Problem: Eve Spiral's westward march ruins the game

jcwilk · 2020-01-11 08:40:10

DestinyCall wrote:

Theoretically, eve spawns are already a rare event and only occur when they are needed, based on "when there are too few families or too many babies for the existing mothers to handle."

Yeah it is annoying though that so much of a family's survival or lack of survival is in the hands of that algorithm. I wonder how much control mothers really have wrt yumming, staying warm, staying fed, etc... Players joining is such a random pattern it's difficult to discern whether there's just not a lot of people logging in or whether you're being skipped and for what reason

DiscardedSlinky · 2020-01-11 08:52:11

Well since Eve's name can be spelt the same forwards and backwards. OR left to right OR east to west that means they were always meant to walk west.

Casuals.

petaldancing · 2020-01-11 21:33:51

DestinyCall wrote:

I can't speak for everyone, but I find it much less enjoyable to know that the majority of the towns I'm born into are going to eventually stall out and die because the game expects us to trade with non-existent families. The current state of the game is very hard to deal with, even as an experienced player and active forum member. I can only imagine how frustrating it must be for someone who has recently started playing OHOL. Assuming you make it passed the initial steep learning curve and like the game enough to stick with it, eventually you will need something from the desert/jungle/tundra. Only to discover that in some lives you can't touch anything in the jungle/desert because it is too hot and the tundra is too cold. No matter how much protection you wear, you still can't pick up anything.
You keep trying and eventually, you manage to get into the jungle and harvest latex for rubber ... but now you need sulfur. And sulfur means going into the desert and for some reason, the desert is still too hot to enter. You ask other people for help, and they tell you to ask a black person. But there are no black people in your village. You ask where to find black people and they tell you they live in other villages. So you go looking for a different village. Assuming you are lucky enough to find another village and it happens to have black people, you try to ask them for help. And that's when you discover the language barrier for the first time.
If you don't give up on the game at that point, you are a stronger person than I am. Or you really enjoy hitting your head against a brick wall. I can't even bring myself to writing a tutorial for "how to make kerosene" in the current game state, because it involves coordinating the actions of three different races across multiple lives. It sounds ridiculous to write it all down, since actually doing it in game basically requires a huge amount of luck.

you've summarized my exact feelings on the game in its current state. it's honestly baffling that the race restrictions are STILL a thing after this much negative feedback... i honestly feel like every minor problem with the game has been amplified by 1000 just by having race restrictions. half of these issues would be fixed immediately if race restrictions were removed. jfc

Spoonwood · 2020-01-11 22:13:06

petaldancing wrote:

you've summarized my exact feelings on the game in its current state. it's honestly baffling that the race restrictions are STILL a thing after this much negative feedback... i honestly feel like every minor problem with the game has been amplified by 1000 just by having race restrictions. half of these issues would be fixed immediately if race restrictions were removed.

A while back Jason made it clear that he wanted the game to be on the knife edge of failure:

jasonrohrer wrote:

I really like the way the Eve game feels right now. It should be, absolutely, right on the knife edge of failure. You get farming going right as the last wild food is eaten. You barely make it. You fail a lot. Half your babies die.
...
That makes me extremely hesitant to "bring the bottom up..." because I don't want to ruin that frantic feeling. That very intentional, frantic feeling, when you are naked in the wilderness.

https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewt … d=5304&p=3

I completely disagree with what Jason did there, because he eliminated various possibilities in the Eve game, leading to a decreased diversity of possible experiences as an Eve or in an Eve camp. But, I digress.

My recollection comes as that a few weeks ago someone on the discord quoted him saying that he wanted every stage of the game to lay on a similar knife edge of failure. Don't many of the complaints suggest that the game is often on that knife edge of failure and people have something similar to that frantic feeling?

DestinyCall · 2020-01-11 23:03:27

And that we hate that feeling. Failure due to unfair game mechanics is not fun or enticing. It is just discouraging and frustrating.

When I look around at a nice town that is doing really well and know that it is doomed to failure within a few generations due to forces that are beyond my control, I feel defeated. Everything looks great right now. I have done everything I can to improve the village already. It is well-designed and problem-free .... but I know it doesn't matter. Before long, the water will run out and the town will crash. Nothing I do in this life or a dozen others will prevent the fall.

The game has set an unfair challenge. It is a problem without a solution. The outcome was already decided before I was even born and I can't change it, so why even try?

It pretty much kills my enthusiasm for village building.

jcwilk · 2020-01-12 00:32:48

DestinyCall wrote:

And that we hate that feeling. Failure due to unfair game mechanics is not fun or enticing. It is just discouraging and frustrating.
When I look around at a nice town that is doing really well and know that it is doomed to failure within a few generations due to forces that are beyond my control, I feel defeated. Everything looks great right now. I have done everything I can to improve the village already. It is well-designed and problem-free .... but I know it doesn't matter. Before long, the water will run out and the town will crash. Nothing I do in this life or a dozen others will prevent the fall.
The game has set an unfair challenge. It is a problem without a solution. The outcome was already decided before I was even born and I can't change it, so why even try?
It pretty much kills my enthusiasm for village building.

Well the knife's edge thing is different from what you're describing... I love knife's edge but I agree that what we are working with is not even on the knife, the knife is on the table and we're in the dirt wishing and sometimes pretending we're dancing on the edge but no, just dirt.

It's frustrating because the problems seem so obvious but maybe the solutions are complicated for technical reasons *shrugs* I just can't give a fuck about villages at all at the moment, now that there's at least one bell ringing I've pretty much washed my hands of it all. I've got my coordinates that's all I need, time to fuck around in donkeytown and weird distant satellite camps in a vain attempt at forcing metagame into a game that currently has none

pein · 2020-01-12 10:47:53

lets not forget that many things changed since the spiral

the most important: wells

wile it was kinda rare but I have seen towns on two sides of a bigger swamp
since the oil and water have 160 distance, and if someone places their well offset with like 40 or 80, then towns get to be around 300 away from each other
it's 160 now? so the next well is 200 away, that's the closest you can get in ideal conditions
if an eve can't see a spring then either join others or goes a bit further each time

the issues:
-a lot of eves are bad and unserious so they take the spot but they don't make anything useful so space is wasted
-even if going west or east ca be more simple, it's way too much after a while, maybe weekly the spawns should turn around so we can get back to older towns
-making contact with the right skin tone families is essential and towns got no future without rubber at least, used 30 rubber to clear out the Newcomen. used 3 cisterns and a few buckets to clear ou an upgraded well.
That 30-35 buckets is like almost nothing, a few active farmers can use it up quick, especially with tree planting, milkweed or skewer farms
the 30 rubber is too much, average players can't do it
-no value to cities, no point living in one over the other. if has water and a bell maybe then is valuable, until then is lot of randomnesses but generally dies out.

Distance is one thing that could and should be less of a problem with higher tech levels. So I think it should be simplified when you got technology. Instead of time and luck-based travel, we would need cost-based travel. essentially you would have a map and could go anywhere on it, maybe scout it out the first time around, instead of spending a full life to search, you could go to transport locations by paying for the ticket. we don't have a currency yet, and can't really balance that well but around 10 min of work should give you enough cash to travel 2000 away.
until then, a few requirements like cart, enough pies or other food (for example would cost you 0.1 pip each tile you fast travel so for 2000 tiles 200 pip, which is like 12 pies(drop plates when someone travels).

Travel is boring and random. Not much point of it.
I had this other idea that each map would be separate and a minimap could arrange the spawns so they always close.
That way we could have a bonus for each family within their map. The maps could be recentered around the eve spot, then even be unlimited or very big outside of it. Like 1000x 1000 but the center would have travel locations to each other.

I feel there is no good reason why we do things, we just survive but no geopolitics or no value to locations.

In mount and blade for example, you had these villages which made different stuff cause they had a different layout, some of them were near a special map form, so was on border and get raided often, others were harder to reach, based on which city they belong, they had trade to it so the cities depended on them to produce stuff and cutting off trade was possible. Sure, it's premade balance there, and AI sandbox.
But we could have like some premade locations and better value resources in some places. For example, more water or more clay or special resources, which would make a city more important than others over time, so players would want to go back. That would make wars a bit more viable too.

One Hour One Life Forums

#26 2020-01-11 08:40:10

Re: Problem: Eve Spiral's westward march ruins the game

#27 2020-01-11 08:52:11

Re: Problem: Eve Spiral's westward march ruins the game

#28 2020-01-11 21:33:51

Re: Problem: Eve Spiral's westward march ruins the game

#29 2020-01-11 22:13:06

Re: Problem: Eve Spiral's westward march ruins the game

#30 2020-01-11 23:03:27

Re: Problem: Eve Spiral's westward march ruins the game

#31 2020-01-12 00:32:48

Re: Problem: Eve Spiral's westward march ruins the game

#32 2020-01-12 10:47:53

Re: Problem: Eve Spiral's westward march ruins the game

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