One Hour One Life Forums

bread_lord wrote:

Re: oppositional posts, I assume the argument is that in order to be considered legitimate, a family line would have had to consist only of unrelated players coordinating exclusively in-game.  It is not an unfair argument, but it does boil down to differing opinions on styles of gameplay.  Since the game's creator has never expressed opposition to voice chat, it then falls to players to define what is and is not within the spirit of the game and, of course, it is unlikely everyone will agree (for instance, to a purist, all forms of external communication violate the spirit of the game -- including these forums).  Once upon a time, the fact that raiding in MMOs was facilitated by external addons and voip was something that also inspired bitter debate.

A statement like this comes across as either insincere or ignorant.

For starters, OHOL has a very specific system that limits communication based on age. Voice chat completely circumvents this. I'd say that very much goes against the spirit of the game and you're fooling yourself if you think that's up for debate.

Next you have the external organizational effort to force a closed group of players to keep spawning with each other. Again, the spirit of the game isn't to play with a pre-organized group of people. Jason (the game's creator) has publicly expressed his opinion on this in the past (playing with friends), and while it seems he's toyed with the idea, ultimately it sounds like he's come to the conclusion that it's not within his core vision of the game and is something better left for private servers. See this topic for his posts: https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=138 - I'll quote a few of the relevant lines below.

jasonrohrer wrote:

There is a chance that you will be born along with your friends, but babies also get spread out randomly.  There is no built-in friend feature.  That's not really what this game is about... it's about different situations in every life.

jasonrohrer wrote:

This game isn't about playing with friends.  You're right about the alienation issue too, with cliques of people who are on voice chat, but who never speak/chat in the game.  A bunch of silent, well-organized people who seem to be telepathic.

I agree that it would make the game worse, probably.

So is it a legitimate, "within the spirit of the game" strategy? Evidence points towards "no".

In the end, is it a big deal that's ruining my game play experience? Probably not.

But why not do it on a private server? That's effectively what's been accomplished on a public server in this case with the active player vouching. Just with the added potential of souring other players' experiences and skewing some game stats that could otherwise provide some interesting data on the state of the player base.