OneLife
OneLife copied to clipboard
jasonrohrer
Arc Resets.
This game has always been advertised as a "parenting and civilization building" game. But these days "civilization building" has turned into just looting dead towns so you can build your town as fast as possible. People aren't climbing the full tech tree when some random person comes with a truck that has kero, oil, loom, and other late game items to a town that only has a shallow well. Like whats the point. Or even worse, people just straight up run to and live in an old abandoned town so that they don't have to work at all. This kind of gameplay loop has always hit me in a sore spot. The game is about survival in the wilderness, not luxury that you yourself did not work for. You should only get luxury after you've spent countless hours with your family, bonding together by building a place you can call home. This game would heavily benefit from a monthy or bi-monthly arc reset. After everyone has climbed the tech tree and experienced the full game you get to live in luxury for a little while. Then at the start of the month or every other month, the world wipes and you do it over again starting from scratch. Then you'll get that gameplay that was so heavily advertised.
I already posted this in the forums, so you all can fight me over there. I'm just posting this here so I can see what Jason, the big man himself has to say about this.
Yeah, this is something that I've thought about....
There are two things here:
-
The game is pretty boring and lacks challenge once things get too built up, and there's to much technology around. Well, it can be boring quite a bit of the time, let's say. I mean, you still do run out of food and fuel eventually, and then you have to scramble to keep the village alive. But obviously, the "Eve game" has always been the most exciting part of this game. Scraping a basic farm together, and huddling near the fire, before the last bits of wild food in the area get used up.
-
The world that players have built up over YEARS is impressive. Networks of roads, various monuments, highly-developed cities. It seems like a shame to destroy all of that...
And also, lots of other multiplayer building games have "wipes" on regular schedules, like Rust does. It always seemed like a bit of a design crutch. Though it definitely keeps the game lively.... though it also creates a kind of boom and bust cycle, where "the wipe is coming tomorrow," so nobody really bothers playing the day before the wipe.
In OHOL, things DO get lost to the sands of time eventually....
Current player arc has been going 1104725 years so 1 104 725 minutes = 2.10044223 years? and for resetting the world im not for or against it
The thing is. We can go ahead and do an apoc or an arc reset. But in maximum two days there will be trucks again, maybe even within 24 hours of reset. So I personally think it won't really make a big difference, except having to start from nothing for a day or two.
When is the last time a family lasted 200+ generations? It's not very normal, due to a mix of low-pop hours and griefers killing off the families.
Like this is the amount of new families just over the last three days:
In the last month or two there has been two attempts (by Kaden actually xD) to do the apoc. And he has been soooo close, both times on the last step before being stopped.
And the only reason it gets stopped is the amount of hours the players have put into designing towns, churches, farms, etc.
It might change the meta of the game to do regular wipes. It would also give people the chance to actually get to see the monument and make templates without having to drive for 21 real-life hours.
I myself don't really have an strong opinion for either or, but thought I'd share my thoughts on it at least.
just heard that was with the april fools vog mode thingy so that wasnt even a player driven apoc, so i cant say when our last player driven apoc was
I would be alright with resets happening if they weren't too often. I have played during the rift and I remember the daily resets. It feels really shitty to have work you've done be reset. It makes the game feel completetly pointless if the things you do don't have impact. Things need to last at least a little while. Visiting ruins of old towns is a fun experience in itself.
So I guess my suggestions for this is to do resets infrequently. Maybe every 3 months? That way people can make fantastic towns and not see their hard work disappear into the void for a while. Road workers can work without feeling like their roads are meaningless.
BUT I also agree with Dopie, resets will hardly matter in the long run. Maybe the first 12 hours you'll see people struggling but after a day at max it'll be about the same as it always is right now. It's too easy to climb the tech tree.
It could be cool with conditional resets. Where certain objects gets left behind as a memoir of the past, like all photos, papers (permanent & non-permanent) and waystones.
But I guess this would not be possible if the spawn locations get moved back to 0,0, as all of these items would be culled long before we would reach back up to them (unless added to the noCull list).
And with arc resets I believe we would see a player increase right after a wipe, then slowly decline as we are closing in on the wipe day. Since who wants to put in hours the days before a reset? It would be like brooming the floors today of a building that is getting demolished tomorrow.
Hopefully resets could be done without wiping out all families as well, if not we would likely not see any new families top the deep roots family leaderboards.
Personally, I prefer the big towns over the tiny eve camps. It is novel for a few times, but too much and it all feels the same, making you wonder what the point of it is if there is nothing to show later. Scavenging and seeing the dead towns is more fun to me, then you can look over what they did, the notes they left behind.
There is a vocal minority just complaining about big towns, but I always find things to do in them. It is much easier training newbies how to play when you don't have to worry as much about survival. Old towns usually neglect their farms or kitchens at times, so it can be fun filling up on foods for your family, even being able to make complex foods with more resources available. If nothing else, it is nice to build aesthetic structures around town like churches or decorative walls, which makes the place feel a little more unique, like you did make a mark on the world.
Besides, with the newbie wave, towns came and died extremely fast for a while. Me and a few of the other veterans all didn't want to be a part of that mess and would rather just hermit while scavenging old towns for materials for rockets. It felt more fun launching friends into space than being in tiny camps that will probably die within a dozen more generations because nobody is able to organize. The Eves that resettle old towns probably feel the same way, that they don't want to deal with the same old early gen grind.
There are groups of people that like to make special themed towns occasionally, usually around holidays. If there was a wipe scheduled near then, it would discourage this and make the culture of towns worse. I could see many people just not feeling like logging in at all just before the wipe since it would feel meaningless to build something nice to just be erased from all history the next day... not even a ruin for people to look back on and remember the fun they had that time.
Many apocalypses have been attempted, but if you check it is mainly by the same guy (Kaden who created this issue) every time. We have taken them all down for two years now because we want to fight for our towns and families we have created, even dead towns have left their mark on the world.
It takes like 4-6 hours to reach the end of the tech tree, maybe 12-20 hours to build a mega city. Less if there's a lot of experienced players in those families. THAT is the crux of the issue. You can't even take it slow, you NEED to rush the technology ASAP to upgrade your well because otherwise your family will starve. If you're not at the Newcomen Well stage 2-3 hours after the Eve spawns, your town is basically doomed since you're going to be out of water.
Maybe it's worth increasing the amount of water you get from shallow/deep wells to give players an alternative to just rushing to newcomen/oil tech immediately? The Shallow well gives 13 buckets of water on average which is nothing, and the Deep Well gives 33 which is also barely enough to fill up 3 Cisterns
Unless the resets are very common they won't accomplish much, and if the resets are common the game feel just goes down the drain and it feels like nothing matters which makes the game suck, like we experienced during the Rift era.
One hour one life is a game labeled as a “parenting and civilisation building game” the parenting aspect of the game really comes through when new players are joining, wide eyed ‘children’ coming into a new and challenging world are taught by the ‘parents’ who have more experience with the world they're living in. However “Civilisation building” is not represented very well for a few reasons. There is an extremely limited tech tree and towns will quickly be built up over just a day or two. I have played extensively on both the bigserver2 and small servers so I can say from a place of experience that if players know what to do, it doesn’t take very many ‘total player lives’ to go from nothing to a fully advanced settlement.
But is building up individual settlements that soon die out really “civilisation building”? Regardless of whether a town is built up from scratch or not, a single family's influence seldom extends beyond a few hundred tiles in the game world. Perhaps a few thousand for very old families.
I’ve always seen the meta of this game to be held back by the mindset that “families must build everything from scratch or it doesn’t count”. It doesn’t even make sense to think the game was developed to be this way for a few reasons.
Families rely on each other for certain resources, it's simply a necessity that advanced towns bring supplies to less advanced towns, this is literally a game mechanic. Players have full knowledge of the game world and access to powerful transportation tools such as highways, trucks and planes, even oil pipelines and rail cart transport systems exist! Though they are hardly used.
Some people seem to think that the most interesting thing you can do is wipe the map and start the same grindy process of building the same cookie cutter town that looks exactly like the last 100 towns you’ve played in. I’m not convinced. I wish we had a meta that valued each (RARE) Eve spawn event as an opportunity to build more infrastructure for an actual civilization. These eves could be treated as a goddess instead of refugee, greeted by the representatives sent from other families and led to the next spot chosen and prepared for this special moment by the community. Westward expansion would be a slow crawl, with every tarry spot carefully regulated and all fresh tarry’s fully exploited. Intricate road networks could carefully connect towns and even individual players' private housing/property where they keep their sports car or truck and favorite outfits. These are just some ideas of what could happen with a slightly larger base of players and a metagame shift, the possibilities of what can be done in this game haven’t even been close to reached in my opinion. If only players could stop trying to kill off families for a fresh start and something supposedly interesting we might actually be able to build something that more closely resembles a civilisation.
No new civilization has ever “started from scratch”; all human knowledge is built from what came before. Progress has always been marked by continual advancement, any loss of advancement is defined as a setback not progress.
All of this to say that I don’t think arc resets would change much in the current meta, they would either be not frequent enough to matter in terms of having old towns to loot/explore or so frequent that players would get frustrated that nothing they built was able to last more than a few days. Yes, you need to wipe every few days if you want to avoid dead towns getting looted for advanced tech.
I am against arc resets. The server gets fresh starts every morning when the families die overnight. Last week the eves were pushed so far west that there wasn't really any towns to even loot, so there was a legitimate fresh start, and it didn't matter because the playerbase just built back up within a day. People who think that arc resets change anything or give a "fresh start" are deluding themselves, or you. Kaden has been obsessed with apoc for a year now and this is his latest attempt at being the one who wipes the server.
2. The world that players have built up over YEARS is impressive.
Nope. It isn't years worth of things on the map. The server has wiped things on updates. Weeks, maybe months. But, not years.
OHOL is a six year old game. Anyone who has played long term is going to absolutely sweep through the tech tree at this point. It took 30 minutes for rockets to start launching - think about that for a moment. The hardest item with race requirements took players half an hour to produce.
Early game CANNOT exist as long as there are skilled players around (think bs2 vs S1 during server splits.) Before racial restrictions it was possible for Eves kids to start Newcomen tech.
The survival aspect of ohol really only ends up shinning at early game but here’s the issue; because you need to work hard and fast to stabilize that’s exactly what happens. You rush to get tools and the farms up and boom mid game occurs in an hour or two max depending on who is in the village.
If a majority of people wanted a wipe we would have a wipe. Instead we get one or two people doing extreme stunts (which have now been fixed) to force through an apocalypse which still got stopped.
If families cannot even last a meaningful amount of time what good are wipes anyways?
The thing is. We can go ahead and do an apoc or an arc reset. But in maximum two days there will be trucks again, maybe even within 24 hours of reset. So I personally think it won't really make a big difference, except having to start from nothing for a day or two.
An arc reset that took things back to (0, 0) would have an effect of more than 24 or even 48 hours. The monuments would be in range of a person driving in one lifetime there and back for probably a week or two.
As DopiePanda says in the same comment:
It would also give people the chance to actually get to see the monument and make templates without having to drive for 21 real-life hours.
just heard that was with the april fools vog mode thingy so that wasnt even a player driven apoc, so i cant say when our last player driven apoc was
It was shortly before that. It got done by Joe Earnest. Let me see here:
It was March 26, 2022.
Unless the resets are very common they won't accomplish much, and if the resets are common the game feel just goes down the drain and it feels like nothing matters which makes the game suck, like we experienced during the Rift era.
Resets only need to be as common as to keep the monuments in range of driving there in a few lives (not so far that people have to share an account and drive over multiple lives each).
Nothing matters in this game. There is no achievable, measurable group goal. It's always been that way. If you felt that way before, that shows that you understood it then.
Families rely on each other for certain resources, it's simply a necessity that advanced towns bring supplies to less advanced towns, this is literally a game mechanic.
That's not a game mechanic. It's not what happens during an arc reset period. It's not a necessity, because families have done without such before. There have existed families that started after an arc wipe or arc reset and survived until they were making oil.
If only players could stop trying to kill off families for a fresh start and something supposedly interesting we might actually be able to build something that more closely resembles a civilisation.
You aren't going to have more things to build, if families lived longer.
People who think that arc resets change anything or give a "fresh start" are deluding themselves, or you.
The Tarr Monument would get viewed more often on bs2.
The Original Methman Monument would also get viewed and more often on bs2 if there were arc resets.
So, that nothing would change simply ends up wrong.
If families cannot even last a meaningful amount of time what good are wipes anyways?
They would push people back to near the monuments there Tarr. You know, like the Tarr monument?
The oil pumpjack would get used more.
We wouldn't have young camps with loom clothes (which never makes sense).
The wick burner and correspondingly the kerosene newcomen pump wouldn't appear so often.
Also, families would need to share a backpack more often.
Additionally, rubber tire carts and trucks wouldn't be as frequent.
And people wouldn't try to resettle as much. Or would waste their time running right. Like someone on s1 commented in the chat, I think, last week about running right and not finding anything. I saw that a few months ago also. Well, if there weren't so many dead towns out there or players weren't on a server with so many dead towns so often, then some players might just start to rethink resettling dead towns or getting stuff from dead towns.
Also, one problem with towns progressing is how all the end game towns REQUIRE oil that is only made by the arctic ginger family. So it is in the best interests of everyone to try to give that family a head start so their own town doesn't run out of kerosene and consequently, water. If we had more alternatives to just oil for endgame, maybe there wouldn't be as much pressure to advance the ginger family ahead ASAP so people can keep drilling oil.
- The world that players have built up over YEARS is impressive.
Nope. It isn't years worth of things on the map. The server has wiped things on updates. Weeks, maybe months. But, not years.
How about you leave one comment with your opinion like everybody else and not use every single thread as your personal soapbox or debate hall? You flood this entire community with your deranged nitpicking and it's exhausting. Please get help, you are unwell.
:edit: Using the edit feature to add to my comment instead of creating 5 more. My opinion on arc resets: We worked hard to keep this arc going as long as it has, and I'd like to see that continue. If the playerbase ever overwhelmingly wanted an arc reset, then an apoc would be more than possible. As it stands, apoc doesn't happen because it's only ever a handful of players who attempt it, and the majority of the server that opposes it. One of the few attempters is this github issue's author, and he will say and do anything to force his will upon the majority.
I like the idea of quarterly arc resets because there are enough people who badly want to play "from scratch" as a community to warrant the experiment, regardless of how certain most of us feel about the outcome. It would also give us a regular event to look forward to, kind of like seasonal events in other long-running MMOs.
But maybe instead of wiping the bs2 arc, could it possibly be something like server1 getting wiped and having the reflector direct everyone there by default for a week or two? Most players would get the raw eve experience, and those who really just want to build big cities would have some time for a really epic prebuild on bs2 before everyone comes back.
If a majority of people wanted a wipe we would have a wipe. Instead we get one or two people doing extreme stunts (which have now been fixed) to force through an apocalypse which still got stopped.
Devil's advocate: the lack of apoc isn't a good indicator of anything as it stands given the dramatic asymmetry in the mechanics of triggering vs. canceling it, in combination with the lengths modded clients go to in assisting anti-apoc players. Likewise, the relatively low number of people attempting doesn't mean much either: nobody attempts apoc because it's pointless to attempt it.
We wouldn't have young camps with loom clothes (which never makes sense).
Airdrops aren't a result of no resets. They are an emergent phenomenon due to so many players coming to the same realization about the game's resource economy: being far from other fams means your fam dies from lack of critical resources, and you can't pick up your well and move, so the only lever available is to make sure fams spawning to your west advance and stabilize.
(I do think airdrops and "just run east" are problems, but I also think the solutions lie elsewhere.)
Last APOC i pulled the first tank of kero as gen 3, had a truck full of oil in another generation or 2 .
Last APOC was player driven as a temp fix for the eve pull back into dead towns with no water, Jason was AFK for a while so an APOC cleared the dead towns so we could make new wells.
If a player driven APOC is gameplay then players fighting against the APOC is gameplay too. Many players don't want to be in a town and see it deleted, they fight against this. This is the main driving reason why we have not had an APOC go through. Players always answer the APOC bells to defend the world and see themselves as fighting for the side of good against the evil APOC.
The map culls itself which is a kind of a slow APOC as it is, and an actual APOC does not reset us to 0,0. If you had APOC reset new eve spawns to 0, 0 you might have more people on the side of the occasional APOC, but atm its just an insta culling. Without additional incentive right now the deck is heavily stacked on to the pile of "dont delete my stuff while im building it" and someone is always building on top of the last generations creations.
Annual resets would allow people who enjoy early game stages to have a go. I mean with all families in Eve camp and not one truck to retrieve from an old town. Maybe only for a few hours, but if we know the time beforehand, it will provide them with opportunity for early game experience some crave. Plus i don't thing anything of value would ever be lost, towns are regularly abandoned, notes and photos are lost and nature reclaims it all, only slowly. Damage to sentiment is done with or without reset.
I see it as a good game event, and one that certainly would peak online for a day.
P.S. Anti-apoc team keeps claiming silent majority as ally, but in reality there would be barely dozen people who really commit to stop apoc attempts and average player plays three lives a week and couldn't care less about possibility of one.
Apoc is severely asymmetric, it only takes seconds to undo the work of hours so any attempt would require significantly more effort then resistance. Even in the scenario of the whole server committing to apoc small group of experienced players would be able to stop it.
I agree with everyone saying that the arc reset isn't the solution. It is already simple enough to erase the map at any moment with the apocalypse! I like the idea of keeping ruins that we can find when we travel far, but the oldest are already lost where nobody can't see them now. The map is forever going west, maybe it could be erased east forever too?
Also make the eve game last longer by make the spawn further away? Make more tech more complicated, so we have harder time to climb the thec tree ? I don't know, I just feel like there is other solutions to explore..!
Yeah, it seems like things kinda mostly work, organically.... there are times when Eves spawn far out, or families die out, and stuff is getting lost over time.
As far as it not being a civ-building game.... well, SOMEONE built the civs that we're currently discussing/complaining about.
What you're saying is that each and every player doesn't get to build their own civ. But of course they can't. It's kinda like each player wanting to be Eve. If everyone is Eve, then no one is, to quote The Incredibles. I.e., if everyone was the founder of a huge family, who would be IN the huge families?
It does seem like letting resets happen organically, a bit more often, would be good. I don't think it's good to have it on a schedule, because that makes effort feel pointless during the days leading up to the known reset date. But apocalypses should happen now and again, more than just once every 3+ years or whatever. So it seems like it will have to get a bit easier to cause an apocalypse. Just a tiny bit easier.
And I'm going to investigate the possibility of the apocalypse moving everyone back to be around 0,0 again....
Yeah, it seems like things kinda mostly work, organically.... there are times when Eves spawn far out, or families die out, and stuff is getting lost over time.
As far as it not being a civ-building game.... well, SOMEONE built the civs that we're currently discussing/complaining about.
What you're saying is that each and every player doesn't get to build their own civ. But of course they can't. It's kinda like each player wanting to be Eve. If everyone is Eve, then no one is, to quote The Incredibles. I.e., if everyone was the founder of a huge family, who would be IN the huge families?
It does seem like letting resets happen organically, a bit more often, would be good. I don't think it's good to have it on a schedule, because that makes effort feel pointless during the days leading up to the known reset date. But apocalypses should happen now and again, more than just once every 3+ years or whatever. So it seems like it will have to get a bit easier to cause an apocalypse. Just a tiny bit easier.
And I'm going to investigate the possibility of the apocalypse moving everyone back to be around 0,0 again....
Before you come to the conclusion that apocalypse is too difficult and that's why it hasn't happened, please consider that the truth is that it hasn't happened due to an extremely concerted effort put forth by a large group of veteran players who have sacrificed an absurd amount of time countering apoc efforts.
All it takes for anyone to successfully apoc is to sneak it past on a day where not many players are around, which has nearly happened dozens of times if not for myself and others making a daily habit to check for apoc attempts. Many times an apoc was only narrowly prevented thanks to one or more of us being forced to drop our current life events and respond to the attempt. Many times an apoc was protected by only THREE people and we were still only barely able to dismantle it. All it takes is an ounce less diligence from anti-apocers and a couple more attempters, and an apoc would happen. If it gets any easier to pull off, I am sure that apocs will be seen far more frequently than you might expect from a minor change.
Also, it's important to mention that by making any changes to apoc mechanics in response to Kaden, you are validating the efforts of a person who has at least 15 confirmed alt accounts that he has purchased in order to evade the curse system - which has been our only defense against him and the other handful of players in his friend group who have been making this game miserable for the past year. I can think of no better way than to signal to your player base that their time and efforts aren't respected, and that instead the people who are killing the game have their whims catered to.
I would MUCH MUCH MUCH rather have pre-set reset points if we must reset. Like every couple months. Then people can plan to do cool stuff on the reset and enjoy the Eve start you want them to.
If they happen at the whims of a few people people will most likely not be aware the game is going to reset and miss the Eve town window.
PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH THE APOCOLYPSE. Having a handful of people decide to delete everything is toxic for the whole community.
Making the Apocalypse easier won't change anything when it comes to early gameplay - it will still only take a few hours to reach the end of the tech tree.
There are new Eve towns happening ALL THE TIME, but most people don't realize it because they evolve past that stage very very quickly. Having the Apocalypse more accessible will not affect the number and longevity of Eve towns in any way, except maybe for the first 6-8 hours after it happens.
The Apocalypse is potentially an interesting tool that can create conflict between two sides in the game, but as it is right now making it is always a one person job - making the Apocalypse an event that requires cooperation between multiple players to achieve would make it potentially an actually source of conflict between two factions.
Maybe make Endstones decay and require the Dark Nosaj the user be 55+ to use? RIght now the strategy is to head out as a fertile woman, give birth to a baby, kill it, get endstone, repeat until you have all the endstones hidden in a location and THEN start the apocalypse. Having to make continuing sacrifices during the process would make it so people need to actually band together and cooperate to make it happen, rather than having it be a one person sneaky operation on the down-low. After all, end-of-the-world doomsayers should spread their word and celebrate the coming of the end times rather than trying to keep it a secret