One Hour One Life Forums

Hmm... maybe it's not working?

Also, there is currently one way you can play in the same family twice in the same 3-hour period.... and that's if you're Eve.

If you're Eve, you have no lineage set, which means you get one more chance to get born into your family later.

This is kind of a nice side-effect, a bonus for being Eve.  Also, Eve is much less likely to come back and grief her own village, right?

Maybe this is what happened to you, Turnip?

Distance on the home arrow is a good idea.... though the mystery is cool, so I'm not sure....

It is possible to reach even the farthest bell if you have a baby along the way and then your baby keeps going after you die.

However, the baby will not have your home arrow....  Hopefully, the bell will ring again in your baby's lifetime....

I'll think of a way to make a baby inherit a home marker to the last bell the parent heard before the baby was born....

The idea with the bell is that long-distance pilgrimages are possible, and an interesting aspect of the game.

I've taken a few pilgrimages myself in the game, and they were some of the most interesting stories that I have lived so far.

Yeah, the most recent server update horked this, sadly

The first PU message for the kid is not arriving on time before the LN message comes through.

I don't think relations for any babies are coming through....

If it says "No relation," then they weren't really your kid.  You cannot name them.  If you're in a crowded area with other mothers, perhaps it wasn't really you kid?

Sapling farm?

Some letters are easier to make than others, and only require one sapling each.  Others require many saplings.  R requires 3.  I think that is one of the hardest letters.  If you want to talk about me by name on a sign, you have to earn it with nine saplings.

I don't want signs to be easy, at all.  I hate sign clutter in Minecraft.

A sign should be special and treasured.  The posted/locked signs can be stolen and posted somewhere else.  Signs are valuable.

Letters as currency?

This is some kind of code bug, not a content bug.

There are probably a bunch more just like this, because I was changing the way transitions were generated to get locking and unlocking signs working.  Oops.

Joriom 17 The Jason

Also, for those who say that griefing is not a problem anymore, or is not a serious or overwhelming problem, or that only a few vocal players are worried about it, or that it can be dealt with through a culture of shaming griefers, or whatever.....

....one of my friends said, "Can't you just ask them to stop?"

If the game allows this, it's part of the game, and people are going to do it.  It IS part of the game, but having ways to deal with it is also supposed to be part of the game.  Every civilization needs to figure out how to deal with this, both inside and outside the game.

Currently, in the game as it stands, I know that I could destroy every village, and I know there would be no way for them to stop me in the long run, even if they were paying attention and killing me whenever they caught me.  I'd just keep coming back.

This is a problem.  It doesn't matter what happens in practice, or what people will actually do.  It matters that it is possible.

If it's not a huge problem now, there is potential for it to be a huge problem in the future.  I'm not going to wait until it's a huge problem before I fix it.

Lots of good points here.

The thing about needing to let babies die to avoid overpopulation is true, so aren't you "wasting" babies if there's a lineage ban?  Well, with this change, the influx of babies to your village would change too, because the same people wouldn't be getting born to you over and over.  I.e., way less "baby spam" in general.  Especially later in the life of your village, a baby being born might be a special thing that you're waiting for.

I am worried that this would make long-term civilization much harder than it already is...  that's not the point of this change, so I'm trying to avoid that.

I thought that I maybe did the math wrong for maintaining a pop of 20 and how many new people you need per hour.  But I'm pretty sure it's right.  If you want to maintain exactly 20 people, there will be 20 people dying every hour, which means you need exactly 20 babies born during that hour to replace them.  When grandpa dies, a new baby is born.  So you cycle through 20 new people per hour to maintain your population.

Everyone wants to play in the big city, sure.  And that means that people suicide to escape from primitive life, which means that no other cities develop.  No one has to help build other cities, if the big city is always available through baby suicide.  Why do so many fledgling camps die instead of growing?  It's impossible to get something off the ground if your babies keep killing themselves.

The idea here is not that everyone will be stuck in a primitive life forever, but instead that multiple cities will be growing in parallel, all at different stages of development.  The very best players will be working in all the cities, over time, instead of all focusing on the top city only.

Forking is a problem.... I do want people to be able to walk out and start a new village.  I'll think about that more.  Could be based on location instead of family line.  You simply can't be born too close to where you were born before.

I think I'm going to use the "boiling a frog" approach here, and start by testing out a small lineage cool-down.  Even a few hours would work wonders to stop repeat griefing of the same village and make baby suicide spam less effective.  Also, I'll have it scale with population, so this will have no effect on low pop servers, and also won't be a great burden during slow times late at night.  For the time being, coming back tomorrow will mean you get to live in the same villages again.

Anyway, if it works well, the cooldown can grow over time as people get used to it.

FeignedSanity and kubassa, stop fighting please.

Kubassa, this isn't a game that is meant to be played with friends.

Obviously, if you want to do that currently, you have to fight against the game every step of the way.  Baby suicide on the main servers, or using a custom server setting to play on one of the vacant, high-numbered server.

If I wanted to make a game that was easy to play with friends, I would have made the game way differently.  You would have a friend code that you could share to control who your mother was.

Heck, the whole birth thing wouldn't even be part of a game that was meant to be played with friends, since it doesn't make sense.  The whole point is that a STRANGER is your mother, just like in real life.  If I wanted to make a game to be played with friends, I would make a game where you and your friend were the same age and behaved like friends, not like parent and child.

So I'm not going to avoid implementing features just because it might make it harder to play with friends.

You have high numbered servers, and custom servers, if you really want to do that.

Not sure that I've heard the notion of banning everyone from repeat lineage before....

That means that you'd pretty much only get a chance to play in a given city once, unless you migrated back to it with a different lineage later?

Yeah, that certainly aligns with the spirit of the game.

I'm trying to list all of the impacts this would have on the game, and there are tons of them, and many seem to be good:

1.  Every life is truly different, meaningful, precious, fleeting, etc.

2.  Being Eve means something.  You are always founding a new city that has potential to grow into the next mega city.

3.  Being born to an Eve means something (you are one of the new city founders).

4.  Baby suicide won't get you back to the city, but will eventually just stick you as an Eve when you run out of villages to spawn into.

5.  Every baby is precious, because there's a limited supply that will come through your village in the immediate future.  If you let them all die, there will be no one left to be born to your village.  That brand new, clueless player may be your only hope.  Better train them up right.

6.  Enforcement of law has enormous meaning.  Easily deals with repeat, trans-life griefers in the same village.

Negatives:

1.  Every city is always dying through lack of new blood.  Once every active player has played in that city, the city will have no more babies.  This concern might be imaginary, given the ebb and flow of the player pool, time zones, etc.

2.  Seems to subvert the "two tribes" emergent competition.  Villages are supposed to be competing for a greater share of incoming babies based on how good they are at producing food, warmth, etc.  The youngest village automatically has an unnatural, insurmountable advantage.  (Though currently, a young village has no chance if all babies are suiciding there, even if they are better at taking care of babies.)

3.  The longer a player plays in a given day, the less and less interesting the game becomes.  Perhaps they start in some of the biggest cities, but each life is in a less established city, until finally they are stuck being Eve over and over again.

Obviously, a lot of players like working on the same thing life after life.  They want OHOL to be a different game than it's supposed to be, and they will be angry and vocal if I subvert this any further.  I'm not so worried about this, because I do need to make the game I'm trying to make, and not remake minecraft creative mode with parenting or whatever.

I've always wanted dying in this game to be a HOLY FUCK emotionally-rattling moment.  This life is over, I can't believe it, I'll never see any of you again, please remember me, goodbye, I love you all.  I want you to physically weep every time.

I think the game is pretty close to this if you play occasionally.  The first time you live to old age with your grandchildren running around you as you die.

But being born back to the same village in the very next life subverts this somewhat.

Being born back at some point in the future can amplify the meaning, though...  like being born as the grandchild of your granddaughter.