One Hour One Life Forums

I'm horribly tired, barely awake and about to go to sleep, so hopefully my grammar isn't too atrocious here but it very well may end up being so

>>"And this game should always be about struggling to survive, at some level.  It should always be possible to fail, both at the individual and village level.  But villages were everywhere.  You could always wander into a deserted one and pick right back up.  Failure meant nothing."

The game was supposed to be about working together to build up a society and world that stayed there.  It was hard to survive, but what you made was left over to make it so future generations could continue from where you left off.  It seems that some of that idea is falling out of favor now.  Rather than a wipe, dying out, making people constantly have to re-start, why not make it so there are other struggles that make it more difficult for cities to survive once they are built up?  Maybe the cities attract dangerous wildlife, maybe disasters start to strike more populated areas but are recoverable and workable to get through.  Maybe everything in the world ends up getting a natural decay level so there isn't always a big stockpile of so much stuff in some places, with things lasting longer depending on what they were made of.

>>"Building a village from scratch is the interesting part, and making a contribution that really matters is the most meaningful way to leave a legacy."

Except if the villages are just wiped away in the way that's being done now, you haven't made a contribution that matters.  You have no legacy.  You have nothing saved at all.

>>"Griefers are a symptom, not a cause.  If you are struggling to survive, you have no time for griefing."

This here shows me that he really doesn't understand griefing at all, and if it's not understood, it can't be lessened.  Making it even more hard to struggle to live isn't going to stop griefing, and in fact a number of the changes being made are going to make griefing all the easier.  Griefers don't care about long term survival, they only care about living long enough to screw everybody else over, then they can die and be reborn to do it all over again.  The only way to make survival so difficult that you have no time for griefing would be to make survival so difficult that you had no time to do *anything* at all other than survive.

>>"Your chance to continue living and working in a given village will end when the lineage in that village dies out.  No more wandering back later and starting over in the same spot with everything already done/built for you.  Each new line will start in the wilderness."

Wow, griefers are really going to have a field day of fun with that.  Not only will they get to screw over people hard, but they'll be able to wipe out entire lines now and everything they've done so much easier.

As mentioned earlier I think adding item decay to everything would really be a better way to go.  You could have repair levels and let things be patched up and used for long term, but the overall highest durability would go down over time so eventually it would have to be totally replaced.

>>"So, think for a minute before you jump on the review button and call me LAZY in all caps, please."

I wouldn't call you lazy in all caps in a review, but I might write here on these forums that some of these changes definitely feel lazy.  There should be other things to make the survival challenge difficult when cities are built up rather than destroying everything and making everybody start the same things over again.  You just want to make the current situation more difficult and add more failure so people will be stuck doing the same stuff again and again, which is definitely an unindustrious way to deal with the situation no matter how long you're working each day.

There are two things I'd like to see, more content and less griefing.  By what you've written to us in the newsletter I can see you don't really have a grip on understanding griefers and griefing overall, so I don't know what to hope for there at this point.  Re-doing the early content over and over again isn't fun for me, that isn't progressing, that isn't doing anything that matters.  It means you're building it for a different type of gamer than me, you're building it for the Flappy Bird type of gamer that wants to do the same bits of content over and over at super high difficulty levels.  You're feeling that ultra over the top challenge is what people want and what makes it fun and thinking that people aren't playing because they're not being challenged enough anymore, which to me makes me think you don't really understand what most of these players were looking for.

Maybe when you see these changes do not end up causing a big rush of people to return you'll understand a bit more.

The wiping was fine, the game will probably need to wipe multiple more times as changes come, and that's not what this is about.  It's that thinking that's some kind of a solve and making sort of a built in village wipe as well that's all too easy to happen especially if griefers decide they want to make sure it happens.

I think I need to go away and give the game time to mature, and I will return one day in the future to see if it became something I can enjoy or not.

The apocalypse was one attempt at an end game.  It also was an attempt to create a momentary shared collective experience.  To create a memory.  "Were you there back when there was an apocalypse?  Wow, what a day that was!"

But allowing one faction to end the game for everyone really isn't that interesting of an end game.  Why is why I built-in an OFF switch and used that switch right away.

This is also what makes the higher number servers so popular.  People can keep working on the same village week after week there even with low populations, because they can all find their way back, even if there's no continuous family line.