One Hour One Life Forums

Booklat1

Member

Registered: 2018-07-21

Posts: 1,062

Re: To make the game even harder, it needs to be made easier.

The game difficulty changes a lot throughout the techtree and it is true there is a clash between more grindy/survivalist players and rp ones. I disagree that social skills and creativity are a characteristic of rpers only though. If that was the case you wouldn't see pein building cute pens and tarr doing mad science. Social skills might help survivability on occasion and that is why better communication is indeed necessary. Honestly, I believe the solution for these different issues is making the game harder for pros and slightly easier/give more easy rewarding tasks for new players. This way pros remain engaged at all moments in many different activities and learning players and roleplayers can still contribute while having fun.

By each civilization state i suggest:

Eve camps: Eveing is easy but very grindy and your success extremely dependant of other players. I don't believe it is very rewarding for roleplayers forcing a story but the crisis generated by wrong choises in this era can be quite entertaining for both eve and kids, and pros and newbies. Animals, getting lost and starving are the main reason new people die in this stage while pros mostly never die while eveing and keep chaining for days, only occasionally dying to a hiden snake/wolf. To make it easier on newbies I think more single use food items like onions, wild carrots and burdocks could exist and more depth be added to the map with rare resources and landmarks existing, giving players a better understanding of the map. If all this new stuff translates into later tech this would be great. To make it harder on pros I suggest making animals step on items, fixing a very know exploit that only really helps pros.

Pre-sheep farming: Very grindy stage for pros. Finding iron, making pottery, smithing, upgrading wells, all can be done by all sorts of players but a pro will do every one of these tasks fast (except iron gathering) if the town is being well mantained by others. Newer players actually do important jobs in this era since berry farming and pie making here are a good way to help pros keep doing their work. I would like to see newer players in this stage of the game being pushed more to the world outside towns by giving entertaining tasks for them to do. Stuff like trapping rabbits, hunting animals for food, collecting eggs, stuff that give you a neat reward if you go out and grab it. As long as these are designed to be fun tasks people will do it more than berry farming. This way people may even learn the importance of other tasks like mining and getting lamb for compost. Pros alrerady have a hard time here so maybe branching up a bit the tech so they can have options in case their 30 minute walk for iron hasn't been successful.

Sheep era: Composting is easy, but it sucks that you gotta do it if you want to progress. See, the problem with compost is that it is wasted if people only use it for food. You need rope for tech, and a lot of it actually. If you have no compost being made, maybe lacking some of the crops needed for it, you'll have to work your butt off to get to a point where you have enough compost that farming is sustainable. And then do extra to progress. Sure you can gather rope in the wilds but that is after you have a horse-cart and newer players will most likely blow this task horrendously. At one point we should get better rope making in this game and I think it should be in sheep era. Another techbranch of rope making items would be another task for pros to strive while alowing others to use compost for their projects. This is the last stage in which water is an issue. Once you have a newcomen pump and many trees or the oil pumps you are safe from water shortages. The last patches have made this era much more entertaining already without solving the compost grind. It's also quite the same for newbs as it was before the changes. Newer mechanics like reasonable food decay, inorganic fertilizers and more clothing/apparel options would help sheep era become a more diverse experience.

Machine era: I havent played much with these features but this era features reasonable water production, huge iron sinks and considerable need for rubber and oil producing. Its a lot of hardwork to get to distillers, lathes and diesel pumps. Cars are a tough cookie too but they aren't that much better than horses so i don't think pros would bother with them long term (if the game didn't change). This whole meta is quite new but it adds cars to roleplayers which gotta be a fun thing, and A LOT of work for grinders. Newer players might feel lost with all this hard tech but the clear differences from sheep era might count for a sense of progress to them. I believe this era is fine as it is, we should strive to make earlier eras more interesting (again) to give this stage more challenges to overtake.

Beyond: As new tech is added and our needs covered this game will also have to get more dimensions. Should we always make tools to make soil and make soil to make food? Why not get food in the wild if someone cut all wheat and let all carrots seed? Why not make imestone into fertilizer through a chemical process? Why not plant more trees if you havent found oil? Why not build heaters to fix that snow patch in the middle of the town? Why not make inseticides to kill mosquitoes? Why not make bear attacks and homes more interesting by making animals step in stuff?

CrazyEddie

Member

Registered: 2018-11-12

Posts: 676

Re: To make the game even harder, it needs to be made easier.

he already told us what the game is about. "Parenting and civilization building". I feel like too many people forget the "parenting" part.

Well said.

I think most people do get it, though. Most of the time the experience is, I believe, both rewarding and in keeping with Jason's intentions.

lionon

Member

Registered: 2018-11-19

Posts: 532

Re: To make the game even harder, it needs to be made easier.

In the baby-boom hours the issue with parenting is, even if I get a learn-willing newbie, I'll soon pop out more babies making teaching very hard to close to impossible.

Sylverone

Member

Registered: 2018-12-16

Posts: 63

Re: To make the game even harder, it needs to be made easier.

We can always be "in the middle". You can be useful to the village and also act like a decent person when someone obviously doesn't know what they are doing, it doesn't have to be one or the other. And if you actually show people what to do instead of killing them for making mistakes, maybe they will be more useful to the village afterwards.

I do think that this clash can be part of Jason's intention, although he already told us what the game is about. "Parenting and civilization building". I feel like too many people forget the "parenting" part.

Yes and no. Being useful AND personable is certainly a good ideal, but it's not quite right to assume people can "just do that". The variety in people's temperaments is quite wide, and roughly 40-60% genetic. (This is different from heritability; identical twins have stronger personality correlations to each other than to their parents, as I recall.) That doesn't excuse people from responsibility and doesn't mean they are without choice, but acting against one's personality (read: default tendency) requires an exertion of will.

I'm sort of thinking about this in terms of the Big 5 personality traits. It seems like the traits mainly in play in this debate are Conscientiousness (including tendency to be goal and achievement oriented, to persevere under adversity, and to value established order, hierarchy, and routine), Openness to Experience (including interest in pursuing new experiences, ideas, and values, interest in art and creative expression, and desire for spontaneity), and Extraversion/Introversion (Extroverts are more energetic and outgoing, and experience more reward from socializing and actually more positive emotion overall, whereas introverts are more likely to be more withdrawn and contemplative on average).

Based on cursory impressions (which I should note aren't that reliable except for Openness and Extraversion), I would estimate that that Aurora is probably pretty high in Openness as well as Extraversion within this community, and pein is probably higher than most in Conscientiousness, maybe fairly high in the intellectual side of openness, and maybe a bit lower in Agreeableness (ie less forgiving and compromising, but also less likely to be a pushover or wishy-washy). Conscientious people are sometimes described as judgmental, and don't have time for people that they don't consider to be pulling their weight. I could be off in these guesses, and I'm just trying to illustrate more clearly how these traits might relate to the disagreements at hand.

The game difficulty changes a lot throughout the techtree and it is true there is a clash between more grindy/survivalist players and rp ones. I disagree that social skills and creativity are a characteristic of rpers only though. If that was the case you wouldn't see pein building cute pens and tarr doing mad science. Social skills might help survivability on occasion and that is why better communication is indeed necessary. [snip]

I have a speculation that video game players tend to be higher then average in Openness across the board, just given that games are very much about experiencing novel challenges and scenarios, and overlap quite a bit with other artistic media. (Maybe less so for people who exclusively play sports or FPS games, but maybe that's personal bias talking, heh.) I was surprised I couldn't find any research about the topic. But within any crowd you can find sub-gradients, and within each trait there are sub-traits, so there are different "flavors" of openness and conscientiousness, etc.

In any case, I don't think that being an RPer necessarily indicates that you are better at communicating on the practical level. I'm not really sure how or if that might correlate with specific personality traits. I mean, maybe being more extroverted means more likely to communicate, but it certainly would imply much about whether the communication is useful or helpful, though.

I think from a practical philosophical perspective, we accomplish the most if we focus on what we individually can do to improve things for everyone, which of course can include debating these things and making criticisms. I just think it's important to keep in mind that to a degree, Conscientious types and creative types have always clashed, but that both of these groups (which again, do overlap) benefit from a balancing effect provided by the other. Artists benefit more from their gifts if encouraged to balance them with discipline and discouraged from bad ideas, and conscientious types (who tend to be inflexible) can benefit from the adaptability of creative types. As an example, organizations become more likely to fail if they become too liberal (weakly correlated with openness) or conservative (weakly correlated with conscientiousness). They either waste resources on bad ideas and crash, or fail to adapt to changing conditions and crash. So the tug-of-war can be annoying, but is actually more functional than one side dominating.

Anyway, enough bloggin from me I think. Hope this is in some way interesting if not useful.