a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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Game Over...
Just drove all over the map. When the griefers have so completely griefed that even they aren't playing at the moment, that's the nail in this game's coffin.
The_Anabaptist
I don't know, if you can find a horse & cart, right now its like your playing as Mad Max.
Just driving around looking for your next bite of food.
If I'm in a charitable mood, I'll load up some wild wheat sheaves or firewood and drop them off at the nearest bakery. Otherwise just scour the wasteland to find that rare tool and then make everyone cry as you drive by them slowly with it sticking up in the back of the cart.
The_Anabaptist
If this were Dwarf Fortress, I would tell you to "Dig Deeper!"
But this is OHOL, so I'll just have to request a /shrugs shoulders emoji in the next update.
The_Anabaptist
The_Anabaptist wrote:Maybe you missed the line in the last news update where Jason said he's taking vacation with the family for the next two weeks?
Cut him a little slack.
The_Anabaptist
He should have hired help a long time ago.
Maybe you want Jason to waste your $20 on a couple hours worth of paid moderating. I'd rather see him use my $20 elsewhere, so I'll agree to disagree with you.
If you don't like wading thru the cesspool then you have my permission to stop the self harm. Just quit reading the forum posts when they start upsetting you.
The_Anabaptist
Maybe you missed the line in the last news update where Jason said he's taking vacation with the family for the next two weeks?
Cut him a little slack.
The_Anabaptist
I would think of it as similar to expansion / contraction of the manufacturing index.
In this case, 20 min is our base line as that is what it takes to earn another life.
If we have a dip in life expectancy below that baseline for a long enough stretch then people could use up their lives without /die. Which by my book would be bad.
A brief dip into that territory doesn't necessarily indicate problems, just people being cursed to live in interesting times? And that is what you were aiming for, right?
The_Anabaptist
I get it. We vocal few are the minority. I'm glad that you put some numbers in front of us so that everyone (hopefully) gets it. The churn rate of players doesn't matter to you as long as there are new people ponying up money weekly. Which is why my carnival barker comment hits the nail on the head.
I just wish that you would find value in what we had to say. Using the polls frequently and often to get our collective pulse costs you nothing.
Ask us something like this: Which of the following features is the biggest turn off in term of playing the game another time the most?
1) The crafting instructions tool
2) The repetitive clicking of the gameplay
3) The lack of variety in what to do from one life to the next
4) The survival difficulty curve of the game
5) The PvP combat system
6) Other
I'm going to bet that whichever of these answers ends up on top, isn't the one you are currently focusing on. I know you think you know, but I don't think you really do.
The_Anabaptist
Stoning people has been around since biblical times, if not earlier. It would make sense that it could kill infants or elderly easier than healthy adults. Snowballs had the same drawback when it came to killing people with low food. I think it is reasonable that anyone should be able to chuck a round rock with a right click and inflict a measure of harm. Add a no-pickup mechanism to it like mosquitoes inflict, so one person doesn't stand on a pile of rocks and rapid fire them. A community should be able to mass punish a person, possibly to death, without a huge investment in tech. It would probably be the closest we can come to shunning somebody, or protesting an aggressor who possesses better technology.
The_Anabaptist
In regards to crowding in the Eve window:
I had a recent rift eve life where I found a good spot, got the starter tools, setup a kiln and started firing clay. Had another Eve wander in, who liked what they saw. If you said something to them, they would repeat it. If you fetched kindling, they would immediately make the biggest fire they could with it. They ate whatever was within screen view. I don't know if they thought they were helping, but they certainly were not. I know that we had a couple additional Eve neighbors in the greater area, from what my kids reported to me. None of them directly visited the kiln area, and certainly none of them wholesale moved in like this.
Now, do I drop everything, use valuable time and resources to make a bow and arrow and murder the interloper? Every time they burned my spare kindling, so help me, I wanted to. This is part of the reason I recommended adding rocks as a weapon. A well placed rock or two might have given them the hint that they weren't welcome anymore without outright killing them.
As a result, I do think the current map dimensions are too small. And that Eves need to be separated more, so that what occurred here is the rare exception and not the rule.
The_Anabaptist
Allow a player holding a round stone to right click throw it at another player. Not looking for an Insta-kill here, just remove x pips of food from target. Throwing a stone should not be impeded by property fences. A thrown stone should knock a target off a horse / horse & cart.
There should be some "weapon" that doesn't require a craft to make. It should be easy enough for a mob of civilians to be able to stone a slowed aggressor or problem player to death.
The_Anabaptist
Jason,
I appreciate the data in this post. I would encourage you to release more data like this either prior to, or shortly after, future updates in order to help us keep perspective.
It does make me wonder why my last town spawn seemed so iron deficient. Did my ancestors just have bad luck in their home choice? Were they raided and had their steel and tools stolen? I did roam a while and I don't remember seeing a single spent vein in my travels. I'll definitely pay more attention to those details now.
The_Anabaptist
Without milkweed, your fires will die from the lack of kindling & your farms will die from a lack of tilling. An hour of clicking on wild berry bushes isn't much of a game.
And adding marriage and the like is such a red herring right now.
The_Anabaptist
You completely missed the point of the story, but whatever.
At one point, the town did have a property fence, but no gate to the south in my lifetime and the far north was open, which is how I got out to find the stone hoe in the first place. I don't regret prioritizing the saving of the town over the occasional theft of items. But the game will get old real fast if we are stuck in perpetual cycle of regression back to the Stone Age without hope of advancement. Pretty soon we will be asking for stone wheels and wooden shovels to be added to the tech tree.
The_Anabaptist
Just spent an "interesting" life under the new feudal serfdom system.
Town was without any hoes, metal or stone, but did have a couple bowls of milkweed seed. I left town early in life, hoping to stumble upon some milkweed. Fortunately, I found a small failed town with a working stone hoe and hustled back. Forced to abandon my first baby along the way, as the hoe was vital in my eyes.
Was able to get milkweed planted, but water was a problem. Fortunately, my ancestors built a long road to a shallow well. So bowl by painful bowl, I watered the first five milkweeds and got a second hoe made. Had some more children, who I impressed upon the importance of milkweed production. They were very smart, and had a flurishing farm going in no time, allowing me to focus on dirt deliveries by wagon.
A raider in a horse and cart came and stole a stone hoe. Fortunately, we had plenty of extra milkweed at that point. Spent my old age collecting round rocks to be fashioned into more stone hoes for generations to come.
Thus I lived the life of a serf. One of many to come for myself and my children, I expect.
Goodbye shiny metal robots, you are a fading dream...
The_Anabaptist
You want a conversation Jason?
Honestly, you remind me of an old timey carnival barker who just finished suckering a bunch of rubes into paying a nickel to see the "MAN EATING CHICKEN" which of course is just a man eating a roast chicken. As all the rubes get mad at being suckered but then you flash a sneer and say "You can either be mad and be the rubes who i conned out of a nickel, or you can tell all your friends about the MAN EATING CHICKEN and laugh at the rubes who paid a nickel to see it."
Yes, I and the current player base are the rubes who paid good money for a game and were bait and switched. We can't help that. This thread was started so that I could say, "We don't have to be the rubes who con the next batch of paying customers either with our previous positive reviews or our ineffectual howling in the forums."
The_Anabaptist
Jason,
Frankly I'm amazed that you think I started this thread to actually talk to you. I'm talking to the other players. Duh. The fact that you've had the time to say something twice must mean it really hit your sore spot.
The_Anabaptist
Thank you Jason,
I'll be sure to quote you when I update my review.
The_Anabaptist
Tried getting born just now. Same mom three times. She's desperately running from a trail of crying newborns.
Frankly Jason, it is a bit ridiculous that I can't play your game in its current state. Not that I don't want to, I just tried three times. I can't cause I (and very many others) can't feed themselves and evidently none of us have a mother who can even try.
People, wake up, put a negative review on any site that will take it. Be specific about how this game has been made to be unplayable. Save others some money and a lot of grief.
Jason, if you want to make such sweeping changes, I'm fine with that. But do it on a beta server and don't port it over to the production server until the kinks are ironed out.
The_Anabaptist
Lots of whining and moaning going on. And yet the game recommended % on the main page of the website hasn't changed. So much hot air without any meaningful direction, I'd think I was in the tropics right now...
The_Anabaptist
What if you had the 7 deadly sins & 7 heavenly virtues as genetic traits that you could acquire and pass on?
I think this would fit the ethos of the game quite nicely.
The_Anabaptist
Since you are asking for question suggestions, how about?
What emphasis should the upcoming weekly updates focus on?
a) Bug Fixes
b) New Art Content
c) New Tech Tree Content
d) Gameplay Balancing of Existing Content
e) Just spend the week playing OHOL and documenting each of your lives for us.
The_Anabaptist
I see our last poll was over a month ago already.
Is there nothing you want to ask the unwashed masses?
Seems like the waste of coding time if you aren't gonna use it more frequently.
The_Anabaptist
As a child, farming can indeed be frustrating as you have little access to labor saving devices, or there are no clear roads connecting important locations.
As an adult, I find the addition of a cart to be a huge boon. You can load up four filled berry bowls and take them to the carrot patch, mass insert carrot and grind them there, then take the finished bowls to the future compost location. If the straw ain't there yet, take the cart and load up all four sheaves and bring them back to the bowls. Sadly, shoveling shit is just that.
The cart is also nice for those times where you just have to get four baskets and go out of town for soil or a couple buckets and a bowl and drain some ponds.
The_Anabaptist
My only concern would be that the limited map is so static that I essentially memorize it all by its biome contours. I often run without home marker and just memorize my way back to town by biome contours and landmarks. It would be nice if the biome boarders would shift over time, or if the entire map was swapped out once a quarter just to keep things fresh.
The_Anabaptist
I would agree that under the current state of the game, there is little incentive to pass anything down to direct family members. Even though they are born to you, they are effectively strangers. Those kids that are competent are the least likely to need what few possessions you have. At that point, at the end of my life, I'm just looking for an under clothed girl in the community that is displaying a work ethic to gift my stuff to.
It would be nice if there was a feature in the game where you could somehow flag another player to be added to a friends list. The purpose being that the subsequent times you were born then if any of them were in the position of a fertile female (and they weren't in your banned map zone) that you could be prioritized to be born to them. This could strengthen the bonds between some players over repeated game sessions. And thus might further encourage the passing on of goods and setting up properties.
The_Anabaptist