Update: The Apocalypse

fatalwolf · 2018-04-07 05:09:41

Finding an abandoned village should be incredibly rare and considered a treasure. I also find that there are two types of people. One type that is ok doing menial task for the sake of furthering the family line. The other is the type that dosent want to contribute to the bigger picture but instead wants to start their own. Id suggest adding an option to spawn as an eve or a baby. Also to stop people from suiciding as a baby to get to a better life make the baby unable to break from the holder until they are a certain age.

Lum · 2018-04-07 07:02:36

fatalwolf wrote:

Finding an abandoned village should be incredibly rare and considered a treasure. I also find that there are two types of people. One type that is ok doing menial task for the sake of furthering the family line. The other is the type that dosent want to contribute to the bigger picture but instead wants to start their own. Id suggest adding an option to spawn as an eve or a baby. Also to stop people from suiciding as a baby to get to a better life make the baby unable to break from the holder until they are a certain age.

At which point they would probably still kill themselves. Age won't change much.

roccaturi · 2018-04-07 08:51:34

I personally like the "wild child" attitude of baby tear-assing away. I've always wanted a game that you couldn't choose your starting condition in, and wouldn't want to see OHOL capitulate to the norm. That said, I do think that there is a weird incentivization structure around rerolling characters quickly if you don't get what you want. It leads to some strange behavior. Something could probably be done to either coax players into their roles or let them have that single up-front Eve/child choice.

Last edited by roccaturi (2018-04-07 08:52:48)

Xuhybrid · 2018-04-07 14:28:12

The apocalypse can be triggered by one person? What a joke. It should require at least 3 people, similar to how you need 2 people to break a wall. All you've done is given griefers more power.

Lizard989 · 2018-04-07 15:08:06

If a political structure separating villages is added then you can take the idea of three players turning a key, but also make sure they are from separate villages. Oh, and after the update, people are definitely rushing the apocalypse I haven't seen a town with walls, or domesticated animals ever since the update. People are basically ignoring some of the fun of the game, just to get to the endgame, that is really just for when you get bored of the top of the tech tree.

Last edited by Lizard989 (2018-04-07 20:26:39)

Lizard989 · 2018-04-07 15:25:19

denriguez wrote:

Portager wrote:
I will say, with this new spawning apocalypse vision that you have, you are going to have to seriously nerf griefing (or give us armor, watchtowers or something). The bottom line is that no family tree can last sufficiently long at the moment, because of griefing. We just need a way to fight back. Then we can really fulfill the true vision that you outlined here, multigenerational families working towards the advancement of our societies.
Yes. Very much this. I'm 100% on board with the vision, but murder griefing should be much more difficult. I look forward to inevitable resource raids, intergenerational feuds, and clan warfare, but we at least need a chance to defend ourselves and save our family line if that's to continue to be the focus. IMO a knife should kill in two hits, not one, with a shorter cooldown than it has currently. This would give victims a chance to run, defend themselves, or carry their only daughter to safety as the victim bleeds out (some fun, dramatic RP possible there). I'd even be OK if arrows still killed with one hit--that'd be the weapon of choice for warfare--but close-range instant death by knife is unrealistic and can be absolutely devastating for a bloodline.

I agree with this, even before the monolith it was WAY to easy to kill someone. I managed to accidentally do it by clicking on the wrong tile. There definitely should be first aid and medicine in the game. Maybe even medicines that help you live longer in some way.

EvilBlackCat · 2018-04-07 15:55:23

Lum wrote:

fatalwolf wrote:
Finding an abandoned village should be incredibly rare and considered a treasure. I also find that there are two types of people. One type that is ok doing menial task for the sake of furthering the family line. The other is the type that dosent want to contribute to the bigger picture but instead wants to start their own. Id suggest adding an option to spawn as an eve or a baby. Also to stop people from suiciding as a baby to get to a better life make the baby unable to break from the holder until they are a certain age.
At which point they would probably still kill themselves. Age won't change much.

Agreed, and then you have just wasted resources raising them.

I have to say, I've been rather happy to be able to off myself sometimes. I was born to someone yesterday who said some horribly atrocious things so I jumped out of their arms and ran off into the woods. Had I not been able to do that I would have quit and frankly pressing % is too damn much work, hehe.

Xuhybrid · 2018-04-07 17:08:51

jasonrohrer wrote:

Ah, it seems that everyone suddenly woke up!
Apocalypse is off again, for now.
But it created a cleanse that was sorely needed.
I'll be working on some other stuff today that will create more of a "natural" apocalypse when a village dies out for real (the next Eve will spawn very far away, in the wilderness). That, actually, might have been the problem. Everything was happening in the middle, very close together, and when a village would die out, a later generation would just resume it.
You would walk in any direction and find a village. It was getting very crowded.
The longest generation is 31. That's only 7 hours!
BUT some of these cities have clearly been developed for WEEKS. That means that after people die out there, later players discover and resume.
I do want ruins to be discovered sometimes. BUT the main game should be figuring out how NOT to die out. Dying out should matter. It should be a big deal. The village should be lost if it happens. Not just "respawn as Eve and follow the road back to the village and continue."

I don't think you understand why people play your game man. Just saying. The value we all find seems completely lost on you.

Xuhybrid · 2018-04-07 17:13:56

jasonrohrer wrote:

The apocalypse was one attempt at an end game. It also was an attempt to create a momentary shared collective experience. To create a memory. "Were you there back when there was an apocalypse? Wow, what a day that was!"
But allowing one faction to end the game for everyone really isn't that interesting of an end game. Why is why I built-in an OFF switch and used that switch right away.

I had a feeling this was the true purpose but you've literally just confirmed it for me. You wanted to reset the maps because it was getting hard to optimise the game having all of the things in the world already. So you made "content" that easily allowed anyone to reset the world. I wonder if you expected 5 Apocalypse to happen in 1-2 days? Probably not.

The main point of this "content" is so you can absolve yourself of any blame. "The players chose to reset. It wasn't my choice at all. I am not to blame."

jasonrohrer wrote:

This is also what makes the higher number servers so popular. People can keep working on the same village week after week there even with low populations, because they can all find their way back, even if there's no continuous family line.

Have you asked yourself why people enjoy the game that way? Why do i enjoy spawning as a baby, in a place i used to live a few days ago? Why do i enjoy seeing the progress it made while i was gone? Why do i enjoy continuing my work from a previous life? That is the point of this game. Getting one hour, to make a small difference. If your intent was to make family lines the focus of the game, then why make it impossible for farming to last? You made wheat and carrot farming unviable and finite. Explain how you're meant to LAST LONGER if this is the content you put in the game? You're not making any sense. Why do you use the word "popular" and say no, this is a bad thing?

Last edited by Xuhybrid (2018-04-07 17:23:34)

3vilrabb1t · 2018-04-07 19:10:53

Im glade the update is off again. I dont mind the idea but i think it shoude atleast need 5 ppl too activate or something no singel player shoude have that kind of power... and how about u think more about the systems in place so no weekly changes are needed like in farming . otherwise i rly enjoy ur game

Lizard989 · 2018-04-07 21:06:05

A way to fix the griefers just ending the game problem could also be to have multiple monoliths, so if a large civilization doesn't want to be reset, they can form some kind of defense military and defend the monolith for their part of the world. It would also help if the game had more support for a political structure, while unrealistic having some supported way to vote would help stop griefers from not being stopped by people, by people agreeing a bit more. Or you could add paper, that works too. I have no idea if that makes Any sense.

Rebel · 2018-04-07 22:37:50

Can't stress enough how much more I enjoy this game when there is non of this "running back to a town that I was in two lives ago" bullshit.

The point of a game is to get from zero-tech to end game tech in one family line.

atm after the resets, I have had so much fun trying to keep my families alive while trying to advance the tech tree

I totally agree and am having alot more fun with spawning miles into new lands and trying again. its so satisfying when your family is making tools or clothes, even buildings.
I hated the fact that lands were just filled with advanced towns everywhere and there was no point in playing, now every time I play its a real challenge, and feels alot more like the game Jason wants it to be.
Yes you can still find old towns, but you really do have to prepare for the journey.
and tbh, dying is pretty much an apocalypse just for you/family.

Last edited by Rebel (2018-04-07 22:38:00)

quaity · 2018-04-07 23:20:32

Rebel wrote:

Can't stress enough how much more I enjoy this game when there is non of this "running back to a town that I was in two lives ago" bullshit.
The point of a game is to get from zero-tech to end game tech in one family line.
atm after the resets, I have had so much fun trying to keep my families alive while trying to advance the tech tree
I totally agree and am having alot more fun with spawning miles into new lands and trying again. its so satisfying when your family is making tools or clothes, even buildings.
I hated the fact that lands were just filled with advanced towns everywhere and there was no point in playing, now every time I play its a real challenge, and feels alot more like the game Jason wants it to be.
Yes you can still find old towns, but you really do have to prepare for the journey.
and tbh, dying is pretty much an apocalypse just for you/family.

So I'm assuming after the update, if an Eve finds your village, you'll be killing them?

M3L4N1N · 2018-04-08 05:24:10

jasonrohrer wrote:

The game must be hard.
Always.
It should never be easy. You should never get to the point in the game where you can say, "Hey, we made it! Now what?"
If people are bored, that is a bad sign. It means the game has gotten too easy. Over the past few weeks, the game in many villages had gotten easy.
When things are too easy, player decisions don't matter very much. There's no drama. No "turning points."

Jason I just found out about you when this game first hit Game Informer yt channel. Never played any of your games before, but I'm not a heavy gamer these days anyway. I'm quite a different user posting here because I haven't even purchased this game yet. I plan to do so very soon just to support you, but I probably have no intention to ever play it. My enjoyment comes from watching the organic story lines and the evolving meta of this game on youtube. I like to study human psychology, which as you know has a lot to do with how and why people do things. Sometimes there is no clear answer, but a lot of the time there are answers. Kind of like puzzle pieces one must fit together to make sense. Once you have identified those pieces, then sometimes it becomes possibly to predict human behavior, and even begin to understand the human condition.

I feel that this game you created is the first one to ever have the potential to truly explore the psychological depths of the human condition. if you let it happen that is. I was able to accurately predict certain meta developments of this game just by using actual early human history as a template. What did the beginning of humanity really look like? How did society organically evolve into the ones we see in front of us today? This game was beginning to answer some of those questions right in front of our very eyes at 525k times the speed it actually happened in our world. Sure it's only giving us a glimpse of all of the complexities of early civilization, but that microcosm it provided was still more than what any other online game has ever achieved. This was happening in the mere few weeks 1H1L has been available.

You say that the point of this game is for one family line to go from creation of a society to the end of the technology line. However, the way you designed the game currently makes that impossible, and it has nothing to do with revisiting abandoned villages. Contrary to popular belief, writing is almost as old as irrigation technology, and is even older than irrigation in some parts of the world. If you want generations to survive, there must be a way to pass down knowledge through writing. The ability to chisel laws into a stone block at the center of a village would go a long way in maintaining generations. But it seems like your fear that people will be bored, once they reach the end of the most recent technology tree, would deter you from making the game any easier for communities to thrive and survive than it already is. But therein seems to lie the crux of the problem. There is a miscommunication between the purpose for you making this game, and the reason why people have fun playing and watching it.

I, like many others, don't feel that this games fun is based off of just survival. Just like the fun of life itself isn't based off of pure survival. You spoke of not wanting the player to get bored so quickly. Even though I haven't seen anyone complaining of the game becoming boring, if that is your concern, then give the player the opportunity to do what real humans did throughout history when technological advancement stagnated. They reinvested that time and energy away from survival technology, and into visual and performing arts. Give the player the ability to be creative somehow. Give them the ability to create unique items along with the ability to name them; Things like murals, pottery, jewelry, temples or adorned grave sites for great rulers they once had. Already, in your game, people were developing organically in a way that mirrored the real world, why not go even further? You implemented the option to create a gold crown, and within days kings and queens were being crowned in the larger villages. Then with that crown came jealousy to covet that crown...

I saw a video where a player was born into an established family, plotted to kill the young princess and take the crown for herself with another player. She lured the princess to the bakery and killed her, then gave the weapon to her accomplice. They then went to the birthing area, alerted everyone that the queen was dead, and then held a faux ceremony where the murderer was given the crown. Luckily the player we were watching witnessed the incident and identified the perp to the others. The two accomplices were punished, and in that village from thereon out, no one named their child the name of the usurper and her accomplice. Those names were considered to be swear words among those people and their descendants. These are events that are very similar to stories told in historical books, which are now happening organically in your game. I have over a dozen other stories like that from watching videos of 1H1L. Like how the developing meta of trolls wanting to kill the current monarchy, gave birth to a secret order of protectors who's job it was to protect "crown and country". These are things that really transpired in the history of our world, and I highly doubt that people are playing your game while reading early human history books as a guideline. You didn't set up a system for royalty and knights to protect the land. You simply made gold crowns a craftable item, and the community did the rest. Doesn't that invoke a sense of amazement within you?

I tell you all of this to say that I feel by doing the apocalypse style reset, it takes away from something wonderful that was happening organically which mimics real world history. Civilizations dying out and being rediscovered happened scores of times, at hundreds of ancient cities around the world. This true aspect of real cultural history should be adapted to compliment your vision and not detract from it. If server population of players and items are the problem, then implement a better decaying system, again, modeled after the real world. The more natural an object is, the faster it decays. As the technology becomes more advanced, then like real life, iron last longer than bronze, and steel lasts longer than iron, but they all still decay. Same with the wells and buildings. Make it so that they have to be maintained after a while or they will waste away into useless ruins. Maybe consider expanding the recycling system to repurpose objects back into their base elements, or into something more useful, but at a cost of losing some of the original raw material. So if a knife needs 3 or 4 parts to make, you can only salvage 1 or 2 of them for very specific new items. This was commonly practiced by early human civilizations.

I feel that a lot of the hard questions you have in developing this game can be approached and solved from the viewpoint of using the real world as a possible solution. The problem with making a civilization game that so closely mimics actual conditions experienced by the earliest humans, is that you can't do it half way. Either you use real historical knowledge and solutions as inspiration for solving those problems, or you are going to have to keep implementing programmer magic that breaks the immersion and overall experience. That is what the monolith is. It is programmer magic which you needed to solve problems you hadn't foreseen in your original design, yet doesn't make any sense within the original concept of the game.

If you must continue with the apocalypse system, then please divide the servers. Make half of the servers persistent, if only to satisfy the players who desire a continuous persistent world, and do not care if the technology tree doesn't change for a few weeks. Then make the other half of the servers for players who like more of a challenge, and don't mind having their progress wiped out every once in a while. I still feel that those server wipes should be scheduled and completely out of the hands of the players. Make it every couple months or something agreeable to the players, so that everyone who plays on those servers knows what is coming. I have never seen so many pissed off players of an indie game, that is as beloved as 1H1L after a single update change. If you watch videos of people playing your creation then I recommend watching HoneyBunny. He was the one who was a part of the original members of a secret order of protectors being created in your world. A game like this creates its own persistent stories, and that is the fun of it. All you have to do is give them the tools to tell that story, and people will love it.

You are right that survival should be hard, just like in real life, but real life didn't have magic monoliths destroying the world by way of human intervention during the bronze age either. There is a happy medium between the tough survival game you desire to make, and the persistent civilization and community world building players desire. Until that happens, I just want to congratulate you on creating a new genre of game that will surely be copied in the months and years to come. This game was as fun to watch, as I'm sure it was for people to play pre apocalypse. It can be that again, in a self-sustaining world with a few adjustments, that I'm sure you're already working hard to make into reality.

Last edited by M3L4N1N (2018-04-08 20:56:33)

afloatingstone · 2018-04-08 06:41:46

Great analysis by M3L4N1N. I feel like OHOL is as much a social experiment as it is a game. The only rule is that you have to eat to survive. Apart from that, just give the players a variety of resources and options and see what they do with them. The game is like a continually evolving story of human development to which every player can contribute, for better or worse.

willard23 · 2018-04-09 07:57:04

I kind of appreciate the potential apocalypse, since the likelyhood of aquiring all the ingredients is pretty low, and takes a humongous amount of time. in addition, some things like lack of gooses, and rabbit homes being permanently abandoned made it so that some villages were next to impossible to keep running because people were just stupid with their resources and werent taught how to do it without sabatoging the future. the reset makes it so that we can make a village planned out well, where there used to be a lack of raw knowlege, hopefully we can use what we know now to make our next villages better designed, placed, and upkept.

Orzulth · 2018-04-12 01:50:35

So literally any player that I have never had any interaction with can completely end my current game, along with any progress that I had previously made (even if I am no longer progressing in that "village" due to character death). Yea... That's pretty crappy. Not at all what I paid for.

I have never once asked for a refund for a game that turned out to be something other than what I expected. This isn't the same scenario though. This game WAS what I expected. Then a random change has the potential of completely invalidating every single second I have played... Poor form...

That said, I am not asking for a refund. The powers that be should really start just offering them if they are going to make such drastic changes without talking to their investors. And investors are EXACTLY what each and every one of us that paid for this game are. We give money to the "company" and expect a benefit in return (enjoyment). That literally every decision or move I, or any others, have made in the game can be invalidated by ANYONE is just asinine.

Yes, I know that no refunds will ever be given. This is the modern day. These things just don't happen. But instead of just taking investor money and then metaphorically telling them to "shove off" maybe you should speak to your investors. A Happy playerbase is a growing playerbase. And from what I have seen in game (and on forum, on YouTube, on Facebook, etc.) the overall consensus that I can see is that people are no longer happy. And why would they be when they see what amounts to a griefer successfully undoing the progress of the players ENTIRE time in game.

Baker · 2018-04-12 02:02:58

Orzulth wrote:

So literally any player that I have never had any interaction with can completely end my current game, along with any progress that I had previously made (even if I am no longer progressing in that "village" due to character death). Yea... That's pretty crappy. Not at all what I paid for.
I have never once asked for a refund for a game that turned out to be something other than what I expected. This isn't the same scenario though. This game WAS what I expected. Then a random change has the potential of completely invalidating every single second I have played... Poor form...
That said, I am not asking for a refund. The powers that be should really start just offering them if they are going to make such drastic changes without talking to their investors. And investors are EXACTLY what each and every one of us that paid for this game are. We give money to the "company" and expect a benefit in return (enjoyment). That literally every decision or move I, or any others, have made in the game can be invalidated by ANYONE is just asinine.
Yes, I know that no refunds will ever be given. This is the modern day. These things just don't happen. But instead of just taking investor money and then metaphorically telling them to "shove off" maybe you should speak to your investors. A Happy playerbase is a growing playerbase. And from what I have seen in game (and on forum, on YouTube, on Facebook, etc.) the overall consensus that I can see is that people are no longer happy. And why would they be when they see what amounts to a griefer successfully undoing the progress of the players ENTIRE time in game.

It's been turned off now.

Go! Bwah! · 2018-04-12 02:04:06

I have a lot of problems with this game myself but...

Orzulth wrote:

Yes, I know that no refunds will ever be given.

... no, you don't know that.

https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewt … 3545#p3545

Orzulth · 2018-04-12 02:21:25

Baker wrote:

It's been turned off now.

I am finding this out now. Work has kept me away for a few days, and trying to catch up is an arduous process. Unfortunately I saw something that I greatly disagreed with, and joined the conversation before I had caught myself up 100%. This was my mistake and I hope that nobody was put out due to it.

That said, I still stand by my previous post. I am all for change. I usually embrace it, and I typically enjoy it. That wasn't a change though. Change is whitewashing a house and painting it a different color. Change is not ripping the entire house off it's foundation and putting up a house with a self-destruct button that is located at the curb.

And if any landlord did either without speaking to the lessee beforehand they would be in court very quickly.

Finroth · 2018-04-12 02:40:36

I feel that this game you created is the first one to ever have the potential to truly explore the psychological depths of the human condition. if you let it happen that is. I was able to accurately predict certain meta developments of this game just by using actual early human history as a template. What did the beginning of humanity really look like? How did society organically evolve into the ones we see in front of us today? This game was beginning to answer some of those questions right in front of our very eyes at 525k times the speed it actually happened in our world. Sure it's only giving us a glimpse of all of the complexities of early civilization, but that microcosm it provided was still more than what any other online game has ever achieved. This was happening in the mere few weeks 1H1L has been available.
You say that the point of this game is for one family line to go from creation of a society to the end of the technology line. However, the way you designed the game currently makes that impossible, and it has nothing to do with revisiting abandoned villages. Contrary to popular belief, writing is almost as old as irrigation technology, and is even older than irrigation in some parts of the world. If you want generations to survive, there must be a way to pass down knowledge through writing. The ability to chisel laws into a stone block at the center of a village would go a long way in maintaining generations. But it seems like your fear that people will be bored, once they reach the end of the most recent technology tree, would deter you from making the game any easier for communities to thrive and survive than it already is. But therein seems to lie the crux of the problem. There is a miscommunication between the purpose for you making this game, and the reason why people have fun playing and watching it.

I agree completely with M3L4N1N
I was so sold on the idea of what i did mattering to some future person. Creating a civilization. That is what the small youtube vid shows on the home page of this game and i bought it straight away. And this type of gameplay does not take away from those that just want survival. If you want to strike out and setup your own village, go for it. You can start out as a younger girl, can take supplies or nothing at all, allowing for setting your own difficulty. This happened throughout history and is what set humans on the great expansion across the globe. I was never bored working for the next generation or the thought someone would find our village and take over.
BUT when the last female in my last village died, I was like, "oh this is pointless", I stopped hauling in iron and resources and just let myself die. Then I logged out and not back in.

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