a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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Biome viability is limited only by the imagination of Jason.
Need fresh water in the arctic? How about adding the option to: take snowball, add snowball to bowl, melt snow over fire for a bowl of water?
Need a cool/cold room in another biome? How about adding the option to: Take a saw and cut a block of ice out of an arctic zone, cover ice block with sawdust, then transport it to the desired enclosed biome. How else did the warm part of the world get ice cubes and for their drinks and meat lockers in the summer before refrigeration?
Bottom line: Our tech tree needs to be wider in order to support a diversity of climate cultures. There are plenty of real life examples of how cultures adapted to biomes. All our cities look mostly the same because there is only one implemented way to progress them up the tech tree.
The_Anabaptist
hi bb.
Do you have Zoom mode? (if answers no, then)
Do you know OneTech? (if answers no, then)
Do you know to use a backpack?-I always tell my kids to carry a pie in BP and I give them a berry bowl full of wild berries and instruct them to always have it with or near them and eat from it till they get older.
-I always try to find a backpack for them and I tell them to find/make clothes
-I always tell noob kids to download a zoom mode to enjoy the game
I really believe that the OneTech link has to be in the game main menu rather only in the forum and a small zoom must be in the vanilla version.
Player retention Would be a lot better if people knew about one tech and zoom mode, People must know that Vanilla and tooltip is not their only option.
Especially now that we need to Travel to survive and the map seed is crap, play with vanilla is the worst experience you could have.
The conversation should go:
Hi Bby.
Do you want to die?
Then you should get the Zoom mod.
Then you should read OneTech.
Then you will know to get a backpack if I haven't already given you one.
Oops, I've already had another kid, now off you go!
The_Anabaptist
Pretty sure only masochists and newbies play on update day anymore. I too have been waiting weeks at a time nowadays. Dumping a clearly untested update on a production server is just terrible customer service. I'm continually amazed at how it is treated as the norm here.
The_Anabaptist
If I'm gonna be raised by wolves, then I want to be able to bite other humans and spill out their entrails! And have domestic dogs follow me around everywhere like I'm the pack alpha! I'm up for this content upgrade!
The_Anabaptist
... It would be weird to not be elitist about greatness though, top tier is kinda the whole point of greatness ya know? It takes the exceptional to know the exceptional.
Insert witty comment about TRUMP here.
Have fun folks, this should be cannon fodder enough to make this the longest thread ever.
The_Anabaptist
So if I build my town in one of these 3 zones, I guarantee that everyone born into my town will die but the zone specialist and non-specialize races survive? And I limit myself to out of town maladjusted players of the same races?
This whole not picking up or dropping things just sounds wacky. Don't like it at first blush.
The_Anabaptist
Hungry work for birthing babies. Only fair to introduce early mortality due to child birth in a civilization building game.
The_Anabaptist
Genetic fitness should probably give you a small plus each time one of your kids (male or female) reaches breeding age. And you should get a penalty only if you fail to live to breeding age.
Now maybe that means we need more environmental hazards to make living harder. Plague, Famine, etc. In order to not make it too unbalanced on the positive gain, or just make not living to breeding age be a bigger hit negatively. Yes, it makes playing a male a bit boring. Tough.
The_Anabaptist
I miss hunting rabbits.
I put the snare in front of the hole, but they never come out. I remove the snare and they pop back out to mock me. I make a berry and carrot bowl, but can't apply it to the snare. I search the tooltips looking for /snare and any other keyword I can think of that might help to no effect.
I miss hunting rabbits.
The_Anabaptist
Someday in the far future, aliens will be reading these archived forums. They will undoubtedly confuse them for factual records about the near future when America's second civil war breaks out immediately after Trump's impeachment. Starvation and mass killings of gingers indeed.
The_Anabaptist
Honestly, a chance at crop failure sounds like something that should be replicated to all crops. Thinking that you get a set "x" bonus of foodstuffs for the planting is a very naive world view. A variable yield could indicate an early frost, seasonal flooding, freak hailstorm, etc. Basically that it was a particularly bad year this harvest season and the kids are gonna go hungry this winter.
Lets see some honest representation of a farmer's risk.
The_Anabaptist
In honor of the day everyone should spam /die all their extra lives to leave as many bones on the map as possible.
The_Anabaptist
Idea: Make the rift boundary a reverse battle royale mechanism. The longer the arc lasts, the bigger the playable area grows. Done right, this could be a way to replace starter items that have exhausted. That additional tarry spot, well site, or iron strike just sitting a few tiles outside. Survive a little longer, and they will be accessible! Plus, it makes it harder to keep a corner of the rift walled off.
The_Anabaptist
This is a game. Can we please leave the gender politics out of it? Whether something is "women's work" or "menfolk's work" is more of a cultural bias or mindset than "Is she physically strong enough to swing a pickaxe?" or "Are his ham fists dexterous enough to thread a needle?"
At least stick to the premise of "should we do this change or not?" Additional parameters like gender discrimination can be added after it is clearly a success or failure.
And remember, picking up a berry bowl with carrot counts as all your skill slots.
The_Anabaptist
Jason,
I appreciate your proposed changes, and more importantly the thoughtful way that you laid them out to the community.
I will note that there have been plenty of forum threads previously that have also proposed similar versions of what you have laid out. It is nice to see you give credit to someone you respect, and I hope that you take a bit of time to glean additional ideas from the community as well now that you have chosen to pursue this.
The_Anabaptist
Thanks!
Here's a quote on this subject from a lost post:
If you believe that "the customer is always right" in this context, you are sorely mistaken. Which "customer"? There are 80,000 of them, with 80,000 preferences and opinions. There's only one game. This isn't a restaurant, where I can make a custom dish for each patron if I really want to. This isn't a service business. I mean, yeah, if the game's not working for someone, and I can't help them get it working, I give them a quick refund. In that sense, they are "always right."
But "customer service" doesn't mean changing the design to appease one customer. How could it? That's utter lunacy, no more tenable than changing a movie to appease one disgruntled audience member. Majority rule would be just as nonsensical. Audience, what color should Yoda be? A. Blue. B. Red. C. Green. D. Purple. No, Yoda is Green because Mr. Lucas wanted him to be green. If you don't like his color, well, good luck with that.
The only way forward is to keep audience feedback in mind as I decide what to do with the game. In the end, I must decide. That's the only sensible way for this to work. And feedback is just that: feedback. Not angry demands.
With that quote in mind, how did we get to this point?
And by "we," I don't mean the OHOL community, but the entire game industry and fanbase?
Many game developers are TERRIFIED of their own audience, and bend over backwards in a hopeless attempt to appease them. But of course, you can't please everyone. You change the game in a desperate attempt to keep one vocal minority happy, and another vocal minority pops up to take its place. The game gets worse as a result. Almost always.
You are all EXTREMELY lucky that I'm not scared of you. At all.
I know how this works. That is why OHOL gets better and better instead of worse and worse. I'm not running around trying to appease the next angry mob. There are times when the mob is right, obviously, but just as many times when they are dead wrong. It takes time to figure out which is which. Just because they are angry, that isn't a sure sign that something is horribly wrong with the game. They were angry when I removed infinite carrots back in March 2018....
But when did the audience acquire the terrible delusion that they were masters and the game developers slaves? Do you really believe that's the way that great games are made? Or great art in any medium? Which great game was made that way? I don't know of any.
Even with all of the experience that I have as a designer, when I give other designers advice about their games, my advice is ignored 75% of the time. I'm their lifelong friend and trusted, respected colleague, and even then, they usually don't listen to me. And very often, they are right not to listen to me, because I don't understand their game as well as they do, I don't share their vision, and so on.
So if the advice of a trusted, respected colleague and friend is ignored generally, where on earth did you get the idea that the demands of a random angry stranger on the internet must be obeyed?
Alright, I'll bite. One factor is due to the ease of modding. I don't remember this level of vitriol prior to average joes figuring out that they could add content to a beloved game. With your desire for high levels of control/vision Jason, I don't know why you ever allowed modding in the first place. Now we have a zoom mod that a significant segment of your player base swears by as the only way to play the game, and your steadfast refusal to build it into the base game. This one mod causes so many player vs player balancing issues and I would consider it a friendly/benign mod in its intent. I can only imagine what it must be like for you to deal with more malicious mods.
The_Anabaptist
Was born. Mom is running all over creation with me. Screen goes white with black circular squiggly shapes, like the map isn't keeping up. Client crashes. Restart the client twice more, see nothing but white with black squiggly shapes for a period of time, then crash out again and again.
The_Anabaptist
Compost should really be made out of rotten banana peels. And pine needles, just to give them a real purpose. Just saying.
The_Anabaptist
Nah, just make two bots whose sole purpose is to find each other, RP for most of their lives, and then spam War / Peace to the server in their old age.
The_Anabaptist
Lol. List what still makes you happy. Makes it easier to fix for next week.
I'll start with some reverse-psychology. I love it when I'm playing on a Saturday afternoon and I get a Server Shut-Down message and it doesn't even record my artificially short life in the genetics stats.
The_Anabaptist
Just go do it on one of the sparsely populated servers? Keep it off the main? Seems like something you wouldn't need permission for, if you kept to yourself.
The_Anabaptist
All these proposed changes made me realize something important. As a player, I'm finding myself spawning in game as a baby less and less. Once a week is getting pretty close at this point. Pretty soon I'll need a carrot as bait too.
The_Anabaptist
I don't know, Jony. I think I would totally knife someone for their backpack after this up-date. The extra storage space is more precious than iron to someone who values efficiency. That's kind of like trading and war rolled into one.
One life = one backpack.
When I pass on the village's only backpack to my favorite grandchild, I'll be sure to tell them a few funny stories about the pack's previous owners first and warn them to watch their back. It will be like passing on a gold crown, but you can store extra knives inside it.
You make a very good point. Once the change is implemented, all you will have to do is look at who is wearing backpacks to know who the killers are. If you do happen to find an abandoned one and return to town, the next stab wound will mean a whole bunch of people standing around you, waiting for you to keel over dead, instead of applying a bandage to you.
The_Anabaptist
Or the higher tech backpack could be the same slots + 1 baby holder. It's not that the community hasn't been clamoring for such a thing. Throw us a bone already.
The_Anabaptist
Why did people switch from fur to cloth in the real world?
Because it was more practical.
Why don't they switch in the game?
Because fur is more practical.
(And, hunting rabbits is more fun than farming berries and carrots.)
Change that, and people will use less fur.I would prefer a farming update over rabbit extinction.
More practical in real life? In his youth, my father could shoot over 200 jackrabbits a night for their pelts. No, it probably was a combination of over hunting and changing fashion tastes that forced the switch over. I definitely know that I don't see that density of jackrabbits around anymore.
Not that I want to stop rabbit hunting mind you. It is an exceedingly fun and satisfying activity in game. I think I will be fine with pond depletion. Hopefully people will just ignore them as a water source and start preserving them for their egg production.
The_Anabaptist