a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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add edible fences but you can only eat them if you're downright racist
if all updates were fixes rather than awful content that needs to be fixed later this game would be crazy good right now.
And yes, this is my way of saying "good update"
thanks for the response Jason
I might try and elaborate how said political views influence in player perception of the object of your mechanics, families in this case
good update, might play the game when it doesnt have a segregation mechanic anymore
seriously, good fucking update though
Tool slots are getting expanded check live dev changes.
So your post is about better communication and not saying "hey jason, i really dont like this"
But you basically say "hey jason, i really dont like this"
Can you expand a little bit on why specialization bothers you that much? what elements?
You misunderstand. Racial specialization was an example because it's being reason of a lot of talk ever since it was added.
The post is about saying "i dislike this because of x"
instead of
"try this new idea i had to fix this "
I think specialization has one major problem that is just a dealbreaker for me and few other issues. not so big post ahead on the main issue. thanks for asking btw.
The main big problem is how it mechanically seems to perceive and treat ethnic groups. We could get in this huge academic debate on wether or not an ethnic group can be attributed x or y characteristic, if it's even ethical to go throwing stereotypes on individuals based on their genetic backgrounds, or how much variation there actually is inside a group and how that relates to the other two questions. I don't think that we need to get this much in depth on why it is an accurate or inaccurate mechanic as a representation of what ethnical groups can be, because there are two details that I think makes it more obviously inaccurate and obviously deterministic. All races are not only more adapted to a biome, but have the ability to use items that others don't, a cultural characteristic rather than a biological one. Not only that, but every family of a race group has the same characteristics. So why is it so bad? Because culture is learnable, so race restricted knowledge makes no sense, and because genetic background doesn't necessarily relate to a expected cultural background, thus making all people of the same skin color tied to the same cultural features also is inaccurate. As someone who teaches biology I just can't agree with this idea of skin color determining so strongly one's culture and environmental adaptability. Probably the best example ever of environmental adaptation in humans is how skin color affects our resistance to sunlight and even then there would be simpler ways to implement this rather than "everyone else is absolutely miserable regardless of anything while being in the desert".
To conclude the main issue and the message I get from it, but I think it's a bad fit for the update that added it to be called family specialization and then focus on ethnicities rather than families themselves. Why are the red haired folk from way up north the same culturally as the folk south? Why is it almost for families of the same ethnicity to find each other? Not only that, but some families end up being more useful than others and in a very predictable system.
You could honestly ask what doesn't bother me about this feature.
tarr has also absolutely great points on how it restricts our accessibility to features rather than making weaker content needed. This in addition to tools slots (which isn't even a bad mechanic, just one that Jason could've been more careful when adding to an already running game) ends up greatly limiting how often you can play with features you'd actually like to.
This is a message to all the community, players and Jason alike. The game has been seeing less and less people online for a while now. I haven't been playing much since tool update. Racial specialization was then the last nail in the coffin for me.
I'm not here to talk just about that. I came to discuss how the current state of the community doesn't allow us to give input to Jason in any way that can be helpful to him. You see, it's a known fact now that Jason would rather see input on what's broken than random ideas on how to fix problems/add new features. But it is also true that sometimes Jason puts together features that are made to fix problems they just fail to fix/that end up making gameplay far less interesting. And the way we respond to that is very not helpful. Sure, there are exceptions, personally I find that Tarr and Destiny are very straight to the point when gving criticism as many others are, focusing at first on why the newly added system might fail/have failed. But still, the general reaction is usually just outbursts that cause Jason to completely ignore the issue at hands for entire months at times.
Please, players and Jason alike, lets start a new trend of better communicating these issues. Instead of giving solutions to every new feature that we feel are broken can we please focus on the communicating why we feel it's broken part? In the end jason will find the solution that mostly suits his idea of the game anyway.
I think there is so much that we should get revisited, so many features that got rushed over and that we keep trying to redesign for Jason intead of just saying "hey jason, i really dont like this".
personally I'd love to see racial specialization completely removed and tool slots expanded to fill that design void of family specialties but this isnt the point, the point (to me) is racial specialization sucks enormously and I haven't had joy with this game ever since it was added.
So please Jason, while I think it's absolutely great you're now again back on the "resource balancing" stage of development don't forget to clean the enormous mess that some past updates have turned the game into, a few weeks over redesigning some player hated features should help. We'll all profit from this and from the community trying to make peace over past wrongs
Just removing racial restrictions would make something like tool slots more palatable because then it's your fault for not planning.
As I've said everywhere racial specialization should be about buffing certain things rather than nerfing. It feels ass to travel around 10+ minutes to find no one and decide whether to tank your meme score by walking around with children or just settling down which then makes it even harder to find people.
Travel in the game right now is terrible especially because Eves and families are spread from the apocalypse. If we're going to have to keep needing people apocalypse needs to restart the whole server instead of letting people live. This would at least put the Eves nearby instead of the mess we have right now.
Just make each family (AND NOT RACE) have a randomly assigned tool so individuals get that extra skill. Tada, we've got specialists without absolutely robbing the game of half of its fun plus sending off questionable messages about ethnicities.
And am I the only one that thinks Jason should spend just about as much time working out spawn mechanics as he did the rift? This is seriously worth the work in many updates since it's so fundamental to the overall gameplay loop but specially early and post-late game. I still think giving us a massive rift-esque continent with bigger biomes and limited spawns solves half of these problems.
Shouldn't we buff WIS instead of INT? Smart people can make really dumb mistakes, you know.
*loudly laughs in brazilian*
It might have prevented some 10+ updates that no one wanted or liked I'll be very honest
If only we got more family features instead of the apartheid simulation update
Simple stuff like each family giving all members favored foods or free tool skills, anything that buffed families instead of creating stereotypes like black people are desert people and gingers are ice people
It was a very nice zen playing experience. I made a little camp there and got around to learning how to do some things I never tried previously. Why not just do this in one of the low pop standard servers? Because on this server, you respawned to your death location regardless of the cause. I can’t always play for a full hour to eve chain to be able to find home again next life. When I play on bigserver2, I am usually planning to commit an hour so I can die of old age. But when I had an uncertain timeframe or only 20 minutes to play, it was great to pop into my camp and do stuff secure in my knowledge that I could come back even after dying from starvation at 45 or whatever. This isn’t possible on the low pop servers where eve chaining is the route to returning home. You must live until 60 or risk losing everything. I have actually had intermittent network issues cost me my eve camp on a low pop Server. Yes, it’s possible to scout and seek signs of life on the land to find home, maybe, but I’m not the luckiest at that, and I don’t want to use my limited playtime for that.
The ability to respawn at death location regardless of cause brought me to this server, and it was nice while it lasted.
respawn at death location is not my fave but everything else in this server seems more interesting to me. Damn shame I wasnt around to play
even if this server is the dead, its clearly something people in this thread want right? a server with all the ohol features without these goofy mechanics?
These shoehorned mechanics are rapidly approaching a point where they no longer fit the base game. It's more or less been there since the tool slot update, family specialization, etc. Systems that were never meant to be a part of the game but were awkwardly attached after the fact and really don't work. They're becoming increasingly more broken with every update. I understand the intent but it's something to direct into a new game because it clearly doesn't work here.
Oh dear, it has been happening since long before that, probably around when property fences were added.
The game was simple, a very material world that you interacted with and with the other people in it. You all had to eat and that's all that mattered for a long part of the gameplay loop.
Its hard to keep giving us challenges that we don't simply troubleshoot through in a few days and find a solution for. Resource based challenges suffer from overgrindyness, rng being too forgiving or too cruel, and the fact the we optimize new content pretty fast compared to how fast Jason can add it.
But fuck me if I want to play a game that forces a solution to this problem that involves segregating races based on their skin colour and still failling at doing so because players still prefer to make multiethnic civs.
Honestly, I don't even know how does Jason have the mind fortitude to keep pushing the absolutely hated ideas (some, like the rift, I actually appreciated as an experiment). This one though, I hardly see it being worth the stress.
Also, in my own opinion (and for selfish reasons because I'm also using it), I think Jason should be able to sit down and spend time cleaning up the OHOL engine, and improving the OneLifeEditor.
There's a whoooole lot of stuff boot-strapped in the code to get certain features of the game working. He's literally adding tags of &SpeechIn or +flight or Alcohol into the NAMES of objects, for pete's sake!
That's like trying to reinforce the foundations of a house with Balsa wood. That might do the job in the immediate sense, but it's not a good long-term solution. I think he knows that, but has to do it because of time constraints. Which ties me back to my argument above, Jason should give himself time to improve the Engine+Editor.
This is, along with ensuring new player experience to be smooth, is probably the most important thing that ohol needs.
More than balancing, more than making unused parts of the techtree relevant, more than making the overall feel of the game according to one's ideal.
There's so much features we ask for and the answer is "well, that'd take a lot of work in this engine". I think before we can think about making houses useful, professions viable, families matter, we have to work on the actual physics/rules/environment of the game on its most fundamental level.
If a rift can't be an ocean because the engine is lacking we end up also lacking the thousands of possiblities that could develop from such mechanic. If we don't build because somehow we just can't get heat calculation right and people dont wanna be enclosed for no benefit we also have a problem. If Jason has to redesign wells a bunch of times while giving off ideas that would be very complex in execution and non-intuitive just because we can't properly count pump depletion and have it transition at the same time, well, its a third problem.
I would love to see jason taking some good two months to cleanup the game. Engine, bugs, unused features, mechanics that were rushed into the game and that could be reworked/rebalanced/straight up removed.
From the end of the pump/oil/plane to the end of the rift development stages of the game we got bombarded with features, some of which Jason managed to fix or even make interesting. But honestly, and this is where my entire comment ties with the OP, I'd rather have Jason take time developing few ideas than the absolute madness that went when Jason came with something out of nowhere and started forcing it into a playerbase not prepared.
War mechanics, rift, genetic score, property fences, skills/family specialties all had their problems and honestly, still do. I wont talk about skills and specialties because i've barely played the game after these but genetic scores were unintuitive, failed heavily at first as hereditary factors and gave no benefit whatsoever to players; fences were unwanted by a vocal majority of players, spammable, very useful for griefing, unpractical to use for the intended purposes, allowed for skipping parts of the techtree when first obtaining animals/rushing early game; War and new fight mechanics never worked, either because swords were mass murder tools in the hands of single individuals or because the restrictions for war made it either too easy to trigger or too unnaturally gamey (you could bow and stab the other family but dont you dare using a sword); I liked the rift but wont talk about here, its already a long post.
Of these I think the only real benefits are the elder mechanic that developed due to fences and wars, slightly more awareness of jasons part on the bottlenecks of resource production/consumption in the game due to the rift, buff to female births when civs are dying (gamey but necessary because drift is a bitch in low populations). These are all incredibly good developments but their cost was having the game packed with unpractical mechanics that very few people actually enjoy and rarely ever work for jason's intent (breeding genuine player interaction).
good update, might decide playing again sometime
lines dying eventually is not an issue.
how long should lines last anyway?
This all boils down to the point in which most content in this game suffers, there's not always this clearest idea of how the features we posses will help the game achieve Jason's plan.
Don't get me wrong, Jason does have his ideas for how content works and should work, the problem is that they dont always coincide (and sometimes he may even be wrong about the former).
"why are you saying all this, Book?"
Well, because both lines and cities suffer from Jason believing their existence creates a paradox. You've heard it before, "some people want fresh starts, some people want lasting effects, which do we get?". In a sense Jason is absolutely right, the ability to restart should exist and it should even be something that's pushed on us after some time. Not just because it's fun to restart, but because all things eventually end. It's not an accurate depiction of reality if all 10 of 10 closely related lineages, living close together manage to survive for long periods of time. Natural history shows us extinct species make up for the vast majority of know groups. It sucks but even that cool city we've built for should at the very list be at risk of being lost - either because all lines there died and its location forgotten or because the very structure of the city made life unsustainable (too few resources, for example).
This is where I think Jason is like 98% right. Im sure he still can find more ways of allowing towns and lines in different stages coincide and interact in the world and that will be a huge upgrade to the game.
What i`m uncertain about is if the latest updates focused on restricting player options to boost player interaction will make the overall pacing of the game and development/sustaining of towns/lines any more interesting. It's still a matter of resources and its still a matter of technical issues like this post talks about. Sometimes lines will end because that update changed everything and this is fine. But we can't take these updates for a valid example of the longevity of lines.
will this game ever get to a point that typical lines spam from few hours to a week but still occasionally getting one over two weeks? Hopefully. I think thats what Jason would want if he was certain he could also make young lines generate and coexist. And the same is true for cities tbh.
Pumpkin cultivation is all I could hope for
in fact, playing ohol design by myself I had envisioned a very similar system
while getting ideas through to Jason is hard sometimes I'm very glad to see he also looked into pumpkins wnough to realize they're all just a type of squash
Booklat1 fala Português, minha vida foi uma mentira...
uhauhauhahuuha Eu sabia que um Caio devia falar português, na real rsrrsrs
Só os pt/br online
The need for berries (and bowls too) once burdocks run out is rather lame. This could've been made without as much hassle if bait could also be made of just carrots (wild ones too)
Adding flat stone ti make more bait is overcomplicating too. There's absolutely no reason why sharpstone + snare shouldnt be enough for someone to trap rabbits early on, and given the fact wild carrots spawn in prairies that'd be exactly qhat we'd need
but that's by no means the same thing is it? Im sure you know that too Destiny
Sure, we get to see what happens without oil but that is obvious and not the data we want to obtain from the rift experiment
ideally the rift would inform us how long until we get to oil, how long till it's depleted and then, tell us what happens when it runs out, all at the same iteration of the game.
As I see it, running out of oil should be like any other stage of the game, a designed adversity so that we can progress into the next technology/social step that allows us to keep thriving.
But honestly, why the fuck is the apoc working in the middle of an oil abundance experiment?
if wells get buffed (maybe they should be) we'll definitely need springs to be rarer.
Otherwise oil will never run out
wait, what exactly works as bait? it isnt just A burdock?
you've come to the right place, we do at times act jerkish in the forums but mostly we try to help people learn the game
Just stay away from unhealthy yum obsession and you'll be fine
it is a better solution
will also most likely delay steel tech a bit which may or may not be good
As long as we still rush axe it should be fine though
Let's be honest, both baskets and bags not decaying anymore were poor decisions made when Jason tried to satisfy us by making storage better but didn't exactly listen to us and threw his first "do you know how many years of game dev I have?"
which is fine, I guess we ARE a pain in the ass but didn't really fix the issue and created others. He might've killed have the playerbase when he first made things decay but he also perfectly nailed the feel that he was trying to capture for the game. Nothing lasts, right?
I get that this change is with the same philosophy and is much more minor than adding decay but like tarr said somewhere, it just kills rabbit farming. Slow rabbits are good, decaying clothes are good, hardship is good. The game shutting its content out after a few generations not so much. Nerfing should guide us into unused content in the sake of our survival, just like the heat update did.
sigmen4020 wrote:This is probably the biggest problem with this change.
I don't think I agree. The biggest problem lies in that a set of bellows requires a rabbit fur to make. Griefers just hide bellows over and over again (who wants to cut trees with hungry work also?), and soon enough a town can't use a kiln. Removing bellows and killing off the rabbit supply, could kill off the possibility of a town making an oil rig or diesel engine well before they can get there.
Also, fug has a good point that this just removes a simple activity that many players have found enjoyable. I remember one of my first lives way back in December hunting rabbits and people were satisfied having backpacks.
Fuck me, spoonwood is actually right