a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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Players could come up with their own titles which hopefully wouldn't be too much 18+. But if someone started giving themselves offensive titles chances are rest of community would deal with the offenders.
If it was my town I'd exile anyone who didn't use 18+ titles
jcwilk wrote:Do you think a lower tech tier might deserve an instant transport that perhaps doesn't go quite as far as the airplane one? I mean heck, waystones ought to let you instant transport to where they point given how sped up time is. Same with bell towers. Having it take any time at all to go to a known location that's only a few km away doesn't make any sense to me when a game second is almost a week.
Nah. Instant teleports imo take the player away from the difficulties of transportation and discovery of old civilizations, lost items/gear/horses, etc. etc. The airplane being so end-game and so costly makes it balanced for the instant-transport effect it provides. It hurts to only be able to effectively carry 3 Items + Kerosene every time you fly with it, of course.
If Jason looks into any other transport tech, it should utilize the existing tech we have, which would be roads/Railroads.
Well, there's a big difference between exploration, transport of goods, and simply getting yourself to a known location. Maybe there could be a second-tier tech way to transport to a map location (eg with waystones or similar) but your backpack has to be empty or nonexistent and your hands need to be empty (maybe pockets could be overlooked, adding extra value to cloth clothing). It just seems so strange to me that with anything but an airplane it takes years or decades to do a round trip or two to a place a couple km away.
jcwilk wrote:Honestly I think there should be an instant-transport option at some point in the tech tree, probably not super deep into it. Think about how long it takes to traverse 1km, even with a fast vehicle it's well over a "year". Who the hell takes a year to make it through 1km of wilderness? 1 game second should be plenty to traverse anything less than 100km -on foot- if your character is assumed to be hustling, given that a game second is a bit less than a week. So IMO it seems extremely reasonable to have some mid-tier tech like a "caravan depot" which connects to other caravan depots and instant transports you as hungry work. Maybe you can link a "brochure" to a caravan depot and you have to walk it/drive it to other caravan depots in order to connect them?
But yeah 8 slots even seems on the low end for how much of a bother it is to build a car. Two people with horse drawn carts sounds 10x more desirable, all things considered, aside from the fact that you need two people but how long does it take to recruit someone compared to building a car? If we could add a massive trailer to the car to hold many more things then maybe it starts to make sense, but I guess the whole tile-to-tile interaction limitation puts a damper on that.
We have instant transport with the Airplane, and doing this costs 1 pip of a Kerosene tank. 2 if you assume round-trip expense. It's also weird to judge the costs of a tank of Kerosene. Since each pip is worth 7 Buckets of Water, flight has to be very efficient for it to be worth sacrificing that many buckets of plant growth. It's really only feasible for what I would consider "Tier 5" Towns; towns that have become so wealthy and powerful that they possess aircraft that can be used to farm long-distance oil, and where The tanks of Kerosene are as plentiful as Steel.
For comparison, the current Bell town that has been active these last few days I would consider Tier 3, and is constantly teetering on the edge of collapse due to griefing.
Do you think a lower tech tier might deserve an instant transport that perhaps doesn't go quite as far as the airplane one? I mean heck, waystones ought to let you instant transport to where they point given how sped up time is. Same with bell towers. Having it take any time at all to go to a known location that's only a few km away doesn't make any sense to me when a game second is almost a week.
We can look to the real world for abundant examples of untrustworthy people who have managed to convince people to follow them. I don't see things working any better in a game.
If it matches real-world broken behavior then isn't that an argument for it being added? I think it's fun and interesting to explore fucked up aspects of life in OHOL, and it lets us leverage our instincts when things in the game are consistent with things in life.
Cars and planes do have lots of potential, and the fact that they are not yet feasible reflects their prototype nature. These cars are still crude cars, after all. I'm guessing that Jason has some plan to turn both of these into beneficial investments for towns after an upgrade or two. Nevertheless, some issues such as the fuel consumption based upon time and the easily-griefed nature of both vehicles limit their use even with upgrades.
But also, even buffed, there is little reason for a city to invest in a plane. To have gotten to that tech level you will have needed one of each race in your town regardless, and even if you need a new seal for your pump after all your rubber-farmers died, it would be easier to seed a town than trade with it. Radios allow people to signal ahead in theory, but the massive amount of time required to make one and the fact you don't know who you're talking to makes this almost impossible. The main use for planes or cars would be as migration vessels: to take the people from one town and move them to the next. Or perhaps even as tourist-vehicles? If that proves to be the case, extra player-carrying capacity might be the most useful thing to upgrade a car or a plane with. An upgraded car that could seat two or three people would be very useful for ferrying people about. Similarly, big planes could be used for entire town migrations, allowing a high-tech civ to keep moving west as their resources ran out.
Hopefully eventually we'll get some very rare resources that are extremely difficult to find and presumably very far away, or maybe they're simply spawned ~10km north of the eve zigzag (although I hate the eve zigzag tbh, I hope that's going to turn into something less weirdly uniform... it seems ridiculous that players can reverse engineer where eves will spawn, it should be unpredictable)
Most humans who made a huge impact on science and discovery did so on their own. Imagine where we would be if those people were forced to work with others in order to complete their work.
I disagree with this analogy. Tell me one huge impact individual who started from the wilderness and came up with anything useful at all to people already deep into civilization. People are always standing on the shoulders of giants. When someone creates something brand new for the world it's usually because they've focused on one tiny sliver of the universe for most of their life and managed to push it forward the tiniest bit, certainly with the help of some form of colleagues through their life. Even if we could imagine someone designing and building an engine by themselves they're not going to go mine and process the ore themselves, and they're probably going to have many assistants and outsource for certain tools. You're conflating invention with manufacturing I think. OHOL allegedly takes place in a post-apocalyptic future so all of the items in the game currently are not new inventions, it's just a matter of manufacturing and manufacturing requires tools, people, etc. People who work for themselves and work alone generally die alone and are forgotten, at best they can hope to have their ideas appreciated, but they're not going to roll in with a space ship if they're spending all their time sorting out how to dig around for iron ore.
I'm torn, I want to throw my vote in towards harshly punishing players who try to game the system, but the most obvious punishment is eventually blocking them from playing (ie, lowering the life token limit) but then that punishes mothers too by making it more likely that players run out of tokens and therefore throttling the supply of babies to a degree. OTOH if those players are just going to suicide anyways then they're useless baby stock... So yeah, 24 seems too high.
What if babies could only walk if their mothers put them down rather than squirming out of their arms, or maybe when the mother puts them down the mother has to right click on them or something like that to get them to be able to walk. Point being, if babies can't be runner bbs then the only way they can exploit their way into a different mother is by doing an explicit /die, which means that /die could be made to have very steep penalties to the bb. You want to game the system? Great, lose a few tokens and 3 points from your meme score and no credit for any family members.
Personally, my infant deaths come from hopelessness. I'm born and I immediately see that this place is doomed. Yesterday I was born to see that everyone's naked and there's no well. Not even a spring site. A primitive camp with a small farm fueled by pond water. Any work I do here is pointless. What alternative do I have to suicide? Wander through bland uninteresting wilderness for an hour? Realistically my absolute best hope would be to find a dead town, and even then I would be alone since I was a boy.
Rather than waste a real time hour of my life I'd rather just die and try to find somewhere better.
Don't care to find the quote but Jason's pretty explicitly indicated he wants to very harshly de-incentivize this behavior. You're born to a mother somewhere and that's it, you don't get to choose your mother. If you're choosing your mother than you're exploiting broken mechanics that should be fixed. Don't like the town you're born into? Too bad, find a character roleplaying a therapist, get over blaming your parents for everything and improve your village.
Honestly I think there should be an instant-transport option at some point in the tech tree, probably not super deep into it. Think about how long it takes to traverse 1km, even with a fast vehicle it's well over a "year". Who the hell takes a year to make it through 1km of wilderness? 1 game second should be plenty to traverse anything less than 100km -on foot- if your character is assumed to be hustling, given that a game second is a bit less than a week. So IMO it seems extremely reasonable to have some mid-tier tech like a "caravan depot" which connects to other caravan depots and instant transports you as hungry work. Maybe you can link a "brochure" to a caravan depot and you have to walk it/drive it to other caravan depots in order to connect them?
But yeah 8 slots even seems on the low end for how much of a bother it is to build a car. Two people with horse drawn carts sounds 10x more desirable, all things considered, aside from the fact that you need two people but how long does it take to recruit someone compared to building a car? If we could add a massive trailer to the car to hold many more things then maybe it starts to make sense, but I guess the whole tile-to-tile interaction limitation puts a damper on that.
Today I was making oil pump, but my brother start a race war, I watched as town turned into slaughter and he was stabbed, so I gave up getting kerosene for those idiots, they kill me in the end. Next I was born in ginger village near to that town, my mom told me I am a war leader, so we ran like 4 people and take over that town. It was exciting, you wanna get rid of excitement in this game? Only griefers would have some fun then? I'm gonna be griefed, stabbed, so what, next time I win.
One of the better chunks of text for sharing to someone without establishing OHOL context first.
Back in the Rift days, before there was a limit on how many bears you could get from a bear cave, I once commanded an army of bears. We wandered the countryside together as brothers, until I was too old to ride a horse.
It was glorious.
Lolll RIP my sides. Maybe we're actually the NPCs and the bears are the players, ever think of that mannnnnn
jcwilk wrote:Spoonwood wrote:Well so much the worse for property fences. They've never worked out like Jason has expected. They've resulted in terrible decaying, ugly sheep pens, and that's the best thing they've had going for them. Such is not a problem for not having murder in the game. What you describe is a problem with property fences. Probably they should just get removed from the game, and really it's not unreasonable to suggest that they should have gotten removed long ago. Private property is a great concept. It is very convenient in the real world. That doesn't mean that shoehorning into the context of OHOL is or ever has been a good idea though.
I managed to get a bear into a property fence bear pen earlier, that was pretty exciting. Sadly it managed to just barely nick me with its paw as i was slipping out, but with my dying breaths I made sure it was there to stay. Until the fences decayed 2 hours later I guess and then it was presumably suddenly released *shrugs* sorry town. But hey they got a zoo for a bit, seems worth it.
I like bear pens myself. I've remember a particular streamer trying one long ago. I've seen them turn into a mess on some low populations servers, and seen successful and stable ones on low population servers also. It's not surprising to me when people fail at bear pens, and make things worse. I do like it hearing about people trying them, but it's just because I like the idea of bear pens (or can think people fools for trying them). At best they are a motivational tool for players... but they are dangerous to the point that I don't recommend anyone try to make one. Also, as a motivational tool, I think there's some serious question as to them motivating the sorts of things that fall within the spirit of the game. A beautiful rose garden may motivate organized farming or watchiing the kitchen a little more closely I suppose. But, what does a bear pen motivate?
I think it's interesting to take games like this where there really is no coded point, no winning scenario, no avoidable losing scenario, no defined goals, etc, and sort of turn it on it's head with a left-field goal like "I want to own a bear". No one really knows what owning a bear motivates or leads to, I think you have to own one to find out. For a brief, fleeting moment I tasted the unknown... I want another taste
Bowser wrote:Had a griefer who did this yesterday, we didn't have a knife up so we couldn't remove the fences and almost everyone involved starved.
Well so much the worse for property fences. They've never worked out like Jason has expected. They've resulted in terrible decaying, ugly sheep pens, and that's the best thing they've had going for them. Such is not a problem for not having murder in the game. What you describe is a problem with property fences. Probably they should just get removed from the game, and really it's not unreasonable to suggest that they should have gotten removed long ago. Private property is a great concept. It is very convenient in the real world. That doesn't mean that shoehorning into the context of OHOL is or ever has been a good idea though.
I managed to get a bear into a property fence bear pen earlier, that was pretty exciting. Sadly it managed to just barely nick me with its paw as i was slipping out, but with my dying breaths I made sure it was there to stay. Until the fences decayed 2 hours later I guess and then it was presumably suddenly released *shrugs* sorry town. But hey they got a zoo for a bit, seems worth it.
Uh, I was targetted as an Eve by 1-3 different players (depending on how many accounts they had), and it was the worst griefing I ever experienced, so I can definitely say that you are mistaken in saying that Eve camps are not targetted... they definitely are, because griefers know how vulnerable they are. You get someone like I am describing in a camp like this and you will have a 0% chance of survival, it's hard to survive at times even without a griefer.
Lol yeah the other day I spawned as an eve and the first kid that popped out ended up pulling out a bow and arrow out of their fucking hat or something when they were just old enough to use it while babbling like a noob idiot the whole time, sneakiest mfer ever.
Oh and maybe a walkie talkie kind of thing? Can't remember if that's been suggested...
- Much less tech required than a cell phone (no need for towers or satellites although perhaps a tower could be used to broadcast much further to anyone with a walkie talkie but they won't be able to reply)
- right clicking on it changes the channel, after the last channel is a "scan" mode where it listens on all channels and switches to the first channel it hears activity on, after scan mode is off, after off is back to channel 1
- a special colored chat bubble appears for any chat coming from the walkie talkie regardless of where it is (held, backpack, floor, etc)
- reaches a certain radius of other walkie talkies on the same channel
- speaking while holding a walkie talkie sends to everyone on that channel (unless it's in scan mode, then it switches to channel 1 first)
- speaking into a walkie talkie degrades the walkie talkie by 5%
- being on for 5 minutes degrades the walkie talkie by 5%
- once it hits 0% it needs to be recharged by: fresh battery + expended walkie talkie (0%) = walkie talkie (100%)
Awesome ideas, particularly the roads. That -could- be enough to make trade a thing since big-ass trucks with massive amounts of storage are absolutely a thing on roads wheras offroad vehicles are usually more about simply getting there (like the generally useless ohol car) presumably that would mean there could be a more advanced road-car that's road locked and the existing kinda pointless car could remain as-is as a lower tech but more dynamic variant. Plus it would mean that towns could build a special high security "docking" area for road cars which could play into the complex property ownership needs around making trading work.
jcwilk wrote:IMO killing should stay as a tool against griefers but other things should come in too like maybe there's a way to hogtie a griefer and stuff him with food like a duck to keep him alive and imprisoned, but it takes a handful of people to be able to do it, or maybe the remaining spawn tokens can be deducted by curses, who knows.
An eye for an eye makes the world blind.
It's not a punishment, it's a vehicle for preventing them from respawning and getting a fresh start
Perhaps curses take a huge chunk out of your genetic score. So with enough curses you wouldnt be able to use any tools making killing near impossible.
Maybe, but genetic score is stupid easy to keep up at the moment... It seems to measure how many lives you have rather than how proficient you are, so it would have to be very severe and then the leaderboard jockeys who absolutely have to be top 10 will cry bloody mary when they get mis-cursed. Maybe if cursing had the current effect, and lowered meme score, and removed 8 spawn tokens, and the spawn tokens regenerated slowly enough for them to ever mean anything at all, then maybe cursing would matter
Bowser wrote:The list goes on and on. I'd rather deal with a murdering idiot that can have their damage relatively easily fixed (if you have pads/needle & thread) than deal with a griefer ruining the town that I could do literally nothing to stop. Yeah, you can curse them... so what. Even if they go to Donkey Town, they'll come back and find you.
Killing a griefer is short-sighted thinking. It isn't a good solution to a chronic problem. A dedicated griefer isn't going to stop griefing because he has been killed. Why should he? Death means nothing in a game with anonymous reincarnation. From your limited perspective it might feel like the danger is over, but it continues in the next town. And your village needs other villages to be alive and inhabited in order to keep going in the long-run. In your next life, you will be born in another town - maybe even the same town that the griefer was reborn into because you killed him. What has killing the griefer really accomplished? He might be "dead", but he isn't finished. He can keep coming back, again and again. Death is NOT the end.
Without a more permanent solution for serial griefers, killing is just a band-aid on a bullet wound. It lets you feel like you are helping your village, but doesn't fix the real problem.
We need to stop seeing murder as the best solution for murder.
Well, if all you have is a bandaid and a gunshot then the bandaid looks pretty attractive. IMO killing should stay as a tool against griefers but other things should come in too like maybe there's a way to hogtie a griefer and stuff him with food like a duck to keep him alive and imprisoned, but it takes a handful of people to be able to do it, or maybe the remaining spawn tokens can be deducted by curses, who knows... Submit ideas if you have em
Ugh... Why do I keep engaging with spoonwood, getting them to acknowledge nuance is like trying to run to bell town from donkey town. Curse my brain and its lack of ability to put the forums down and slowly walk away
My main objection would be griefer management. Like jason mentioned in the other thread a griefer can basically torture people their whole life and ruin a town with no way to stop them.
But is killing the only answer? Maybe not.
A way ive thought about a few times would be if someone built up enough curses they would poof out of existence. This could be abused, and its also highly unrealistic.
Perhaps you could immobilize someone for a short time with the lasso.
That being said removing killing from the game is a stretch for me. Killing has been apart of human society forever. Removing it completely would be too unnatural imo.
Personally i think more tools to associate griefers and manage them would be useful. Non griefers have weapons and curses to fight griefers. Griefers have weapons, curses, bears, boars, wolves, theft, destruction, confusion and misdirection.
Would be nice to have as many tools to counter griefers as they have to grief.
Yeah it feels like some kind of "stun weapon" is missing... Maybe a whip or the lasso or something, although I'm sure that would quickly become a griefer favorite too, stunning bakers and smiths and such
Didn't we just go over this the other day? Too lazy to find the post by Jason to quote since I'm sure you read it already but something along the lines of if you can't kill them then they'll just screw with all your stuff for the full hour. Actually I find it a lot easier to kill people without using weapons, there's no murdermouth or slowdown and no running out of range of fire.
Also, cursing isn't nearly as effective as people think it is. It's quite easy to keep showing up in the same town regardless of who's cursing you. Other villages are nearby, mothers run off out of range of the block and spawn you, and there's all the problematic stuff about mis-cursing and grief cursing.
And if (that's a big if) and when seeking out other villages for resources (ie trade) becomes a thing then killing would be really nice to still have to add tension to the situation, so it's not as simple as trading but it's incentivizing your trading partners to keep you alive as an asset rather than killing you and taking. Or, showing a strong enough show of force that they feel too intimidated to risk initiating combat.
Violence and threat of violence and civilization building are very, very much intertwined. It would definitely detract from the game's ability to model society if other people were automatically trusted to not kill you.
How does trade have anything to do with that?
In terms of gps and phones. The idea would be to launch satellites using the aforementioned rockets. This would likely be super late game. I would not expect updates like this to be done quickly. I could see the amount of craftable items doubling just by implementing the items on that list.
What mechanics are you talking about jcwilk? Tool slots, meme score, and race restrictions? Im fine with fixing mechanical issues and bugs but in general my game runs fine. My experience doesnt run as smoothly though. Since tool slots, meme score weight, biome restrictions, and pumping restrictions the game has become more repetitive than ever.
Yeah, mechanics as in things that wouldn't just be new items. They might involve new items but more out of utility than out of trying to have a large catalog of items. Satellite type stuff is kind of more towards a mechanic (satellite imagery, infinite distance communication, whatever) in the way I mean it in this context, as compared to new more complex foods or faster/stronger/better/cuter whatevers which likely have only very minimal fundamental game mechanics involved and are just items in the catalog.
I agree that his attempts to get trade going have entirely fallen flat, I'm not saying I love the changes he made, however I agree with the direction of trying to make one group of players want something the other group of players has and organically resultant tension arising from that. I don't myself know how to achieve that, seems like he doesn't either, so experimentation makes sense. Not sure if -those- experiments make sense, but what do I know.
I think the foreign babel was a good move though, it seems to help solidify the sense of "us" in the "us vs them" dynamic that's necessary for that kind of tension.
The race specialization makes some amount of sense, like I agree it fuels the "need" of trading, however it does nothing to fuel the "can" of trading... like the process of trading itself just doesn't make any sense in the game as-is.
IMO the missing link is two things:
1. Property - Property fences work pretty well if you really, really want them to, but too few people know how they work and fewer still give a shit about them. I'm not sure what the solution is, but it seems like it needs to be more accessible to players (in a figurative sense) ideally with little to no property management required by most of the people who use it. Even having to open and close the door and keep it closed most of the time etc is just way too much for new players. Maybe the doors just let owners through without opening? I'm not sure, and there's griefing implications too of course, though property fences are mostly used by griefers as is so not much to lose there by further adjustments. And, of course, foreign traders/diplomats need to be able to interact still with residents of the property which can kinda sorta not really be done with property fences but again, something that is more straightforward rather than requiring excessive creativity to be able to trade at all is really needed.
2. Too damn far - This one's tricky and multifaceted, like is the solution to tweak things so that families end up being less far apart? Or is it to tweak things so that great distances can be traveled, or at least that items can travel great distances? Bit of both probably? Maybe even massive caravans that can carry a ton of shit so that it's actually worth the effort.
Both of those problems kind of strongly demand "unnatural" solutions that break the theme, but realplay trading and raiding actually being a thing in OHOL would so be worth it IMO
Toxolotl wrote:Ruben wrote:You really need to stop calling the beginning the end.
I don't find playing in megacities repetitive at all. It's like people are so used to village life that they cant handle the complex endgame.'It's meaningless', I hear them say all the time (I do not comprehend this).
I agree. An easy way to fix stagnation or make the current endgame the beginning of something epic is to extend the tech tree. Make it huge! Stuff like rockets, phones, gps, binoculars, railroads, advanced cars, computers, electricity, air conditioning, furnaces, electronic lathe drill bore hammer roller, several tiers of generators and much more. About a year ago, a youtube video made by Jason gave the impression that 10,000 craftable items would be available in game. Today we sit at about 2225.
I agree, Bigger and better projects to work on.
But Ruben probably spends the first 20 minutes scavenging for clothes, Then another 20 dressing babies and then final 20 minutes dressing grandkids and eating. A megacity isn't any more complex than a budding eve camp, they both need the same things. Food, Water and babies.
Yeah... I'm kind of with Jason on his approach to work on mechanics first, if he just added a bunch of stuff then people would go ahead and build a bunch of that stuff and then the bell towns would all have those things and it would be briefly visually novel but gameplay-wise probably 90% unchanged for a MASSIVE amount of dev/drawing time from him. I remember him mentioning somewhere that he was avoiding turning OHOL into a "networking" game like how castle doctrine was with complex minecraft-like circuits since the programming for that in an infinite map is prohibitively complex, but I think that -some- kind of networking behavior is going to be necessary to really make this game shine, but he'll likely have to keep experimenting to figure out exactly what's needed so he can figure out an approachable way to tackle it. But yeah we still haven't gotten trade to be a thing, and without trade it's just real tough to get interesting endgame dynamics going imo... And/or, a reason to raid/defend aside from for out-of-character reasons.
Sopbucket wrote:jcwilk wrote:I think having more coded mechanisms for communicating ideas like this is great imo... It's important to remember that because time is so sped up there would presumably be many, many more interactions in the analogous full length life so things like keeping everyone in sync about direction and values and such would be happening many times every second. A second is basically a bit less than a week so imagine trying to communicate as many things as need to be communicated across the span of a month in 5 seconds or so... It's just not possible, so it makes sense to have the game facilitate some of that data syncing between humans to bring it slightly closer to how in sync humans would be at normal speed
I think this is a good point - one reason at least we haven't seen complex societies arise in the game is the time and effort it takes to communicate relative to everyone's life span. As cool as it is to see social systems develop organically, I don't think there's anything wrong with using game mechanics to help facilitate some of the interactions, so long as it's handled well. That's basically what private property and fences do at the moment.
How would this be done though. Kinda makes no sense. Every second is a little over 6 days. I like your hat but its time to buy some cattle jcwilk.
How indeed. It just depends on which compromises Jason is cool with really. My point is just that relying on on-screen communication alone is insufficient for society building given the speed of life. Stuff like this threads idea of having ways of marking people using coded mechanics is a good direction to start exploring more of, imo.
I explored an idea for taking credit for contributions to society buried in another thread but it seemed too big an ask in terms of how much effort it would be to code so I didn't end up dedicating a thread to it as a proper suggestion but eg, irl people would gossip about who's putting in work on things that matter and who isn't but there isn't time for that in ohol... So it would be nice if there was a system that scored people based on how much their work is utilized.
Basically just saying let's try to individually keep in mind that there are certain functions of society which are not possible to duplicate organically with such a scaled up pace, so if we want them then we need to think up and suggest simplified, abstract models to fill in the gaps and be candidates for future features