One Hour One Life Forums

If backpacks were worthless, nobody would be using them.
They don't lose their value because there are plenty to be found.
Granted, people don't fight over backpacks if there are enough for everyone. But is the presence of conflict over an item what defines its value in your mind? And not its usefulness?

Sometimes it feels like you don't understand your own game, Jason...

Did anyone mention that compost gets boring? Pick berries, pick carrot, mash and put on wheat, pick berries, pick carrot, give to sheep, dirt on bush, water on bush, repeat

It's a boring task with no tech to make it quicker. To make everything dependent on the compost mini game makes the game even more tedious.

(I would guess. I'm not playing nowadays.)

This would most likely make a difference. Ropes are always needed for something.

I agree Dodge, more could be done to try to keep new players.
And I guess we'd have to ask them why they don't return.
Since there are other games based on OHOL with better tutorial areas, I guess they are a good indication of what is needed.
And if Jason doesn't want to hire someone to help work on the game, perhaps this is something another person could do? Build rooms in the tutorial area to expand and improve it?

Would it be possible to create an abundant tutorial village, so that after walking around on your own a bit, you have an option to meet up with other new players and explore the village together?

Interesting to me would be:

Rabbits disappear and springs stop giving water because of seasons.
They're gone for a while, then they return.
In an open world, but with an improved road building mechanism so that cities are connected.

When winter comes, people are forced to stay together. If they lack resources, they have to move to other towns or go buy supplies.

Then - a new season of abundance.

If all towns die out during winter, the apocalypse resets the world.

I just don't understand why everything has to be so artificial with the rift and forced scarcity when seasons solve the same problems.

Sigh. It feels a little like the current philosophy behind the game changes is "If you're not having fun I'm going to make sure you're having fun! Whether you like it or not!"

It did always feel like the Eves popping up were in reality beamed down from a mothership.

That's why there have been suggestions that the wild roads could be rivers, or paths made by animals.

Or roads from earlier iterations. If we could mine for flat rocks, road building would be simpler.

Soundtrack

https://youtu.be/_Gbtm-93oqE

Farming update needed

I too think that the Rift takes something away from the game that existed before.

The best part about the Rift is that it intensifies the problems that were already present so that they are easier to find and deal with. For example, the problem with bears resetting in their caves producing too many of them was discovered because of the Rift.

I suspect that some of the ideas that have been implemented since the Rift was introduced would be beneficial in an open-ended world too.

It would have been great if we could find a way to have the best of both worlds, the pre-Rift sense of discovery and adventure along with the closer interactions of the Rift.

1. Do we need permanence of families? Why not marriages as a way of creating an evolving history of families? In an open-ended world, if marriage offered some benefit to the families, it wouldn't take long before an Eve-family sought out others.

2. and 4. Roads. More flat rocks + less griefing = more roads. Pre-Rift there was a time when people didn't consider it wise to connect their towns because of the vulnerability to war, but the peace mechanism just might have fixed that.

3. The open-ended worlds had this.

It seems to me that the two main problems with the pre-Rift worlds were:

- People wanting to play Eve sometimes caused a player drought, and old families died out. The Rift fixed this but only because it removes the ability to play Eve except in certain windows.

- There was never truly a lack of resources, since you could always get more by horse or car. But even in the Rift, the concept of lack seems a bit artificial since it is direct result of the Rift, and when it happens, there is no way to overcome it. When it happens, there's no reason in struggling to help your town survive, because you know the Apocalypse is imminent anyway. In an open-ended pre-Rift world with seasons, the goal itself could be struggling through the time of lack, and the sense of achievement could come from whether or not the family succeeded.