a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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Trusted, the point is that a village needs to get good at detecting these intentionally backwards players and dealing with them. The only way to deal with them is to kill them. So killing them has to mean something.
If a village is ignoring the griefer operating right under their noses, there's nothing I can do for them. You're right that there's no way to auto-detect that.
All I can do is give them a poweful tool that they can use if they are paying attention.
Right now, the tool is just not powerful enough.
Someone has suggested a "dance on their grave" mechanic of some kind. Where a village, after killing a griefer, can curse the grave spot, which prevents the griefer from being born in that area for some period of time. The more people that participate in the curse, the stronger it becomes. Maybe it takes three people to ward the person away for 30 minutes, and each additional person who joins the dogpile will add an additional 30 minutes. A whole village could ward someone away for half a day or more.
That idea is becoming more appealing to me now, and I can't currently see any downsides to it. It will take some coding to implement, so I'm still thinking about it.
However, the karmic ladder adds an interesting metaphysical structure to the game beyond just dealing with griefers. It has a bunch of downsides, though (splitting up the player base, giving new players a worse experience, etc.)
What happens to abandoned babies, Do they also go down a level?
Aha! We just discovered Limbo...
Thinking more about the problem of griefers.
Part of the problem is that, even if you kill them, they can keep coming back at you. They can bypass server assignment and keep coming back to your server, and they can baby suicide until they are born in your village again.
Killing them slows them down, but not by enough. Let's assume, though, that this will always happen to a griefer in the end. They will always be discovered and killed (assuming that I keep tweaking things to make that more and more likely, if it's not likely enough already).
One problem with any further punishment of "murder victims" is that it hurts the good guys along with the bad. A griefer may be running around killing people, and we don't want those people being punished any further.
However, I realized that if we compare the average griefer to the average non-griefer, assuming that non-griefers outnumber griefers, then the average griefer's life will be way more likely to end in murder than the average non-griefer. Essentially, the griefer's life will always end in murder, while the average non-griefer will be the unfortunate victim every once in a while.
So, some kind of further consequence for dying by murder might actually be okay. Someone really didn't like you... that should mean something. Even if it was a legit dispute between two benevolent monarchs, the one that was guillotined is special.
I already have 15 servers running. If I had mandatory server assignments, at least for the top half of the servers (so that there still are some free servers around for people who want to play solo or collab on voice or whatever), then those servers could be a kind of karmic ladder.
Going down one rung is pretty obvious: if your life on the previous rung ends in murder, down you go.
Climbing back up though? My initial thought is that you climb up if you live to old age on the previous rung. That would definitely slow griefers down. A full hour down there, at least, before they can get reborn in your village.
It also seems like it would be a harsh purgatory for the innocent victim of murder, but maybe it's okay and kinda fitting.
Another idea is that the ladder could be used for everything, not just murder. Living until old age lets you go up, dying young sends you back down. If you're on server1 and you have a baby, you know that baby is special. The advanced players are already making up their own filters to decide which babies to keep. The idea of having a "city of gold" at the top of the ladder where only the best players ascend is compelling.
However, it would also spread players out, trap new players in purgatory levels filled with griefers, etc. Maybe all new players start on server1 for their first game and fall down from there. You get a chance to play with the best and stay with the best, assuming that you can listen to advice, learn quickly, and contribute without dying.
Apocalypse is off for now.
It was too easy to trigger.
It may return someday, once the tech tree is deep enough that it will take weeks to trigger.
Some fellows with beards are fixin to tell you all about it here:
https://youtu.be/oLA4lEtmH2A?t=2m8s
I don't know much about "the patriot community," but that video made me cry.
But yeah, I also want a good community, so maybe I'll need to change my mind about this....
Beware of a few things:
1. If you don't have enough resolution to support this, then all the graphics will be downscaled, which looks ugly and loses detail. I settled on 1280x720 for a reason, because it will NOT be downscaled on pretty much any semi-modern monitor.
2. The server is sending map chunks based on its understanding of the client's view area. To reduce the volume of messages sent, the server cuts it as close as possible, and lets you get pretty close to the edge of your current map chunk before it sends you additional map information. I expect that you will experience a lot more pop-in, of both biome ground tiles and objects, near the edge of the map when you run this mod, and even a slight spike in network lag will cause loads of pop-in.
The client has no control over what map chunks are sent, so it does not have the power to ask to server for information about a larger area. Fortunately, because of this, this type of mod puts no additional strain on the server. But implementing a larger view area that was pop-in-free would put a larger strain on the server.
Kinrany, I agree about the nature of speech at a private party.
But this is more of a public party. Everyone is invited.
I also agree 100% that the rules protecting the right to free speech do not necessarily apply here. I could enforce whatever rules that I want to enforce. I could force everyone to only chat in Esperanto, if I wanted. If I did that, I would have three or for glorious days of mashing the ban button, and then there would be no one left.
Essentially, I just don't want to get involved in adjudicating individual disputes. So and so broke the rules, I'm telling on you, and that kind of thing. I would have to take a side, someone always gets angry, and it wastes a bunch of my time and energy. These things blow over in time anyway.
Now, as for the community being welcoming to outsiders, I do have a serious interest in that. My livelihood just may depend on it. Please be welcoming to outsiders!
However, I have no idea how to enforce pleasantness, or what such a community would even look like.
Looking at this further, each "batch" of uses is an independent geometric random variable. If p is the chance of moving on to the next batch with each use, we expect 1/p uses before moving on to the next batch. Our variance is (1 - p) / (p^2). And that is where the magic happens.
For independent random variables, the expectation of the sum of the variables is the sum of each variable's expectation. Same with the variance.
We can achieve the same expected value of "100 chops" with a single batch with 1/100 chance of failure, four batches with 1/25 failure, or ten batches with 1/10 failure. They all have the same expected value, due to the summing of the expected value of each batch. p gets bigger and bigger with the number of batches, but the expected value of the total sum does not change.
However, because the variance includes a p^2 term in the denominator, as p gets bigger, the sum of the independent variances shrinks.
For p = 1/100, Var = 9,900 (std deviation = 99.498 )
For four batches of p = 1/25, each batch has Var = 600, for a sum Var over all four batches of 2400 (sum std deviation = 48.989).
For 10 batches of p = 1/10, each batch has Var = 90, for a sum Var over all 10 batches of 900 (sum std deviation = 30).
In the most extreme case, we could have 100 batches of p = 1/1, where our expected value is still 100, but our Var shrinks to 0.
I recently shipped the iron mine with a single batch and a 1/10 chance of failure. It was supposed to feel like a gamble, but an expected value of 10 sounded like a lot of iron. But with a variance of 90 (std deviation = 9.48), we can see that we expect a very wide range. I'm fixing the iron mine to have more batches now.
Not making assumptions.... I played last night and found it to be a griefer's paradise. I didn't see any tents being cut down, though.
When players notice a griefer, they are powerless to stop them. Someone can literally follow you around and mess with you non-stop. Like, if you're baking pies, they can walk off with all your plates. If you're trying to load an oven with kindling, they can empty the kindling before you get a chance to light it. As you're about to plant carrots, they can plant wheat. They can turn every oven into a kiln, and just when you're about to fire a new plate, they can seal the kiln and make charcoal instead. Just when you till a row and are ready to plant, they can take the soil away in a basket. They can walk off with your last carrot seeds, dig up all the remaining wild carrots, cut down every kindling tree.
All this is present in the main game too, of course. But when a griefer is caught, they are killed. In 2HOL, I saw people collectively get angry at a griefer and try to kill the griefer with a bow and arrow and a knife, but it didn't work. So the griefer can keep going for two full hours.
I get how it's easier to recover from the damage, because 0,0 is essentially the center of a giant village that goes for miles (or a network of closely-connected villages), so it would be impossible for a griefer to destroy everything.
And you're right that griefers cannot kill your last fertile female, but they can starve them out. Even that isn't fatal, of course, because the next Eve spawns at 0,0.
However, the fact that the damage isn't complete or permanent is no comfort to the people who are being annoyed by the griefer in their current life. A griefer can easily undo the immediate work of multiple people right before their eyes, and all they can do is stand there saying, "Hey, stop it."
This turns out to be a griefer's paradise. Two glorious hours with no consequences, and no covert operations necessary. The only thing the victims can do is quit and hope to be reborn far away from the troll in their next life...
Recent events in Discord have caused a bit of a stir. An argument turned into death threats and implied Nazi rhetoric. What shall we do about this kind of thing?
Here are my thoughts:
I don't really feel that it is my place to police any discussion content, unless it becomes disruptive to the other discussion. Like, if someone is posting spam, that's disruptive. If someone is posting endless, unrelated memes, that's disruptive.
Here is a case where someone made a statement that I don't agree with, and a threat that I would never make. But I am not that person. That person is responsible for their statements. People come to discord as individuals, with a range of different beliefs and opinions. Many of these beliefs and opinions are troubling to me.... but...
If someone is breaking the law, I would encourage you to seek the assistance of law enforcement.
If someone is causing you distress in Discord, please block them.
If someone is saying things in a forum thread that bother you, please stop reading that thread.
I'm kind of a free speech absolutist. I frequently exercise my right to walk away or look away or change the channel.
"I may hate every word that comes out of your mouth, but I would die to protect your right to say it".... that kind of thing.
That said, in the US, the Supreme Court has permitted the government to enforce "reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions." Thus, your free speech right does not necessarily include driving down a residential street at 4am with a 2000 Watt speaker playing your message at full volume. But notice that there is no such thing as "reasonable content restrictions," because the government is incapable of making those distinctions.
I view this kind of online community like the public area of a city. There are reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions. Don't post memes every second (time). There's an off-topic channel for a reason (place). Etc. But the city is comprised of individuals with widely varying views, attitudes, tastes, cultures, languages, and so on.
As individuals, we always have the right to look away from things that bother us. In discord, with the power of blocking, that right is inalienable de facto. Please use it.
Now, the question remains whether this particular fight was off-topic or disruptive. Maybe it was. I encourage you to move your chat to the off-topic channel or private messages if you wish to continue an extended fight.
Reference for women being required to serve in the military pre-1948? I know they were allowed to serve in non-combat duties, and that many did serve... but I've never heard that they were required to serve.
My point has nothing to do with women "sitting at home" but rather that they generally receive more protection from death than men.
Good idea!
I can't wait to see these results.
Though I suppose I have these answers already in the data....
Gus, I do like the occasional drama and hilarity of twins, though.... the breastfeeding fertility block is 100% true to life, though...
Also, I found this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_Bugis_society
But this culture sounds so alien in so many other ways that it's really hard to translate these concepts.
I'm approaching this from a western perspective, I suppose.
Auner, curious if you know of any examples of societies that exclusively sent their young biological females off to war while their biological males stayed safely at home? I'm not talking about the occasional gender-bender, but as a matter of cultural policy (and this is STILL cultural policy in the US, where only young men face selective service registration.... women are finally supposedly allowed to serve in combat as of last year, but still not faced with being drafted, and the deaths in modern conflicts speak for themselves: https://usiraq.procon.org/view.resource … eID=000671 )
Curious if you know of any societies where biological females do not get on the lifeboats first? Or where the elderly are put on the lifeboats before children?
Looking around, what I've been able to find about female warriors is mostly the stuff of fantasy and legend. I did find this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onna-bugeisha
But it sounds like they were mostly defending the village while the males were off at war.
The disposability of biological males seems universal to me. If 900 women were shot by police a year vs 45 men, we'd have a bit of an uproar about it. But the gender disparity in police shootings (900 men vs 45 women) hasn't even been raised as a troubling issue:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics … ings-2017/
I'm sure the Washington Post didn't look in anyone's knickers when composing these statistics, though, so who knows?
I saw someone saying something like, "Why bother making a lock? All someone has to do is make a key and open it."
That's not true... so I thought I'd clear up some confusion.
Locks use a new object system called "variable objects." They only show up as a single object in the crafting tree, as seen here:
https://kazetsukai.github.io/onetech/#9 … y----%2410
BUT, notice the $10 part of the description comment. That is a variable that will be filled at runtime with ten different values (1...10) to make ten different locks.
Only the matching key works in a given lock.
And the only way to get a key for that lock is to craft the right numbered lock-and-key combo from scratch OR get a hold of the original key and duplicate it.
I'm using $10 to test the system, but $50 or $100 is possible.
But even with only 10 keys, opening a lock is not a simple matter.
Also, I'm aware that there is a bit of an information leak here, in that the map sent to the client contains the actual item ID of the lock and not the ID of the base object. Yes, the client hides the comment from the description, but an easy client mod can change that.
The solution is coming in the near future, where any variable objects will be replaced with their parent, non-variable item ID before being sent to the client. So, for example, all locked doors would be seen client-side as object 921, instead of 1205, 1206, 1207, etc (the locked door objects that are created at runtime).
Variable objects can be used for other things besides keys and locks... maybe even for naturally-occurring items.
Griefing isn't a problem yet...
And if a griefer can't do any serious damage, that means that there are no consequences to much of what you are doing, right? Like, food isn't precious, because it's always easy to get more whenever you need it? Like, it's impossible to "screw up," either accidentally or on purpose?
Yeah, this is a tough one.
Don't want to punish the good guys along the way. You're right that they might make the sacrifice for the sake of their town, but....
Baby suicide is indeed an issue. I've thought about different ways to curb it. Not through any kind of cool-down, because you can't differentiate legit baby death from suicide, but maybe some kind of area constraint? Death before 30 makes you respawn in that same area again, either to a mother in that area, or as an Eve? Or maybe every hour, you are assigned a new area to get born/Eved into. Problem is it would stick a griefer in your village for the whole hour.
It's an interesting idea....
Though one of the fundamental ideas in the game is that you never know where you will be born. It's not really supposed to be a game where you have control over continuing projects into the next life.
Obviously, people are playing the game that way, and working around the game's systems, through baby suicide. Not sure how to deal with that.
Question:
If someone is messing with you, breaking the rules of your village, how do you deal with them? Like, if someone picks every carrot and runs off with it and hides it. And you catch them doing it. And you tell them to stop. And they don't stop. Then what?
That is the only reason that killing is present in OHOL, because I cannot envision how player-generated laws would function without it.
Lots of people have made suggestions about this.
Someone recently asked me to explain my thinking behind the way gender currently works in the game.
First of all, it was very important to me that male and female characters in the game be different beyond just their visuals. I think that gender had a huge role to play in the history of the world, and I think it would have a role to play if we had to rebuild the world from scratch.
Second, I wanted this to be a 10,000-foot view of humanity. Lives pass quickly, and many things are abstracted away. So I didn't necessarily want to represent all differences between males and females. Perhaps one difference would be enough. From 10,000 feet away, what is the biggest and most important difference between males and females?
Females gestate and give birth to babies, and males do not.
In terms of the impact on human history and the development (or re-development) of civilization, I think that this one difference explains almost everything.
Some people say men are stronger that women. But while this might be true in terms of averages, it is not true for each pair of individuals. There are plenty of women who are way stronger than me, for example, and loads of women that are faster than me.
But there's one thing that we can say with 100% certainty: no male can gestate a baby.
So while we might be tempted to explain historical and present social differences between males and females based on male strength (men are sent to war because they are stronger), I think that is minor compared to the impact of reproductive differences (women stay safe at home during war because they are the reproductive bottleneck). A society that sends their weakest males to war will lose the war, yes. But a society that sends their women to war loses every chance at a future.
Is this one difference enough to foster behavioral differences around males and females in the game? It certainly is.
In fact, many people are claiming that the effect is too strong. Male babies are being left to die. In fact, male characters seem worthless in the game. That can't be right.
But that's kind of the point. Relatively speaking, males are, and have always been, kinda worthless. Cannon fodder. Miners. Death row inmates.
For those asking whether I'm going to add some additional value to males so that mothers will be more likely to keep them around as babies, I'm curious to see whether any emergent value develops.
First of all, males in the game can contribute to various village projects without also acting like a fertility multiplier.
It seems like most villages are already limiting fertility intentionally by selectively keeping the right amount of babies and letting the rest die. Obviously, keeping too many babies is a recipe for future starvation.
However, I will point out that a female baby, allowed to mature, represents a risk of unchecked fertility in the future, while a male baby does not. You can tell a female to stop keeping so many babies, but she may not listen. A male can be left to their own devices with no fertility risk.
Previously, giving birth involved a big hunger hit. I turned that off a while ago to soften the game, but you can see how the presence of that hit gave an advantage to male characters (no chance of being "stricken" with birth while out on an errand).
Right now, there is no cost to NOT keeping a baby (letting it die). Thus, there is no cost to controlling fertility manually by letting babies die. Thus, no reason to keep males around to naturally limit fertility.
So how can we increase the cost of birth?
Maybe birth itself should have no cost, but the death of a baby should have a cost? So grief-stricken that you can't eat for a while, or something like that....
Speaking of grief, that would open up a whole new channel, with suicidal babies being really hard to cope with...
So... I should go make baskets?
Yes, you should!
The problem that I'm facing is that high tech life is boring.
That is why everyone in real life is depressed.
For the most part, high tech life is focused on entertainment. Playing OHOL 10 hours a day, for example.
Anything that becomes infinite becomes something that you no longer need to think or make decisions about. Just make more of it. Endlessly.
So if I give you "higher tech" that lets you make 10x baskets from the same amount of tule, baskets become worthless and sorta fall out of the economy.
This is true in real life, of course, where no one uses baskets but instead uses "free" disposable plastic bags to carry stuff.
But in real life, since you don't spend your time making baskets, you spend your time watching Netflix.
I'm never going to have Netflix in the game...
Also, the struggle is still there in modern life, we're just ignoring it for a while. The materials used to make disposable plastic bags do run out over the long haul.
Will make sheep fall in trash pit during next update....