a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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I noticed with the new influx of players—and I suppose with server population cap having been lowered—that Eves seem to be having more babies, and that a lot of these Eves are either experienced players who have gotten over certain aspects of the game and view baby-players as an annoying hurdles after one too many dozens of failed lives, or worst of all, new players who enjoyed the game in the third person through Youtube videos, and not only does this make them less willing to enjoy the cooperative and generations-spanning magic of the game, because it's been somewhat ruined for them, but they also have no actual experience dealing with the game stuff, so they are in fact rude and bumbling Eves.
So the Eves do feel different alright.
I know players are pining for some legacy and closure, because you die and it feels unfulfilling somehow, but then I really don't think I need to learn about the origins of some player-named town, like say DildoTown 2, and the story of its founder, DildoJedediah, and all the children DildoJebediah had (who all had equally terrible names) who feuded about what to name their town, so DildoTown 3 and FourTwentySixtyNineopolis were born, and. . . what I'm say is: I've already met some terrible people and I hope they don't get to leave a mark on anything.
I'm pretty sure FastSpring, the intermediary for payments that the OHOL website is using whenever you buy the game, allows regional pricing?
But then, whatever reasons there may be for not setting up regional pricing, there's the risk that people will use a VPN or proxy to pay much less.
This is a common a thing. Steam will ban you for it—it's been common for years for people to pay less than 30 USD for brand new games on EA Games' Origin service through the use of VPNs.
So one of the reasons, in addition to whatever reasons Jason personally has for not supporting regional pricing, is that he doesn't want to get screwed.
Holy smokes, how did the players manage that? Was that a discord group that made that?
That's a cool little mock-up!
One of my first posts was trying to deal with the feeling that, somehow, the game felt far too unforgiving, but I didn't really know in what ways. Having played enough now (and this has little to do with the new problem of trolling, which I experienced for the first time 4 days after the game released), the problem of communication is definitely ever present. (Again, trolling is a separate problem.)
Being less hungry means being able to communicate for more time without having to panic about food or positioning or immediate responsibilities; but the coordination required is unreasonable: clothes, a fire, homes (a place to hold a forum basically).
There is no equivalent of makeshift shelters or a caves (not inhabited by bears) or even a fireside chat because everything moves incredibly quickly and you can't really gather that many people around fires (and fires are hard to get started). That and people don't understand hunger enough and the general steps for moving up the tech tree to make all of these things less frustrating.
So yes, maybe making communication (which is lifting most of the game right now in terms of player experience) should be improved. The speech bubbles overlapping is irritating, like you said—that needs to be improved.
I think a way of solving the spamming problem for yelling would be to have players mouse over speech bubbles that would otherwise be obscured, so that you can ignore chatter and focus on it (reveal it) when you wanted to purposefully listen.
So the speech bubbles would appear with little ineligible compact scribbling but you would be able to see if there's an exclamation point (a warning or command) or a question mark (a question) and prioritize speech bubbles based on that little bit of information. So not actually yelling, like as a separate mechanic, but just being able to communicate outside of your screen area by having your speech bubble appear as a little bubble with a scribble/doodle animation for other players that are at some distance from you. These players could choose whether or not to listen to you.
[Good post! Something like this would also help towards Eves actually naming their children and calling them when needed, and make the game much less frustrating.]
When people talking about guards, wouldn't that be ironic if one of the guard is actually a murder?
Considered that it's so hard to identify individuals, the whole town would actually turn to a blood bath just for looking for one murder.
The funny thing is that this wouldn't be unlike something that happens in a real real-word place where anything resembling detective and forensic science has been discovered.
But in the real world close knit communities can have a pretty good idea about who may have done something. Villages and the like should be less impacted by sporadic violence because of mob justice and family ties, but right now the game doesn't really facilitate some sort of record or heritage or identifier.
So all the discussion right now is bouncing between weapon balancing and accountability for actions.
I wonder if Jason foresaw any of this?
I already posted this somewhere else, but requiring two arrow shots to kill one player, or one arrow shot with a certain chance to injure them and slowly kill a player, seem like good solutions. It also "makes sense" (killing someone with bow and arrow really would require several tries if you don't pierce a major organ, and even then, there's a slow death). More importantly, bow and arrow thing would feel balanced because you would need a backpack + arrows, which are significant resource costs.
Not sure about knives. Having them break after killing several people seems arbitrary; but the way combat works right now it's hard to imagine another solution unless a new recipe/game feature is added.
(And like, all of these are very cause-and-effect solutions [especially the overeating thing]. Other ideas could involve violent players being paired with each other somewhere entirely far away from players who don't engage in overeating and violence, frequently at least; with maybe some small little clue about what's happening to them because of their bad behavior.)
I thought about something like this (blood on the floor). But maybe at the moment the game is just lacking all sorts of options about dealing with violence and trolls.
The thing about murdering someone, is that you don't want to get caught. So murdering a player and being unable to conceal yourself afterwards because of something giving you away is kind of weird.
Maybe have it so that people who want to kill other villagers have to work for it. For example, a knife (which is difficult to make) with blood stains that needs to be wiped down makes sense. As for bow and arrows, maybe requiring two arrows to kill someone (and maybe only one arrow to injure them based on a random hit percentage, until they succumb and die [from one arrow shot]).
Requiring two shots (the murderer would need to have a backpack of arrows), or requiring one shot (the villager would have time to warn someone if they're nearby), seem like okay solutions. But who knows!
https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=229
https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=257
https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=267
https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=217
There are already several threads about this very thing. Limits on food consumption seem pretty pointless for a number of reasons (why should overeating kill you when you've spent most of your life naked and running barefoot and eating one kind of vegetable? It smacks of band aid videogame logic to a balancing issue.)
The real solution at the moment is what some of the community members have been offering whenever frustration happens: players need to come together and use what they're given without the game's assistance (i.e., the tech tree climb will have to be interrupted because now you must make a bow and arrow, and one person needs to have this bow and arrow at all times and effectively be useless.)
None of the above is really practical, so maybe the real answer is either the boring one (overeating limit), or something interesting requiring players to work together to restrain/kill a troll.
(It could be anything, guard dogs, stones as projectiles/melee weapons used by several players, lock and key storage... )
I'm not a tech guy, so I can't give any more helpful advice other than what's already on the sticky page.
Check this post to see if it's relevant: https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=149
There's also this, which I guess you've already read.
=> Trouble connecting
If your game is getting Login Failed errors or generally not able to connect, you should verify that you are not behind a firewall or web proxy that might be blocking the game's attempts to connect out. The game connects out on ports 80 and 8005.
If connections are being blocked on Windows, you can find evidence of this in stdout.txt. The various network requests are logged in there, and you can see that they are hanging or failing.
Assuming your email and key were [copy-pasted] correctly into the game (you can also edit your account details in the "Settings" folder for the game), then someone must have logged on with your key and email address.
Only one computer can be active at a time.
But for good measure, try reinstalling the game.
https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=138
Private servers is the simplest solution. I'm sure someone skilled enough will make a guide for anyone that wishes to set them up.
For a mainstream solution, that would require work on Jason's part (he works alone), and there are also delicate matters to consider, like my post above.
I've already seen several posts on whether the game should impart more information with its graphics (characters emoting), or systems to help organization in some way, such as names, but ideally every mother should name her child and talk to them as they sit around a fire; or if a settlement decides to name a new chief, maybe they would use a wolf hat for the chief to wear. And farmers and smiths and shepherds and so on should take on apprentices that will pass down knowledge. And if players wish to honor the legacy of someone great, they should pass that on to children.
Ideally players should figure things out themselves. That said, maybe the game does need to remind players in some small way of what they should be striving for (i.e., if you have a name, that implies lineages). Although something as simple as tweaking hunger rates, and giving players enough time to talk, would also change the game a little.
*Gah, another edit, so many typos.
Most of my violent encounters have been highly entertaining.
An Eve birthed me between a wall of bears. As soon as I was born, the wall of bears closed in and I barely made it out. I followed her relentlessly, and she took care of me at some point, apparently impressed by my refusal to die.
Taking care of me took its toll soon enough. She found the only wild carrot around. She dug it and grabbed it. I stood on her tile the second she clicked on herself and she fed me accidentally. She starved to death and so did I later.
I couldn't stop laughing.
I think the ratio of bad experiences to good ones is, so far, healthy. If you and fellow villagers know how to deal with a troll, it actually makes for a stronger community.
Maybe we should start weaving tales for the children about about the Carrot Eating Man, like some sort of chupacabra.
Yes, the change in a few short days has been remarkable.
I wonder what the player experiences have been like? Did they push through frustrations of not knowing what to do? Did some of the players just give up? (Another positive of this game not being on Steam: no easy refunds. It's not a game that is strictly speaking, fun all of the time. It doesn't have to be, that's why certain stories are so memorable.)
I also agree that Sunday was just a bizarre day. I was abandoned many times and ran into annoying characters.
Steam takes a big cut of 30%.
Never mind how Steam as a platform doesn't really square with what Jason has done here: no copyrighting, open source access, and three installers for Mac, Windows, and Linux.
Plus, the OneHOL website serves as a hub for the forums, dev. updates, the Wiki, etc.
I wonder if part of the reason people insist on keeping all their games tied to one account of a game distribution website, is that they haven't learned to use password managers??
Or how to use bookmarks?? It can't be that burdensome to have a game installer on another website that isn't Steam or GOG.
I keep doubling back on ideas about whether the game is too unforgiving in some ways, like in the post I made below.
However, the fact that you died in the pen (to your mentor's heartache) is probably a more interesting story?? Or maybe you must be just positively stressed at all times and never forget about hunger, lest you die a few feet away from the carrot farm.
Right now a lot of grief and needless difficulty spawns from players not knowing quite how to handle community and social aspects vs. survival.
So if I abandon a baby (which I find extremely hard to do and have died countless times, sometimes trying to explain to the baby why it has to die), the baby should at least get to see the upset face of the mother to communicate to it that she's hungry; she can't take care of the baby. The baby-player will at least be given the chance to understand and won't be frustrated because this has probably happened many times to them.
This would also make it socially acceptable to run away from conversations or from a social gathering suddenly because other players would see that your are hungry or starving and need to find food quickly.
The game would change radically (for the worse) if it shoved information into your face about what's going on in general; or if players were given the ability to communicate too effectively—but having basic body language/emotions (at least for hunger/starving states) would be a fine addition.
Yeah, that's interesting idea, and it's been done in other survival games! The only iffy part is it might be incredibly burdensome for any number of reasons. Especially for players who are just getting started and can barely tell when babies might starve, etc.
But you could also make an argument that it doesn't really make sense that someone made it to 60 on a diet of berries, carrots, and life-long literal nakedness. There's no real way of knowing how prehistoric humans dealt with diseases (specifically I mean, they surely used plant-based medicines).
There's also the likelihood that is just wouldn't be any fun. Finding ways of not starving or not being cold (which affects hunger) is a good enough motivator, as is worrying about being stabbed by other players (the worst illness) or eaten alive.
"Killed by Bear shot with arrow" is close enough.
I think I've encountered this person...
I read the replies, and the thought that a villager will need to be assigned to guard duty because of wandering bears and the carrot eating man (who is a prime candidate for a mythical story to scare the village children) is going to make Chief duties so much more stressful.
I feel like the community for this game is cozy enough that someone reading this may have run into a certain someone who says "Leeroy Jenkins" a whole lot, and doesn't seem to do much of anything other than eat all the food (but not all at once). The worst seed I ever spawned.
Or the time a balding man came into the village and started to eat all the carrots and doomed everyone.
Or the time my baby knocked twice on Yogi The Bear's door and got me killed via telepathic bear lag attack.
Someone once stabbed me and I found that very funny. Because you don't expect to die by knife in this game.
There was the time my mother shot another Eve with bow and arrow. I had just been birthed and had no idea if there was a history between them of if my mother was a psychotic killer.
(I'm not entirely innocent. I've done the bear thing once because one of my children would not shut up and I was in a bad mood. We both died. I am also sometimes cruel and give babies instructions that will certainly get them killed. Like making them run in a certain direction, which they do obediently and with loving trust.)
More of this will definitely happen as players become more comfortable and too familiar with some of the game stuff. God help us.
Oh dear. Something similar happened to me.
I set off with three very valuable pouches and, though I was fortunate enough not to starve, it took me very long to make it back to the village, and worst of all, I hadn't found any water. I eventually spoke to a resident who listened to my story, sympathized with me, and then I realized after moving up a little that I had somehow made it back to my village. The crops were mostly gone. That could have been anything, but I assume it was mostly my fault.
The lesson was: set down a Marker.
Anyway, I thought my mother would be furious, but she just reiterated the order before doing it herself and never coming back to the village.
(There was also the time a son of mine was presumably eaten by a bear while carrying three of our pouches. He was later reborn into the village again as a baby and tried to guide me to the pouches as a child, but he just ended up getting us both killed because I hadn't bothered taking any food. Also, he might have been trolling. It's hard to say.)
Now see, what I would've done is complain to every villager that they're eating all the dang carrots and to knock it off or we're all dead.
This is the better way.
(And you hide your knife there too, huh)