One Hour One Life Forums

Late to the party, have not played OHOL for some time so I'm also out of the loop, but the latest update email caught my attention.

I wanted to throw an idea out there from an old RTS project I worked on. We had a similar setup where each player would choose their leader, and the server would figure out military ranks for everyone. Ranks came with real in game advantages, higher ranks could requisition team resources, and there was a functional chain of command where you would receive strategic commands from the player you followed, and issue commands to your followers.

The biggest difference is that we used a points system that I later found out is very similar to the way google searches used to rank search results, and also how some real-world liquid democracies are set up.

Following a player assigns them 10 points, but it also assign 9 points to whoever they are following and 5 points to whoever that person is following. The points are tallied and the highest score becomes "General" with everyone sorted below that based on their score. Voting for yourself gave you a "mercenary" rank, and where everyone had the exact same score, it was assumed that this was done deliberately by the players, so everyone became "Comrad" with the same powers as a General.

This had a couple of side effects that were good for our setup.
- There could be more than one General in a single hierarchy, or multiple hierarchies in a team.
- It was difficult for an individual or two to game the ranking system, but easy for many people working together.
- Whoever a General followed would either become the new General if they already had another chain of command below them, or be promoted to a high ranking officer who "had the General's ear" in keeping with the hierarchical chain of command, the adviser could issue commands to the General even though they were of lower rank.

Anyway it worked pretty well, so I figured it might be worth sharing. We messed around a lot with the numbers, 10>9>5 was a bit of a sweet spot.

There goes OHOL's best kept secret.

Nobody reported it because nobody wanted the dry milk cow exploit fixed.

My take on it was that the system works great but the first pass was a little bit heavy handed.

Black text was good in its own way, but useless without the *threat* of something worse.

I would have made it so 8 to 11 points you get the black text which serves as a warning to the cursed player and also the players around them. Then 12 curse points Donkey Town.

To balance things better, curse points could wear off faster in Donkey Town, maybe 4 per hour... since you'd have to play out at least 12 points down to 8, minimum stay is still an hour, but it takes a lot more curse points to get a long stay. And Discord BS is less effective.

Something else to consider when there are more players - shorter stays in DT will also mean fewer people in DT - which will make DT worse for those in it. With longer stays you'd get higher population in DT, and perhaps the OHOL equivalent of PvE & PvP servers.

Selecting someone to be griefer is a bad idea IMO, and unneeded... Players already do this by naming their kids Awakumberumba McTavernackopolis, or whatever.

Overall I think this is pretty good, although I still think long survival times should be incentivised in some way.

One way to make the /die command a little less appealing: Don't make it instant. Instead, /die can be typed at any time, but it just puts you in a state where you do not feed when picked up, and cannot be force fed.

This would prevent another issue too, where a savvy mother may forgo naming a child so that she can double-tap feed them in such a way that they can't execute the /die command because they are never held long enough.

The thing that stands out to me in this idea, maybe unintentional in the post but... baby bones!

Could you make baby bones different to regular bones, in that they are visually smaller and decay in a couple of minutes instead of an hour?

I should have explained a couple other things about what I had in mind.

Currently you start and end with 4 pips, you can interpret your minutes left alive by your number of remaining pips. This should not change under a variable life expectancy system - the "extra years" you get or lose are in the middle, so an elder with five pips is still 1-2 mins away from old age death. Similarly, the player sprites at old age would change relative to years left to live, rather than years spent alive.

On punishing new players - it really isn't a punishment. If you take the goal of each life to be surviving to old age - lowering life expectancy on repeated "failures" makes the goal of living to old age easier by gradually lowering the target. They might experience their first old age death at 53, and get +2 longevity for making it that far. Only once they've mastered living long lives and start doing it consecutively, do they start living longer each life.

As a new player transitions into a regular, at some point the goal shifts from just surviving to prospering and leaving a legacy. Having a few extra years in the prime of your life only becomes rewarding once a player has reached this phase.

You are right about being abandoned, for experienced players the neglectful mothers will be the thing that makes it difficult to get to 80. That is OK though, it should not be easy.

Anyway, the idea is tabled for now, so I will stop going on about it.

Does anyone know the reason lineage ban does not kick in until after 30 minutes? Was it intended to reduce baby suicides? (because if so, it isn't working!)

"Bad" stone walls usually won't survive 10 hours without being taken down, so a 10 hour old wall is usually worth making permanent. The moss is just there to show a difference between new and permanent walls.

check your email, you're going to need the code anyway.

Mentioned this in another thread already but...

If you die accidentally and lose your Eve chain spawn location, play an Eve to old age on any other server then go back to the server you were chaining on, you'll get your spot back.

Default view distance is 7 tiles vertically, so if you're in the middle of the screen, that's 3 tiles north, 3 tiles south, plus the tile you're on.

The way the game scrolls, it does try to put more screen in front of you than behind, so quite often you are not standing on the center tile.

This has a side effect though.

If you walk south a bit then head east, you will be 2 tiles from the north edge and 4 tiles from the south. Animals step 3 tiles, so in that situation you can easily be targeted and sniped by animals off screen to the north.

It is a good idea to never move directly east-west. To go east, head north-east then south-east.

Or get zoom mod.

Take an adze out with you. You can fit four fence kits in a cart instead of four branches. Halves the trips.

Kinda agree, pick seems pretty under utilised, but that opinion is likely due to our conditioning from other games like minecraft.

Iron veins could give up around 3 to 5 iron when hit with a pick before "drying up" and turning into the iron pit which requires the stanchion, similar to how wells dry up and require deep wells.

Mining iron veins with a pick would become stage 2 of a 3 stage process.