Why does this game feel so frustrating…

LilyFox · 2021-02-06 15:44:12

Hi, first of all I wanna apologize for starting my forum experience with such a negative post but I see many people vent their frustration about the game here and I figured I might as well, if only for the unlikely hope that the developer might read my post and think about it.

So I started this game about half a year ago and while I don't really consider myself to be a new player anymore, I remember pretty well what it was like. And even though I was taking a break during the September sale, I did play a lot during the tiktok baby boom about two months ago. The game is already hard to get into during “normal” player counts of about 40-60 on a server but it becomes almost impossible when Eve towns suddenly have 30 people in them, 28 of who are new and don't know how to do anything other than berry munch. At times like this, it's already a miracle when a town gets to Newcomen level, let alone manages to produce an engine.

Now, this might sound like I'm bitching about periods with too many new people around but honestly, the tiktok boom was probably the last time I truly enjoyed playing this game on bs2. Because despite all the massive issues and my meme score dropping below 30 for the first time since I started this game last summer, at least each life felt like a truly unique experience. The choices you made actually mattered a LOT because each could mean life or death for your town. Yes, towns died out at a rapid speed but even something as insignificant as building a deep well or mining some iron suddenly had a great impact on your town and could mean one or even several more hours of survival.

Nowadays, I can just leave my town as soon as I'm three years old and spend the rest of my life roaming around in the wild and exploring dead towns, knowing fully well that me leaving or staying will have little to no impact on my family's fate. Yes, I could farm, cook or smith but if I don't, someone else will do it who's probably faster and more efficient at it anyway. I could make an engine or even a truck but what's the point if there are already four engines and two trucks behind the property gate that have been dumped there since the town was still at a shallow well level? Lives these days just feel so pointless. I already mostly play on a low pop server where at least I can do everything I want with no stupid ethnicity restrictions but sometimes do I miss the social aspect of playing in a family, which was a big factor that sucked me into this game in the first place. Yet whenever I try going back to the bigserver, it's just the same feeling of stagnation, the same four towns, the same people even. I really wish I had started this game two years ago as it seems like it was a more interesting experience back then.

Sorry if this post is a bit all over the place, I really like the concept of this game and had many great lives in it, I just don't understand why Jason has added a bunch of mechanics (mainly race restrictions and the weird iron system) that don't really seem to benefit the game in any way and just make it more frustrating and difficult, especially for new players. I feel like if it was more friendly towards new players, there might be more people on a server and as a result, more variety of towns and playing experiences.

DestinyCall · 2021-02-06 16:24:42

I feel the same way.

Caprys · 2021-02-06 16:40:48

I love a good newbie apocalypse. It's the only time that the game feels challenging.

Spoonwood · 2021-02-06 18:38:32

Well players can't start up new experiences on their own. They can only start up a new family when *the game code* decides that conditions for a new family exist. So, players end up with the same sort of experiences follows from the game deciding what sorts of experiences come as appropriate.

There were definitely more diverse experiences when you would get born sometimes to a clueless Eve and sometimes to a decent one and sometimes into a town. Why? Because some players who didn't like certain experiences or wanted certain types or wanted to experiment with the game knew would start up new families with new story potential.

Also, the spring system made for less diverse experiences, since it's always the same water progression at about the same time. It used to be that an advanced pump *might* get made *and used* early with shallow wells still around and getting used. Or it might not, and such a pump only appear after several deep wells got drained.

Additionally, before the temperature overhaul, there existed more diversity in settlement environments. Sometimes towns were on desert edges. Sometimes in jungles. And sometimes in cold grasslands. There were more Eves, but also there was less clarity about what was best for Eves to do, because having a jungle settlement would mean mosquito bites, a desert settlement likely meant snake deaths, and grasslands had their own challenges, *and* because it might take an excessive amount of time for an Eve to find a desert edge or jungle spot, and thus it could be preferable in some ways to just settle in a grassland or take the chance on having children who were strong. There also existed more flexibility, since with some jungle or desert settlements, there didn't exist a need to rush technology as the grasslands and prairies have always has basically.

So, it does make sense that the game has less experiences that feel unique, because it's taken things down a path of monotony and inhibiting players ability to have diverse experiences. The feeling of diversity of experience apparently comes when people have an opportunity to explore multiple avenues of experience.

LilyFox · 2021-02-06 19:57:18

Spoonwood wrote:

Well players can't start up new experiences on their own. They can only start up a new family when *the game code* decides that conditions for a new family exist. So, players end up with the same sort of experiences follows from the game deciding what sorts of experiences come as appropriate.

Why does that have to be the case, though? Right now, I think a big issue holding people back from just digging up a well at a new spot and starting over as a pseudo-Eve is the way iron works. You can't start a proper village without iron tools, yet the only time you can unlock iron is with the first well site your Eve (or her kids) creates for your entire family. Why can't we unlock more iron with new wells placed afterwards? I don't have that much of a problem with well sites magically unlocking iron (even though it's hardly intuitive for new players) but I don't see the reason why it must be restricted to only once per family.

I guess the reasoning behind it was that it doesn't encourage people to upgrade their mines since they can just dig up more and more wells to get more iron but there would still be a choice between traveling far distances and placing a new well or staying close to home and spending some effort on upgrading the nearest mines. Plus, I regularly see towns that have unlocked iron veins completely untouched fairly far from town while the ones nearby are already collapsed. So I suspect most people are gonna upgrade their nearest mines just because it's convenient to have a mine near town, not because they have literally no other options left. Right now, the one-mine-unlocking-per-family rule just seems like yet another unnecessary mechanic to make the game more limiting for no good reason.

darkdemon23 · 2021-02-07 00:32:18

LilyFox wrote:

Why does that have to be the case, though? Right now, I think a big issue holding people back from just digging up a well at a new spot and starting over as a pseudo-Eve is the way iron works. You can't start a proper village without iron tools, yet the only time you can unlock iron is with the first well site your Eve (or her kids) creates for your entire family. Why can't we unlock more iron with new wells placed afterwards? I don't have that much of a problem with well sites magically unlocking iron (even though it's hardly intuitive for new players) but I don't see the reason why it must be restricted to only once per family.
I guess the reasoning behind it was that it doesn't encourage people to upgrade their mines since they can just dig up more and more wells to get more iron but there would still be a choice between traveling far distances and placing a new well or staying close to home and spending some effort on upgrading the nearest mines. Plus, I regularly see towns that have unlocked iron veins completely untouched fairly far from town while the ones nearby are already collapsed. So I suspect most people are gonna upgrade their nearest mines just because it's convenient to have a mine near town, not because they have literally no other options left. Right now, the one-mine-unlocking-per-family rule just seems like yet another unnecessary mechanic to make the game more limiting for no good reason.

Jason uses these heavy handed balancing mechanics to force trade yet he fails at doing so almost every single time

fug · 2021-02-07 01:38:28

LilyFox wrote:

Well players can't start up new experiences on their own. They can only start up a new family when *the game code* decides that conditions for a new family exist. So, players end up with the same sort of experiences follows from the game deciding what sorts of experiences come as appropriate.

It's the case because he wanted people to use the kerosene mining pick he made during the rift time...

Given the option for players to use the mining engine or just walk around and hit up new iron veins or find loose iron guess what? The players collected up vein iron + ground iron because why would I convert precious water into a net gain of 5 iron per kerosene?

Planes were nerfed to try to redirect people into using the kerosene pick for the same reason. By removing the ability for players to either get iron from planes or just collecting more and more free vein iron he thought players would "run out" of iron or use the mining pick. Now instead of cracking veins and ground iron or flying to the tutorial people just loot dead towns.

We lost the ability to start fresh colonies for balance.

Dodge · 2021-02-07 08:34:44

LilyFox wrote:

I just don't understand why Jason has added a bunch of mechanics (mainly race restrictions and the weird iron system) that don't really seem to benefit the game in any way and just make it more frustrating and difficult, especially for new players.

Gamedev wants an unrealistic world 100'000 times the size of earth or some shit like that, because of that he had to add a bunch of weird crappy mechanics to emulate ressources running out.

The idea is that he wants to recreate what it was like to build a civilisation from scratch, interact with other groups, conflict of interest, alliances etc.

Ressources is a big part of why civilisations interacted with each other in human history and still interact to this day, a lot of different situations emerged from that, either "good" like trading, alliances, etc or "bad" like wars, theft etc.

Because the ohol world is ridiculously big and for some other reasons like biome placement, respawn mechanics, missing content and so on, these situations never happen so he added race restriction so we had to interact with other civilisations but obviously you cant just plant apple seeds and expect to get oranges.

Same for the iron system, since the map is that big iron was never running out because you can always go further to get more and when it does run out because it's too far the village just dies so it's not interesting at all since it doesn't create any situation.

The goal is to have these situations happen during the lifespan of these civilisations, having multiple civilisations in the same world with a limited quantity of key ressources like iron or oil means that at some point you will have to take some important decisions especially if you used these ressources poorly and in a wasteful way.

So he added the weird iron system to try and recreate that but like before you cant just change one thing and keep all the rest the same and expect it to work.

Nothing to do with some simplistic view of making all these changes just because one piece of content wasn't used...

Spoonwood · 2021-02-07 09:31:28

LilyFox wrote:

Why does that have to be the case, though?

Why would we expect a computer program to be able to know/behave in such a way as if it knows what all sorts of different people like? Different people have diverse tastes. Human interest is subtle and changes over time and throughout a given day even for the same person. Computer programs don't change. In comparison they are constant and targeted towards certain effects. Computer programs would also have to have the ability to effectively read human minds. Why would a simple formal system have the ability to read a human mind which is much more complex, multilayered, and oftentimes messy?

Dodge wrote:

Gamedev wants an unrealistic world 100'000 times the size of earth or some shit like that, because of that he had to add a bunch of weird crappy mechanics to emulate ressources running out.

Gamdev has always had such a world. The Rift didn't delete any part of that world, it just made much of it inaccessible.

Dodge wrote:

The idea is that he wants to recreate what it was like to build a civilisation from scratch, interact with other groups, conflict of interest, alliances etc.

If he wanted that, then such would require people engaging in mating practices of their own accord *and with other players*. Civilizations don't exist without such partnerships. It's no joke that civilizations rely upon families with members of different sexes having different roles, functions, and uses.

Also, Lilyfox didn't write the quote that fug attributed to her.

LilyFox · 2021-02-07 13:04:11

Thanks for the replies, from what you guys are saying it does sound like Jason originally had good intentions with these changes, it's just that the execution caused more problems rather than solve the issue. Like with the iron system, I'd really like to see how the game would look like if players could unlock more iron with each well they build rather than just the first one. At least we could build small outposts on a quest to get more resources and maybe these outposts would later turn into proper towns. Or someone might leave their hometown for whatever reason and start a new civilization from scratch somewhere far away. That seems like more potential for interesting stories rather than just taking the truck behind the gate and looting a bunch of dead towns. (Which would still be possible anyway.)

As for the race restrictions, this is probably the mechanic I hate the most because it actually does the opposite of what it was supposed to do (make the game more “interesting” and towns more “diverse”.) It also doesn't encourage “trade”, it encourages looting dead towns and dumping resources in Eve towns because people need to keep all three towns with locked resources alive, since everyone depends on those resources. Even worse, the race system relies on a very specific balance of ideally just four towns that have experienced people shipping resources between them. As soon as that balance is disturbed (like by having too many new players on a server) everything descends into chaos because the race system is so complicated and unintuitive, there's no way new people are going to see through it quickly enough to prevent their towns from dying of dehydration. And even experienced players are going to have a hard time getting resources because a new player isn't going to understand why a weird red haired guy shows up out of nowhere and starts messing around with a bucket in front of them.

If a game mechanic can only properly function on a server with 60 people on it, there's clearly something wrong with that mechanic and it either needs to be revamped pretty substantially or better just abolished altogether like what happened with tool slots.

DiscardedSlinky · 2021-02-07 15:16:57

I am personally glad psuedo Eve's can't exist anymore. It was so frustrating that people would leave a perfectly good town just because they wanted to go back and play in the mud for 30 mins. 90% of them had no idea how to make a good town aswell so it was literally just their kids carrying them. They're selfish and their fun out weights everyone else's fun. Their kids often died too because of lack of food and they'd kill off the family.

I hate fake Eve's.

One Hour One Life Forums

#1 2021-02-06 15:44:12

Why does this game feel so frustrating…

#2 2021-02-06 16:24:42

Re: Why does this game feel so frustrating…

#3 2021-02-06 16:40:48

Re: Why does this game feel so frustrating…

#4 2021-02-06 18:38:32

Re: Why does this game feel so frustrating…

#5 2021-02-06 19:57:18

Re: Why does this game feel so frustrating…

#6 2021-02-07 00:32:18

Re: Why does this game feel so frustrating…

#7 2021-02-07 01:38:28

Re: Why does this game feel so frustrating…

#8 2021-02-07 08:34:44

Re: Why does this game feel so frustrating…

#9 2021-02-07 09:31:28

Re: Why does this game feel so frustrating…

#10 2021-02-07 13:04:11

Re: Why does this game feel so frustrating…

#11 2021-02-07 15:16:57

Re: Why does this game feel so frustrating…

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