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a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building

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#1 2023-07-12 20:42:05

forman
Member
Registered: 2021-04-24
Posts: 201

Should Be Able To Choose Birth Family (from a list)

People want to play where they want to play.

Inhibiting this (outside of the curse system) is not at all helpful to the game.

It's just another obstacle.

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#2 2023-07-22 10:12:07

thecolorgreen
Member
Registered: 2023-07-09
Posts: 6

Re: Should Be Able To Choose Birth Family (from a list)

bro just /die til you get there, there's only like four fams at any given moment

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#3 2023-07-22 11:32:29

Lunargrl2003
Member
Registered: 2023-07-22
Posts: 9

Re: Should Be Able To Choose Birth Family (from a list)

can be annoying to /die because it tanks your score. if you do it too many times in a row. i know some don't care about genescore. however, i like to keep mine at a higher number so i don't have to eat as often and have extra pips.

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#4 2023-07-22 12:04:05

Shady
Banned
Registered: 2023-07-04
Posts: 113

Re: Should Be Able To Choose Birth Family (from a list)

Here is why that's an issue, very easy way to kill families by mistake and ruins the system of being born anywhere anytime no matter the situation. I personally don't even like the /die system, it gives people too much control of where they are born.


I am Shady, I love exploring the internet.

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#5 2023-07-22 12:52:34

Strilar
Member
Registered: 2018-05-10
Posts: 48

Re: Should Be Able To Choose Birth Family (from a list)

As someone who hates the /die command i'll play devil's advocate here...

I think choosing the condition's of your birth goes against the spirit of this game, and Jason has explained this many times including a well detailed short version here:

Jason wrote:

This game is supposed to be about a bunch of different things: the deep mystery of a trans-generational civilization (who built all this, and why?), being a small part of something much bigger than yourself, the philosophical concept of the veil of ignorance (where you can't control or predict what situation you are born into), and trying to get as close as possible to what death might actually feel like (saying goodbye forever to the people that you have grown to love).

The initial design of the game tied all of these concepts together nicely. You are born to a randomly-chosen mother somewhere in the world, the next step in a long lineage of other players going back into time immemorial. You pick up where your ancestors left off, making contributions and improvements in the little time you have. You have babies in the form of other players who are themselves randomly assigned to you as their mother. And at the end of your hour-long life, you say goodbye to all of this in a very real way, because if you get born again, it will be to a different mother in a completely different situation.

After a long time he decided to create an exception to this in the "Legacy Chain" update allowing you to be reborn back in the same family if:
a) You need to manage to die of old age (this is a good thing as griefer's are often caught and killed before they reach 60)
b) You need to still have descendants alive (encouraging you to care for your family and not just about yourself)

We don't get to choose our parents, our sex, our skin tone, our country, if we're born in a rich or poor family etc IRL, OHOL attempts to emulate this by also trying to offer a different and unique experience each time you click to be born again.

In my opinion, players already over abuse /die command, and it's been used for griefing in many ways, either to be try to be born near somewhere they want to grief or to litter the place with corpses... i've had twins or triplets being born repeatedly and /dying right away filling the nursery with so many corpses, we couldn't even drop an object on the ground to pick our babies, i've adressed several problems about /die in my other post if you have the patience to read it, so i won't repeat myself here.

I'll add that being able to cheat this system undermines the reasons a) and b) above, allowing players to just try to respawn where they want to grief (we had great examples of this last night) or for players to just keep building their own project (like a whole building on their own without interacting with other players) through several hours in a row turning the game into "many hours, effectively one life"

Lunargrl2003 wrote:

can be annoying to /die because it tanks your score. if you do it too many times in a row. i know some don't care about genescore. however, i like to keep mine at a higher number so i don't have to eat as often and have extra pips.

With all due respect, but often when i see people speak in favor of changing the system the arguments i see are focused on their own self-interests. What about the others? This is a community/cooperative/multiplayer game. Being born to another player is something that affects them too, it's a two-way relationship... many times i've been happy to have a kid just so he would /die on my arms, many new players joining the game keep wondering what they did wrong to have a "miscarriage", if you can choose the parent(family) you want, or /die until you roll female, why can't the parent choose the kid they want? what if i would like a male son so they can go to another city to trade a resource we need? (since females usually stay in city)

In short (lol!), don't think just about what you want/care, but think how that affects other players too.

So my vote remains that players should be penalized for using /die command and if a player uses it in a family, then they shouldn't be allowed to be reborn again in that same family (they already chose they don't want to be born there anyway)

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#6 2023-07-22 13:43:20

Lunargrl2003
Member
Registered: 2023-07-22
Posts: 9

Re: Should Be Able To Choose Birth Family (from a list)

i agree with you for the most part. you reminded me of some points. however, i still think /die is good for certain things. some just want to play a diff fam, some want to play a certain race to get race specific things done, some just don't want to be in an eve fam and some don't want to be in a rich fam.

i don't usually die unless i want to play a specific role. people should have choice, but for those who don't that's fine. i do find it sad when my noob family members hold their baby bones and say 'my baby!'. i try and comfort them, and i let them know that another baby will be born.

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#7 2023-07-22 14:27:05

Strilar
Member
Registered: 2018-05-10
Posts: 48

Re: Should Be Able To Choose Birth Family (from a list)

Lunargrl2003 wrote:

i agree with you for the most part. you reminded me of some points. however, i still think /die is good for certain things. some just want to play a diff fam, some want to play a certain race to get race specific things done, some just don't want to be in an eve fam and some don't want to be in a rich fam.

As much as i dislike the /die command, i do understand why it exists, so i'm not saying it should be removed or anything.
We shouldn't force a player to play for one hour in a life they don't want to, if a player wants to be ginger, to try to learn and practice oil, that's fine... but there should be a trade-off, if you want things "your way" then there should be an associated cost to it, right now, that's a penalty to the genetic score for putting your preferences ahead of the family, since every time you /die you penalize them with one less family member.

If there is no "cost" may as well be a character creation screen where you can choose your skin color, family, sex, and even your face, as removing the cost would just allow players to keep suiciding until they have exactly all the conditions they want, which as stated previously, goes against the philosophy of the game which is about adapting to the conditions you were born in.

And i would like to repeat two requests about /die:
1) If a player chooses to /die in a family, they shouldn't be born again as a kid from anyone with the same family name
(thus we respect player choice of not wanting to be there, and we don't grief families with many SID babies from just a single player)
2) SID baby skeletons should disappear after 10sec on the ground and not 2min
(this avoid nurseries, kitchens and other work places from being cluttered with many dead bodies that for all intents and purposes never were born in the first place)

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#8 2023-07-22 23:45:33

forman
Member
Registered: 2021-04-24
Posts: 201

Re: Should Be Able To Choose Birth Family (from a list)

As a player who has sunk in 1000s of hours at this point, I will say there are MANY reasons to not want to play in a particular town.

To be honest, I don't much like playing in any town unless its gen1 maybe gen3-4.

The main reason is that they are so frequently designed poorly.
Forcing someone to play in a particular town is essentially forcing them to clean up your mess.
I don't want to live in your mess, I don't want clean up your mess.

I would rather eve then deal with other people's messes. Even if that means playing on a solo server.

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#9 2023-07-24 16:22:11

Strilar
Member
Registered: 2018-05-10
Posts: 48

Re: Should Be Able To Choose Birth Family (from a list)

forman wrote:

As a player who has sunk in 1000s of hours at this point, I will say there are MANY reasons to not want to play in a particular town.

To be honest, I don't much like playing in any town unless its gen1 maybe gen3-4.

The main reason is that they are so frequently designed poorly.
Forcing someone to play in a particular town is essentially forcing them to clean up your mess.
I don't want to live in your mess, I don't want clean up your mess.

I would rather eve then deal with other people's messes. Even if that means playing on a solo server.

As i said before... whenever i see people speak in favor of changing the system the arguments are only focused on their own self-interests and not in how it affect others.  If you want things "your way" then there should be an associated cost to it.

Things may be designed poorly... in your opinion, still the whole village worked on it and they were happy with it. Noone gets to decide alone how something should be built... communicate with others in game. I've expanded nurseries, changed locations of smith, relocated graveyards and even built whole new rooms for storage because i spoke with nice people and we worked as a team to make it happen in a single life, i didn't do it alone through "three hours, three lives" in the same village.

Btw...If you want to play solo, you can do so by doing tutorial again, after that you get the solo challenge, no need for a server just for that.
But if people just want to play solo or only as eves, i wonder why they want to play on a multiplayer game focused on family, parenting and civilization building.

And honestly, i kinda wish "curse my baby" was still an option, because of wasting so much time getting four or five babies that just keep /dying in my arms, usually being the same player trying to be born in their own conditions. At some points it was unbearable and felt like griefing filling the whole place with baby corpses as i've mentioned already in other threads, so yeah i managed to grab one of the babies, name it and cursed that name so it wouldn't be born there again, not happy about it, but if you don't want to play with me, then i don't want to play with you.

Last edited by Strilar (2023-07-24 16:22:49)

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#10 2023-07-24 16:43:45

fug
Moderator
Registered: 2019-08-21
Posts: 1,130

Re: Should Be Able To Choose Birth Family (from a list)

>wasting babies

That's not how that works. You are getting a cooldown refresh on your ability to have babies by them using the command instead of just running off into the wilderness to die instead.

We were literally so close to originally getting a selector screen to pick where players went to reduce the amounts of sids and babies dying but instead we got the life token system which has classically always sucked. Too few lives and suddenly new players just spent 20 dollars to be unable to play the game. Too many tokens and people just spam the command because there's no real feedback to tell you if you're blocked out of a town due to curses, lack of fertiles, or just bad luck which causes more /die.

A better system would just be a mix of the two. High token cost for Eve (idk 20, that way it requires over three hours to force your Eve spawn) medium cost for a certain family (10 which means if you die young you're gonna be net negative, and living to old age should put you back into it.)

The game does not function without veteran players going to ginger family for example to keep the other families able to keep farming or running. Absolutely ridiculous to have people out here wanting to curse the players who keep the game running smooth for the new players.


Worlds oldest SID baby.

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#11 2023-07-24 17:08:43

squishysquid
Member
Registered: 2023-01-16
Posts: 23

Re: Should Be Able To Choose Birth Family (from a list)

forman wrote:

As a player who has sunk in 1000s of hours at this point, I will say there are MANY reasons to not want to play in a particular town.

To be honest, I don't much like playing in any town unless its gen1 maybe gen3-4.

The main reason is that they are so frequently designed poorly.
Forcing someone to play in a particular town is essentially forcing them to clean up your mess.
I don't want to live in your mess, I don't want clean up your mess.

I would rather eve then deal with other people's messes. Even if that means playing on a solo server.


with everything destructable now, you really probably could just change any town you want to prefered template.

kind of think it'd end with everyone picking ginger because they heard that's important without knowing why though.

Last edited by squishysquid (2023-07-24 17:11:12)

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#12 2023-07-24 18:11:11

Strilar
Member
Registered: 2018-05-10
Posts: 48

Re: Should Be Able To Choose Birth Family (from a list)

fug wrote:

>wasting babies
That's not how that works. You are getting a cooldown refresh on your ability to have babies by them using the command instead of just running off into the wilderness to die instead.

Don't misquote people please, no one ever used the sentence "wasting babies", i said wasting time stopping everything and picking four or five babies in a row just to have them die in my arms because of the problems i already reported several times.

And as i keep saying apparently there is no cooldown on ability to have babies, every day i get a baby born, i pick them up, and before i have the chance to give them a name by saying "you are..." another one is born

fug wrote:

We were literally so close to originally getting a selector screen to pick where players went to reduce the amounts of sids and babies dying but instead we got the life token system which has classically always sucked. Too few lives and suddenly new players just spent 20 dollars to be unable to play the game. Too many tokens and people just spam the command because there's no real feedback to tell you if you're blocked out of a town due to curses, lack of fertiles, or just bad luck which causes more /die.

A better system would just be a mix of the two. High token cost for Eve (idk 20, that way it requires over three hours to force your Eve spawn) medium cost for a certain family (10 which means if you die young you're gonna be net negative, and living to old age should put you back into it.)

The problems you mention here  are a valid point and should be addressed but your solution defeats the intent and purpose of the game as stated by the designer.

fug wrote:

The game does not function without veteran players going to ginger family for example to keep the other families able to keep farming or running.

Because of oil? This is a bold statement, we need resources from all biomes to help each other. You can't get oil from snow without rubber and you can't get rubber without latex from jungle and sulphur from desert, which i believe it's by design so all families need each other to advance civilization.

You can teach new players and help them instead of just solving the problems for them, this is actually one of the reasons why some veterans gatekeep new players, because they "know best" and do everything on their own, so other players never have a chance to try to upgrade a well or mine and learn how to solve village problems, since veterans are always doing it for them. Because they know "properly designed villages", new players rarely get a chance to make any buildings, and so on. There's many ways we can help each other besides just spamming /die until you get ginger so you can go extract oil.

fug wrote:

Absolutely ridiculous to have people out here wanting to curse the players who keep the game running smooth for the new players.

Another bold statement, you don't know why they are spamming /die and neither do i, they may be a player wanting to be born ginger to help others like you said, they may be a griefer wanting to be born near where they want to cause trouble, or they may be doing that because "they don't want to clean other's mess and prefer to play alone" like stated before.

Filling nursery with corpses and have new players keep having people dying in their arms and wondering what they did wrong is not a good thing, and i only ever cursed after being still for about 5 minutes because of baby boom spam. I never curse someone who used /die once.

Here's my suggestion to help address this:

If a player uses /die in a family then they shouldn't be allowed to be born in that same family name again, they obviously don't want to be born there and the family is only suffering from a spam of SID babies, if you cycle through all available families then you're born as an Eve, at the COST of having spent several "lives" each time you /died and reducing your genetic score (if you want to play alone then you're not a good fit to inherit leader or properties anyway)

squishysquid wrote:

kind of think it'd end with everyone picking ginger because they heard that's important without knowing why though.

This is another great argument why selecting where to be born may be a bad idea, population should be scattered and balanced among all tribes (including whites) they are all useful and important in their own way, so encouraging people to just pick a family (gingers for example) or only having veterans doing so doesn't seem like a good thing for the game.

Last edited by Strilar (2023-07-25 02:13:24)

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#13 2023-07-25 01:20:37

Lunargrl2003
Member
Registered: 2023-07-22
Posts: 9

Re: Should Be Able To Choose Birth Family (from a list)

Strilar, I think you need to remember that if we have runner babies. They all end up killing our genescore and wasting our time too. That is likely what would happen if we lost the /die command. Back in the early days of OHOL runner babies were rampant and I'm sure that aided in Jason making /die and the leaderboard. He wanted us to see how precious life really was, whilst allowing us to have choice.

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#14 2023-07-25 02:12:56

Strilar
Member
Registered: 2018-05-10
Posts: 48

Re: Should Be Able To Choose Birth Family (from a list)

I never at any point said that the /die command should be removed as you can see by my previous statement:

Strilar wrote:

As much as i dislike the /die command, i do understand why it exists, so i'm not saying it should be removed or anything.

Please read my suggestion about this problem in my previous post, it has nothing to do with losing the /die command.
I even marked it in bold so it would be easier to see and read for those who tend to skip posts with a lot of text.

Don't think anything about that would cause runner babies either, as it would satisfy both sides.

Example:
Player is born in the jungle family, they use /die because they want to play in ginger family. They can't be born again in that jungle family, which is their wish and jungle family isn't harassed with one player being born there over and over again, causing the player to /die many times leaving several corpses and forcing people to stop what they are doing to grab a baby four or five times because he keeps spawning there and dying in their arms.
Maybe he spawns in the desert family, he /dies again, leaving just one corpse and can't be born in desert family again...

Assuming there's only one of each four specialist families at the moment, at max it would cost the player 3 lives using /die to spawn where they wanted, instead of costing them many more lives because they keep respawning to the same mom they didn't wanted to be with. How is this not a win-win for both sides?

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