A rough, incomplete sketch for makng family survival more meaningful

DestinyCall · 2019-04-03 05:36:25

Jason, I think you are looking at the problem backwards. You look at OHOL in its current state and think "Where is the drama? Where is the meaning? Where is the conflict? If people really cared about their families, they would fight and die to defend them. There should be wars. There should be great struggles!" But the problem is NOT a lack of conflict. If you want the game to be more meaningful, you don't need to create artificial conflicts between neighboring lineages to generate drama. That kind of forced setup feels empty and fake. The stuff that really matters happens and has a strong emotional impact develops organically as players play with the sandbox and build their own little sand castles ... only to have them fall over or get stepped on or grow to epic proportions. All of those outcomes are dramatic and exciting and interesting in their own ways. You don't make the stories more dramatic by assigning people to roles or forcing conflicts to arise artificially, but rather by adding depth and value to the interactions between individual players and between the players and their environment.

Instead of looking for ways to inspire one family to fight another family, think about the problem with trade. Trade is a cooperative activity that encourages interactions between different groups. But it is also a competitive behavior - in order to have trade, you must have something that someone else wants or needs. You must be willing to share with them ... but NOT willing to give your goods away for free. I think you need to take some time to think about how you could change the OHOL world to allow trade to become a reality. Maybe even a necessity beyond a certain point. Ideally, certain high tech level goods should be locked behind rare resources. Things that require significant time and resource investment but provide your village/lineage with substantial benefits. Right now, resources are too random and too dispersed. There is no sense of regionalism because one region of the game is effectively the same as any other. The patchwork randomization allows villages to scatter across the map, more or less equally, but it also means that every successful village is surrounded by every possible resource it might need. There is no significant shortages that could be reasonable alleviated by trade with another village. No gaps that a different village might be able to fill. No luxury goods or regional specialties that they could sell to tourists.

I could care less if we ever gets wars or large-scale conflict between villages, but I would LOVE to get meaningful trade between neighboring settlements.

Dodge · 2019-04-03 08:10:46

You get assigned a random letter (or number) A for example, you spawn in lineage A, if you meet other people in another lineage (maybe only fertile and opposite sex) with other letter it gets added to your letters (potential places to spawn), if you die before 14 or die by any way other than starvation all your letters get erased and you get a new one assigned (next spawn in a random village plus maybe current letters unavailable for some time to avoid going places you've already been to)

Maybe the letters could be resetted each life and depend only on the life you lived previously, for example in current life you visit lineage B so on your next life you can spawn at lineage A and B but if in this life you only stay in your lineage and dont meet anyone from other lineage then on next life you can only spawn in the same lineage

With this we could imagine a scenario where last girl of village travels with remaining members of family to try to find another town to save the lineage.

Maybe dying before 14 and from other ways than starvation would only remove one letter from you so there is an actual incentive to have more than one lineage living together but it would also potentially "steal" people from you current lineage if someone else from other lineage stays in village.

It should both have advantages and disadvantages to have different lineages in the same place
(If you have multiple letters you can switch places without losing your letters using /die)

This could make us care about family since if they die they wont come back to village (unless death by starvation after 14) and if they survive they will be able to continue lineage

Tbh it would still be more about the village and not the actual lineage

For example if the whole lineage immigrates to a far away town and previous town is lost, i get spawned in new place but i dont like it and impossible to find other place i liked, why do i still care about the lineage?

It would still makes us care more that the lineage is doing good than the current system but only because we like the place where the lineage is.

Maybe some recipes could be locked depending on the generation you are in (brain development and generational adaptation to technologie) so a gen 0-10 couldnt make a water pump for example and finding people from other villages could be a matter of life or death.

This could make progression a lot more challenging and give an incentive for trade, theft or war.

This village has a water pump or someone that knows how to make one, what do we do? Do we steal ressources from them so we can survive until we make it, do we trade ressources in exchange of someone building the pump but maybe they will refuse or not honor the agreement or do we invade their village and use their technologie.

Taking a step further when someone dies the knowledge could die with them or get passed on

You have a limited amount of recipes you can learn in a life but you know all the recipes your ancestors knew, if you die before old age (or maybe before you are old a certain age) your recipes you learned (making the object not the actual recipes since game couldnt know which recipes you want to learn) in current life are lost, if you die old, recipes are added to all the new born babies from next generation

This would promote specialization and communication since those learning points would be actual precious ressources and learning the same things in same generation would be a waste.

Basically the idea is to have knowledge and technological advancement as part of ressources that could be traded, fought over or used inneficiently with fatal consequences due to lack of communication.

JonySky · 2019-04-03 08:57:54

Jk Howling wrote:

I agree with Twisted on this one. One of the main premises of the game is the fact that you never know where you'll end up. Every life is different, unique, special. Some lives are better than others, but that's part of the game. And while some people would prefer to stick to the same town for hours at a time, others wouldn't.
This would also enable griefers to spawn into the same town over and over with no repercussions- something that the lineage/area bans helped prevent when they were implemented.

I think, if you did implement family locks, you'd have to be able to balance it out. Return lineage bans rather than area bans, and have murders and SIDS continue to lineage ban. This would enable us to get rid of griefers from the lineage, and for players to have the option of opting out of that family.
I do think it still has too many disadvantages, however.

As for the burial returns.. I love this idea. It'd be a great way to enable us to return to a life we enjoy, without being able to truly abuse it. The idea that it'd be out of our control, and in the hands of our family, seems to fit this game perfectly. It reminds me a bit of the "blessing" concept that cropped up when curses rolled around- a way for other players to reward someone, as well as a way for us to return to a scenario we enjoyed.

I think exactly the same +1

JonySky · 2019-04-03 10:15:40

I also totally agree with what DestinyCall says,
And as I said in the other post about Jason's wars ... We need to create families !!!

The citizens of OHOL look like robots in an assembly line, there is no family, there are no family ties !! ...

When I started playing this game, the mothers acted more like a mother ... I felt that the other player was really getting involved with his baby
lately 80% of times I was born ... I am thrown into the fire in a room full of people and I never see my mother again ...

I try to give a piece of clothing to my children to create a special bond with them ... but it's not enough ...

and something similar happens with the skeletons of people (hated and loved) always left without caring anyone!
I've even seen posts in this forum that recommend not dying in a bakery or a blacksmith shop so you do not have to lift the bones and throw them in another place so that "no bother anyone "

Without saying that, burying a dead person bothers many people because they ruin a shovel!

also as they have said in the other post, sometimes you come across graves of people who will never know what you did, or who you were ... it's just a gravestone under a tree

Some time ago I proposed creating photo cameras ... to create permanent photos with the name below ... or at least that you can write with the current pencil already created to place the name or the annotation that one wishes for future generations

Or at least be able to mark a grave as "EVE"

It would be interesting that the tree of generations on the web have more data, that you can see more information about how the family was after his death
It would also be good to have special family objects to be able to transmit to your children and maybe also the possibility of better identifying the members of your family (tattoos, brands, etc ...)

In short ... it is not necessary to change the mechanics of births and rebirths
I do not want to be born again and again in the same family
that is the beauty of this game ... new life, new family, new challenges !!

If the game is about families
and Jason wants to create families that exist for many generations
it is necessary to create mechanics that allow us to know more about the lives of our ancestors
and about those around us (the living and the dead)

something that tells us what your great-great-grandmother did
or the epic journey of Uncle Bob
or when your brother Tarr was a serial killer

right now these family stories are forgotten after 5 minutes ....
there are no mechanisms to preserve or explain those stories

ahh and writing them on a 10-word sheet is useless ... very few people read those notes, there's no time for that.

that's why griefers are annoying, that's why murderers are not welcome in OHOL, because they only bother the work of "robots" (citizens)
they interrupt the creator of tools, or the one who produces compost, or the one who plants carrots ... and they do not contribute anything special ...
your stories will be lost after 5 minutes of chaos ...

Last edited by JonySky (2019-04-03 10:46:48)

Elsayal · 2019-04-03 11:51:30

jasonrohrer wrote:

if you KNOW how to refine uranium, but you're in the wrong family, does it just not work if you try it? Does it not even show up in your crafting hints? How do you know you are not able to do it? Wouldn't it be frustrating?

The simplest implementation of this could be game-wide, and even broader than just a few special things. What if the entire crafting tree was "filtered" uniquely for each family? These guys can make tinder, but can't make a hatchet. These other guys can make a hatchet, but not tinder. These guys can smelt iron, but not copper. These other guys can do copper and zinc, but not iron.
Only the things that your family can actually do would show up in your hints, and only those things would actually work.

(In general, I've avoided this kind of "forced specialization" because I can imagine it being frustrating.... if you "know" how to fish, but your character doesn't know how to fish, and must observe someone else fishing each life, in order to "learn" it each life... would just be tedious. Going through the motions: "Show me how to fish (again)" This has been suggested many times, by many people, including by the great Richard Garfield himself.... but I have very strong doubts about this approach.)

What if you can make specialist items, but only if you "learn" it ?

Just by looking at someone doing something in a certain radius, you learn it, and you can then do the same in a better way. I guess that in that case, the elder will try to "teach" things more often, creating more bonds in the family. If you add a specific look to it (like glowing golden or something) people should be encouraged to do it.
And maybe you can go further on, with a second or a third stage of specification, if someone with stage 1 of specialty show it to you.

So a kind of a long term culture may appear that way.

BlueDiamondAvatar · 2019-04-03 14:11:01

jasonrohrer wrote:

I'm hesitant to make the max life longer than 60 minutes. The game does what it says on the tin. 2HOL is boring, to me. It's just too long. I could make it shorter, by default, and then family lines living longer could "unlock" full lifetimes closer to 60. So, 40 is the default, and after your family lives 24 hours, it goes up to 50. And then at 48 hours, it goes up to 60. But 40 itself is "long enough." I'm not sure the extra time really matters, or is a strong enough incentive.

FWIW, it would be a strong incentive for me, however you set it up. You might want to add something that indicates how long the player will live, so folks don't get too surprised by it.

What if you centered the average life length on 60 instead of making it the maximum, Eve lives would live to 40, and every ten or twenty generations it goes up another 5, until you get to a maximum of 80. This would reflect the actual variation we've seen in real life, too.

jasonrohrer wrote:

The other boons things are interesting.... though I wonder how it would work in an elegant, flexible way. I mean, if you KNOW how to refine uranium, but you're in the wrong family, does it just not work if you try it? Does it not even show up in your crafting hints? How do you know you are not able to do it? Wouldn't it be frustrating?
The simplest implementation of this could be game-wide, and even broader than just a few special things. What if the entire crafting tree was "filtered" uniquely for each family? These guys can make tinder, but can't make a hatchet. These other guys can make a hatchet, but not tinder. These guys can smelt iron, but not copper. These other guys can do copper and zinc, but not iron.
Only the things that your family can actually do would show up in your hints, and only those things would actually work.

Going back to the wonders idea as how you create the boon - if there's a special object that is used to make uranium, then it'll be obvious that you can't make uranium unless you have that special object. The new game mechanic is also fairly obvious - a server check that keeps people from completing the last step to make a uranium production chamber, if one has already been made.

For earlier techs, maybe the wonder or boon is something that makes early stage startup easier, but doesn't keep other families from doing it. No eve can build a civilization without kindling, but what if there's a wondrous hatchet (or a family) that produces a stack of two kindling everytime it's used on a branch. The family that makes the only copy of that on the server would also be better at pioneering new settlements for the rest of its existence.

Tying the unique tech items to families could be accomplished with some of the ideas talked about - making objects recognize if the person wielding them is a descendant of someone who made it or not, and glow red if held by outsiders. You could take it to an extreme, and make wonder items not work if the person isn't a descendant.

pein · 2019-04-03 14:28:56

antking:]# wrote:

pien I like your idea but how about new families? so if the two lowest scores are being dropped then when they come back they will have an obvious disadvantage compared to more advanced cities.... so what I am seeing that their would be 8 developed cities and 2 all ways eves....
oh and I think that kill enemy members of another family should give points!
and have some objects like a treaty that do the same.... to balance out war and peace.
(make the map smaller)

ok, let me rework a bit:
10 eves spawn in
this blocks eve spawn for 30 min
the server would be Era based, some sort of Years could be implemented, you can be born in end of era, or middle, ofc.
a specific item, like a family marker, which needs a certain action in each era
to prove you got a hammer, you need to place a steel on the altar
to prove you got a shovel, you need to place a stump on altar
to prove you got sheep you put a dug there
to prove you got water, you place a bucket of water
place all the tools there (also functions as storage)

top 2 gets no lineage bans and higher baby count, 6 gets reduced bans, lowest 2 like now, either new players who never been anywhere that era
now 2 more slots open for eves, they need to reach the previous score others did
im not worried, it's not really a disadvantage, im a savior of towns all day, every family has the same problem, no tools, no pen, no carts etc.
so a gen 7 can be on a stage of a gen 3 cause they eat and raise kids and survive but they got no long term plans, no way to sustain water and soil, tools

the eve spans could be different after the first 10 lineages, they spawn near the existing lineage, some sort of strengthening or killing them off by having more babies than the other
as you seen most eves die out without kids so naturally some teams fall off

this teams would be color coded so each color could be taken only once
if blue team dies, next eve becomes blue team
she has exactly 26 min to convince girls to stay so the way i see it, there would be droppings more often
the top lineages last anyway, when you got buildings and nice things, people are more motivated to stay and help

i don't have enough stats on how many eves we need, possibly from every 60 eves only like 5-6 survives
you can check your stdout for ongoing families
generally is max 3 big ones and some went nameless, which also makes some of them suicide

i don't think we need so many eves, right now area ban kills big cities
it should kill small cities by placing others in their area
they either find each other and join forces, or kill each other to gain strength, or adopt their girls and assimilate them
yes, if you start later, you need to reach the checkpoints others had before you
if they started 30 min earlier and did a score of 2000 points
you need to do 2000 points before the end of the era
they would have a slight advantage cause they started before you, but if your points are equal or better than theirs at same stage you wouldn't be considered weak
so maybe this tier list would only check for relative score and that controls the area bans
if you doing well compared to other teams at same stage, your people can return
the absolute score controls the fertility
if a town does a lot of work, they get more babies
more people doesn't often means more work done

take an example of Radish town
we had 2 females, other one killed our mom, so my sis killed her, she was last girl
we could afford 30 people, yet we were 2 of us
it been 20 min until we got 1 girl kid to stay, my sis was almost old when she had 1 more kid then 2 twin girls
1 hour later Radish town was back in business with 40-50 people
it was chill for me, cleaning the town, making a cistern near newcommen, preparing for baby invasion
but i could see that someone else would have kill my sister for killing the other girl then we die out, or those girls wont stay or they are newbees who die in minutes and the town is dead, we hit a huge bottleneck cause of the area ban, not because we had no food (we had no water at the end but i think the cistern helped them make some)

this could be a way to save those camps where the girls die out, they would get close by eve spawns
so they can go out and help them rather than suicide cause the family is dead
if they haven't managed to make an axe in 10 generations, another family spawns near them, pressuring them to either move or improve their score
each area would be same team so compatible, each other area would be different color team so kind of enemies, you cant adopt their girls, they score points for themselves not for you but they are further so harder to find them

happynova · 2019-04-03 16:06:45

jasonrohrer wrote:

I'm hesitant to make the max life longer than 60 minutes. The game does what it says on the tin. 2HOL is boring, to me. It's just too long. I could make it shorter, by default, and then family lines living longer could "unlock" full lifetimes closer to 60. So, 40 is the default, and after your family lives 24 hours, it goes up to 50. And then at 48 hours, it goes up to 60. But 40 itself is "long enough." I'm not sure the extra time really matters, or is a strong enough incentive.

I myself am very firmly in favor of not changing lifespans, not just because there's something pleasant about the "what it says on the tin" aspect of things, but because one of the appeals of the game, for me, is the predictable time limit. If I've got an hour to spare before work, I know I can play one life. Well, maybe I'll want an hour and a half, to allow for possible false starts. But if I have one hour to spare, I know I'm okay hitting that "get reborn" button. If I'm not sure how long a given life might actually take, I'm going to do much less playing in those random spare hours.

As far as different people being able to do different tech things is concerned, I still kind of like the ideas I sort of mentioned on the other thread, where very widely scattered natural features might be necessary for certain things -- maybe Feature A lets you do one set of things and Feature B lets you do something else, but you never find them too near each other -- and where using them to progress up one branch of the tech tree maybe locks you out of a different branch. There'd for sure be some wrinkles to be worked out with that, but it might be an interesting approach. It would certainly be a more natural way of limiting things than, "Sorry, the Smith family just isn't allowed to do Thing X." I think ideally, you want as much of how things work as possible to feel like it comes out of the world itself.

Amon · 2019-04-03 16:59:00

Yes i think encouraging players to do things from ease (ie it is native in the area ad least cumbersome to do) is better at diversification than handfisting diversity.

futurebird · 2019-04-03 17:22:19

I like the one hour limit too. It gives you time to reflect and not get caught in a kind of daze of playing some game for hours and hours. You stop. Maybe another life? maybe not.

DestinyCall · 2019-04-03 17:35:10

happynova wrote:

jasonrohrer wrote:
I'm hesitant to make the max life longer than 60 minutes. The game does what it says on the tin. 2HOL is boring, to me. It's just too long. I could make it shorter, by default, and then family lines living longer could "unlock" full lifetimes closer to 60. So, 40 is the default, and after your family lives 24 hours, it goes up to 50. And then at 48 hours, it goes up to 60. But 40 itself is "long enough." I'm not sure the extra time really matters, or is a strong enough incentive.
I myself am very firmly in favor of not changing lifespans, not just because there's something pleasant about the "what it says on the tin" aspect of things, but because one of the appeals of the game, for me, is the predictable time limit. If I've got an hour to spare before work, I know I can play one life. Well, maybe I'll want an hour and a half, to allow for possible false starts. But if I have one hour to spare, I know I'm okay hitting that "get reborn" button. If I'm not sure how long a given life might actually take, I'm going to do much less playing in those random spare hours.

I strongly agree. It is suppose to be One Hour One Life, not 45 min One life or An Hour and a Half One Life. If the idea is to allow you to live longer in a certain town, I'd rather see the ability to chain back to the same lineage one or two times, since I'd love the ability to live on a few times in the same town so I could tackle a multi-generational project or two. But there'd need to be cap to prevent people from hanging on forever. Personally, I'd love to see it implemented that if you die at 55+ you will be reborn as a child of your nearest fertile relative. If there are no fertile women (too young, too old, too male), then you will be sent somewhere else. But otherwise, if you make it to old age before kicking the bucket, you get a second run through the same family. You can /die (or die before 55) if you would rather go somewhere else in your next life. You can do this twice for a total of 3 hours lived in the same town. For each additional life you live in that lineage, your lineage ban is extended. So if you live one life, you get the normal lineage ban. Two lives in the same town, you get a double-length ban. Three lives lived back-to-back and your lineage ban is three times as long. So you are trading out potentially seeing the town at some future point for investing more time in the same town right now. If you do a good job, it might last long enough for you to come back and see it again.

happynova wrote:

As far as different people being able to do different tech things is concerned, I still kind of like the ideas I sort of mentioned on the other thread, where very widely scattered natural features might be necessary for certain things -- maybe Feature A lets you do one set of things and Feature B lets you do something else, but you never find them too near each other -- and where using them to progress up one branch of the tech tree maybe locks you out of a different branch. There'd for sure be some wrinkles to be worked out with that, but it might be an interesting approach. It would certainly be a more natural way of limiting things than, "Sorry, the Smith family just isn't allowed to do Thing X." I think ideally, you want as much of how things work as possible to feel like it comes out of the world itself.

I highly agree with this idea as well. I think regional diversity is a key change that could help stimulate trade and town specialization. Right now, all villages are essentially the same village with more or less equal access to all tech and resources. Ideally, there should be more branching of the tech tree - especially toward the upper end - depending on available resources. Think of a game like Civilization. Some cities will be located in an area that makes it ideal for industry and production while another city will be located at a spot that makes it into a vital trade hub. Yet another city might be positioned in such a way that it is able to produce massive amounts of food, enough to feed a huge population. Something similar should be possible in OHOL - with one village being located close to rich natural resources that stimulate its growth in a particular direction while a neighboring village might have a completely different set of resources available to it and a different specialization.

Amon · 2019-04-03 17:47:25

Returning to the village might help with better internal organisation.

jasonrohrer · 2019-04-03 18:01:33

I have thought about this (regional tech trees), but it's pretty difficult to pull off. It's hard enough to have one tech tree, let alone five. Even if you just think about walls... wood walls in the forest, adobe walls in the desert, snow walls in the arctic, stone walls in the mountains, mud walls in the swamp, bamboo walls in the jungle.

Yeah, it would be cool. But it would also take forever.

And all those different kinds of walls would be necessary, because the only way it would work is if biomes were very large... so large that a complete survival tech tree was necessary in each biome. Whole sets of crops, etc., unique to each biome. Yikes.

The idea, of course, is that even higher tech would require ingredients from mutiple biomes instead of just one, which would motivate trade. But I still don't see that really happening. It would certainly motivate journeys, but probably not trade. Also, if the towns are close enough for trade, that means the biomes are close enough to travel between too.

I think the entire idea of "long distance trade" as a goal is misguided. It's just one kind of trade, and a very special, relatively modern type. Macro trade.

What about micro trade?

happynova · 2019-04-03 18:52:06

jasonrohrer wrote:

I think the entire idea of "long distance trade" as a goal is misguided. It's just one kind of trade, and a very special, relatively modern type. Macro trade.
What about micro trade?

I think people tend to focus on trade between towns because that's the only kind that seems like it could be easily made to make sense. There's absolutely no upside, in things as they stand, in me refusing to let someone have one of the bowls I've just fired until they give me a pie, or refusing to let them have the pie I just baked until they give me a bowl. That would clearly be to everyone's detriment. A town only works if everyone has what they need to do their jobs, and if the town stops working, everybody suffers. It's in my interest to make sure that the the baker has enough plates and the farmer has enough compost and the guy out collecting iron has a pie to put in his backpack. These people are part of the machine that's keeping me and my kids and my civilization alive and well.

I guess what you really want is to introduce the fruit of the tree of selfishness into this naturally self-organizing communist utopia, and you'd think that would be easy enough since it's the constant state of the real world, but I honestly don't know how you could do it, and I certainly don't know how you could do it in a way that doesn't feel like it's the hand of god trying to force people into doing something artificially.

I suppose currency might do it, since money kind of drives everybody crazy, but even if you invent coin-minting, there's still not a rational incentive to use it.

The idea of introducing some kind of natural disaster possibilities to put survival pressure on once a town reaches steady state flits through my mind, since people do get more selfish when famine strikes. But while that might make things interesting (and certainly more challenging), I still really doubt that it gets you trade.

DestinyCall · 2019-04-03 18:54:00

Although I would very much like diverse villages that can be self-sufficient within a single giant biome, I understand that would require a lot of extra work creating unique items and crafting formulas for every biome. And, ultimate, it probably won't make the villages "feel" different enough. Basically just re-skinning existing structures so a jungle village looks more tropical and a tundra village looks more snowy, but the crafting steps and requirements are essentially unchanged between the two biomes. That's a lot of work to put into making a bunch of art-assets when the end result is just more of the same, only in different environments. If the jungle villages grew different crops from the grasslands villages or the tundra villages survived by hunting seals while the prairie villages hunting buffalo for many of their early tools that would be more interesting ... but even more complex to implement and properly balance. It also wouldn't really generate trade, because each unique village type would still need to be self-sufficient within its own biome. A tundra village would not NEED a desert village to survive. The whole point would be that these villages could survive WITHOUT any access to another biome. I like the idea, but it isn't really addressing the right issue.

So again we are back at the original problem. Why bother trading if you already have everything you need?

My idea is centered around the idea of fixed location resources. Things that must be MADE in one place, but might be WANTED in some other fixed location. So, you have a diamond mine that can be worked by a miner to produce a few diamonds every five or ten minutes. A dedicated diamond miner could produce a lot of diamonds in an hour, but that would require him to spend his entire life in the mines, working to dig out the precious crystals. Meanwhile, the land around the diamond mind is cold and unforgiving. Not suitable for farming. So he can't produce his own food. However, several miles away, there is a wheat farmer. He lives in a prairie and spends his time growing a lot of wheat. Wheat grows very well in his valley and there's plentiful water thanks to the nearby swamp lands, so he is able to produce more wheat than he needs to feed his children. However, you can't eat raw wheat. Fortunately, there's a village nearby and the village has a bakery. The little old lady that runs the bakery has an arrangement with the wheat farmer to gather the wheat from his fields and another arrangement with the shepherd to gather the meat from his pastures. Then she makes these raw ingredients into tasty pies. The farmer and shepherd get a cut of her pies for their help and the rest of the pies are traded with other villagers who also contribute their work to the village community. Including the diamond miner who makes occasional trips back to the village to drop of diamonds and pick up baskets of pies that let him continue to do his chosen work, far away from the conveniences of the larger village.

You might call it "sharing" instead of "barter", but this kind of cooperative labor exchange is the core of meaningful trade between people. The development of "currency" is a relatively advanced economic construct. And even established values for individual items is fairly advanced - I mean, how do you place a fixed value on a mutton pie or a bar of iron? You can't eat the bar of iron, so if you are starving, the pie is worth way more to you personally. But you can't make a shovel out of a pie, so if you really need a shovel, the iron is obviously more valuable. I don't think you can expect people to carry out complex trade negotiations in OHOL. Talking is limited to fixed characters. Paper is hard to make. Signs are frustratingly labor intense. If I want to set-up a stand to sell my fresh-baked pies, I'll spend half my life just posting the prices on a billboard next to the locked boxes. Can you even make numbers? I haven't bothered with delving that deep into letter-making. I know you can't SAY numbers in chat, which is another serious impediment to active trading, especially when combined with the age-related text cap. I would need to wait until I was older to start selling burritos simply because I can't say "One burrito is three gooseberries" until I'm in my teens.

Honestly, I'm a little unclear on what you even mean by "micro trade". Trade between two people in a village is limited by the lack of personal inventory space and ownership. Until we have private houses or storage - somewhere to secure our possessions and a valid reason to do so, all trades inside the village are by necessity very open.

Amon · 2019-04-03 18:57:59

Macro trade was definitely a thing that happned in the olden days (touchstones tended to travel from one end of the world to another through multiple generations, and let's not talk about the buddha statue in a viking ruin) Long distance trade happned in the bronze age for example, however they happned in incriments with many towns made along the way (image town A, town B and between town AB that's mostly a trading hub). If there were transport options for multiple people and multiple goods, travel of entire families would in fact become much easier for people if they could go out and set up an advanced camp instantly, giving some space to more specialised communes within a city complex that don't require generations to fully take off.

For less local general trade and more local, well i don't think it'll be easy to implement since everyone will keep trading for efficiency. Well in a way, everyone is kind of sharing. Everyone does their part in the village and contributes to it, and the part they contribute gives them right to benefit from the other parts.

I mean the smith won't withold a hoe from the farmer if the farmer can't give him three pies because he knows if the farmer don't farm, the village will get disorderly(replace this with anything else important). The best villages are those that run smoothly like butter with least conflict and those will end up living the longest.
Maybe have some resources benefit from being REFINED and CONVERTED on the spot of acquisition, which then makes it far easier to return back to the village, but this would only work for long time exploitable resources. Which COULD possibly is my best guess form some more independant entities within a bloodline with their own space within a larger commune. Since there is actualyl a physical land barrier from one end to another, it's not as much of a mess of everyone is running everywhere and taking everywhere.
Iron veins at their current state don't cut it, they'd need to be upgraded long term to make it a necessity to build a small commune where you'd haul pie and soup ingredients for the workers and haul back some form of easily transportable iron pack for the town that's far better than just stacking baskets with iron ore.
Moe spots like that perhaps. quarries, yet give us quarries, give us all the flat rock and other stone debree. Or maybe also some large potter's fields where en masse clay is gathered. Why you'd want a kiln there to stack all those nice paltes n bowls should be obvious. Maybe it should require so much work it's an effor of an entire family unit. (branch of the bloodline)

The swiftfooted caravan master arrives at the forges, his cart empty. He inquires the head backsmith for tools/iron for his blacksmiths.

The head blacksmith matriarch of the family eyes his cart. Where is the pie she speaks before she promptly shuts and locks the door to the smithy.

What are the trader's options now?
He could've arrived with food, maybe he could've promised food. Or maybe he should bring back some warriors to retake the iron by force and reinstate another group there so the cycle resumes.
And what option do the forgers have? They need food, do they give in to the promise of food later or do they remain firm?

(But what prevents the smithing family from making their own food? No water, no ability to palce soil on badlands. hm.)

As for having regional variants...well I mean time by time, piece by piece. Lifestyle could be different so there doesen't need to be a way how to figure out how to force arable land on the snow biome, for example at least.

Last edited by Amon (2019-04-03 19:05:10)

Spoonwood · 2019-04-03 19:50:46

DestinyCall wrote:

Jason, I think you are looking at the problem backwards. You look at OHOL in its current state and think "Where is the drama? Where is the meaning? Where is the conflict? If people really cared about their families, they would fight and die to defend them. There should be wars. There should be great struggles!" But the problem is NOT a lack of conflict. If you want the game to be more meaningful, you don't need to create artificial conflicts between neighboring lineages to generate drama. That kind of forced setup feels empty and fake. The stuff that really matters happens and has a strong emotional impact develops organically as players play with the sandbox and build their own little sand castles ... only to have them fall over or get stepped on or grow to epic proportions. All of those outcomes are dramatic and exciting and interesting in their own ways. You don't make the stories more dramatic by assigning people to roles or forcing conflicts to arise artificially, but rather by adding depth and value to the interactions between individual players and between the players and their environment.

I think this correct and well-put.

Greep · 2019-04-03 20:14:56

Microtrade and property feels like a pipe dream with the way the game is set up. Way too many things need to be changed.

Let's say I want to claim a hoe so I can be a farmer or something. Well I need a house with a lock. So I get a dozen pieces of cut stone and a door and a key.

Meanwhile, everyone's starving, and I spent my life doing something useless, and I'm almost dead already. Plus if I don't have a backpack, I have nowhere to even safely put the key.

OR, I could just use the damned hoe and put it down somewhere, which took all of 2 seconds. The amount of time it takes to secure property can't be greater or even close to the amount of time it is used. Which means either greatly extending a players' time in a town or shortening greatly, by a factor of like 10, time to make a basic locked house. We're talking butt log or easier walls bone keys or something.

Now let's take it a step further: Why can't someone just take junk and lock it up or grief giant areas with a giant door? You basically need policeman to guard and monitor houses and activities to know who's griefing. But the game is just to cutthroat to have all of these player activities. Overall survival has to be easier at whatever point in the town that you want property to start up.

We do have player houses and property on OCS. But I can also ban people who grief houses and steal stuff or create locked off areas, and we have infinite lives in a permanent town, and there's no real struggle at this point. Plus we started houses after we solved pretty much everything else.

And even then we don't have trade (if you don't count people leaving presents xD)

Which means you have to solve both the property issue, and adding stuff worth trading.

An altervative is simplifying property from storage to soulbinding. I.e. you can claim exactly one, maybe two, unclaimed object with "/mine" per life, or something along these lines, and it is displayed as something like "Greep's stone hoe". Not sure if that's really possible with the current engine, but it would pretty much instantaneously easily allow trading and property. And when you die it'd be unclaimed. You probably could only be able to claim something you just created, too.

Last edited by Greep (2019-04-03 21:08:16)

jasonrohrer · 2019-04-03 21:07:48

Hardwiring property rights is something I've never seriously considered. I imagine it would make the game tedious. But maybe counting on property rights to emerge from player action is unrealistic.

Rust does something really hack-ish with the tool chest (or at least it used to), which effectively makes a radius where no one else can build, unless they can get to the tool chest and grant themselves access.

Other than that, there are no hard-wired property rights in Rust. If you can break into the building, you can take whatever. Same with anything left on the ground.

Anyway, building access mechanisms are sufficient to bootstrap property rights. Currently, buildings in OHOL are very costly, and limiting access is even more costly.

Greep · 2019-04-03 21:14:15

Well, I don't know if Rust is really the best role model haha. Unless you want the game specifically to be about killing people and taking their stuff :3

Thaulos · 2019-04-03 21:40:31

You wouldn't need to "hardwire" anything. Just adding a tag on an item with the name of the family who "/claim"ed it should be enough for players to enforce it themselves. No need to stop others from using it or anything like that. Players would just need information on who claimed the item when they pick up the item for example. Ideally a visual indicator like a hue on the item picked up would also give it away.

I really don't believe you can have any sort of social structure besides a hippie commune without private property. And you can't have private property without being able to enforce it. And you can't enforce it without information (who and what).

Glassius · 2019-04-03 21:43:12

jasonrohrer wrote:

Also, if the towns are close enough for trade, that means the biomes are close enough to travel between too

This would not be a problem, if land can be protected. Dogs may be useful to detect such intruders and say them: Get the fuck off my property!

Greep · 2019-04-03 21:43:57

@ thaulos I think you would, though. Because it's not something people would be looking out for. Am I going to mouse over every hoe everyone picks up and the person picking it up? It's not like there's name text bubbles above peoples' heads and flagged items. Otherwise it can't really be enforced. Honestly if I saw a hoe on the ground that's claimed I'd just take it.

Last edited by Greep (2019-04-03 21:52:52)

DestinyCall · 2019-04-03 22:37:52

Thaulos wrote:

You wouldn't need to "hardwire" anything. Just adding a tag on an item with the name of the family who "/claim"ed it should be enough for players to enforce it themselves. No need to stop others from using it or anything like that. Players would just need information on who claimed the item when they pick up the item for example. Ideally a visual indicator like a hue on the item picked up would also give it away.
I really don't believe you can have any sort of social structure besides a hippie commune without private property. And you can't have private property without being able to enforce it. And you can't enforce it without information (who and what).

Ohhh here's an idea. Instead of giving people the ability to "claim" random items, why not add a Maker's Mark to valuable crafted objects, like tools and clothing. "Made by John Smith"

It wouldn't have a direct effect on people being able to use your stuff, but it would give you a direct link to your products. If you make a shovel and someone takes it without asking, you will know and you can track down the right shovel, instead of taking someone else's. And if you made all the clothes in the whole village ... people will know you are a hard worker. And if you come back to the village years later, you might find people are still using the buckets you made when you were here generations ago.

Or find a wool sweater that you made for your first child, passed down to you.

Last edited by DestinyCall (2019-04-03 22:55:56)

jasonrohrer · 2019-04-03 22:46:29

Maker's mark is interesting!

I wonder about room in the UI for that much text, though.... It would also busy the display with info that people don't really need moment-to-moment.

It's also non-trivial to implement server-side, because that info would need to be tracked per object on the map, as objects move around, go in and out of containers, etc. And also transmitted to the client so that it could be displayed... for every object on the map!

Leaf -- picked by Eve Starr. Lol!

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