Update: Precious Life
June 8, 2019
Life has been cheap in the game for a very long time. It always bugged me. Death is inevitably going to be somewhat meaningless, but it was a bit too meaningless. Yes, in any game where there's reincarnation, players are going to leverage that to achieve various goals. However, there should still be some trade-offs and difficult choices involved. Infinite and free is boring, because it makes you not need to decide.
The original concept for this game was actually One Dollar One Hour One Life, and that would have dealt with this problem quite squarely, while also committing commercial suicide in the process. I've also toyed with only allowing one life per player per hour, but that also seems too extreme.
There's a wide spectrum between those extreme options and life being completely free/infinite, though. It needs to have some cost, so you feel the pain of death a bit more, and so you at least have a more interesting choice to make when you choose death on purpose in order to get born into a different life. The solution is to only give you one life per hour, but let the lives build up over time, so that you have a buffer.
These numbers will be adjusted in the future, but currently, you start with 24 lives, and you earn one new life every hour whenever you dip below 12 lives. You earn lives this way day or night, whether you are playing or not. Most people will build back up to a full bank of 12 lives every night while they're sleeping. You start with 24 to give brand new players some cushion as they learn the game.
It's amazing how many of the long-term problems in the game are in some way related to life being too cheap. From griefing, to baby suicide, to too many Eves. We've tried a lot of laser-focused solutions to these specific problems, but the over-arching problem of cheap life remained.
To accompany this change, the lineage/area ban on /DIE is back, mother birth cooldown has been restored to the way it used to be, and the Eve spiral is back, replacing the newer Eve grid placement. The spiral now works along with the ancient map culling, resetting back to the center of the map once it has been reclaimed by nature, so Eves will come closer together periodically, instead of just once a week when the servers restart. Finally, roads, along with stone walls, are not reclaimed by nature, so you can build long-term routes across the map, even as civilizations die out along those routes. This should help distant villages continue to find each other over time.
And snowballs no longer make you drop what you are holding.
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