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.
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