Why I take a hands-off approach

jasonrohrer · 2020-06-25 17:09:17

I just got an email from someone who wants me to police both in-game chat and discord way more than I currently do. For Discord, as an example, this person claimed that it wouldn't take more than 15 minutes a day to read all messages and deal with bad actors. This person also claimed that cursing doesn't work in-game, because people tend to curse you back.

Here's what I wrote:

I just take a hands-off approach to these things. I've been running this game as a public service for 3 years now. So.... 15 minutes a day (as you suggest), x 365 days, x 3 years = 273 hours of time spent policing discord.
I hope you understand how 273 hours would be completely wasted in a never-ending battle..... for what, exactly? To tell some strangers what they can and can't say? For the benefit of whom? To benefit parents who don't pay attention to whom their children are talking online?
I don't have 273 extra hours to devote to such a pursuit.
And in terms of chat messages in the game itself.... let's see... according to the logs, in the past 40 hours (the logs are flushed after about 40 hours to save disk space), there have been 126,337 spoken utterances in the game. In just two days.
During that time, the word "FUCK" has been uttered 516 times, as one example. 516 times in a two-day period.
If I had a "report" feature, there would be DOZENS of reports to investigate per day. And many of those would be false reports, trying to frame someone. And each person paid $20 for the game, so I can't just ban someone by accident. So I would have to deeply investigate each report. This would consume many hours per day that I simply do not have.
Cursing works. The person will be born far away from you for 30 days. If they ever come near you during that time, they will be clearly marked.
If they curse you back, who cares? You won't be born near them for 30 days. You don't WANT to be born near them, right?

You can always walk away from whatever town you're born into and start your own family somewhere else. Just dig a well out there, and leave all the trolls behind. Build a fence (which is very cheap and quick to build) to keep people out. Exile any "bad" babies that you have.

Keep in mind that I've already spent a full hour just responding to you. This stuff takes time. I have an update to push out today, and the game is going on sale in 5 minutes on Steam as part of the summer sale.
When managing a community of 100,000 people.... well... it's just not tenable to police the whole thing. I've tried doing that in the past, and I've absolutely run myself ragged.
I'm halfway through my life (age 42), and I have way better things to do than argue with strangers online, right? Like.... go outside and plant an apple tree or something, or go fly a kite with my kid, or call my uncle and talk to him because his father just died, or reconnect with an old friend, or read my teenage son's screenplay that's sitting here on my desk, or take a nap.
I don't want to spend any of the time I have left chasing down some 15-year-old who wants to type the word "nigger" online. Sheesh!

jasonrohrer · 2020-06-25 17:12:26

in before someone says "you can't leave and start your own town because of iron."

You mean because you can't come back to town and steal an engine from the trolls?

jasonrohrer · 2020-06-25 17:38:57

Also, while I really appreciate the tireless efforts of the moderators, I have always insisted that they waste as little time as possible dealing with nonsense.

When we add up the total hours humanity has spent on such activities, it's really staggering.... how many hours of sleep and family time and productive work have been lost.

In other news, Bobo Bill just emailed me asking if he could be unbanned from Discord. Will it ever stop? No, of course it will never stop.

Lava · 2020-06-25 17:41:45

jasonrohrer wrote:

in before someone says "you can't leave and start your own town because of iron."
You mean because you can't come back to town and steal an engine from the trolls?

Kerosene isn’t abundant at all so even if we have an engine there’s no oil for the bootstrap

Arcurus · 2020-06-25 17:47:45

did some one say iron? i guess thats a trap like father for Spoonwood....

jasonrohrer wrote:

in before someone says "you can't leave and start your own town because of iron."
You mean because you can't come back to town and steal an engine from the trolls?

fully agree with the time, sad that you needed to spend one hour on it.

but iron.... ok iron is in this case not a real problem:

Lava wrote:

I think this should be a given, I just spawned as an eve Four times in a row! I’m literally exploiting this system by making a wellsite and dieing right after therefore giving everyone around me infinite iron. On top of that I don’t even want to eve! I was 5th place and I dropped two points cause of this.

Arcurus · 2020-06-25 17:50:12

jasonrohrer wrote:

In other news, Bobo Bill just emailed me asking if he could be unbanned from Discord. Will it ever stop? No, of course it will never stop.

lol we need a news reporter, thats for sure, hard to keep up with everything...

merryllamax · 2020-06-25 17:51:46

Hi Jason. This game only cost me 20 dollars and it already paid for 50+ hours of fun so that seems like a great deal to me, especially considering the updates are free. I love this game and what it says about the human condition, about community and belonging, about trying to hold on to permanence, even though we all know nothing is forever. I also love the cute drawings.

I agree that you don't owe anyone unpaid labour, especially labour you don't enjoy. Some people are just really, really entitled.

karltown_veteran · 2020-06-25 18:13:37

nothing wrong with saying fuck ingame. sometimes "diddly darn" just doesn't cut it

Coconut Fruit · 2020-06-25 19:36:43

I don't see a problem here, I don't feel like we need to police these things.
I would even say that this game teaches being a good person, since bad people are being cursed by others very often - that's a good lesson for them.

The only bad thing that we can't often handle, is Bobo killing families with his many accounts, so cursing doesn't really help. I wish I could curse all of his accounts at once, some kind of hardware ID, so cursing would actually ban his PC for 30 days and not just an account.

DiscardedSlinky · 2020-06-25 19:50:10

Banning over speech is excessive, but I think when there's obvious examples of people ruining other peoples fun CONSISTENTLY they should be looked at and punished. The people who's fun they're ruining paid you 20 dollars too. It would stop a lot of the complaining as well from the community.

Like I said, consistent. There's definitely people that get accused of griefing when they're not. But if you have 20+ reports of a player in a short period of time being shitty that's not just hearsay.

If you can't do it maybe start looking into other people getting involved in stuff like that. You're all we have Jason. We HAVE to come to you. You're not helping us or consistently communicating with us. So to us it feels like you don't care about the community at all, which sucks. The community is getting more and more angry at this kind of stuff. The mods have their hands bound by your loose rules and can't help much either.

Actions speak louder than words Jason. You telling us you care about the community over and over isn't meaning much anymore.

merryllamax · 2020-06-25 20:10:59

Coconut Fruit wrote:

The only bad thing that we can't often handle, is Bobo killing families with his many accounts, so cursing doesn't really help. I wish I could curse all of his accounts at once, some kind of hardware ID, so cursing would actually ban his PC for 30 days and not just an account.

Did Bobo buy this game multiple times? Is Bobo a better income source than all of us? lmao. Or can you have multiple accounts with one purchase?

Dodge · 2020-06-25 20:18:35

DiscardedSlinky wrote:

...

Step 1. Make a group of 20 people on discord

Step 2. Everyone reports a random person

Step 3. GG your group can now ban anyone on a regular basis

Now imagine the game gets actually popular and there is 500+ players at any time good luck sinking days and night of policing every report.

Also that person paid 20$ too so perma banning their account would be a big issue with steam and maybe even the law, you would need clear rules of what is forbidden to do, hmmmm what is forbiden??? killing players? it's a part of the game, killing sheeps??? it's a part of the game.

Definitly not the solution to that issue.

Arcurus · 2020-06-25 21:01:27

DiscardedSlinky wrote:

If you can't do it maybe start looking into other people getting involved in stuff like that. You're all we have Jason. We HAVE to come to you. You're not helping us or consistently communicating with us. So to us it feels like you don't care about the community at all, which sucks. The community is getting more and more angry at this kind of stuff. The mods have their hands bound by your loose rules and can't help much either.
Actions speak louder than words Jason. You telling us you care about the community over and over isn't meaning much anymore.

Jason implemented curses to give players a weapon to make a kind of ban on their own. He spent lot time advancing and balancing the curse system to the wishes of the players.

If i remember right, Bobo is known to have 4 plus accounts plus some helpers. At least Bobo accounts seem to spent quite some time in Donkey town.

Jason implemented even a forgiveness system after being asked by the community.

Jason implemented posse to hunt down grievers, ok this might have had the opposite effect then he expected, but at least he tried to give some weapons against grieving. He did not want to take care of every single possibility of grieving, since he thinks thats not in his possibility, so he wanted to give us weapons to fight them. For sure he could do some more tweaks to limit the biggest grieving options like some engine locks or something but also his time is limited, and he has also a family and kids to take care of.

Jason responded the last weeks to tons of smaller and bigger bugs the community reported, see github.

yes there are still many things that could need some balancing / fixing like family iron (oh no i said iron), eve spawn, the biome restrictions or the combat / posse system to mention some and for sure he / we all could do a better way of communicating it.

But for sure putting all the blame on Jason does not help either, ok in the end he is responsible, since its his baby, but he gave the community more then anyone can expect. OHOL is open source, so anybody who has the skills can develop the exact version he wants, who does that normally?

OK thats not easy, but if there is such a great need from the community, then the community has all the tools to create their own variant, at least one will know how to program stuff hopefully.

There is a saying, lead, follow, or dont waste your time and go out of the way.

yes its hard, but like that the world works. Implement your own stuff, follow / help one who does that, or at least try to not waste your time.

And yes sometimes you wont get exactly what you want and sometimes it can be very frustrating thats live, we all learn constantly and try to make it better each according to their capacity.

Maybe Jasons biggest problem is the communication with the community, maybe one day there will be a better way or maybe not.

The only thing we all can do is to take our part and try to make something great together.

Its normal to get frustrated from time to time, just go little bit out and enjoy the nature and once calm, be productive again. Yea that maybe hard, but that will help in the hole life.

Arcurus · 2020-06-25 21:05:22

merryllamax wrote:

Coconut Fruit wrote:
The only bad thing that we can't often handle, is Bobo killing families with his many accounts, so cursing doesn't really help. I wish I could curse all of his accounts at once, some kind of hardware ID, so cursing would actually ban his PC for 30 days and not just an account.
Did Bobo buy this game multiple times? Is Bobo a better income source than all of us? lmao. Or can you have multiple accounts with one purchase?

dont think he, or the one who gave them to him, got them for free, so yea since he paid 4 times, he can have 4 times as much fun before he ends up in donkey town

Legs · 2020-06-25 21:11:48

Nobody:
Absolutely no-one:

Jason: "saying the n-word is perfectly okay."

merryllamax · 2020-06-25 21:42:59

Legs wrote:

Nobody:
Absolutely no-one:
Jason: "saying the n-word is perfectly okay."

You built such a perfect straw man here they should show him off in museums.

Guy · 2020-06-25 22:57:31

Be nice if you smited a griefer just once though.

jasonrohrer · 2020-06-26 03:41:53

Okay, let us count the n-word then.

In the current logs there are 100,000 utterances, which represents something like the past 30 or 40 hours.

The n-word was said 3 times.

The word "RAPE" was used 18 times.

I guess it's good to know where the priorities of the community lie....

And no, you can't play on multiple accounts without paying for each one. I guess Bobo, if he really does have multiple accounts, has bought a bunch.

And no, there is NO way to block someone who goes and buys extra accounts. This was an even bigger deal for The Castle Doctrine, where players could use secondary accounts to explore target houses without risking the savings in their main account. Lots of people bought a second account for this purpose.

If you block double use of the same credit card, it prevents people from buying gifts for friends, and then can just go buy a gift cart to bypass this restriction if they really want to (and there's no way to block the same credit card on Steam, since the person can have multiple Steam accounts).

If you block IP address, it prevents people in the same house from playing (using shared public IP like everyone does through NAT), and a determined attacker can just use a VPN or even just go to the library or Starbucks. And thanks to NAT, people's IP addresses change constantly, so if they buy a second account next month, it will likely be through a different IP anyway.

So then you're stuck, and you just have to acknowledge that multiple accounts are a reality.

It's kinda like DRM being fundamentally impossible.

Coconut Fruit · 2020-06-26 03:58:43

I played a game where everyone had an unique hardware ID, and to change that ID one would need to change a component in their PC (RAM, hard drive or whatever)
I'm not sure if it would be worth implementing something like this in OHOL, because currently only Bobo abuses us through multiple accounts. But if there were more people doing it, it would be cool if we could "CURSE" hardware ID instead of hash connected to the account. This way it wouldn't be worth buying more accounts only to grief, unless you have many PCs.

DiscardedSlinky · 2020-06-26 04:34:54

Who cares about alternative accounts? They're unavoidable yes, but bricking an account is 20 of their dollars down the drain. Eventually they will stop. Spending 20 dollars over and over just to grief doesn't sound fun to me. Plus they'll have to make new accounts. It's an all around hassle, which is a deterrent.

Coconut Fruit · 2020-06-26 05:46:19

DiscardedSlinky wrote:

Who cares about alternative accounts? They're unavoidable yes, but bricking an account is 20 of their dollars down the drain. Eventually they will stop. Spending 20 dollars over and over just to grief doesn't sound fun to me. Plus they'll have to make new accounts. It's an all around hassle, which is a deterrent.

We have a steam discount -40% now, possibly he bought some on previous discount.
And also Bobo doesn't need to buy new accs over and over again, after some time his old accs get out of dt, so he can use them again.

Spoonwood · 2020-06-26 06:00:48

jasonrohrer wrote:

Okay, let us count the n-word then.
In the current logs there are 100,000 utterances, which represents something like the past 30 or 40 hours.
The n-word was said 3 times.
The word "RAPE" was used 18 times.
I guess it's good to know where the priorities of the community lie....

And no, you can't play on multiple accounts without paying for each one. I guess Bobo, if he really does have multiple accounts, has bought a bunch.
And no, there is NO way to block someone who goes and buys extra accounts. This was an even bigger deal for The Castle Doctrine, where players could use secondary accounts to explore target houses without risking the savings in their main account. Lots of people bought a second account for this purpose.
If you block double use of the same credit card, it prevents people from buying gifts for friends, and then can just go buy a gift cart to bypass this restriction if they really want to (and there's no way to block the same credit card on Steam, since the person can have multiple Steam accounts).
If you block IP address, it prevents people in the same house from playing (using shared public IP like everyone does through NAT), and a determined attacker can just use a VPN or even just go to the library or Starbucks. And thanks to NAT, people's IP addresses change constantly, so if they buy a second account next month, it will likely be through a different IP anyway.
So then you're stuck, and you just have to acknowledge that multiple accounts are a reality.

It's kinda like DRM being fundamentally impossible.

I'm not in favor of banning from the game over speech in discord. But, again people have a finite amount of money. Again, they would eventually run out of money that they would spend on the game. So, banning in the long-term would stop the behavior. Stop telling everyone that banning wouldn't work, when in reality it would.

DiscardedSlinky · 2020-06-26 06:25:57

Coconut Fruit wrote:

DiscardedSlinky wrote:
Who cares about alternative accounts? They're unavoidable yes, but bricking an account is 20 of their dollars down the drain. Eventually they will stop. Spending 20 dollars over and over just to grief doesn't sound fun to me. Plus they'll have to make new accounts. It's an all around hassle, which is a deterrent.
We have a steam discount -40% now, possibly he bought some on previous discount.
And also Bobo doesn't need to buy new accs over and over again, after some time his old accs get out of dt, so he can use them again.

Banning an account is a permanent strike. One less account, 20 less dollars.

It will be a HUGE deterrent for people. People who "occasionally" grief will stop for the fear of their accounts being banned. Constant griefers will eventually run out of accoutns and give up. It's an all around win.

Banning WORKS. That's why literally every single game in the world bans people. You need an actual fucking punishment. Donkey town is a slap on the wrist. It's good for what it does, but we need more. Griefing is too easy for it to be so unpunished.

Tipy · 2020-06-26 07:40:36

Jason already has moderators in the discord and forums. On discord you can also just block people

Tipy · 2020-06-26 07:42:50

Also we have curses to deal with griefers. Some of them go around it by buying extra accounts but there is a limit to how much one is willing to spend to grief and banning people has the same weakness

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Why I take a hands-off approach

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