Fun cannot be implemented

Gogo · 2020-03-25 23:22:27

After many ideas how to 'improve' OHOL, I can finally see. Trading, currency, lands, co-op? It won't give us any more fun. We will have new challenges, more dangerous things on a map, nerfed resources, more complex troubles. It's someway connected to what real fun is, but it's not the quintesence of it. The real fun is - living in chaos!

Question - how to make game more chaotic? You can't! Game is chaotic itself on early stage and spontaneously from time to time, it's up to players, or more likely, when things escalating between them. The more we building up our towns and 'civilizations', the less raw and chaotic life is, the more bored we becoming.

While teaching kids and caring for them is nice, learning tech tree gives satisfaction, building and finishing projects makes us proud, working in town is pleasant, the fun part is where the chaos is. Killing spree at rifts were damn fun, drama and roleplays are pretty fun, babypocalypse, griefers, even bear attack etc., because it creates so much needed uncertainty.

I'm playing some older games while being on quarantine, basically checking all games from 90s-till my computer can handle. The most fun game I've re-discovered is Carmageddon from 1997. It's a racing game, but... not normal.

Beside winning by going through checkpoints, you can kill all pedestrians or animals, your opponents wanna kill you by hitting on you, you can jump from one rooftop to other or fell from high height (game physic is awesome), hit barrels which gave you different bonuses and effects, and auto-repair gives you long race-life. You can do crazy shit and the havoc (a.k.a. chaos) you and your opponents creates is soooo good.

Last edited by Gogo (2020-03-25 23:24:55)

pein · 2020-03-25 23:48:54

Dunno, the fun can be different for every person.

Personally I would like mass scale politics for the resources and territory holding, more map diversification. So when you are bored of surviving you could focus on expansions and upgrades.
Generally upgrading buildings could be fun and varied and would add value to cities. The problems could be always present but they should be different all the time.

I think a tower defence style game could be made out of OHOL with ease. Waves of animals or AI-controlled bandits attacking, and defensive systems, or just clever walling, maybe upgradeable walls with destructible hitpoints.

Catastrophes could be a thing, Tropico had it best if you didn't focus on housing, tornadoes hit you, if you had high pollution, storms caught the boats. Droughts destroyed the plants, the electricity went off, tsunamis or heavy rain or such. It always had a reason, you caused it by sparing on the upgrades, but it wasn't a bad thing always, you could redesign the town after, and be prepared for some of it.

I think adapting to surroundings and the conditions is a fun mechanic. For example, Banished served as an example for a lot of current strategical city builders, the main challenge was surviving the winter on low production and creating enough firewood to sustain the homes, while work was way slower during a short period. The themes are different like Frostpunk has an ice age, Surviving the Aftermath has nuclear spillage, Surviving Mars has dust storms.

The importance of adapting is fun, we could have dynamic food values, where you would need to create a certain food in a time period, or allowed to collect wild resources temporarily to get boosts on it. That would mean that overproducing and storing it would be less effective, heck, even some light food decay would be fun, maybe reusing rotten food for composting.

As for the conflicts, I would prefer an honourable duel system where you can decide who is right and wong cause things aren't black and white, this mob mentality posse punishing is far from justice, most of the times the conflicts have no true meaning, people just stressed or both of them think they are right, a skill-based duel would be fun, most towns got a lot of bored people who start killing each other anyway.

The other would be Fort fights or Castle sieges. Or even some sort of sport, where you don't die but you can compare to others.
With the 60 min max life, maybe 10 minute training for it would be enough, a bit more on casual side.

jasonrohrer · 2020-03-25 23:58:51

Yeah, you're right that "chaos" is missing. Once everything is set up in a village, life is very structured and predictable.

However, when a core resource runs out, things become unpredictable again, at least for a short while.

For example, when the oil well we are depending on for our predictable life goes dry, we suddenly have to scramble.

DestinyCall · 2020-03-26 00:11:44

Pretty sure 90% of the village never sees where the oil comes from so they would have no idea if oil well is dry or not.

Even if they suspected something was wrong, it's not like they can really do anything to help. Easier to just go about your business like usual and pray to the oil fairies.

Spoonwood · 2020-03-26 00:42:53

Gogo wrote:

Question - how to make game more chaotic? You can't!

No, it's possible. After all you say:

Gogo wrote:

Game is chaotic itself on early stage

Were an Eve button to get put in, at least some players could select that more chaotic environment and could spawn anywhere on the map.

And after all people playing on low pop servers still play One Hour One Life, and when players could /die enough times to become an Eve out in the wild, they were still playing One Hour One Life.

Also, imagine trying to set up an Eve camp in a jungle with mosquitoes flying out that you can't kill and you don't have protection against (at least not for a long while). Eve might try to smith and she drops the tongs because the mosquitoes bite her.

But things like that aren't likely to happen, because there's still a lack of recognition that the current temperature system has longstanding problems.

jinbaili83 · 2020-03-26 00:45:46

Oil is bad example. Once oil starts flowing its depleted by same players who build that rig, converted to kerosene and used on diesel well to fill dozen cisterns around the fields so it can not be stolen or wasted. Before water goes out town can be dead from other causes than starvation.

pein · 2020-03-26 01:14:20

jasonrohrer wrote:

Yeah, you're right that "chaos" is missing. Once everything is set up in a village, life is very structured and predictable.
However, when a core resource runs out, things become unpredictable again, at least for a short while.
For example, when the oil well we are depending on for our predictable life goes dry, we suddenly have to scramble.

Most players don't realise that something runs out and don't have a chance to fix it cause they lack the experience for it. So while you nerf things in order to make things harder, still the very few veterans are the one to do it, and it isn't harder just more tedious to go further for iron or water.
It's not a city-wide pressure it's a personal pressure.

But the personal pressure isn't well implemented, cause some people leech off others and won't get punished for it, while others work hard to sustain them. Saw a grandma feeding all the kids and grandkids all alone, even helped out a bit but I wouldn't want to sacrifice a full life on it, preventing any sort of technological upgrade which I was the only one able to solve.

That's enough of a problem that we got core resource and not core resources, so the problem will always be the same so the approach can always be the same. Since water will run out and you need upgrades, you can just make it run out and upgrade. Moving all the water from a well and an upgraded well to a cistern, has the same effect as using up over time, but with the advantage of being able to work on higher-tech.

That's why the water system is kinda bad, the focus is not on optimally using the water and increasing output over time since there are no recharge level upgrades, especially after Newcomen is just input and output. Last time I did that, I was bored as hell to do it over and over, using up the rubber and charcoal, making new charcoal, running the well, halfway there I was like "rather just run out now, we don't even need this water, we just need to empty it so I can install that damn engine"
For normal players, there are only 2 states: you got water or you don't.
And it's not like that you don't have water and everybody scatters to make contact or solve the crisis, people just stand around anyway and try to survive from the resources they got.

The biggest problem I see is that people want to be helpful but they can't. And I can't even tell them how to be helpful as I'm helpless myself.
"go find another town" or "make carts, buckets and go 200 tiles, collect stones and take a shovel, make a well there and bring that water back here" kinda never happens cause If they could do it they would already do it.

The other problem is too much focus on gathering and input/output but processing it has no value really.
Pottery is good cause making the bowls takes time so I can gather clay and others process into something useful.
But making an adobe house is 90% gathering and building it takes no time when you got resources.

There are no static jobs, even if you got a city, it just acts as a collection point like you can stack up some butt logs and tell kids to process it, or maybe pies, but other than that there is a long stagnation where people can't do anything cause they got no resources to use up.
As a veteran, I even stopped cooking pies cause I do it too fast and people get bored cause they can't even do that. Some towns got this rush, all the veterans get together and we start making pen, flooring around the berry, buildings, etc. then all stagnates cause resources are further and we got no goals to work for.

The oil game is even worse, as destiny says, nobody knows where the oil is, what is there, what you need, even if you do find the oil spot, you cannot enter the biome and get it yourself, and nobody scatters to find others to do it, people just quit on it or do something else, even if you got gingers, no guarantee that they will do it, the other time I spent 5 minutes to convince the only ginger to come along with us, she made a fire and then went back to the city cause she didn't want us to tell her what to do and she never done it before, she didn't even comprehend why she would be the only one to do it. The other time we had 30 gingers and I was dropping a note for straight 10 minutes until found a guy who only had to assemble all the things I prepared for him.

The hero complex of veterans runs out and they already know that this takes a whole life and there is no guarantee it succeeds cause they didn't born with the right skin colour and that's just the worst feeling to have the skill, have the resources, but the game limits you from achieving that goal.

When we had unlimited resources, at least we had unlimited work, put those newbies to collect berries and make clothes, even if they slow it won't hurt others.
Water was a basic resource what you could convert into soil or food.
But by making water the bottleneck, the bottom level also stops, nobody is being able to work cause there are no resources.
Since effectiveness matters more, being ineffective is making you useless. Your time doesn't worth a thing. Newbies are ineffective, therefore useless. I enjoy their enthusiasm, but that alone won't make them useful, I want them to be useful, I want to thank them honestly but can't really.

When I scrape pond water into buckets and they don't make pies, they dump it on the bushes I get a sudden urge to murder them.

This game needs more static jobs, processing resources so player numbers matter, their time matters. Create something out of nothing. it does not have to be food, it could be bricks or other construction material, it could be anything of value without the need for tedious gathering. There is no point for overproducing cause you won't get a profit. There is no point of staying in the city cause there is no goals to achieve, even if you would build a pyramid brick by brick, it would make it more interesting but there is nothing you can do without resources. And even since we don't even have horses and we can't get them, even the fastest veterans can't get enough resources to occupy all the other players. I enoy optimizing towns but lately, I don't feel I got enough tools to do so.

And that's when killing start, people don't have a goal, a way to produce anything, they just want to stir up shit or go out in a dramatic way. Even that is more boring since we don't have a duel system just a big brother style vote out. Skill doesn't matter in a duel and there is no duel, the hunter and the hunted.

Legs · 2020-03-26 01:53:45

You know, I almost never drill for oil. I've done it a few times, I understand how, it's really not hard. The problem is that any nearby tarry spots are dried by the town well. Any further spots are very difficult to find without cheating (zoom). They occur randomly and only one family can use them. Since they're so far building a road is pointless, it'll be dry by the time you arrive. Maps and waystones are pointless, it'll be dry before anyone else finds it. There are two options for oil: exhausted tarry spots and pumps that one aggressive autist is spending all day to exhaust. If you're lucky you can find an untouched spot with a horse cart 1.2km from town then fail to do anything with it. That's the current meta.

Cheats completely destroy the balance of tarry spots. The same goes for iron mines. It's either empty or some autistic cheater is aggressively draining it within a lifetime. Jason will never address this because he relies on cheaters for charity work but it really REALLY breaks the meta of the game. Any form of balance is impossible as long as cheating is so rampant.

DestinyCall · 2020-03-26 02:20:15

This game is essentially unplayable without zoom. It is hardly cheating to use it.

Spoonwood · 2020-03-26 02:34:33

DestinyCall wrote:

This game is essentially unplayable without zoom.

I don't understand what in essence can't be played without zoom. I guess that's not what you meant though. Can you speak more clearly? Can fug speak more clearly than using that phrase 'essentially unplayable'?

DestinyCall · 2020-03-26 02:38:08

Spoonwood wrote:

DestinyCall wrote:
This game is essentially unplayable without zoom.
I don't understand what in essence can't be played without zoom. I guess that's not what you meant though. Can you speak more clearly? Can fug speak more clearly than using that phrase 'essentially unplayable'?

It means I will not play it.

Legs · 2020-03-26 03:05:24

DestinyCall wrote:

This game is essentially unplayable without zoom.

That is a fatal flaw of the game. You are wrong to cheat. Everyone else that does is also wrong. It should result in a permaban; you are more of a griefer than literal griefers because you directly harm the game balance and mechanics. Without you and people like you the game would be objectively better and far more functional.

Of course that won't happen because mod ability is what enables Jason's couple of free part-timer's to gift their labor. Which is clearly much more valuable than the quality and integrity of the game overall.

DestinyCall · 2020-03-26 03:45:01

Oh yes, the zoomers are ruining OHOL. And Donkeytown is full of innocent victims.

You are hilarious, Legs.

Spoonwood · 2020-03-26 05:10:16

Legs wrote:

It should result in a permaban; you are more of a griefer than literal griefers because you directly harm the game balance and mechanics.

What does balance mean here? Does it have any meaning at all?

The game is a survival one where all players individually die. It gets claimed as a parenting game where all children die also. It gets claimed as a civilization building game where buildings disappear also.

So surviving is impossible. Parenting is unsuccessful by design, and civilization building is unsuccessful also by design.

You want balance? But what survives? What can honestly get called a success by the core concepts of the game?

Can you tell me what the hell the concept of balance means in terms of the purported concepts of the game? I certainly don't know, because failure looks built in a priori and inevitable. Success isn't built in, and an eternal being would probably keep coming back at players saying things like "you died." "Your family died." "The buildings you made don't exist and barely even existed from what I've seen." "And you want to tell me you succeeded?" "You were naive at best and a fool at worst to assume that success had anything but the most transitory of meanings".

When a game builds in failure by design and success isn't, and failure massively overwhelms success quantitatively speaking at best, what in the world is balance?

Gogo · 2020-03-26 05:38:40

The trick with resources is, if you teach others how to bring oil and they would do it, game would become easier. When it become easier, dev would somehow make it harder again. In your best interest is not to try too hard, because it's Sishypean work.

DestinyCall · 2020-03-26 05:59:48

"Moving the goal posts" is the current design philosophy.

Instead of keeping one step ahead by adding new content and interesting challenges, just keep adding more restrictions and enforced scarcity so the game is Nintendo Hard.

It takes longer to do the same old things and sometimes you can't do anything at all because you lack critical resources. That's progress, I guess. Just not forward progress.

fug · 2020-03-26 06:00:38

Gogo wrote:

The trick with resources is, if you teach others how to bring oil and they would do it, game would become easier. When it become easier, dev would somehow make it harder again. In your best interest is not to try too hard, because it's Sishypean work.

1% of accounts have ever made oil in this game.

You cannot teach something to someone if they're:

A). Unwilling to learn.
B). Wrong color.
C). You lack the resources.
D). The content is dreadful.

You need to be ginger, you need a student, you need the stuff prepped or able to be prepped, and you've got to want to do it in the first place. It's literally the same people over and over doing all the oil on the server which basically is the only reason people can even play in the late game. You aren't making the game harder on anyone except the people still willing to do it at this point. It's not more engaging, it's not more fun, it's just a virtual chore you're doing to benefit everyone on the server. These people are the lifeblood of the game and eventually it's going to burn them out and when that happens everyone will be stuck in mid game towns having no idea how to progress.

DestinyCall · 2020-03-26 06:09:51

I have to admit, I'm part of the problem.

Shortly after we were released from the Rift, I was FINALLY getting the nerve up to learn the oil grind. I figured with the infinite resources available in the boundless world, I could be excused for wasting some of the iron on my own feeble attempts at learning how to plunder black gold from the fabled tarry spots. Prior to that, I tended to avoid anything in the diesel tech range because it was so technical and involved using a LOT of iron to make a LOT of little parts and hopefully not mess them all up or put them together incorrectly. Not really something that can be easily taught to someone else in game and I tend to avoid using wiki or youtube or even OneTech, when I can avoid it. Of course, it's pretty much impossible to do certain things without using outside resources in this game. And I wanted to be able to pull my weight if my town was in dire need of oil. So I was finally going to do it. I was going to learn how to get oil and actually go do it!

Then the racial restrictions update hit and BAM! Suddenly, I had to be ginger, preferably male, and in a village with proper tech and an abundance of iron and there needed to be no one around that was better qualified to do the job .. and I would need to do it without using a horse. Hahhahahahahaahahaaahahahahaaaaa .. ha ... ha ... ha ....

Long story short, I've still never done oil from start to finish and probably never will. Sounds like a real pain in the ass.

fug · 2020-03-26 06:16:45

Ask anyone who has done it before, it's not enjoyable in the least. I stopped doing oil at all after tool slots were introduced because you would basically be left with a useless skill set after the diesel engine is done + the oil part.

Tongs, kiln, regular hammer, newcomen hammer, roller, bore, lathe. Seven slots gone instantly to do a single engine

or

Tongs, kiln, hammer, file, roller. Five slot to do the oil grind (at the time).

Obviously tool slots have gotten a bit better since then but whenever you get bad rng it's a damn nightmare. 20+ pipes to strike oil feels so incredibly bad even if its rare.

Gogo · 2020-03-26 09:18:59

For me oil is pretty easy, unpleasant part is when pump is finished and you need either luck or many pipes to start extracitng. Tip, have water in tank to refill the bucket, don't go to ponds back and forth. Or make a well near to pump and teach kids how to do the oil (there's a pump 0,2 N-W from gingers, I made map to it).

Oil should be co-op through generations, like I'm making maps, someone else will make parts for pump, someone else will deliver the parts, someone else will extract the oil. Doing all stuff alone is too exhausting.

Ilka · 2020-03-26 15:46:13

These changes made by Jason are like a broken leg.
Does a broken leg create interesting stories?
For sure.
Only after some time it turns out that you can't really do many things you have done before and are much more limited with a broken leg.
In addition, a broken leg is not pleasant at all.
Unfortunately, due to these "corrections" we are forced to limp with a broken leg.
Jason thinks at the moment: "It didn't work? Maybe you still have to break a few fingers on your left hand? This will finally be a challenge!"

I wonder how long it will last?

DestinyCall · 2020-03-26 16:23:43

OHOL: Rear Window Edition

Elsayal · 2020-03-26 17:27:39

Ilka wrote:

These changes made by Jason are like a broken leg.

I don't think so : iron is easier, and beast are really dangerous now
It's a good time for hunter !

Spoonwood · 2020-03-26 18:10:30

Elsayal wrote:

I don't think so : iron is easier, and beast are really dangerous now

So, a hand cart of iron with four baskets and backpack may well cost 160 pips worth of time. Wild berries will require water. This is what you call easier?

Elsayal · 2020-03-26 18:18:49

You are right : I forgot the hungry works !
Well it will be challenging even for veteran, at least
I must say that getting a bunch of iron was really easy. I want to try this update anyway : after that I tell you what I think.

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Fun cannot be implemented

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