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jasonrohrer

Administrator

Registered: 2017-02-13

Posts: 4,808

Update: Long Curse

A curse is a mechanism by which you can say, "I don't want to play with this person anymore."  After you curse someone, it prevents that person from being born near you---or you being born near them.  Originally, this block was only supposed to be temporary, perhaps a few days.  But over time, my thinking about curses has changed.  If you really don't want to play near this person, why should the game second-guess your wishes by applying a time limit?  So the duration got longer, eventually reaching 90 days, which is where it stayed for quite a long time.

But even 90 days isn't that long, in the grand scheme of things.  Especially in the face of griefers who have dozens of accounts and cycle through them every 90 days after their curses wear off.  You thought you had taken care of this annoying player.  Having them buy an alt account is bad enough.  But then facing the original account 90 days later, popping up like an eternal and glacial whack-a-mole, is even more ridiculous.  How many times do you need to say it?  You don't want to play near this person anymore.

For this update, I had originally increased the duration from 90 days to 50 years, which is effectively permanent.

However, there's also some concern about the effect on innocent players getting cursed unfairly, either through intentional framing or simple mistakes.  If curses are permanent, won't these spurious curses slowly pile up on the most active players, even if they are innocent?

Again, we should remind ourselves that curse just prevent you from being born near these accidental curse-givers.  However, there's one more effect in place, which is that the radius of the block (how far away you need to be born) grows based on how many living players currently have you cursed (how much you've been bothering the people who are currently playing) and based on how many total people have you cursed, whether they are playing or not.  The radius formula is 50 times the number of living people who have you blocked plus square of the number of total people who have you blocked.

That second factor starts small, and is pretty much a non-issue for people who have a handful of accidental curses.  But for a serious griefer, who is bothering lots of people, it grows fast.

However, if curses essentially last forever, you could imagine innocent players accumulating enough accidental curses over time to bring that second squared factor into play.

The first step in figuring this out was to actually look at the current curse database on the live server, which tracks curse counts over the past 90 days.  That data is as follows:

      2 24
      1 21
      2 17
      1 13
      2 12
      1 11
      3 10
      4 9
      3 8
      7 7
      2 6
      7 5
     22 4
     33 3
     36 2
    155 1
     46 0

2 people had 24 curses, 1 person had 21 curses, 2 people had 17 curses, and so on.  At the bottom, you see that 46 people had 0 curses, which is just the people who had their last curse expire in the past week (these get cleared out every time the server restarts during an update).  In total, 329 people received at least one curse in the past 90 days, which seems like quite a few.

But not when you consider the fact that 9746 people played the game in the past 90 days.  Thus, over 96% of the active players were not cursed at all in the past 90 days.

This gives us a rough upper bound on "accidental curses" for the vast majority of players (1 or less in a 90-day period), which also gives us an idea of how many accidental curses might accumulate on someone for a given expiration window.

All this information feeds into the choice of 5 years as the expiration time for curses, which means that the vast majority of players would not accumulate more than 20 during that time, which is something we can live with.

Meanwhile, active griefers who are bothering lots of people will get their accounts tarnished for five solid years, which is as good as permanent.

Along with this change, the ability to CURSE MY BABY has been disabled, since curses are more serious now, and you have no chance to change your mind and forgive them (since your baby is often dead already).

Solo Eve spawns on low-population servers can now crave all foods, including higher-tech foods, from their second life onward.  And several bugs in property inheritance and fitness score have been fixed.

ShadyDeRats

Banned

Registered: 2024-03-14

Posts: 62

Re: Update: Long Curse

https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLife/issues/1043

Can you look at issue 1043 for a real quick second

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5,350 days alive!!!!

mensrea

Member

Registered: 2019-02-10

Posts: 54

Re: Update: Long Curse

Problem: I am having trouble spawning reliably in the default server of OHOL. I have in the vicinity of 40 curses per oholcurses.com. I have been playing since 2018 or so. Perusing my curse history, they tend to come in waves. I'm not a griefer, and I may knock down walls around a smith without indoor bonus, because that's stupid and I smith alot. I used to fight against griefers, but definitely haven't bothered since the exile update, and stopped bothering around the end of rift update. I especially don't bother because of the risk of being cursed.

In particular, this problem started when someone got a handful of people to curse me while building an engine with someone in July. It may have been about water that we were out of and that they wanted hoes or something. Only a moron would want to farm without water, using steel we had a limited resource of to build a well engine.

Basically, I think my failure to spawn is caused by the square of the total number of curses. I think there are serial cursers, who may have multiple accounts, who have cursed me over the 5 year period resulting in this problem. I recently received some curses for a minor disagreement by a serial curser who encouraged others to do the same, and has driven me to donkeytown. Even worse to believe, would be a serial curser with multiple accounts who could boost someone's square radius by using each of their accounts to curse using some addon or phex tool.

Jason, I appreciate the thoughtful posts that you make, but like the news or propaganda, a simple mind can be easily swayed by hand-wavy argument. Anyone can be wrong about causes and effects. True intentions can be hidden in good sounding reasoning, or mistakes can be made resulting in unforeseen or collateral outcomes.

I think the curse system in its current form has other effects than just sending someone you don't like to donkeytown. When two people don't like each other and have reciprocally cursed each other, the one to login before the other gets to play and the other is sent to donkeytown. Second, it drives sales of additional accounts by players who want to continue playing. Third, long-time players may simply quit when they experience this, which is where I am tending to lean at this point.

In the past I have seen beautiful donkeytowns. But it has been a very very long time. Lately, I don't see donkeytowns proceed past deep wells. I find more skilled people playing in donkeytown and less griefing than I would expect.

In other words, you could tweak the curse system to drive revenue and kill the game's playerbase, despite the reasoning you present the ideas with.

QuirkySmirkyIan

Member

From: New Jersey, United States

Registered: 2018-07-06

Posts: 318

Re: Update: Long Curse

Yes Mensrea you are correct the curse system really needs some balance changes. At minimum I would suggest making the curse radius maybe like 4x smaller if you are trying to spawn in a DIFFERENT family. So update the curse area ban formula to 1/4 at the end for only different family. Since the point of a curse is to prevent someone from playing with you. 9/10 you won't leave to go to another village so it seems kind of silly that for an account with a higher curse score all it can take is 1 of those players to be online to block you from spawning EVERYWHERE. Another idea is to reduce / remove the effect of offline curses from inactive accounts. Maybe after like a year of an account being inactive their curses hold no value. Most of the curses on my main account are from like 2 years ago and I'd imagine most of those players are long gone.

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Open gate now. Need truck to be more efficient!