One Hour One Life Forums

Amazing

Uhm, I disagree...
Before the rift I sometimes spent my life building walls in front of bear caves because I was tired of all the bears.
There was one village I remember being destroyed by bears because we struggled to find ingredients for arrows in time.

The problems were always there, and we knew. The difference is that with the Rift the problems become a hundred times bigger.

Another suggestion (I know you don't like suggestions, but...)

Why not alternate between Rift and no-rift worlds?
When an apocalypse happens in an ordinary world, it creates a Rift. When something happens in the Rift to end it, it becomes a normal world again.

Yay!

Perhaps we should call it PvG and GvP?

I think you're right, we can't remove griefers. But, for every game feature it's wise to ask whether the functionality benefits griefers most, or normal players.

Bears everywhere.
How embearassing that we were'nt able to kill them all.
At least navigating through the bear-full world taught us to be bearful of where we stepped.
Now it's bearly an inconvenience.

Please fix bears.

I don't think he doesn't care.

I think it's a matter of the developer's vision.

Someone once told him that 'griefer' is a village job in the same way baking, hunting or farming is, and that notion seems stuck in his mind.

He seems to believe that griefers are necessary to create tension, and he seems to think that it is possible to develop game mechanics that lets players and griefers live side by side and create fun for each other.

My guess is he hoped that by implementing war swords, griefers would kill other families instead of their own, and fences would protect us from outsiders hence protect us from griefers. Thus, griefers and normal players creating fun for each other.

He seems to fail to realize that efforts like that doesn't really matter because the nature of griefing is to not play the game as intended.

My feeling is we will not see any true progress in this issue until the developer's vision evolves. Until then, griefing will remain the game's biggest weakness is my guess.

I don't feel the Rift is improving the game.
Maybe tweaking it will make it better, but at some point one should consider following Norwegian Mountain Code 8: Don’t be ashamed to turn around. https://english.dnt.no/the-norwegian-mountain-code/

My impression is that the main obstacle to the game is Jason's belief that griefing benefits the game. It will never be possible to stop griefing, but precisely because of that the game mechanics should discourage griefing as much as possible. Right now it feels like the game accommodates griefers. Even before the Rift, it did feel a bit like OHOL was a game for people too cowardly to play real pvp games...

Spoonwood does have a point: If before the Rift we were discouraged from attempting to be reborn in the same place, why is the Rift world now so small that we can easily navigate back to whatever town we want to live in? It does seem like two different game philosophies are at play, and that loosening the restrictions regarding player choice could have made the pre-Rift worlds more enjoyable for more players.

At least I can see the value in testing it. Just as I can see the value in testing the Rift as a concept.

People have different ideas of what interesting is. Some like to /die until they find the best place for them to live. I almost always play the life I'm given, because to me what is interesting is being born into different kinds of environments and making the best of the situation.

In a Rift world, we are bound to meet strangers in every life. I would find it more interesting if in some lives it was just me and my little family, far away from everyone, perhaps struggling to keep the line going because we knew that if the last girl dies, the whole city is lost. While in other lives, the opposite is true, there are so many different families present that we know that even if our family dies out, the town will continue.

I find it more interesting not knowing whether I'll be born to an Eve in the wilderness who has to start from scratch, or to a mother who stumbles upon an old town and decides to bring it back, or in a late game civilization where I have time to learn something new or just waste my time...

My impression was that before the Rift, the reason people didn't come together was not because they couldn't find each other. For example, in one town, someone was killing all Eves to protect the city. There seemed to be an Eve spawning point nearby. We didn't need the Rift to bring us closer together, we had the Eve spiral and a network of roads. Cars and aircrafts.

The reason families didn't meet up seemed to be purely an evaluation of game mechanics vs chance of survival - in other words a question of people's experience with griefing.

If the ability to make peace existed in the pre-rift worlds, my hunch is there would have been a lot more multi-family towns.

As for arcs, towns were dying out before the Rift as well, from lack of iron or oil. There might not have been a world arc, but there certainly seemed to be town arcs.

And yes, pre-Rift I did have lives where I spent my entire adulthood on horseback and only finding traces of people passing through the area, but no living soul. Some might hate those kinds of lives, but I valued them for being different. Call it the joy of exploring.

Yay!

The game is not primarily built with pvp in mind. If you want to play a game where raiding isn't easy, you need to find a game where the main point of the game is to raid and protect against raiding.

In OHOL, griefing is far easier than keeping your family alive. The moment you decide to try to keep your children alive, you're at a disadvantage compared to those who don't care about their kids.

Fences don't help because griefers can be born inside or outside. So a game where raiding is hard is a game where griefers can't be born into your midst.

I was in a town recently where multiple families resided. Someone started killing others with a war sword. How was a person born inside that town supposed to know which strangers to keep out of town, and which to allow to stay inside? The game interface doesn't even show which families your family is at peace with, except in the moment it happens.

No, the problem is not that people "don't learn" how to deal with griefers. The problem is that griefing is seen by the developer as a main feature of creating tension and excitement in the game, instead of being dealt with for what it is: This game's biggest weakness.

Or, just gently let the developer know that even though the game was not perfect before, with the recent updates it seems less enjoyable than ever.