Kerosene newcomen pump got buffed

Coconut Fruit · 2020-05-01 04:14:27

After the update it will give tank of water with 8 uses (8 buckets of water). That means we get 4 buckets from one use of kerosene - the same amount as from using it on diesel water pump. That means there is no reason to not make kerosene newcomen pumps whenever we have kerosene.
No need to wait for diesel engine before making oil, we should start with oil right away... Damn, that's a pretty nice buff for gingers, since only they can make oil.

Tho, main well isn't the only way to get water, we can always make more wells nearby, get water from ponds... I don't really know why towns lately so rarery have full cisterns of water.

Coconut Fruit · 2020-05-07 10:05:44

So, I just played a life as a brown person. We had diesel water pump, but no kerosene. I wrote a note, took a rubber ball and a pencil, got a few empty tanks, and went to gingers to ask for kerosene.
They were at newcomen pump stage, pretty nice town... But they had no kerosene for some reason... I mean, that happens all the time. And if gingers have no kerosene, nobody has it.
I donated them latex and palm kerners for empty buckets, but they still had no sulphur, no horses, no steel pipes to make oil runs.

So the idea is, we all should donate gingers as often as possible. They should be drowning in latex, sulphur, palm kerners and horses. We should also donate them steel pipes, many many steel pipes, especially white people should do it, since they can't offer anything else.

In return gingers would share crude oil, they always should have it, they should make oil runs right away, it's very useful in kerosene newcomen pump stage anyways, and oil runs would be a pleasure if we had all resources ready right away.

There are only 4 families, we live in every of them, we should help each other more often and things will be better. Gotta deal with biome restrictions and with that Jason won't remove them. We should adapt or we will always lack kerosene.

Help other families, especially when you are born as a male, gingers always at first!

jasonrohrer · 2020-05-07 17:03:24

Sound like it's working as intended.

Running into a less-developed ginger village is an interesting wrinkle. A challenge where the best solution isn't obvious. You can't just go through the same motions over and over to achieve the desired result.

This is also one of the grand challenges of developing a persistent multiplayer game. In a single player game, you can make something very hard, but still offer a kind of guaranteed success through persistence. Think of Super Meat Boy. You might fail a given level dozens or even hundreds of times before finally squeaking out a by-the-seat-of-your-pants success. But that success is waiting there for you, if you keep trying, and the retry cost is very small. But still, we can offer something like a 50:1 difficulty. 50 failures for every success, on average.

In order for achievements in a persistent multiplayer game to mean anything, they need to be hard as well. But if we have a 50:1 difficulty, that doesn't necessarily mean than everyone tries it 50 times and eventually experiences that sweet success. It can instead mean than 50 individual players tried, and 49 of them failed.

In other words, 98% of the player base experiences nothing but failure.

This also has to do with the retry cost and the "already done by someone else" factor, which is part of the retry cost. If you failed to get oil drilling going in your last life (what a bummer), will you even be able to try in your next life? Maybe you're born in an Eve camp. Maybe you're born in a town that already has oil drilling. Maybe you're born in a town that has none of the necessary infrastructure (like a newc bore).

So you might very well have 98% of the player base shouting, "This sucks, it's pretty much impossible."

Meanwhile, every town eventually has access to oil, which means it's clearly not impossible.

Of course, how many failures happened in each town before success?

In designing this game, it's often helpful to view families or towns as the entities that experience failure or success, which has the unfortunate side-effect of discounting the average player's experience within those towns and families.

If 75% of towns get oil before running completely out of water, is that too hard or too easy?

What if 50 players tried and failed to get oil in each of these eventually-successful towns? It's hard to balance both concerns.

DestinyCall · 2020-05-07 19:27:07

If 98% of your player base is unhappy, I'm thinking something is wrong with the core gameplay loop, whether the game is single-player or multi-player.

Spoonwood · 2020-05-07 19:46:31

jasonrohrer wrote:

In designing this game, it's often helpful to view families or towns as the entities that experience failure or success, which has the unfortunate side-effect of discounting the average player's experience within those towns and families.

It is utterly meaningless to talk about families or towns as experiencing success. All of them die out. And there is no standard of success, only one of failure.

You've NEVER had a standard of success for this game.

Seriously, stop writing lies Jason.

pein · 2020-05-07 20:57:41

1% of players did oil. It's a struggle of a full life, now you removed the ability to even enter a biome so that's less than 25% of the 1% can do it.
Asking others to do it, even with every single resource provided for them is a 10-minute begging without any result. People who can do it will do it, people who can't do it, won't do it, even if someone explains in their own language. Water as a basic resource worked fine, people could do something al the time, even if they weren't too optimal or useful their time saved some of yours. Water as a high-level resource puts all the focus on optimization and nothing on time or effort, you yourself called exploration and gathering "free" which is basically how you value the player input and the rewards of their work. Right now on a later stage, people would need to constantly use water and soil on 8 bushes to feed themselves with it. That for an average player takes kinda more than 8 minutes.

Legs · 2020-05-07 21:35:27

pein wrote:

People who can do it will do it, people who can't do it, won't do it

Even if you can do it, do you want to do it? I've drilled oil a few times because I was curious what the process was like and I wanted to try something new. Turns out, drilling for oil gets old fast.

Maps and waystones for tarry spots are always outdated, so you have to spend half an hour running around in the wilderness far from home to find a viable location. Then run back and forth through more bland wilderness transporting materials to drill. It's easy enough to do, just really boring. If you care enough to bother you can pump a lot of oil in a few lifetimes, it's really not that hard. But do you really care that much to spend your precious recreation on a tedious virtual-resource grind? When it's very likely that the towns you're supporting will die out overnight anyway?

Last time I drilled oil was when the homeland update came out, because traveling to foreign towns and working with other families was still fresh and new. It was fun that time. It's not fun any more. I'm not gonna bother, and if nobody else does either that's fine. The town was going to die soon anyway.

That's the sort of nihilistic, fatalist mentality that I think a lot of players are being forced into with all these artificial difficulty updates. It's cool to see a town that lasts a long time. It's cool to see it grow and expand over time as a week or two of history gradually builds up. It's cool to log in day after day to see that family you worked hard for is still going strong. It motivates players to contribute to that continued survival and keep the story alive. When there's a hard cap around 50 generations and you know your family will never survive the night, it's hard to stay motivated. They're dead no matter what we do. So why bother?

Last edited by Legs (2020-05-07 21:35:53)

One Hour One Life Forums

#1 2020-05-01 04:14:27

Kerosene newcomen pump got buffed

#2 2020-05-07 10:05:44

Re: Kerosene newcomen pump got buffed

#3 2020-05-07 17:03:24

Re: Kerosene newcomen pump got buffed

#4 2020-05-07 19:27:07

Re: Kerosene newcomen pump got buffed

#5 2020-05-07 19:46:31

Re: Kerosene newcomen pump got buffed

#6 2020-05-07 20:57:41

Re: Kerosene newcomen pump got buffed

#7 2020-05-07 21:35:27

Re: Kerosene newcomen pump got buffed

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