Update: The Posse
September 28, 2019
The big changes this week focused mostly on griefing and long-term family preservation. The most recent arc lasted 67 hours, which is much better than before, but we're still not there yet. Ideally, an arc would last 5-7 days, to the point where we hit an interesting resource-exhaustion situation. The arc ends when there's only one family left, and families were lasting longer, but still dying out too quickly.
After looking at the data, it became clear that very few people were ever going to Donkeytown, even though there were plenty of curses being doled out. In fact, the most widely-cursed player had accumulated curses from 104 people, and even that extreme outlier barely went to Donkeytown. The fixed-radius blocking associated with curses---where someone you cursed is guaranteed to be born far away from you for the next seven days, wasn't working. Even if many of the living players had an incoming player cursed, their blocking radii wouldn't cover enough of the map. There could always be a crack for a heavily cursed player to slip through.
And it was clear that some of these griefing players were actively trying to kill off families to bring the arc to a swift end.
Now the blocking radius for a cursed player grows depending on how many living players have that incoming player cursed, growing by 100 tiles for each additional cursing player. If you try to get born during a time when 10 living players have you cursed, your blocked radius will cover the entire diagonal diameter of the rift, meaning that it's impossible for you to get born there, and you go straight to Donkeytown. However, as the number of living players who have cursed you rises, it becomes gradually harder and harder for you to get born in the rift, as you are pushed further and further away from more and more people. Thus, the more you bother people, the more likely you will be to end up far away from people or even in Donkeytown.
As an example, a recent sample showed that 13 living players had cursed that most-cursed player (the one with 104 curses). That player has gotten to the point where they will almost always be born in Donkeytown. They've bothered enough people that, day and night, there are always a bunch of bothered people online in the game at the same time.
Next, I took another look at killing, and how it gives lone griefers an advantage as they sneak around and pick people off. You now get a 3-second warning when someone targets you before they can actually kill you, and their murder-mouth sounds have a visual indicator when they are off-screen. Your character also shows a SHOCK face while they are targeted. So you can see them coming, with plenty of warning. Still, depending on how skillfully you move relative to them, they might be able to catch up to you. Furthermore, a lone griefer, using skilled movements, can often evade a determined group of players. This never felt right. The group should have a huge advantage over an individual, and a lone griefer shouldn't be able to get the jump on anyone.
The solution to this problem is the new posse movement system. If you're trying to kill someone, acting alone, you move slower than normal. If you join up with a larger and larger group, all targeting the same person, you move faster and faster as a group.
All of these changes make unilateral killing much harder. Your victim gets plenty of warning, and you can't catch them. However, a lone individual can still guard a choke-point or area, preventing anyone from passing through. Lone guards are good. Lone killers are bad. On the other hand, it is also much harder for a lone griefer to escape from a determined group, because the group speeds up. When the whole village decides that you need to go, they should be able to carry out justice without too much mucking around.
But even with these changes in place, I'm still worried about families dying out too quickly. Maybe flukes of baby distribution are still contributing factors. I decided to redo the baby algorithm yet again, this time always giving incoming babies to the family with the fewest fertile females after the Eve window closes. It used to be round-robin, but that kind of even distribution might not be enough to keep a struggling family alive. And so far, it seems to be working. Here's the family graph for three hours from the latest arc:
Oh, and one more really cool thing: you can now build boxes on property fences. They allow you to store things there, thus conserving space, but they also serve as pass-through channels, allowing you to pass stuff in and out of a fenced area without opening the gate.
Specialized work units are now possible. Get ready to apply those time and motion studies!
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