a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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I'd assume it's from the 20 minutes of baby hell that occurred while the last real arc was trying to end.
People including myself have rushed wells since the change. People speedrun them in <30 minutes and just dump them wherever they can and then the arc devolves into hide and seek. Well hide, and you seek where it's actually possible to play.
At least when I do it I tell people where they are. Someone else has been just doing them and hiding them just as quick as I can do them.
jasonrohrer wrote:It seems like there's currently no reason to survive as long as possible in the game... which is itself a huge problem.
I never cared about genetic fitness since it had no use. Now since it's actually worth having high genetic fitness I don't want to just die. Creating more things like this may encourage people to focus on surviving their life instead of giving up.
I mean if you have a low GF score you're sort of incentivized to suicide.
Want to make carts/buckets/flooring? Learn adze/axe/saw as a child then produce a bunch of butt logs, boards, and discs. Proceed to kill yourself and come back and skip having a bunch of useless skills your entire life. Better to waste a few minutes than to be stuck for an hour with skills you'll only use a few times.
Interesting, maybe the limits stopped the ability to have veteran players carry a town.
For example: I couldn't even smith steel as Eve even though I can do the whole steel set and more in less than a life.
Tongs, thread and needle, firing kiln, firebow drill, hatchet and I had to have someone from the discord just come over and hammer my steel for me. Hell, I can barely even do a bakers Eve start either because that requires Tongs, Firing kiln, Oven, firebow drill, hatchet.
Plus on the flip side who actually wants to do the oil grind? It's not hard to do its just time consuming and sort of annoying to do.
I mean if you want the arcs to only last two to three days then yes oil is currently lasting too long. Either reduce the amount of tarry spots thus setting the world spiraling into downfall (less annoying) or make oil be used up faster (the oil grind is generally seen as annoying so this is a more frustrating option.)
You sort of need to have oil run out for the sake of seeing how long people last without it. Oil is probably still a luxury in the game as iirc last arc had a town that just brought water in via horse carts and buckets.
Also, not really the proper thread but can the bugs with skills be focused on before just reducing skill slots? Currently it's more important for players to learn how not to use skills vs deciding on what skills you should take. The easiest one to point out is you learn fishing by using a fishing rod on a worm but the reverse of worm on fishing rod doesn't teach you the skill but allows you to use it.
I mean some of the issue is people want their own surnames for whatever reason. Some players want to start their own families and go from there (this is obviously a problem because we can't have 20 Eves with a game population of like 50.) Then of course there's how late game plays vs early game.
Early game is about rushing things and always needing to do the next thing quick, quick, quick. You need to set up your first farms for the population to start growing, you need sheep so you can make compost and pies, you need tools so you can move up. Early game is really well refined at the moment where there's almost always something that needs doing.
Compare it to late game: You're still farming the same crops, you're still smithing the same way, and you're still doing all the early game stuff but just doing it to keep things going. The only things that change are how you get water and how you get iron. Running out resources honestly wouldn't make late game anymore fun in my opinion because instead of things being a murderfest you'd probably have a bunch of nomads wandering around until there just isn't anymore easy food.
Until late game tech is actually useful and refined (diesel engine is a forced thing vs a loom which is actively useful but not needed) you're going to see a bunch of bored people just stabbing each other. There's no real difficulty in late game because a good player will always outproduce what they need thus the games only real difficulty comes to seeing how long it takes before the general masses get bored enough to start killing each other.
I mean there's different levels of issues:
Murder wise:
-You can't actually out run someone who gets in melee range with a bow on slowdown (or it's at least very difficult.) I know I've been shot multiple times because they got too close while I was more focused on being productive rather than the idiot with the bow.
-The quick swap issue mentioned by twisted. You can swap targets after the kill command to instantly attack someone without them getting a notification.
Gameplay wise:
-Late game gets stale. You can see how people even in this thread were specifically trying to reset the world to get back to playing the game fresh. There's not enough refined or good content at the top of the tree like the bottom to keep things interesting. Due to the limited well mechanic after the first out of play you can't even bootstrap a town so you have to go to one of the designated well spots and hope it isn't one of the bad ones.
-Repetitive lives. Combine this with something like the well change and this forces players to live in the same 2/3 places constantly until the map wipes. People played in mega cities before the arc but they weren't there 24/7. No one would have fond memories of all the cool places if you just lived there forever and ever in a week.
Then of course you have the issue with normal players and trolls alike wanting things to end which eventually just leads to a weak point where everyone stabs each other.
Nothing between early game and late game really changes minus how you get your water and iron. You still eat the same foods generally, still have the same jobs, but the difference is early game you NEED to do things vs late game where you WANT to do things.
Cursing across lineages is allowed again because otherwise people just grief constantly as Eve. If you need proof then you can search Eve Kill or Eve Ziv who constantly grief as Eves any chance they get. It's 100% a different game early when you're trying to play properly working to get a functioning village and someone is just going around the map to kill everyone.
You can't fight back like in the old pvp system as if anyone with a bow gets on within range to shoot you its not possible to make gap at 75% speed. Of course this means griefing is just people jumping on horses and stealing shit vs random stabbing when it becomes later into the arc.
The curse system overall now functions more as a "I don't want you near me" mechanic and if you're pissing off enough people that your banned radius is putting you in DT that's on you. Warmongers in general aren't worth having around at all so it's better to just curse them as I stated before. You have no reason to want war besides "muh arr-pee" and you know how people feel about useless roleplayers.
War essentially just really bad roleplaying. The only value it potentially has is ending an arc and that still requires two parties to agree that the arc needs to end and what not. You're better off just sharing resources as we've never even gotten close to running out of anything ever so far except something like the griefed arcs.
It's why you see Eves move in together at the start of the arc instead of every player making their own little town (that and all the wells get made instantly after an arc starts generally.) It's also not very interesting to deal with "raiders" since how combat changed to benefit the person who shift clicks first. Back in the day one good guy with a knife was enough to take any asshats out and now its just a matter who sends in the kill command first.
Combat is terrible, there's no reason to steal from each other, and there's not even a reason to be an independent family. It's better for everyone to just group up and make multicultural towns as it generally means if one family gets dumb girls or has an accident the place will go on.
It's plain shortsighted to want war, and frankly dumb of anyone who wants it hence why I always curse warmongers. Better to keep the fools out running around elsewhere rather than making a mess of a town people are being productive in.
Also just to point out how bad the newcomen situation is: To make an engine requires six skill slots by default due to the current design (nine slots if you don't have someone do the rubber part for you.)
Tongs, Firing kiln, newcomen hammer, newcomen roller, newcomen bore, newcomen lathe, then knife + oven use for the rubber and finally the hammer for the tank. Unless you have a decent gene score you cannot even do basic smithing (which seems kind of silly) nor can you recycle. At the very least newcomen stuff should be grouped or at least discounted to prevent forcing a player to take a bunch of skills they use once or twice in a life.
I'd say the issue is bad enough to the point where I'd recommend creating all the newcomen related stuff then killing yourself to avoid being stuck with a bunch of mostly useless skills which is kind of a problem.
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Yes, fug, I will reduce the slots today, I think, as a start. Probably 6-12 instead of 8-16.
But I hear you about the "useless" specialization for one-time things at the top.
Still, wouldn't you spend a whole life making an engine? Why not make two if you have time left over?
Anyway, it's totally possible to "group" a bunch of tools in one slot, like:
+toolCooking
+toolFabric
+toolSmithing
+toolFarming
+toolMining
+toolWeaponetc.
And then, of course, you'd have only two slots, and have to pick which professions you want each life. It seems a bit less flexible, and also gives us less "tweaking" room. I mean, if you have 2 slots, is that too many? I can't really lower it. I also can't really raise it with genetic points too much.... 4 "meta" slots would be way too many, right?
So the single slot is more fine grained for these kinds of adjustments.
You don't make two engines in one life because generally speaking it's expensive to mass produce as you need 17 steel on hand + one iron. Also, generally speaking you'll be making the first diesel engine around or before you have oil so you can't just produce two as you have to split resources between the two projects. If you're smart about your engine you'll use it to mine a few times before setting it up for water use which opens up the chance to at least start the second diesel engine in your lifetime.
But yeah, the issue with top level content basically being a one and done is really a bad feeling. The server potentially needs a single draw blade if they pass it around which means only one person ever needs to learn the drill bit skill. This is why instead of really refined groups like you're suggesting I tried to break it down into both a base level of a skill and a more expert level of a skill. With four points (base) then I can either be really good at two things or mediocre with four. With a max of six points (30 gene score gives one, 45+ gives the second) I can be really good at 3 things or mediocre at 6.
Categories could be:
Smithing
Cooking
Constructing
Trapping/Animals
Farming
Carpentry
First aid
Weapons
If something fits into two categories like a knife is both a weapon and a cooking utensil then it's accessible either through the advanced tier of cooking OR the basic level of weapons. You'll be able to poke bread for the baker but you won't be sure how long its supposed to be in the oven. Obviously the only issue is trying to figure out what is advanced vs basic and what not.
After fooling around with it today you probably either want less tool slots or more items being labeled as tools.
For example: To be a competent baker you need
Oven, tongs, firing kiln, knife, and maybe axe or hatchet. After that I had three slots over that I just never used because anything after that I'd felt I'd likely be spread too thin to truly cover another activity (hoe, diesel pump would have opened up farming or hammer and charcoal pencil would have opened up smithing.)
Late game smithing feels really bad since you only really need 20 minutes or so to put together a diesel engine but after you've used all your slots you end up with 5 newcomen skills, (You can skip out on drill and make someone else learn this) hammer skill, tongs skill, and then finally the knife skill (and pencil skill if you drop drill bit.) Newcomen skills are basically used 1-3 times most depending on what you're doing (roller and bore getting the most mileage) which just blows a lot of your skills for important but lackluster abilities.
You suffer from having too many slots (which is kind of nice) if you do basic levels of things like farming/smithing/baking but then suffer having all your slots filled by higher tech stuff which is mostly useless once you make one diesel engine.
It'd almost be better if it was grouped up into tiers and you were given like 3-4 points to basically spend so for example.
Basic smithing: Tongs, Pottery, Kiln, steel hammer. (one point)
Advanced smithing: Newcomen tech + attachments. (one point, two points total in the smithing tree.)
Basic cooking: Hot coals foods- shrimp, rabbits, geese, arctic char, boiling water, sugar cane pulp (one point)
Advanced cooking: Stew, kraut, bone broth, pies, mutton, turkey, omelets, tacos, burritos, carnitas, palm oil (two points total.)
Basic animal husbandry/hunting: Catching rabbits, shearing sheep, knitting needles, breeding sheep, mouflon hunting, fishing, killing sheep, hunting geese
Advanced animal husbandry/hunting: Bear hunting, wolf hunting, killing snakes, hunting boars, catching horses, shrimping, breeding cows, breeding pigs.
I could keep going but you sort of get the drift. You can have overlap in what gives out access to which tools/abilities. For example something like advanced cooking giving knife access along with advanced survival. etc etc.
Limit still probably not enough. 5/6 wells were again made solo and the 6th was made by someone else. Only reason I think the last one squeaked in was due to a few mistakes made in the smithing/walking sections of the speedrun. Again, this takes about 30 minutes to get them all done and costs 7 skill slots as of currently.
Seems a little incomplete imo.
If I'm looking at it right attaching a piece of paper to a bow and arrow bypasses the need to learn the skill. Fishing by default is worse than shrimping and now requires you to devote a skill slot to do it. Seems weird to have fishing be a skill when something like rabbit hunting can be done without losing a skill slot too. Froe isn't on the list of skills which is either you being nice or a miss not real sure which but something like the newcomen drill which is much more useless is a skill so.
Also a little weird you can refine kerosene freely but can't really use it without being trained. I'm sure I'm still missing stuff but at least the base list is there to check out.
Buildings are basically bad due to lacking anything you need to do in them longer than a few seconds. The perfect building ends up being a T like pein posted due to any activity you do indoors can be done from that setup. Same thing can be done with fishing with a single T building which was the original design.
You really don't need buildings in game except as a fancy looking boundary or well more importantly you don't need finished buildings. Generally speaking the best building is three walls and a row of boxes that can be dismantled or moved just to keep weirdos from hanging out.
Challenge accepted.
The biggest fear is that a bunch of niche skills end up basically being traps.
Knitting needles are the biggest culprit of something you never ever want to take due to how wool clothing is. Wool is better used to make pads and thread vs making actual wool clothing with the only notable good piece of wool clothing either being a santa hat (bis nondecaying) or an apron which isn't really needed.
The adze is something you ask grandma Eve to make a bunch of mallets and a few fence kits then you don't really need it anymore. Basically you lose a tool skill slot if you end up being saddled up with being the adze person.
You also really don't want to be stuck being the only person who can use a saw since they're important but also rather useless due to lack of things you can do with them. Another tool I'd tell Eve to make a bunch of stuff related to it to save others the hassle.
Again, the pickax is important but sucks to have to be trained in. You can open up a mine (normally sometime you do once or twice max.), you can break walls, and then of course rip up roads and bust ovens/kilns. Pickaxes just plain suck to need to be trained in.
Of course on the flip side there's some things you just generally always want depending on how many slots you have. You almost always want to be able to use a sharp rock because of how versatile they are. Mashes rabbits, digs up wild foods, makes storing branches easier, opens up making arrows, etc etc.
You always want to be able to cook food or be able to smith. You obviously don't need both but you definitely want to be able to do one or the other. This allows you to skip out on waiting for tools to be made or makes sure you can keep yourself well fed throughout your stay in a place. Having oven access gives you turkey, all pie variants, rubber cooking, bread, potatoes, and mutton which works out well since mutton pie is basically the best food.
Having access to hoes is probably nice too just for the sake of being able to farm on demand but isn't something I'd put S tier like Smithing hammer/Sharp Rock/Oven.
Basically the only real issues I see are the traps (knitting needles), the terrible (saws, pickaxes, files), and the must haves (sharp rock, oven or smithing hammer, and hoe.)
Thanks, that fixes a lot of the annoyance of rabbit hunting Jason.
I mean it's definitely problematic to have one player wipe all the springs out on the map before anyone else was able to get to the point of making their own well. However, is it really worth fixing if this isn't done every arc? I'm sure speedrunning wells will either get old, people will catch on and also start speedrunning wells so it won't be that big of a problem forever. While higher tech wells could potentially tap lower tiers it would feel awful to finally get your camp running and need to instantly upgrade due to some unknown force around you upgrading their well.
This also opens up the question of why keep the Eve window open so long if all the wells are tapped within the first hour or so of play? I understand why its open as long as it is before this update but feasibly after the first 30 minutes of this arc you had to go west and join a collective or spend your time starting a camp that had a 99% failure rate. If players were truly playing for lineages at this point you would have seen fences up around the few available wells and a bunch of floundering Eves trying to struggle as nomads until they eventually all died out when the Eve window closed.
So to reiterate: It's probably bad for a single person to be able to mark all the town sites and it's even worse that this can be done within 30 minutes of the game start even if I can't see this constantly happening due to when arcs start. Eve window should probably be a bit shorter as in the current form of the game you can't make a viable camp after all the wells are created which just leads to Eves having to join villages/cities/camps instead of making their own claim to fame somewhere. Spreading the tap out decreases likelihood of seeing other villages but lowering the tap has the inverse effect of allowing a solo player to claim all the wells even quicker.
At least this whole thing made the arc interesting.
-You have to be quick if you want your town in a nice spot.
All six wells were created within 30 minutes due to only focusing on making wells and nothing else. All six wells are along the west side of the map with the last one being 80 units east of the southern most well.
-You don't need a lot of natural resources to make a place super successful.
One of the two or three functional towns on the server was created in a swamp with one clay pit. People had to specifically run clay in from far away to get the basics for extra plates and bowls. Natural food ran out pretty quickly and it was up to players to feed and tend to themselves.
-The rift can definitely be smaller than it is now and still be manageable.
As someone who doesn't really like the rift it's definitely feasible for the thing to be quite a bit smaller than it already is. As long as item spawns were adjusted to take into account the smaller size it could probably be smaller than the original box. We're funny enough seeing some troll waste their time trying to grief clay and flat rocks due to the overabundance out in the wild east.
-Spring tap out is potentially too far or too close.
Either the tap out range needs to be larger to prevent another west side style arc (basically makes it harder for someone to solo pick all the town locations) or needs to be smaller to encourage towns to be close to each other. Kind of sad we got the tapped out option + the limited wells in the same update as otherwise this would have been a really wonky arc.
I'm sure there's more to think about considering the arc hasn't ended but at least this has been one of the more interesting ones as of late.
It's a gift to Jason. I hope he enjoys the chaos and entertainment that comes from this very special arc.
I'm glad someone can have trust in Jason because once you've played the game long enough you just become jaded.
Sort of hard to have faith in a guy who can reintroduce a bug (he had to fix on vacation with his family, then readded it by accident next week) as a feature is good at making decisions. If its not poor decisions you then have to double back every week to check what from last week is buggy (hint most weeks have bugs because Jason doesn't test it.) and following that Jason spreads misinformation about how things work.
https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=7954
This isn't the case at all and hasn't been the case. You can (still) curse people from the tutorial like you could when cursing was originally introduced and what not.
So we have:
-Doesn't know how things work in his own game.
-Purposely rereleases bugs in attempts to get people to do his bidding.
-Doesn't test content he releases.
I have faith the game will go forward but it's going to zigzag, double back, roll over, and everything else in between as well.
If a game needs constant content updates to keep being interesting, then it's not a good game...
Pretty sure people want content considering he did two weeks of updates before jumping into another content drought (fancy clothing + new food was back in March for Christ sake.)
Since then lets look what has been added content wise:
4/21: Fences. Overall at the time an update that just led to people hoarding and other shit. This update led to him purposely releasing the sword in a fucked state in an attempt to force people to use them. Bad update made worse by him trying to force change instead of letting it happen organically. 2/10.
4/28: Cameras. People really thought these would be cool little in game things but having to view them on the website kind of killed the hype of them. A silly gimmick at best and at worst something to piss off a bunch of people because he was threatening bans if you posted altered pictures meant he kind of soiled this update himself. 3/10.
5/5: Springs. Botched by the bad idea of placing Eves on top of springs constantly this is what lead to the infamous Eve Tarr raiders which is both a failure on the swords part and design choice. However, I don't think the springs were too terrible by themselves. There was clearly too much water based on making wells on ponds so it wasn't all bad. Springs by themselves are probably a 7/10 but the way Jason screwed it up 2/10.
5/29: Slot boxes. While some people swear by these things a storage downgrade is still a downgrade. Clearly storage can't be powercreeped forever due to server issues but we did eventually get a storage upgrade in the form of rubber carts (again...) 5/10 update as I'm clearly bias against slot boxes.
6/22: Meme score + murder mouth. Update gets a small pass because Jason was sick this week.
7/5: Rubber tree cuttings, scraping, and other fixes. Rubber trees were good, medkit aprons were good, scrapping was and is still half assed. You now remember it's been three months since he added this mechanic and hasn't gone back to add the rest of the steel items to the recycle list. 9/10 for the fixes this week minus scraping which is 3/10 due to being incomplete and requiring a scrap bowl to scrap a pile of scrap.
7/19: New player models. To put it short and sweet new player models are always good. 10/10 update, good update week.
7/27: Rift update. Has made the game stale for about three months now, removed early game play, and has generally made the game worse. -1/10.
8/2: Elder note removal and diesel iron mining. Good updates that fix clear oversights (iron too scarce, and troll fence removal.) 10/10 update that fixes actual problems with the game.
8/24: Fixes update. Hungry work for all trees (boo), partially fixing newcomen towers (eh), "working" curses (better), and setting families to neutral instead of at war to start (woo.) The only new content that came from this was dug up snowballs, elder pens, and and a deconstructed loom. 6/10 update.
9/27: Boxes on fences. Okay on paper but changed nothing 2/10.
10/12: Upgraded horse carts + water tanks 10/10 update don't need to say much about how good upgraded storage is in this game vs downgrades with niches. Water tanks made newcomens water pumps better due to making farming elsewhere better. From a content change these were both good.
10/19: Rabbit baiting and maps. -3/10. Ill thought out and likely not getting changed until 1/20 due to Jason's speed at fixing content this update just made rabbit hunting annoying for the sake of being annoying.
So out of 33 or so weeks we got 13 content weeks and 20 weeks of tweaks/fixes/whatever. I don't think people would mind less content if it was done well (aka didn't need to be fixed the following week due to being a buggy mess.)
Put your suggestions in reddit pls.
The people make their suggestions in reddit like Jason said, so, you must do that.
Posting your suggestion to reddit is like tossing it into the trash. If you want things actually looked at you want to post it to the forums or the github.
My only question would be, how much bait could a bait bag hold, if a bait bag could hold bait?
Three bait per one bag, same current ratio at which you can make bait. This works out perfectly whether you are using a cart or a basket.
Basket would hold bait bag, snare, and food item. Catch three rabbits and bring them back to town, bring bait back to snare + bait bag and return to hunting.
When it comes to carts you can bring three bait backs + three empty baskets and return home with nine rabbits + 3 empty bait bags. The general idea is to make trapping sensible if he's going to leave it as is instead of in the dumb way he has it set up right now.