Update: Tough Roads
July 14, 2023
Paved roads are now harder to remove, requiring a two-person operation, just like rail tracks. The paving machine now requires a smithing hammer to stop, which makes it much harder to stop by accident.
Donkeytown players are now much farther away (200 million tiles), but they have access to all the biome bands, meaning that they can potentially build their own thriving civilization out there. Maybe they'll even have their own world-famous opera house someday.
Given that curses last five years now, and some people may have issued many curses casually in the past before this change, a new FORGIVE EVERYONE command lets you wipe the slate clean.
There was a bug occurring at every server startup that reset each player's curse count back to zero, which meant that the global component of curses (which affects how far away you need to be born from someone who has you blocked) wasn't working correctly. With this week's fix, the players that have received hundreds of curses will now feel the full effect.
There has been a long-standing client-side bug that would register your death as a disconnection event in rare circumstances. This bug has finally been found and fixed.
And finally, there's a new SERVICES screen in the client, which can be used to generate hash tokens to verify your account with third-party services. For example, future versions of the Phex chat service could verify that you really have a game account, to prevent spam bots from posting.
| Update: Long Curse
July 7, 2023
A curse is a mechanism by which you can say, "I don't want to play with this person anymore." After you curse someone, it prevents that person from being born near you---or you being born near them. Originally, this block was only supposed to be temporary, perhaps a few days. But over time, my thinking about curses has changed. If you really don't want to play near this person, why should the game second-guess your wishes by applying a time limit? So the duration got longer, eventually reaching 90 days, which is where it stayed for quite a long time.
But even 90 days isn't that long, in the grand scheme of things. Especially in the face of griefers who have dozens of accounts and cycle through them every 90 days after their curses wear off. You thought you had taken care of this annoying player. Having them buy an alt account is bad enough. But then facing the original account 90 days later, popping up like an eternal and glacial whack-a-mole, is even more ridiculous. How many times do you need to say it? You don't want to play near this person anymore.
For this update, I had originally increased the duration from 90 days to 50 years, which is effectively permanent.
However, there's also some concern about the effect on innocent players getting cursed unfairly, either through intentional framing or simple mistakes. If curses are permanent, won't these spurious curses slowly pile up on the most active players, even if they are innocent?
Again, we should remind ourselves that curse just prevent you from being born near these accidental curse-givers. However, there's one more effect in place, which is that the radius of the block (how far away you need to be born) grows based on how many living players currently have you cursed (how much you've been bothering the people who are currently playing) and based on how many total people have you cursed, whether they are playing or not. The radius formula is 50 times the number of living people who have you blocked plus square of the number of total people who have you blocked.
That second factor starts small, and is pretty much a non-issue for people who have a handful of accidental curses. But for a serious griefer, who is bothering lots of people, it grows fast.
However, if curses essentially last forever, you could imagine innocent players accumulating enough accidental curses over time to bring that second squared factor into play.
The first step in figuring this out was to actually look at the current curse database on the live server, which tracks curse counts over the past 90 days. That data is as follows:
2 24
1 21
2 17
1 13
2 12
1 11
3 10
4 9
3 8
7 7
2 6
7 5
22 4
33 3
36 2
155 1
46 0
2 people had 24 curses, 1 person had 21 curses, 2 people had 17 curses, and so on. At the bottom, you see that 46 people had 0 curses, which is just the people who had their last curse expire in the past week (these get cleared out every time the server restarts during an update). In total, 329 people received at least one curse in the past 90 days, which seems like quite a few.
But not when you consider the fact that 9746 people played the game in the past 90 days. Thus, over 96% of the active players were not cursed at all in the past 90 days.
This gives us a rough upper bound on "accidental curses" for the vast majority of players (1 or less in a 90-day period), which also gives us an idea of how many accidental curses might accumulate on someone for a given expiration window.
All this information feeds into the choice of 5 years as the expiration time for curses, which means that the vast majority of players would not accumulate more than 20 during that time, which is something we can live with.
Meanwhile, active griefers who are bothering lots of people will get their accounts tarnished for five solid years, which is as good as permanent.
Along with this change, the ability to CURSE MY BABY has been disabled, since curses are more serious now, and you have no chance to change your mind and forgive them (since your baby is often dead already).
Solo Eve spawns on low-population servers can now crave all foods, including higher-tech foods, from their second life onward. And several bugs in property inheritance and fitness score have been fixed.
| Update: Trust
July 1, 2023
A funny thing happened on the way to viewing last month's sales data. One Hour One Life sold 36 copies in the nation of Argentina. This is the fourth biggest country in terms of units sold in one month. However, all of these sales only brought in $27 total. Because prices were set long ago, they haven't been adjusted based on exchange rate changes over the years, and Argentinian residents can currently buy the game for 78 US cents per copy.
You might think that is bargain basement price is driving sales over there, but I suspect something else is afoot. US residents who want multiple accounts are buying them in bulk by using VPNs and tricking Steam into thinking they live in Argentina.
And why would one person want so many low-cost accounts?
Because they are using the accounts to grief, and quickly getting cursed by other players, and their accounts are getting stuck in Donkeytown over and over. They escape Donkeytown via the purchase of a new account, which gives them a fresh start.
Of course, the price in Argentina can be adjusted, but this discovery highlights a deeper issue:
The curse system is great, insofar as it allows you to say, "I don't want to play near this person anymore," and have your wishes respected. Each person gets to decide what counts as "unacceptable" on their own, without needed consensus from others. Maybe one person doesn't like swearing, and another person doesn't like berry munching, and a third person really hates bossy players. Some people might like the drama of a murder or theft, while others might hate it. Curses allow us to avoid defining global behavior rules that must satisfy everyone.
The problem is that curses only work if you've encountered that particular player (or account) before. When dealing with a brand new, unknown account, they don't help you differentiate that account from other uncursed accounts---even accounts that you've enjoyed playing with many times in the past. Essentially, all the uncursed accounts are lumped into the same category: they are all unknown variables.
The new Trust system inverts this, allowing you to whitelist accounts that you feel belong to "good" players, from your perspective. By saying "I TRUST JANE SMITH" or "I TRUST YOU" to the closest person, that player is added to your eternal trust list. You will then see "+" symbols around their speech, and this effect persists across lives, with no time limit. This doesn't allow you to track specific players across lives, but rather shows you the growing group of players that you generally trust.
The other accounts in the game are either cursed by you---in which case, you've specifically caught them doing something that you dislike---or unknown variables---in which case, you can proceed with caution until you can determine their trustworthiness.
Aside from marking trusted player's speech, the Trust system has no effect on birth placement or other gameplay elements.
Cursing someone, of course, removes them from your list of trusted players.
| Update: No Perma
June 23, 2023
This update deals with one of the last sacred cows left over from historic One Hour One Life design decisions: truly-permanent structures.
There were two player-built items left in the game that could not be moved or destroyed: ancient walls and the bell tower monument. Both of these things were added long ago, before property fences and many other things. They each required ten hours to soak before they became permanent. Ancient walls were originally meant to be discovered when exploring abandoned towns---perhaps the last remnants after everything else had decayed away (back when I was thinking that most things would decay away in time). And the bell tower was meant to be a major community accomplishment along with a navigation beacon between towns, back before there were other navigation aids in the game. If you managed to build the bell tower, which required cooperation across many generations, you would be able to keep it forever.
The problem with permanent structures, of course, is that they are permanent. If they are somehow built in annoying places, they will be annoying forever. The idea was that people had plenty of time to notice the annoyance before permanence set in. The problem is that you might not notice the annoyance until later, especially if the permanent structure is built far away and permanently entombs something that you might really want to access, like an almost-completed End Tower.
So, you can deconstruct both ancient walls and bell towers now. If you care about your bell tower, you can always protect it with property fences. And ancient walls will still appear in ancient towns, but their fragile beauty now be protected with a careful husbandry.
There have also been a bunch of issues fixed with property gates. You can no longer be assigned ownership from great distances, and destroying an in-progress gate now correctly clears ownership status. Finally, in line with the above discussion about permanence, you can no longer build a long string of property gates right next to each other, since these were effectively impenetrable walls as long as you and your heirs remained living. This was being used to work around the intended removeability of property fences that are supposed to work in conjunction with sparse gates.
| Update: True Aim
June 10, 2023
Still working through the list of reported issues this week.
The biggest and most time-consuming fix was to the aiming system for the in-game photography camera. It worked perfectly... on a 1280x720 screen, which was the only thing I had ever actually tested it on. Due to scaling issues on other screen sizes, the position and size of the photo that was actually taken was way off from the white aiming line shown by the camera. This has been fixed to work on all screens, big and small, and to produce the same 400x400 photograph on any screen.
There are many transitions in the game that require an unused version of an object (for example, a brand new chisel or a full bowl of berries). The hint system now includes information about this with the new (FRESH) and (FULL) tags. Before, you might try to use a partially-consumed object by following the hints, and there'd be no explanation of why it failed. Your bowl might be one berry short of a pie.
For content fixes, you can finally eat chopped onions, tomatoes, and garlic from a plate without following through with a recipe that uses them. Boards can now be piled up. And an empty plane is no longer stuck on the landing strip until refueling. You can now tow it off for deconstruction without using more fuel.
I'm taking next week off from updating for a family vacation.
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