One Hour One Life Forums

My name was Frejya Red, an inexperienced farmer trying to learn the many different types of plants.

During my lifetime, I had a daughter I named Freya Red, who was then promptly stolen from me by a man named Todd Mary from far away. I chased them down for a long while until she died in his arms. I had to leave her there out in that barren place or risk death myself. I never forgot her. Nor her killer.

Not long after that, I had another daughter I named Elizabeth. The first thing she typed out, one letter at a time, was the dreaded name- Todd Mary. I knew then that my first daughter's killer had been reborn into my arms as a newborn babe. I promptly abandoned the child and left them to die- though it seems they managed to survive infancy only to perish at another's hand- good riddance.

After several years doing work on the outskirt of town living as a barren woman- I returned in my late thirties and had a pair of sons not long after the other. I named the first one Thor and his brother Leon. As I took care of them by the fireplace, a cousin nearby not right in the head had a son they did not pick up. I fed him for a time alongside my two boys and when it became clear his mother would not be right in the head anytime soon- I dubbed him Charlie.

I must confess, Charlie was my favorite boy even though he wasn't my own. He was affectionate and said kind words while my two boys were quiet and said little if anything at all. I made sure all of them were fed and warm by the fire, clothed with whatever I could get them.

Charlie and Leon went off to try farming down south, while Thor never left home. It seems that whatever was wrong with Charlie's mom might run in our family. I tended to him though as much as I could between tasks before he too grew too big for me to care for and he perished.

After that, I was too old for children and simply focused on the farms. One by one I found the bodies of my boys- I don't know what happened to them- there was plenty of food and they should have been warm enough with the clothes. With sorrow in my heart- I kept working until I was older still. I eventually  gathered their bodies in a basket and laid them together my three boys- Charlie, Thor, and Leon - out in the cemetery field. Yet even as I looked at them gathered there, my heart longed to find my daughter, Freya. I went back up to the far north-west and through sheer luck found her and brought her body back home and laid her next to the brothers she never got the chance to know.

I made no attempt to find Elizabeth.

With but moments left in my life, I waited for my time next to where I had buried them- happy to know I would be together with my family at long last.

A family together at last-
Frejya, Freya, Thor, Leon, and of course- my adopted son Charlie.

I was born to afk mother and adopted by Eve Ziv and raised by her. Thanks mom!

I ended up wandering away down south and found a new village full of cool peeps. Zuko Freckleston really tried to teach me the language there with minimal success. Apparently Duke = Peace and Thyss = Plate.

Thanks ya'll for making me have a good life.

So I have been on a few month hiatus from this game after the weird temp update that made it so you couldn't survive without clothes. I got really frustrated with it and decided to take a break for the sake of my temper and sanity- and also to see if things would change and the game would be enjoyable to play again. Every couple of weeks I would check up on the forums and updates and see what was going on. Yet, it seems with every week more and more people are less satisfied with the game.
People also no longer seem excited about updates but are instead dreading them- no longer do we see updates as new fun content but instead another disappointing or difficult add on to the game. Even people who are still hopeful only look forward to updates to see if they remove or fix features from previous  updates in the past.

This is not good.

As said in previous posts, I loved this game and the potential it has shown but the direction it is currently going is opposite what drew people in in the first place. It saddens me greatly that so many people are having their love for this game sucked dry. I just wanted a cool game full of family members bonding, working hard, and learning together how to survive in the wilderness. What we have now are mounds of baby corpses and hard to understand mechanics that are impossible to teach new players about before they perish. We have chaos, despair, confusion, and anger all the time with little to no hope.

It is still possible to turn this ship around and get back to what made this game fun and interesting in the first place. But really, it is all up to Jason and whether he gets the message. I understand being a game developer is difficult and I really hope he hasn't thrown in the towel on this game- I couldn't imagine trying to come up with and implementing new content for such a complicated game.

What do you guys think?
-Elles

Jason posted something about posting problems instead of solutions so I'll try to skip to the points.

All towns are essentially the same. The only differences between one town from the next is what they lack vs what they don't lack and maybe some key people who decide to stop and chat. If you've been in one mega city, you've been in all of them.

The underlying problem behind this problem is that there is only one way to do things. In our real world, your population does not die out because you did not farm carrots- if you need carrots but do not have them you find something else in your local area to fill the role of a carrot. There are different environments with different stuff that can still add up to surviving and a successful civilization even if you did not have a thing.

Because there is only one technological path to walk and no alternative paths, all civilizations walk the same path and after a few hundred hours- that same path, however interesting initially, loses its spark and shine.

There are so many fun and interesting civilizations and cultures in real life all because of simply having different resources and landscapes unique to their area. Yet in OHOL everyone deals with the same biomes and items, making trade improbable.  The reason people trade is when they dont have a thing and need/want said thing. But because of how ohol works, if you run out of a necessity you die quicker than you can facilitate any sort of trade with a neighboring village. Any sort of necessity-based trading would have to be done by someone with a lot of foresight who notices the dwindling number of that something- in which case they would either go out and get the thing themselves or make it so they can get it when they need it later. And if they find themselves unable to- usually because there is no more of said thing in their area- the village next door will be no help as they're probably in a similar boat. And even if they're not, how many times are you going to be trading with them for the thing until they inevitably run out or the person(s) facilitating trade on either side die?
There aren't a lot of luxury items to want in ohol either, most of the time if you don't have that thing you want you just live on without it because there are more important things to do and you just don't have the time. Maybe you could trade that iron for some paper, but would you? Especially since your people will need that iron generations on? There are no silks, jewels, and/or high dining stuff in OHOL or really a lot of things to be described as luxury save for the crown. Plus, with how most players are on ohol- how long would it take just to get the people from the other village to stop and listen to your proposal? Especially with the limits of communication.

To put everything in short: Trade doesn't really happen in this game due to its very nature and neither can any real variation from one village/town to the next.
I would like this to be changed one day, as I believe this game has a lot to offer and a good amount of potential in the future. Just as this point, I am bored of playing the same jobs in ridiculously similar towns.

Sorry!  Accidentally double posted

Normally, I am either completely apathetic or ecstatic about the new updates. So when I heard about how hard the new update was and how it was making the game unplayable, I was thinking back to things like the dog update that everyone was upset about and I was like 'eh, its prolly not THAT bad."

Wrong. Oh how wrong I was. So young, so naive, and way too optimistic.

Now I am not a pro by any means at all but I do like to think that my skills as a player range somewhere between average and decently good depending on the day and the circumstances. But even I, when confronted by the massively absurd amount of difficulty presented by this update, have to ask one question- Why?
I understand wanting to make your game difficult and for wanting clothes to play more of a role in OHOL but I'm sorry chief, this ain't it.
New players are already struggling enough as it to understand the mechanics of this game and now you throw another curveball at them? One that almost all experienced players of varying skill levels are struggling to work with?

Ya wanna know what just happened in the game I just played? I was born to an Eve with the surname of May and we stayed in one place for a bit after I got to be able to move around and was able to start gathering milkweed to start stuff up. In the brief three minutes of life I was able to move around, the full banana tree was eaten and I had to stop to eat four times from other sources due to my low amount of bars and even then it was not enough and I quickly died a little over the age of five. Once I am able to move around, I don't frequently die young- I usually make it into  at least the late forties or early fifties without problem unless something crazy happens. Even when a town begins to starve  I am able to sense it ahead of time and flee to a nearby jungle or something for refuge.

I'm sorry Jason but your game isn't fun to play anymore, not in the slightest. I was gonna hop on and play with a friend as a twin for the first time today but then this update came out and made this game unplayable. We're both doing other stuff now waiting for this horrible wreck of an update to either be over with or fixed entirely. Please for the love of god do not let this continue on much longer, I love OHOL dearly and do not desire to see it fail and want it to be a well known and enjoyed classic in the foreseeable future. An update like this being implemented makes me curious as to whether you do any play testing whatsoever before releasing an update or if you had done much testing, what made you think that this was what the majority of your player base wanted?
-Sincerely, A Frustrated Fan