Myths and facts about why player numbers are dropping over time

Spoonwood · 2019-10-17 17:24:20

wondible wrote:

JonySky wrote:
Why has child suicide returned? what is the reason? rift ??
Perhaps the situation with the arc age report has people thinking there is an eve window open, when there is not.

That would imply that players would enjoy an easy option, such as a choice screen, in order to become an Eve. And also the possibility of having a freshly untouched starting location. But, that would require that the game designer would care about such players and would respect them making their own choices and trying to make their own fun, not his fun. He hasn't done that on a consistent basis, and that's a strong contributor to why player population has declined over the months.

Last edited by Spoonwood (2019-10-17 17:25:33)

Glassius · 2019-10-21 22:31:10

New players are not staying, because OHOL is a fraud. It promises to be about parenting and building civilization. It is none of them, because "everything runs out".

How to break parenting
1. Restrict toddler speaking. It is adorable and touchy maybe first 10 times, but getting more frustraing with each attempt.
2. Make game so hard, that experienced players which can teach have to spend all their time saving city from destruction (hi pein!)
3. Make offspring a budding bacteria, not something two players try to give born to. A random child during forging? Great idea!
4. Keep each life unique a way, your offspring success does not affect you. Now there is the useless score. Maybe some players are developing their characters and skills for achieviements, but most of us enjoy rewards much more

How to break building civilization
1. Make Eveing the hardest part of game. Hunter-gatherer lifestyle is essential to allow building outposts and make long-distance travels, to enable wars and trade.
2. Eveing was the most fun part of game. It was already made nearly impossible excluding OHOL hardcore players. Rift makes it even worse.
3. Condemn everyone to inevitable doom. If you think that encourages people to build civilization, consider this video

And a bonus, how to piss of playerbase
1. Tell a solo-made indie game must have declining playerbase after 18 months. Consider Minecraft.
2. Tell how complex this game is mentioning all semi-states. Ignore that items in other games are state machines increasing complexity to levels not possible for OHOL
3. Tell you are the best solo designer (I've spent 173 hours in StarDrive 2, 17 hours in OHOL since Steam release. Also Steam Charts says, SD2 is better )
there-are-2-kinds-of-people-ei-brie-larson-brielarson-55230287.png
4. Disregard zoom
5. Give them "dogs" and "potatoes"

This is not bugs nor design which breaks OHOL. It is it's philosophy.

Beautiful discussion, no doubt! I enjoy reading valid points, like poor tutorial and tooltip. But this game would not need any of them, if it was successful in parenting part. I will keep looking to the forum sometimes, feeding my salty satisfaction how OHOL is dying, just as I expected it will.

Last edited by Glassius (2019-10-21 22:31:57)

NiGB0 · 2019-10-21 23:48:35

Gogo wrote:

I prefer family tree than table with players.

OHOL has family tree too. -> http://lineage.onehouronelife.com/serve … 51DD9F1AE6
Click on a portrait to see the family tree of the character.

Spoonwood · 2019-10-22 00:54:28

Glassius wrote:

This is not bugs nor design which breaks OHOL. It is it's philosophy.

Yep. Not sure if I disagree with you anywhere.

FulmenTheFinn · 2019-10-22 16:11:52

Glassius wrote:

New players are not staying, because OHOL is a fraud. It promises to be about parenting and building civilization. It is none of them, because "everything runs out".
How to break parenting
1. Restrict toddler speaking. It is adorable and touchy maybe first 10 times, but getting more frustraing with each attempt.
2. Make game so hard, that experienced players which can teach have to spend all their time saving city from destruction (hi pein!)
3. Make offspring a budding bacteria, not something two players try to give born to. A random child during forging? Great idea!
4. Keep each life unique a way, your offspring success does not affect you. Now there is the useless score. Maybe some players are developing their characters and skills for achieviements, but most of us enjoy rewards much more
How to break building civilization
1. Make Eveing the hardest part of game. Hunter-gatherer lifestyle is essential to allow building outposts and make long-distance travels, to enable wars and trade.
2. Eveing was the most fun part of game. It was already made nearly impossible excluding OHOL hardcore players. Rift makes it even worse.
3. Condemn everyone to inevitable doom. If you think that encourages people to build civilization, consider this video
And a bonus, how to piss of playerbase
1. Tell a solo-made indie game must have declining playerbase after 18 months. Consider Minecraft.
2. Tell how complex this game is mentioning all semi-states. Ignore that items in other games are state machines increasing complexity to levels not possible for OHOL
3. Tell you are the best solo designer (I've spent 173 hours in StarDrive 2, 17 hours in OHOL since Steam release. Also Steam Charts says, SD2 is better )
https://pics.me.me/there-are-2-kinds-of … 230287.png
4. Disregard zoom
5. Give them "dogs" and "potatoes"
This is not bugs nor design which breaks OHOL. It is it's philosophy.
Beautiful discussion, no doubt! I enjoy reading valid points, like poor tutorial and tooltip. But this game would not need any of them, if it was successful in parenting part. I will keep looking to the forum sometimes, feeding my salty satisfaction how OHOL is dying, just as I expected it will.
http://giphygifs.s3.amazonaws.com/media … /giphy.gif

I agree with a lot of these points.

Gogo · 2019-10-25 10:18:10

NiGB0 wrote:

Gogo wrote:
I prefer family tree than table with players.
OHOL has family tree too. -> http://lineage.onehouronelife.com/serve … 51DD9F1AE6
Click on a portrait to see the family tree of the character.

Oh. Thanks!

Spoonwood · 2019-11-26 23:12:05

jasonrohrer wrote:

I mean, if I added a whole new biome, that would make for great visual video content. But still, you'd explore that biome for 5-10 minutes, and then go back to actually playing the game.

Rereading this it just feels so strange. Do you think that when you added old type jungles and deserts that people 'just' went back to playing the game Jason? I mean, maybe the first players did. But somewhere, someone along the line have to have thought 'hmmm... maybe we should rethink where we set up towns from the ground up.' And then there was novelty in terms of possibilities for how the game could develop. I mean, people moved away from settling in colder areas to living along desert edges and in jungles.

Tempted · 2019-11-27 07:09:17

pein wrote:

Its not one upgrade particularly, its all of them
They didn't bring meaningful change, its just fixing non-existent problems while allowing more problems.
People can get hooked up on the game, but they will run out of content, unique activities.
The tech tree is not varied enough and not too long. also, there is no content update, no new clothes, no new animal mechanics, no decor items.Even old elements that could be fun and useful aren't fixed like ever. like mine carts and rails.

Yep. I don't see it changing though. Just a continuous leap into more difficult play trying to shove a square peg into a round hole.
People like challenges. They also like to have fun. This game gets more challenging, and less fun as time drags on.

Greenwood · 2019-11-27 08:13:44

Am I the only one who liked the game as a noob, even in high-tech towns? I did read up a bit on onetech though to be fair. Usually I just became the town nurse or helped with baking or something similar for a while.

Last edited by Greenwood (2019-11-27 08:13:58)

Spoonwood · 2020-04-18 02:27:05

4 months of positive upticks for Eco from November to February, and the last 30 days looks green also: https://steamcharts.com/app/382310#All I don't think that's from sales, and I doubt all of the months there were from sales also.

3 months of red recently for OHOL and still red for the last 30 days: https://steamcharts.com/app/595690#All

And given that all things were equal with respect to people's behavior (it obviously isn't, because people are inside more often now than last year), there exists reason to believe that the game would drop in numbers even more since it gets advertised as a *parenting* game, where the veterans have cause to refuse to feed every child, as lineages like this show: http://lineage.onehouronelife.com/serve … id=6131252 and some earlier lineages from the 4 family system also suggest.

Lightning · 2020-04-18 13:28:56

You just love to necro posts dont you spoonwood ?

Glassius · 2020-04-19 16:52:44

It is a new topic here. I was also expecting a playerbase increase during pandemia, but nothing like that happens. It seems Jason is so successfull in designing the game of one-time, unique experience, no one wants to play it again

Spoonwood · 2020-10-18 14:57:45

Lightning wrote:

You just love to necro posts dont you spoonwood ?

Yeah, I do... but not quite for the sake of only necroing. 6 months on this reply.

Do you see the redline peaks from when the game first got sold to the public in early 2018, and then the Steam sale in later 2018? Do you see how it quickly the numbers decline thereafter? It looks to me like the rate of player decline in late 2018 until to 2019 is slower. Of course, there exist many factors, like time of year. But, during that time period temperature blending existed, and at least some players had a more forgiving pip drain rate due to that (not veterans gathering resources out in the wild though). There were also substantially different types of camps. Food value was more similar across generations for both of those time periods than now.

Now, for new discussion, what do you think the numbers look like from the latest sale and after it? I haven't seen them, but from what I've seen from the Steam numbers and pinging the reflector, the rate of player decline since the latest sale is even greater than what happened with the original sale in 2018. And maybe, since the game was less expansive, it was less likely to attract players who wanted to study how to play it than with previous sales. And sales sometimes result in destructive players getting another account also.

Challenge can be good for veterans, I think in general. But, too much challenge for new players kills off interest and results in boredom. And for veterans too, though, I think to a lesser extent.

Maybe the next sale will be better with new players having a more forgiving pip drain rate. It's such a shame that destructive players are likely to buy another account if/when such happens and have a slower pip drain rate also, but what could get done about that?

OneOfMany · 2020-10-18 15:16:12

This is an intense game. It's like Rust but, without the shooting. The intensity of play does not suit itself to casual conversation, which is the best part of the game. After all, the point of playing any game is to have fun. When you're new it's easy to get overwhelmed. I think it's important to think of us veteran players, as the third tutorial. Take your time to teach your kids, or your mom, how to eat (ie, yum, farm, cooking, diversity of food) Drop in an "ILY" to them and they'll be hooked. The experience in playing varies greatly between lives. Shitty lives, awesome lives, lives where you don't matter and others where you save everyone. This is a shitty game, by all respects, but the game play can be incredibly conducive to dopamine surges.

DestinyCall · 2020-10-18 16:07:10

Spoonwood wrote:

Lightning wrote:
You just love to necro posts dont you spoonwood ?
Yeah, I do... but not quite for the sake of only necroing. 6 months on this reply.

Did you just necro that quote of someone complaining about your thread-necroing to necro this thread again?

Man, that is some next level necromancy right there.

I am impressed.

Spoonwood · 2020-10-18 16:20:20

DestinyCall wrote:

Spoonwood wrote:
Lightning wrote:
You just love to necro posts dont you spoonwood ?
Yeah, I do... but not quite for the sake of only necroing. 6 months on this reply.
Did you just necro that quote of someone complaining about your thread-necroing to necro this thread again?
Man, that is some next level necromancy right there.
I am impressed.

Yeah. So, I think I didn't answer that question at the time, because at the time, it seemed clear to me that such a question wasn't actually a way to express curiosity, but felt more like a way to attack anything getting necroed. Or something like that. People pressuring the moderators to have me banned, because of me responding to some old post, and all that.

But, since I think that period is over and done with, I felt happy to treat the question like a genuine one.

Please note that I talked about far more in my comment, and if I had made a comment just replying to that question it would have been rather silly on my part. It might have been silly to respond to that question in my comment also.

But, there is some value in talking about old topics sometimes. And even more so, when such an old topic still has relevance today. So, why not enjoy a necro here and there at least?

Last edited by Spoonwood (2020-10-18 16:31:07)

Eve Troll · 2020-10-19 01:29:29

A post so nice spoon necroed it twice.

NoTruePunk · 2020-10-19 03:10:47

One solution to keep families dying to low pop might be to up the f to m sex ratio when there's low numbers of players online.

DestinyCall · 2020-10-19 05:24:11

Or we could just get rid of dudes all together. Do we really need Y chromosomes in a world without fathers?

Spoonwood · 2020-10-19 12:10:17

DestinyCall wrote:

Or we could just get rid of dudes all together. Do we really need Y chromosomes in a world without fathers?

No. I mean before homelands and fertility control, I think there was more to it. But, in a world where players have fertility control, I'm not seeing a need for male characters. One might think it silly to have a world without men. But, it's also a silly world where men aren't fathers ever. I think just eliminating sex entirely better, or at least worth considering.

Edit: But then again, I hear that players like to roleplay getting married. I read on discord that one player who started during The Rift and said that most of her experience was garbage (not her term, my interpretation), that she ended up getting saved by some roleplayer who had a marriage, and she said 'you can get married?' or something like that. Then again, marriage isn't something that makes sense in the scope of the characters of OHOL if you ask me, since men don't play any part in the "reproductive" process. So, I don't think that marriage is something that characters in the OHOL world would think about.

Alright, maybe you want to argue against that, because of modern marriage and all that. But, for some people at least, the primary function of marriage is people having biological families. And I think that the state usually conceives of many, if not most marriages as being about people having biological families, even with notable exceptions.

Last edited by Spoonwood (2020-10-19 12:32:30)

sigmen4020 · 2020-10-19 16:46:31

DestinyCall wrote:

Spoonwood wrote:
Lightning wrote:
You just love to necro posts dont you spoonwood ?
Yeah, I do... but not quite for the sake of only necroing. 6 months on this reply.
Did you just necro that quote of someone complaining about your thread-necroing to necro this thread again?
Man, that is some next level necromancy right there.
I am impressed.

He's a master of his craft. A true level 99 necromancer.

One Hour One Life Forums

#101 2019-10-17 17:24:20

Re: Myths and facts about why player numbers are dropping over time

#102 2019-10-21 22:31:10

Re: Myths and facts about why player numbers are dropping over time

#103 2019-10-21 23:48:35

Re: Myths and facts about why player numbers are dropping over time

#104 2019-10-22 00:54:28

Re: Myths and facts about why player numbers are dropping over time

#105 2019-10-22 16:11:52

Re: Myths and facts about why player numbers are dropping over time

#106 2019-10-25 10:18:10

Re: Myths and facts about why player numbers are dropping over time

#107 2019-11-26 23:12:05

Re: Myths and facts about why player numbers are dropping over time

#108 2019-11-27 07:09:17

Re: Myths and facts about why player numbers are dropping over time

#109 2019-11-27 08:13:44

Re: Myths and facts about why player numbers are dropping over time

#110 2020-04-18 02:27:05

Re: Myths and facts about why player numbers are dropping over time

#111 2020-04-18 13:28:56

Re: Myths and facts about why player numbers are dropping over time

#112 2020-04-19 16:52:44

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#113 2020-10-18 14:57:45

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#114 2020-10-18 15:16:12

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#115 2020-10-18 16:07:10

Re: Myths and facts about why player numbers are dropping over time

#116 2020-10-18 16:20:20

Re: Myths and facts about why player numbers are dropping over time

#117 2020-10-19 01:29:29

Re: Myths and facts about why player numbers are dropping over time

#118 2020-10-19 03:10:47

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#119 2020-10-19 05:24:11

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#120 2020-10-19 12:10:17

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#121 2020-10-19 16:46:31

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