter how high the population on a server.
This can be solved in other way than giving us infinite food. Infinite food is boring.

Infinity of anything is interesting, because the possibilities are endless. Finite of anything has limited interest at best, since there exist only so many possible combinations.

Spoonwood · 2020-04-19 13:19:43

jinbaili83 wrote:

@ Spoonwood. Could you study this problem in more scientific fashion.
We have publicly available logs from servers that have lots of basic life data.
You can compare numbers of dead todlers from diferent months so we can see if game is better now or worse in this aspect.

I think the more relevant statistic would be how many children starve before age 3.

Your request for information on knowing how severe things are in this respect is fair.

Spoonwood · 2020-04-19 13:27:46

pein wrote:

on higher-end, I would like some control about pregnancy, doing activities that give you more babies, not full control, some randomness to it would be fine, fatherhood won't happen, not with current mechanics, there are things that will never change and you better accept it

Accepting that certain things just won't happen would make it impossible that some longstanding even exist. Denial of problems is not a way to get a solid foundation for a game.

pein wrote:

There are many playstyles and you can't just limit it to roleplaying.

All of the social relationships are role play ab initio. The whole game involves players assuming roles in a fictional setting.

Spoonwood · 2020-04-19 13:39:03

The_Anabaptist wrote:

Choosing a family's size is most definitely the act of parenting, arguably good parenting even, and even civilization building. Ignoring the historical reasons during times of stress, I will focus on modern times.

I think I agree about the real world.

The_Anabaptist wrote:

While OHOL doesn't have birth control, it definitely has the ability to limit family size.

Family size over time in OHOL is only limited by players not having children. Mothers not feeding children and thus them starving to death, only limits how many people exist at a certain time.

The_Anabaptist wrote:

Some people use it to consolidate their meager resources to ensure one or two kids live to sixty, vs a dozen all dying in their teens. Why should one philosophy be shamed over the other?

Because one philosophy involves opportunity not existing for players.

The_Anabaptist wrote:

China: One child policy. While the rule has cause many unintended side effects, without it, China would not be the country it is today. There simply would have been starvation of billions.
Spoonwood, this the most spurious complaint against the game I've seen in ages.

*laughs* are you serious? Given that players had an attitude like that of China during China's one child policy, where would the parenting exist other than for the one child? With forced reproduction that means that child 2, child 3, and so on would all NOT be parented. And the game is advertised as one of parenting.

pein · 2020-04-19 16:50:51

Don put me in the same group as spoonwood for any reason

generally, civilizations had problems with food so they either wandered around or hunting or tending animals
farming came after that, and cities formed near rivers

kinda sad that water is a huge problem and the only problem

the population wasn't increasing without food, and machines changed that we can have unlimited food and kinda unlimited population
good point on china, pop control is important

healthcare was really bad even until the middle ages, and religion prohibited the advancement of science

war is generally profitable, people broke rules and science advanced, cause war provides funding for inventions

kinda different in Europe, agriculture was limited by space so they had to use the space efficiently, but for America, they brought cows because unlimited pastures and beef was cheaper than any other food

similarly, in Australia they brought sheep, they also needed dung beetle cause it didn't exist there, part of the reason so many deserts in Australia, a tiny bug missing changed the climate

poor countries got more kids, and they become even poorer because of it. Bangladesh, the Caribbean, etc. The issue is that you can control your own population but not for others, not city wide.

-------------------------------

In a game, we would need a fun system and positive actions give rewards, doing nothing can be punished
The population is still a resource and should be important. In extreme cases, you should consider abandoning kids but generally, it should be a positive thing to have population.

Infinity is only interesting if we have exchange rates on resources so you could sink a lot of items to create another, then on and on.
We don't really have anything valuable, like iron is level 1 then tools are level 2. Horsecarts level 3. Most of the upgrades from there aren't as useful as they should be, minecarts, buildings, cars.

A city can only function with like 12 people, if there is more, the resources deplete faster and you don't have any jobs to do for everyone.
This is really bad, there should be always something to do, you should be in a constant state of needing workforce, that would require renewable resources that need to be processed.

Spoon: if you say that parenting is more important than advancing in tech, that ruins the gameplay for players who like crafting and doing things. We already have the memescore which says that the player who raised 2 kids is better than the player who fed all of them.
So the game becomes less if you really force just one side of it.

Spoonwood · 2020-04-19 17:06:46

pein wrote:

Spoon: if you say that parenting is more important than advancing in tech, that ruins the gameplay for players who like crafting and doing things.

My ideas lie along the lines of letting players have control over how many children they can possibly have. So, I don't know why you would suggest that I would say something like that.

Forced reproduction though, given that players should feed all existing children, does make parenting more important than advancing in tech.

Last edited by Spoonwood (2020-04-19 17:07:53)

Ilka · 2020-04-19 17:42:03

Well, the longest family lines of the last week are only 54 generations.
Most of Eve started camps when there were few players on the server.
This made it possible to feed the second generation and survive the family.
However, the result is still very bad.
Because I saw what was happening in the Eve camps, I don't understand why there is no limit to children per woman, especially Eve?
30 and more children before Eve dies at a young age is absurd.

Glassius · 2020-04-19 17:44:07

It is a big offtop, but you are wrong in few areas here pein.

pein wrote:

healthcare was really bad even until the middle ages, and religion prohibited the advancement of science

Healthcare was bad untill the XIX century, when the vacciness (from English Edward Jenner) and antibacteria hygiene (from Hungarian Ignaz Semmelweis) started to be used. But despite rapid progress in XIX century, antibiotics were still awaiting to by discovered by Scotch Alexander Fleming in 1928. Look at below tomb. The vaccince for diphtheria was available at those years, yet it was too expensive for most people

pein wrote:

war is generally profitable, people broke rules and science advanced, cause war provides funding for inventions

War was profitable up to industrial revolution. In 1899 Polish banker Jan Gotlib Bloch proved in the book "Is War Now Impossible?" that advanced, industrialized society cannot gain profit because of war. I world war proved he was right. II world war was possible only because of dictartoships disregarding the wealth of governed nations.

Regarding religion: there are religions stopping science, but Reform Judaism and Catholic Church were pushing science towards.

pein wrote:

poor countries got more kids, and they become even poorer because of it. Bangladesh, the Caribbean, etc. The issue is that you can control your own population but not for others, not city wide.

It WAS true and still is in Africa, but ceased to be in the rest of the world. Before industrial revolution in XIX century, all societies were malthusianic: every food production improvement was eaten by increasing population leading eventually to all living at the edge of starvation. Such malthusianism was existing in Africa, so every food help and medical care provided by foreigners in XX century was leading to catastroply in tribal societies.

But it changed. Now also Africa is in the middle of demographic transition.

AmberA · 2020-04-19 18:30:54

I really enjoy the parenting aspect of this game. It is the #1 reason why I play. I completely agree that the balancing needs work.

I'll give an example of a parenting life that is good and one that is not.

GOOD LIFE AS PARENT:
- Minute 1: Baby is born, name baby, talk to baby to make baby feel loved, introduce baby to my mom and anyone else important to me in town such as their siblings, father if they have one, gma, etc.
- Minute 2: Carry baby while we look for clothes and also show baby around town, talking to them about the history of the town and history of our family.
- Minute 3-5: Introduce baby to task options, pack lunch for the baby (fill bp with food), maybe teach them something if they are new before they go on their way.
- Minute 6+ Return to working and now ready for another child. Usually the baby is happily working by now and will seek me out to show me what they did.

BAD UNFUN LIFE AS PARENT:
- Minute 1: Baby is born, name baby....WHOA another baby pops out. WTF ok. Try to name the first baby....2nd baby is screaming to be named...damn it baby have some patience can't you see I'm trying to find some food to eat. Can't go find gma, or father or siblings unless they happen to find me. Babies don't feel very loved because they get no one on one time with parent.
- Minute 2: Grab any clothes I happen to see nearby, since I can't carry both babies I MUST stay by the fire causing babies to not get the tour and don't learn about the history. Forcing me to stay by the fire means now I have to feed everyone's damn babies so now I'm hungry all the time. Both babies are probably talking two letters at the same time so I can't read either of them. POP...third baby...WTF no...tell 3rd bab "I'm so sorry, we have too many bbs" I choose to not feed it hoping it will die. Unfortunately some child always feeds it so now I have to keep it. First baby is walking away, I bring it back to the fire while some stranger names 3rd baby "Gay".
- Minute 3-5: POP...another baby, damn it I'm not ready. Oh thank god first baby has hair...dump eldest baby in berry farm "You are big now, fill bp with berries, ILY"
- Minute 6+: Half the kids starved because they were new and got no teaching or choose to die because their childhood sucked.

Glassius · 2020-04-19 19:19:41

AmberA, simple solution: give few seconds (20 secs) ban to baby spam after breastfeeding

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A Game of Child Abandonment

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