a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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I do not think simply adding a bunch of substitutes would help either, because people would find the most efficient one and it would become meta.
I think the problem can be condensed to too much of the early tech tree requires access to the green/swamp biome. During the early game when you have no clothes, it becomes unfeasible to settle anywhere else due to lack of food, necessary crafting ingredients for early tools, large amount of clay needed for first pottery/oven/kiln, and swamp will be only water source until you have steel.
Also, because people are born in different places the average skill level/expertise with different jobs/crafts will be around the same and biomes are small enough that we can feasibly have access to every biomes resources no matter where we are.
Thanks Jason, I will keep this in mind for the future.
I will however argue that I think there are some valuable, well thought out suggestions like Lyche's mega suggestion thread.
Be cool if all game items were names that you could name your kids. I often want to name my kid after something going on in my life like rabbit but that's not a name.
you are longstraightshaft
The city dwellers immediately lunge at you with their swords
So it's interesting that this is the true steady-state of the game (two families) without a bunch of artificial Eve-ing and self-imposed lineage banning.
Yes, it actually makes perfect sense that over time the number of lineages converges to just two. I wouldn't even be surprised i]ft it converged to just one family. This is an example of genetic drift. Even if survival in each family was equal, by random chance(who got the most daughters that stayed) each family's share of the player base will change.
Simple genetic drift simulations use asexually reproducing creatures as well, which makes drawing comparisons even easier.
With a small population like 100, it is easy to see why it would happen. Especially during times with shrinking populations, not every woman is going to get a girl, and some will get a couple of girls.
So basically what I am saying, by pure chance eventually you'll end up with just one family.
Here is a link to a simulation, with N is set to 100(players) and allele frequency(portion of population in family) is set to 0.5. http://phyletica.org/teaching/drift-simulator/
So, based on this simulation assuming a stable population of 100 players, you'll usually end up with one family after only a few dozen generations. With a shrinking population, it should be quicker and growing population take longer.
This doesn't take into account area ban, but the family that is best able to spread out should eventually win out (they are in enough towns that you cant be lineage banned from all without murder) vs a family that stays in one town
Also doesn't take into account underdog effect, where people will see one family shrinking and thus they try harder to keep that family alive vs the #1 family.
Last name extinction is also an interesting related topic. Mathematically most last names should become extinct, as by random mating will result in the most common last names taking up a larger and larger portion of the population.
I just witnessed the same thing in game. My sister, a girl name Shay Blondin, kept begging for someone to stab her so she can play Eve. If you look at her family tree, you'll see she got her wish.
Pregnancy preview where the baby watches the mother's life for 20-45 seconds and she has a pregnant belly? People could use /die during that time and the mother isn't bothered, just a little disappointment about the bump going away without a kid. I think it'd be important to make the baby be born 45 seconds old to keep the wait time till you can play about the same for everyone.
I like this idea... like a kill cam, but literally the opposite. Instead of seeing the actions of the person who ended your life you see the actions of the person starting your life.
It may be difficult to change clothes appearance/the character model for a baby bump, so I suggest a sort of visible 'pregnancy glow' instead.
I think a 10 second server ban or cool down on /die would help stop people from spamming it.
Now that I think about it, the child of my 19th cousin would be my 19th cousin once removed... if I am not mistaken. I am not sure. I haven't met anyone tagged with anything more unrelated than 19th cousins though. I will make a github issue on it.
Keyin wrote:Some kid in my village was trying to play Eve by getting people to kill him (and thus area ban him, because he is involved in a murder).
So this is still a feasible way to Eve. As long as you can get someone in every village to kill you within 90 minutes, you can play as Eve.
Or the reverse, if you kill someone in every town you can Eve, but you're more likely to go to donkey town.
I recommend NOT helping people in this way. It is annoying behavior. Don't encourage it.
Yeah I didn't kill him. Some old lady did. I was honestly lost for words when it happened.
Some kid in my village was trying to play Eve by getting people to kill him (and thus area ban him, because he is involved in a murder).
So this is still a feasible way to Eve. As long as you can get someone in every village to kill you within 90 minutes, you can play as Eve.
Or the reverse, if you kill someone in every town you can Eve, but you're more likely to go to donkey town.
So, I spawned into the southern Blondin town and went north to a smaller Blondin town where I met my 19th cousins, and some of their kids. Their kids showed as no-relation.
I wanted to know if we could use swords on each other. I didn't want to kill my 20th cousins, so I decided to wait until one of them was grown. I asked him to try to use sword on me and he agreed. However, before he was old enough to use a sword my crazy 19th cousin stabbed me with a knife because she wanted to die, so I never found out the answer.
So, has anyone else met a 20+ cousin? Can you use sword on them? Or do they count as related despite showing no-relation?
It would've been a lot better if we had more males. But they all instantly killed themselves.
I died before I had a chance to retire from motherhood and be a technician grandma.
Maybe if men had a clear mechanical advantage, the way women do, they would be more inclined to stay.
And yeah, when there's a genocide going on somewhere else, all those people getting area banned = baby boom for towns that have a good amount of fertile women.
There are a lot of questions that need to be addressed about a quest/jobs board
How many quests/jobs can each person post?
If it is just one, it would be hard for you to try and coordinate a village. If you can post many, you can fill it up with junk/spam/wild goose chases
Who decides when a quest/job is complete?
Unless there is a mechanical way to determine this, people can just falsely complete jobs and take them off the board. If only the creator can say it is complete, eventually the board will be full of stuff that is already done. If it requires a certain number of people, it may not be feasible to get that many people to confirm it is complete.
How hard would it be to create/destroy the board?
How many quests/jobs could a board fit?
What order would you see quests/jobs in or would they all be displayed simultaneously?
basically...I think that a board wouldn't be a simple solution. People would probably grief them the way they do signs if they're easy to edit/remove from.
If they're hard to edit/remove from, people will post a bunch of stupid quests/jobs like get aunt Sheryl to shut her mouth about my man.
I am not against this idea, but I would really like it if someone could flesh out the details with its own separate thread.
A jobs board would definitely help, but the type of players who would read/use a jobs board as intended are probably well aware of what needs to be done, and they can probably tell what projects are partially done that need to be finished from looking at what items are lying on the ground.
After the novelty of them wears off, most players would probably only take a quick look through them the way they do papers now or not even bother.
Also, the job board would probably be reserved for non-emergency job needs... like if the farmer died and no one is farming, no one is going to look at the field, see that the berry bushes are drying up, and go to post it on the job board. They will either work on the problem themselves, ignore the problem, or go to the middle of town and start yelling about it.
Again, most people will probably only look at the board once or twice in their lifetime.
Things like building a bakery might be good to put on the board though, because it isn't an emergency that it gets built and it will probably take a while.
Having it work as a list of occupations would probably be good too... you only need to list once that you'll be focused on tailoring.
Other people come to the board and see other people listed as gathering iron/rabbit trapping so they decide to do something else. I am picturing something similar to the Bee Movie, where they have a list of jobs openings constantly being updated as worker bees die.
/die doesn't give birth cool down
it resets the cooldown
That only happens if the mom picks you up before you /DIE. 5/6 moms can't pick me up in time to get their cool-down reset.
I became Eve three times to see if it was a fluke.
I just tested it in game. I can type /die faster than my mother can pick me up if she isn't standing still. Meaning I can use up a couple minutes of her fertility. Combined with other players logging in, I can still easily become Eve by putting all of the fertile women on cool-down.
Humans developed monarchy, because it was an improvement over despotic tyrannies. People didn't like monarchies in general, and I don't think they do in this game either, and won't either. Benevolent monarchs are rare, and even then, people don't like having a lack of control. Crowns shouldn't have ever got put into the game.
Monarchy could be simply seen as a formalized version of despotic tyrannies... even a tyrant needs to keep those close to him/her happy or else they will be overthrown. Most people who don a crown in this game fail to do that. It's all me me me. But done right, I have followed one king.
People do not like having a lack of control. That is true. But then what do you propose instead of one person being in charge like a president/monarch? If it is everyone old enough to hold a weapon shares equal power... that has it's problems too. Most people do not care one way or another how things are done, as long as it does not directly impact them. That is sort of what we have in most villages. Those 14+ are in charge equally, and most of the time they don't care what anyone else is doing. But then when someone does something that directly interferes with their unspoken goals, they all too often lash out and kill the person or make a big deal out of it.
The sort of government we have in most towns is eerily similar to group projects. Often, one person is running around trying to work on everything... someone hasn't contributed at all... you told someone to do something but they haven't and you don't know where they are. At least with an assigned leader, tasks/responsibilities can be delegated to others. The King/leader has a right to punish those who aren't meeting the bare minimum requirements to maintain their sector. People can specialize on one thing instead of worrying if someone else forgot to do something. We can have one person on baby duty, explaining the laws instead of a bunch of people just standing by the fire oo'ing and aww'ing at their babies.
Maybe others enjoy their freedom more, but I get kind of tired off it. Often as a baby I'll ask "JOB?" and my mom will say something like "Eh, just do whatever" "Look around, be independent" "Whatever needs to be done".
That's not really satisfying... some of my best lives have been where others have told me they need me to take their place as hunter/guard.. or where they saying something like "We really need X..no one is doing X" If it isn't something like taming a sheep, I'll usually do the job that needs to be done and continue to work on it for the rest of my time whether that be baking, maintaining the farm, making clothes, or making more space/organizing. This sadly doesn't happen often.
Thank you Jason! I hope you are able to find the right balance.
I started playing a few days before the war sword was added... and honestly, the day or two when only a few people knew how to kill with right click + shift were my two favorite days of playing... the mood of the game felt much more relaxed.
Now half the time I am born into town there's a murder grave... and I cant focus on anything because there's always an eve coming to town.
Also, I notice after me and my family get massacred, I end up being in a town with a baby boom (because everyone died at once). Usually the town wont be able to handle the number of babies, and a famine happens... or a bunch of eves spawn nearby and come to kill us, too.
And the cycle of boom and bust continues.
Hopefully the new update to Eve spawning fixes this issue somewhat. Would be nice if seeing an Eve was a rare thing.
There is no point. If the sexes were this way in real life, the same in every way except women have babies, and men are sterile females, we would live in a very different society.
Males would be aborted because it would be the 'end of your line'. Evolution would work its magic.. and people who have the most females would continue to grow as a percentage of the population, until female was the only sex. We would just be asexually reproducing females(some people actually think this is the way our species is going, look it up haha).
In real life though..in order for a man to qualify for many of the running events.. the time they need to make to qualify is less than the time of the female world record. Because females have wider hips, they gave up some speed in order to be more likely to carry a child to term. (also, testosterone is considered a performance enhancing drug)
Male role is protector>provider>reproduce. Men do not reproduce, so they are left as protector>provider for their sisters' kids because I guess their sisters' kids are most related.
Males have no edge in protection vs having another female protect you, they are equally likely to come out a winner in a fight.
Provider, you could argue men have a slight edge..I think the only thing you could argue is placebo affect. Something about looking at your male character makes you say "I can't just spend my adolescence standing around, feeding kids... I need to do something for the nursing women and their children..they need to stay here where it is safe... to keep the line going!". When in reality, if you were also female, the same exact thing could be said... you just have to let the children you birth starve, unless there is someone else out there willing to take them.
The village isn't worse off having an additional female who just gives birth to doomed babies as far as I can tell vs one less female. And if you happen to give birth when you're hauling in the iron/rabbits, it doesn't take much effort to take them to the nursery. Heck, the baby may even run towards another female once they realize you wont feed them(I do this fairly regularly, so many bad moms...) Meaning you don't even waste time feeding them.
So males and females are equally capable of protection
males and females are equally capable of provision
but males and females are not equally capable of reproduction
So, tie, tie, and +1 to female. Males are just nerfed females.
I think they should at least have edges in protection and provision. A grappling system where men have an edge, longer period of time before they die of injury, less cool down after murder on weapons, more max hunger pips, faster movement speed, less slowdown when carrying heavy objects, something to give them an edge.
Right now, the only time I play male is if I want to do some rp. Or if I really like the town I am in and I don't want to waste the time starving then trying to get back/don't want to upset my mom. Or if I think there's already a lot of females and we are nearing overpopulation. Imagine if females had birth-control...then even overpopulation wouldn't be a reason to play as male.
Printed money is only accepted because it has something backing it up. When we used metal coins, the worth of the currency was backed by the value of the metal it is made from. We recently moved away from that.. our currency is no longer made from precious metal, and we have paper notes that are backed up by the government. Basically, the US dollar is only backed by the united states military... it is the reason it is accepted by other people. The notes have no inherit value.
I do not think there needs to be a currency. Just use a nonperishable commodity that everyone values as currency(ropes,buckets of water, iron), or simply use barter. The only realistic currency system is one where anyone is free to print/mint their own competing currency, which is not ideal.
I would support a way to carry a large store of value in a compact space though.
Currently there is no good contender to be a currency in game.
The properties of a currency you want are:
1)Non-perishable
2) Easily divisible
3)Able to store large amount of value in small space/weight
Pretty much everything fails #3, and most things fail #2
Many MMOs solve this problem by making their currency take up no space and also making it weightless(#3) and usually nothing can be purchases for only a few of the currency, making it easily divisible.
Also you give an example of buy 4 milkweed-stalk/2 thread/1 rope from the store. You can't buy 1 rope unless someone has already sold one of the above. That raises the question of, when does the person who sold the item to the booth get their compensation? If it is when someone decides to buy the rope, that could take a long time. If it is immediately when they sell the rope to the booth, then there needs to be a credit system.
And this raise the subjectivity of value. I may think that rope is really valuable, and want to sell rope to the booth for a large amount of this currency(whatever it is) so that I can buy some iron. There may be other who agree on the value and are willing to buy it at that price, but most people will want to pay less.
Under your system, how would value be determined, since value is subjective? How many rope can I get with one iron? How many rabbit furs can I get for two buckets of water? What can I use this money for other than buying stuff from other players? If it isn't good for anything outside of this reading booth, there is no reason for you to leave the booth with money in your pocket.
The only problem with a system that values food soley based on the # of pips it restores is that does not take into account the other properties of the food. For example, you have to factor in thing like if the food is non-renewable, if food gives you a bowl/plate, the amount of time it takes to produce, how convenient it is to carry the food.
Now, to make trade happen it needs to be worth it for both parties. It has to be profitable to both parties engaging in the trade. That means that both people feel richer because of the trade they made, because that thing they traded for is worth more than the time it took to trade and the value of the stuff they gave to the other person.
So, if I am trading say iron for rope, the amount of rope I return home with needs to be worth more than the time I took to trade and the iron I gave to the other person.
Say it takes me 3 minutes to ride to this other village on my horse cart and 3 minutes to ride home. Say it takes 1 minute to find someone willing and with the amount of rope i want(unlikely, not impossible). Say it takes 2 minutes to unload the iron and load up the rope.
So in total I am spending 9 minutes and 6 iron on this rope.
So the question now is not how much rope is 6 iron worth. It is how much rope is 6 iron and 9 minutes worth. The answer is a lot. Iron is non-renewable and pretty much everything relies on it. Rope is kind of expensive/time consuming to make, but you can make a ton of it.
How much milkweed could I have made in nine minutes? Not counting the time waiting for it to grow, because I can do other things during that time.
Lets say it takes me 9 minutes to put down the soil, plow, water and harvest 36 milkweed. I use the community compost pile/hoe. So...9 minutes is 5 rope to me.
How much rope is 1 iron worth? Very subjective.. I'd say maybe 3? So, to me my 6 iron are worth 18 rope + the 5 rope I could have made=23 rope
You are probably thinking, "So then you trade the 6 iron for 23 rope"
WRONG
If I trade the 6 iron for the 23 rope, I would have been equally as well off at home, making my own rope! Where is my profit margin???
I need at least 24 rope or else I make no profit! Also, we need to account for risk...
This is the risk that I will not be able to trade. My risk of dying on the way there... the risk someone from the town sees a foreigner and panics. The risk I have to spend more of my precious time negotiating, or getting someone to interpret for me since we speak different languages. There is a significant chance the trade will not be able to happen. What are the odds I will not be able to find someone to trade with? Lets say... 30% chance I find no one to trade with.
That means there is a 30% chance I will waste the 6min round trip, and maybe 3 minutes trying to desperately find something. And what is that 9 minutes worth..? Well we already know from last time, 9 minutes= 5 rope. 30% chance to happen means I need 30% of the value of 5 ropes to make the risk worth taking on, so 2.5 ropes. That sets a new minimum to the amount I need from this village 23+2.5=25.5ropes, so I need more than this to make a profit.
So this means if I trade my 6 iron for 26 ropes I will feel like I made barely any profit.
Now we run into a problem. My horse cart has 4 baskets and I have a backpack. The backpack has 1 pie in it,so I only have 3 slots there. The 4 baskets give me a total of 12 slots.
I can only carry 15 rope. Lassos cannot be stored. The trade is not worth it because I do not have the storage capacity to take back the amount of rope I would require for my 6 iron. Even if I used backpacks instead of baskets, I would only be able to carry 16+3= 19 rope. If I used a hand cart with rubber tires I would still only be able to carry 23 rope, and it would take more time to get there and back, so I would need more rope. If I brought someone else to help me carry the amount of rope, I would need to account for the amount of time they could have spent doing other things like making rope themselves. And then I need to give them a share of the rope for the 9mins they spend coming with me, and they will probably want a sizable percentage. So trade ends up not being worth it.
Even if I could get this person to work for nothing because they're my friend... what kind of people are going to give me 26 ropes for 6 iron? Maybe if they're desperate... but if they're desperate, they probably don't have the tools required to grow/make that much milkweed.
In real life, trade can happen very quickly(buying something on amazon takes only a few minutes, which is much less valuable in real life). The cost to have it transported to me is much less. Shipping is a much lower fraction of cost. HUGE amounts of things can be transported at once, like on freight ships or delivery trucks stuffed with hundreds of ropes.
VERDICT- trade does not happen, because time is much more valuable in game than in real life(for obvious reasons)
and space is also much more valuable(only one item per tile, horse carts only fit 12 items). A lot of items aren't worth the space it takes up... I cannot carry so much back with me or take so much to them.
And if they don't want to trade or don't have what I want? I just lost precious time, and I take on the real risk that they will simply kill me for my stuff or invade my town later.
Maybe I am comparing the wrong Items..? An iron tool is not worth much more than 1 iron, so I would need to trade a bunch of iron for a bunch of tools... but then I can only take back 4 tools... so 5 iron for 4 tools..? I think I would rather keep the 5 iron and my time, the time to get there and back I can easily forge my own stuff...
Maybe kerosene tanks..? It basically acts as a huge store of water... if you have a crate with tanks, maybe you would trade your kerosene for my iron..?
But I personally never deal the high-tier well stuff, so I will let someone else do the calculation to see if this trade is viable, but my guess is probably not.
I agree. So much information is lost between generations. Much more than in real life because even if you dedicate the time to teach something to all the kids at the fire, 9/10 times they aren't going to tell the next generation after you're gone. Allowing more information to be stored more compactly and in books would be nice.
Making the binding for the book could be expensive too, in Minecraft leather is required and it is usually fairly expensive on servers...
Something similar could be done, so when you do find a book you think "wow, this must have been important to whoever made this if they went through the effort to make a book"
Also, a decaying system would be nice too... bookworms and such used to be a common problem. Having stages of decay to indicate notes and books age would allow notes to be more easily distinguished, right now there's usually just a bunch of papers scattered on the ground because people wanted to use the basket they were in. Also, if a book/note is getting close to fully decayed, you might have a librarian type player rushing to get a new book made so that they can ensure the next generation has access to the information.
As another note, I think \.. when you're off hunting rabbits for five minutes, if you're in a big town many people have been born and many people have died. It is hard to establish who is in charge and who is doing what... because that is constantly changing.
Lets say you are the king and everyone has agreed to your rule. You go off to do a kingly thing like negotiate with the neighboring town. So, by the time you get there and come back it has been a few minutes. In the time from planning the trip, going on the trip, and coming back from the trip, there have already been new players born into your town. They are already old enough to go do their own thing. There mother has neglected to tell them about the laws/customs/ the king is in charge... next thing you know there's a bunch of kids running around doing whatever oblivious to your authority.
And then theres the question of enforcing your authority... currently in game the only way to enforce your authority is
1)threat of death
2)trapping people in somewhere with locked door/property gates
The first one, if the person is also armed they are equally capable of killing the authority figure(assuming old enough to hold weapons, and low ping/equal combat skill) they can easily choose not to listen, and most people view their life as throw-away anyway, not every life is precious...more entertaining to resist the authority figure than to just follow their orders, etc.
the second one can be difficult to pull off, and if your trapping them in town... you need to get into town too. If you trap them in a small room.. well they aren't going to be useful in there. And if you let them out, there's a good chance they'll kill you as soon as you turn your back on them.
So, to make it easier to hold authority... I think that there should be a grappling/restraining mechanic in the game. This...you could use shift+right click with empty hand to attempt to restrain someone... and if they're too strong for you they could resist and break free(like if an old man tried to restrain a twenty something man) or maybe even the grapple fails completely(seven year old tries to restrain an adult). In a grapple where both people are equal strength, I think defender should win and break free(cannot determine if surprised by grapple or not).
I think this would definitely help with authority because right now, a fifteen year old girl with no name can just run in and start stabbing people. And I, a twenty something man am unable to try to grapple her and get the knife out of her hand... I am unable to restrain her... the only way I can stop her from killing is to grab a weapon and kill her. This makes it impossible for a society to form that doesn't use the death penalty... maybe I would like to grapple her, take her weapon away/knock it out of her hands, and use an item similar to handcuffs to stop her from holding things, and a way to guide her walking/drag her(kind of like when mom holds you) lock her up in a cell, slip food though occasionally.
I think a system like that would be nice... allow a group of people to dog-pile on an invader in absence of a a weapon.
Or in the absence of a grappling system..a weapon that would work similar to snowball, but it reduces their speed to 0 and doesn't wound them.
But yeah, I know the point of this topic is about establishing better communication and relationships... but the main point of the second suggestion is that you cannot have authority over something without power over it. Right now, a king may have authority over his kingdom, but he has very little power over it, because the only way to stop someone from doing something is to kill them. And there isn't much stopping them from killing you? All it takes is a teen with a knife to run up to you to end your rule.. the grappling system would allow a non-lethal method of enforcement, and provide people a better chance of surviving a knife attack.
Ideally I think grappling should take age and sex into account. This would give males more of a role... right now they are the same as a sterile female. In nature, the male role is protector>provider>reproduction. They do not have reproduction, and in the game the only sexual dimorphism aside from ability to feed and birth babies is cosmetic. I think that they should have an advantage in a grapple over females, and maybe as a counter-measure to 'balance' them, their hunger bar could deplete faster to represent men's higher metabolism to maintain muscle.
For age, I think the age with the best performance should be somewhere around twenty eight... this is near the peak for pro-wrestlers, as far as I can tell from a quick google search... decline from the peak should be slower than accent, so 29 is stronger than 27, 30 stronger than 26 but weaker than 29, etc. 28 yr old male always wins, except against someone with a weapon or another 28 yr old male.
But yeah, there can be no social order if the only way to assert power is to kill. And books are cool... especially old books written years ago by your ancestors, that is showing signs of age.
I feel that language learning should be across some ones entire life.. as its possible for an adult to learn another language....
you can still learn as an adult, you just have to do it the way we did before child learning was implemented. Figure out what consonant clusters were replaced with what, and type that out to communicate.
though being able to learn the way a child can, even if as low as 1% instead of child 50% would still be nice... I like the feeling of being able to talk secretly when a foreigner comes to town
Jason what if you did a 180 on the concept of lineage ban and area ban and instead of always hopping around you stayed in one family until that line died out? THAT would make me very invested in seeing the family continue. To up the steaks, once your line dies out there is a 1 hour wait before your can start in a new line. So each generation would need to insure they could be born back in to that family again or face not being able to play another game directly after. If you are born a "Jones" you stay a "Jones" as long as that family exists.
People who didn't like a family could use /die. Curses would still be useful for weeding out griefers (they could not be a Jones anymore) But when the last fertile woman who is a Jones is dead you have nowhere to go for a bit.
I actually really like that idea, would be a nice change of pace. I know it isn't what Jason envisioned, but it would definitely make me feel more invested.
The more lives I live, the more nihilist philosophy i apply. Nothing matters, no matter what you do water/iron will run out and your city will die/be wiped by apocalypse.
Why fight the eves coming to kill you? Maybe you'll be born into their lineage later. Why be greedy with resources? you will only have them for an hour. Why care about the lineage you're in? If you play for a few hours you will be in many lineages, and they'll all be dead in a couple days anyway. Better to let the eves live in the town to decrease odds of the town being lost from low population hours/last female had no girls.
hmm, don't think i'd ever go... none hosted in the mid-west sadly.
can you explain why you disagree on being able to remove wild berry bushes?