One Hour One Life Forums

When I first started playing the game, I suggested that Jason add a mechanic that automatically adds curses to people who kill multiple children under the age of three.  It never got any attention.

Donkey Town and the ability to send people to donkey town with curses has been getting a bit stronger, but as I told you in discord...the greifers have been out in force in the last few weeks.  Check the forums for topics on how to use a pit bull to kill a town, and a new discord server being set up for OHOL griefers. 

I do like your idea of blocking players, so that you won't be born as their child again.  There are several moms I wish I could have blocked -- I'm always on the lookout for the evil laugh of that mom that scooted me out of town to stab me as a child.  It would impact the fertility of certain players over the long term.  Some players might blanket block everyone - because they like to play as Eve.  But maybe you can only have ten players on your block list, so it never keeps you from having a random town life.

I have been twinning today and had no bad experiences.  No one tried to stab us, or kill us.  But both myself and my twin are experienced players.  There are subtle ways to show your mom and aunties that you are a good baby.  Don't move unless asked to follow or come.  Say "HI".  Don't whistle overmuch.  Grin and emote as they talk to you.

Also - I've seen some older twins dying in the middle of town as a pair a couple of times today.  Don't know if that's you and your friend or not, but... FYI, it is much better to leave your bones on the outskirts of town than in the middle of the nursery.  Bones in the nursery are bad for fertility.

Welcome to OHOL!  I hope you will stay in spite of our greifer infestation.

Love the new deep roots calculations and section!

Even more of a reason to fix the family tree server bug.... One of my elder deaths in the past few days is an ancestor unknown type.   Fortunately that family only went on another two gens, so it isn't a big deal.

But I can't be sure any of these is ACTUALLY my deepest roots - the longer a family goes, the more likely it is to get cut off randomly, right??

Also, the family tree server is super slow right now (tens of second, maybe a minute to load).  Maybe there are a bunch of us looking at it?

FWIW, it would be a strong incentive for me, however you set it up.  You might want to add something that indicates how long the player will live, so folks don't get too surprised by it.

What if you centered the average life length on 60 instead of making it the maximum, Eve lives would live to 40, and every ten or twenty generations it goes up another 5, until you get to a maximum of 80.  This would reflect the actual variation we've seen in real life, too.

Going back to the wonders idea as how you create the boon - if there's a special object that is used to make uranium, then it'll be obvious that you can't make uranium unless you have that special object. The new game mechanic is also fairly obvious - a server check that keeps people from completing the last step to make a uranium production chamber, if one has already been made.

For earlier techs, maybe the wonder or boon is something that makes early stage startup easier, but doesn't keep other families from doing it.  No eve can build a civilization without kindling, but what if there's a wondrous hatchet (or a family) that produces a stack of two kindling everytime it's used on a branch.  The family that makes the only copy of that on the server would also be better at pioneering new settlements for the rest of its existence.

Tying the unique tech items to families could be accomplished with some of the ideas talked about - making objects recognize if the person wielding them is a descendant of someone who made it or not, and glow red if held by outsiders.  You could take it to an extreme, and make wonder items not work if the person isn't a descendant.

What's wrong with a mush of civilization?  That's what happens in real life.  Cultures blend and shade and mush together all the time.  And why do villages have to die?  There are very few places IRL that people have inhabited that haven't eventually been taken over by others.  A place that can sustain life will eventually be discovered by another group and exploited by another group.  It might be immediate, or it might take millennia, but it's going to happen.

I get that there are some benefits here... making people care if their family dies, avoiding reincarnating in a rival family and greifing from the inside, etc.

But anything that systematically locks potential players out of a family or town is going to doom that town.  Period.  And it would filter out experienced players more often than the casual players.  We'd need to have two to three times the number of experienced players on the server to make any exclusion mechanic viable.  I don't think if you implement this a month from now it will work well.

At least for now, I think OHOL needs a mechanic that makes people more likely to return to a family.  Not just because that makes people more likely to be attached to the survival of that family, but because it makes the family more likely to survive .   For the macro-dramas you want to enact, we need more families that survive longer than a day.

A lot of the suggestions for whether or not players return to a family are very black and white - you either go back to that family or you don't.  But it doesn't have to be that way.  It can be a percentage.  You have a 50% chance of having a normal random life.  You have a 50% chance of getting back to a family in which you have some connection (genetic, burial plot, whatever). Tweak the percentages based on how things work out.
 
Or increase the chance that someone can return to their pool of prior families based on the number or complexity of their burial grounds, or whatever behavior you want to incentivize.   I mean, it could be anything - more chances to return the more cycles of compost you start, or number of trees you planted, etc.

This is my quick summary of the thread so far. Hope other folks find it helpful, too.

Potential short-term solutions to the problems of trade and war include:
  * Make people more unique by adding more character models
  * Make more unique clothing options, so one can more easily recognize family (CHECK)
  * Further reduce spawning distance to make closer towns possible

More code-intensive suggestions:
  * Create "bumper" biomes that have an abundance of a specific resource
  * Add mechanisms to allow players to sidestep area bans
      - like family creating a special tomb or grave for the bones of your character.
      - or a need for descendants to exist in order for you to return
  * Add "wonders" that can only exist one place on a given server. 
      - Assumes adding another location indicator
      - Provides some benefit to people of the town
  *Create more diversity in locations where civilizations can thrive, by making more biomes viable for Eve camps

Biggest Lift:
  * Completely rework spawning location and duration to encourage more depth to family relationship

Other key issues raised:
  * Many current players are not interested in another war game and would stop playing if war became common.
     -- These same players are interested in commerce and cooperation between more diverse towns.
     -- For what it's worth I agree with this point of view.

  * There is a war developing between specific players rather than between characters or family groups.
    -- See Ominous Blade Blank's post in this thread
    -- See Tarr's thread on testing twins and groups by Discord participation
    -- See Toxic's thread about creating a griefer discord server  https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5804

You just described what happens right after the servers reset for an update.  Multiple eves show up near an old town, and immediately have babies.  Resources are short, and there are some people working like crazy without any coordination while other people flail and/or grief.  Was it Friday night?  And yeah, the quality of play during reset this week was TERRIBLE. 

We gotta find a way to make resets less painful.

I really like that last pen, pein. 
What software do you use for your designs?

Yes.  I like it.

The forums are for longer timeline thoughts and discussions - similar to how I use email.
Discord is for quick discussions, setting up logistics, etc.  - similar to texting. 
I would not twin or set up group play with someone who does not have Discord.  But if that's not your thing, it's probably not necessary.

And for context, I had never used Discord before I started playing OHOL.

Hey, futurebird,

I like pokemon go and looked recently for other gps-based mobile games.  There's one that is a resource management game, but it's graphics suck and it wasn't farming so much as building a giant resource-grabbing corporation.  Not that I'm one of the "corporations are evil" folks, but this was a bit much.  Also the gameplay seemed super simplistic, especially at the early stages.

https://www.resources-game.ch/en/

As to whether or not you should go make a farming/gathering resource management game with a real world GPS element... I would definitely play something like that.  But the larger question is - do you have the coding and graphics design skills and/or project management skills to finish something like that, and would you enjoy putting tons of time into working on developing this idea?

Best way to find out is to spend some small amount of time working on it - maybe a week or a month?  and see what kind of progress you make, and if you enjoy the process.

You may not actually be "lazy", you may just be appropriately cautious about diving into something that is not entirely the right kind of work for you.

^^ this.  +1  Good job all.

I did my first knife dis-assembly today, and quite honeslty the fact that everyone on the forum refers to it as "melting down" the knife made me think it would be quite a bit harder than it actually is.

knife + smithing hammer = blade + short shaft

easy peasy, lemon squeazy, as my kids like to say.

The early gen smith we had was really into replicating tools.  We had two axes, two shovels, and two hoes.   I started pestering him for shears for the sheep as soon as I was old enough.  But did he make shears?  NOOOOOO.  He made five knives.  FIVE!!!

I got three of them in my bag, figured out how to take them apart, and proceeded to make a set of shears and a bow saw.  All without any use of the forge whatsoever. 

Which is a bonus, I have an odd fire phobia, which apparently extends to smithing involving the firing forge but not to baking.  Don't judge.

Let's just call this breaking knives, ok?  No melting is needed and the term can confuse the noobs and the crusty oldtimers alike.

P.S. Thanks for giving me a thread to brag about my knife breaking adventures in. 

Portager, I've had similar thoughts.

I think to make this as simple as possible fore Jason - it could be added as a link to your family tree description.  Right now if someone murders you, it adds a field that indicates who murdered you.  It should be simple to add a field that shows you were adopted by xxx, and that you adopted xxx.

I am not a programmer, but my guess is that replacing the birth mother with some other person would be extremely complicated and difficult for Jason to implement.

Also, I'm pretty sure english is not your first language, so I have nothing but respect as I calmly inform you... weaning is when you STOP breastfeeding a baby.  it's the process of getting them to eat solid foods. The typical American euphemism  for breastfeeding is "nursing" the baby. 

Best,