One Hour One Life Forums

+1 to this. I think the way the game is actually being played by people right now is not at all the way Jason describes players behaving in the proposed scenarios

Jason, you are a visionary and a dreamer with hundreds of amazing ideas which you have brought to reality.

You have a vision of a game world where certain things take place, and right now it seems you are in the process of finding a way to patch this game to realize this vision. But I don't think any single specific patch with a couple new items (no matter how "magic") is going to significantly shift the "meta" towards these massive story arcs that you imagine. Eventually, hopefully, though many patches this game will evolve into something close to what you wanted.  (I actually like the property fence idea though I am not knocking it)

But I think you chose a very difficult medium for your creativity - video games. I am pretty sure this is intended to be a fun playable videogame and not just a free expression of your own desires in digital form. Either of those things are perfectly fine, but "fun games" need to have certain things in them that players have come to expect.

And I think it can basically be boiled down into "points". "Points" isn't necessarily a number that adds up, it could also mean "achievements" which is a very common thing nowadays for a reason. Name a popular fun game that is commercially successful and you can bet your money that it saves some kind of numerical score in the form of XP, money, completion %, etc, or else it records the progress of the player through a world or a story. Probably both of those, plus random achievements.

OHOL has points too, if you think about it

- Age you manage to live to,
- number of surviving offspring,
- amount of critical resource harvested in one life,
- level of technology advanced in one life,
- lineage length
- number of murdered babies...

Right now you have this listed as game on steam, and you have a bunch of players (like me, admittedly) that are approaching this like its a game. We are breaking this game down into some kind of personal "point system" since there is no official one. The goal of any particular life is to get a lot of points. Getting points or achievements  releases dopamine in the brain which makes you feel good. Then you want to keep playing to get the feeling again. This can even explain griefers. Their own point system is how many people they murdered or how long they can stay out of donkey town and that is what gives them their rush.

To this type of player (me being one of them, but its not every player) nothing else really matters. Story arcs are cool when they happen around you and they dont interfere with work but there is no desire to walk up to anyone and start putting together a "storyline" while I stand there slowly starving. You keep saying "an hour is plenty of time" and in a way it is.. it is plenty of time to GET STUFF DONE, not to talk to people about the imaginary weather. According to my own point system Id have more fun running 300 tiles north to fetch iron we probably dont even need for 5 more generations, alone, that I would standing around talking to people about "village issues".

I know you hate hearing this but IMO an hour is NOT plenty of time, because at the end of that hour, my point-keeping ends. And my points have nothing to do with storylines. If you listen to the people talking on the forums you will see that many of these people feel the same about points. We strip the game down to its engine and try to get more points out of it. Burying the dead? No, it wastes precious iron the cost of which works out to x number of pies which take y minutes and 9.25 berries to produce. Sheep pen? how can we make it in the least amount of time with the least resources, everyone share your hackiest ideas and we will discuss the game code.  Roleplayers? they are a drain on society! Right now, in the game nobody wants to even talk to each other about the location of important resources because we are all busy running around playing slightly different games in our heads. which is a slightly different game than is in your head, Jason.

So I think one thing that should be worked on is some way to permanently keep track of players points. Like remember that thread where people crashed your servers because of their little application that scrapes their stats.. why do you think they did that so much it crashed your servers? people are desperate to know about their own points and compare them to the points of others within a globally agreed upon system.

I personally check my lineage line page obsessively because (you will probably be happy to hear) having a long lineage is important to me even though I never expect to be born back to there. It makes me feel accomplished for some reason I dont understand.

Anwyays, I think one (of many) important step towards making this game have "storylines" is to have some way to tack points or progress across multiple lives. Right now many people are playing their whole preferred meta out within a single life, which means there is zero time for interactions with other people unless your meta is roleplaying (and we dislike them apparently). If people knew that their points and achievements in one life were being collected onto a stats page that everyone can see instead of lost forever at the end of an hour, I think the pace would be less frantic within that hour. (and I still say make it longer than an hour)

I think by rewarding every possible action within the game with meaningless "achievements" will encourage new people to learn a variety of tasks on their own instead of locking into same useless grind of berry farming until we have 8 bushes per person. The "collect all the achievements" attitude can be strong.

I think that removing the lineage ban will make people care about what happens in their town more, and that rewarding players by letting them come back in a way that benefits only them is EXACTLY what you want to do. Its what people are requesting and it doesnt MATTER if they are playing the game to benefit the players around them now or themselves later, at least they are playing the game, and having fun, which is prerequisite for storylines. Getting to live multiple lives in the town they helped build is what the majority of people around here deem to be fun.

Also FFS, we need to be able to talk more than ten words to each other to have deep rich stories, its really annoying to try to time a three part message and guesstimate how long it takes your peers to read each message part before replacing it with the next part only for them to be like "what?" and then you starve. It really discourages talking. Messages can still get longer as you get older but like double the character limit or something, please. Also I instinctively use the numerals 0-9 when i type which results in many incomprehensible messages like "i am years old" and "the resource is tiles north". Why is there this limit on numerals?

I have been playing exclusively at night between 11pm and 4am EST for a few weeks and I would agree with everything this person has said.  I personally dislike the general vibe of the towns.. You are either witnessing a murder-fest, or people are walking around gossiping about the last murder-fest, or some roleplayer couple awkwardly asks you to bury them after their last dance (true story).. so I /die out of every big town immediately and play in a situation where i am 3rd gen or less. I would say that I have seen all these types of people. But in the early game they come in waves... First experienced (and some just curious) players run through the forest as eve for 1-10 minutes (they could have been in a town helping keep it alive but the "Eve meta" is popular among experts). Griefers would never try this, they hang out in the towns. And the players who never talk and the ones who depend on stored up food cant survive in an eve camp. So you are left with 2-5 "decent" players spread out across multiple eve camps. I suspect there are exactly the right amount of eve camp attempts at any one time so that the "decent" people who shun society just bounce between them without ever touching the cities (which they probably /died from and cannot even access anymore, like me) That means more than the expected percentage of good players are not in towns, while the people who cant survive well and griefers run amok in the larger towns that have food and weapons lying around.

I played as eve the other night (I play as "onion".. maybe you have met me) that went to 15 or 20 generations, and by generation THREE one of my kids said "beware the nosaj cult" as their last words, and by generation 5 it was a murderfest. I played a legitimate 1.5 hours in other lives and was born back into my own eve town at around gen 7. Two people were murdered in front of me. I only had enough tokens to choose to curse one of the culprits, and I had to play 20 more minutes in a town that now sucked balls in order to do so. Nine or ten people witnessed the murders but only one was old enough at the time to curse the culprit. Are the kids that witnessed the murders going to grow up in this town to avenge their mothers and curse the evil man when they turn 56? no they are going to peace the eff out of there and play in another eve town and forget it ever happened. Overall a crappy experience, this is why I stick to early generations.

I suspect that griefing due to boredom (And probably alcoholism cause honestly, its 3am on a weekday, there's no way everyone is sober) might be worse at night. Its pretty bad honestly. Bad enough that I'm avoiding the whole late-game.

Ok Im finally out of steam. sorry for the rant... Don't get me wrong I like this game a lot and It gets better with each update.