Update: Who's Who
February 9, 2020
You might call this the information overload update.
First of all, in-game, hit ESC. There was always a graphical hint showing the controls, but over time, the list of "hidden" verbal commands has grown quite long. Now you have a hint sheet for all of them.
There's one new command on this list, and that's the /FAM command. Type this on the chat sheet to see +FAMILY+ labels pop up above the heads of nearby people who count toward your genetic fitness score. These are the people that you need to take care of if you want to climb the leaderboard, have a healthier old age, and unlock more tool slots.
But what about far-away family members? Aside from your mother and grandmother, all of your genetic fitness offspring are younger than you, which means they were born after you (so you had some chance to help them survive). When one of these babies is born, your character will call out, and you'll get a temporary arrow pointing back to the birth location. You will also see +FAMILY+ labels above the heads of all your family members each time a new baby is born.
A similar system has been added to help you keep track of relationships in the leadership system. When you receive and order from your leader, you get a temporary arrow pointing back to them. When you issue an order as a leader, you get an arrow to your closest follower (so you can get the order-passing process started), and you also get +FOLLOWER+ labels above the heads of all your nearby followers.
Note that, thanks to these arrows, issuing an order to your followers can actually help them follow you---when traveling as a group.
Also note that exiled followers don't receive orders or see these arrows, so you don't need to worry about griefers using them to track people. And as a leader, people only get an arrow point to you if you issue an order. So you can control exactly when people can track your location.
Next, to bootstrap the leadership system, everyone auto-follows their own mother, if their mother has no other leader.
Okay, okay, that stuff is pretty cool, but there's one more massive improvement this week. For a long time, curses have been personal. You chose who to curse, and there's a guarantee that the cursed people won't be born near you for the next 30 days. Cursing is a way to say, "Get away from me in the future, I don't want to play with you anymore."
But of course, that didsn't stop people from migrating later in life, returning to the same village repeatedly to cause more trouble. And even though you cursed them, they were impossible to recognize.
Not anymore. Now, each person you curse gets assigned a permanent 2-noun label. Whenever they appear in your game, they have black speech bubbles, and they appear to babble this 2-noun phrase periodically. Only you can see them doing this, though. Other people who have them cursed see a different label. But this will allow you to recognize the same bad actor in future lives.
There are also a bunch of other little changes. A lone griefer can no longer block other people from getting born on low population servers. The waiting period for killing is now 12 seconds, and is cut in half for each member that joins a posse. Posses of three or more people cause the victim to gasp repeatedly in terror, producing a "T" off-screen sound marker. Twins no longer count toward posse size. Human-caused wounds all have a waiting period of 15 seconds before healing can be performed (a gushing state), preventing teams of two griefers from tag-team healing each other repeatedly. When your leader dies, you get information about who replaced them.
After letting the dust settle on the latest genetic fitness score changes, it seems that there is a de facto ceiling around 52. I've adjusted the tool slot curve to account for this:
|
|
|
