One Hour One Life Forums

I've got murder on my mind.  I was taking a look at the life logs recently, and saw a somewhat normal murder rate of around 6%.  Then I ran the analysis a different way, and computed the murder victimization rate.  This is the percentage of active players on a given day that are the victims of at least one murder.  I ran this analysis on Thursday, February 5, and I was shocked by what I found:  a whopping 25% of active players were murdered at least once on that day.  Turns out that this was an anomalous peak, but other recent days weren't that much lower, as seen in this graph:

This analysis motivated some of the changes last week to kill waiting times and curse visibility, and you can see the minor effect of those changes toward the end of this graph.  But still, I wasn't entirely sure what was going on.

Mid-week, I added a new kill log to the server, letting me see who was landing the kill hits, whether they were solo or part of a posse, and who was being saved via healing.  This log did not paint a pretty picture.  Since the log was set up on Wednesday, there have been 174 kills, 153 of which were solo killers, acting alone.  There were only 21 group kills, and 34 instances of players being saved by healing.  Yes, that's 87% solo kills.

And what's the problem with solo kills?  Well, a more detailed analysis of one day's log showed that 62% of the solo kills were done in cold blood, unprovoked by previous murder, while only 20% of the group kills were done in cold blood.

That brings us back to why killing is in the game in the first place.  Why not just remove it entirely?  Because you need to have a way to "vote someone off the island" who is violating village rules.  Otherwise, laws become impossible.  Killing isn't the only kind of possible griefing, and removing killing entirely makes everyone powerless to stop those other kinds of griefing.

But if you really are voting someone out of your village by killing, and that's the point of killing, solo killing really has no role to play.  If everyone agrees that this person should go, you don't need to kill them solo.  You can form a posse and kill as a group.

Solo kills are unilateral actions where there is no group consensus.  Most of the time, I'm guessing, solo kills are simply griefing, full stop.

Over the past two years, I've added loads of adjustments and limitations to solo killing in the game.  Now we have a panoply of warning mechanisms and advantages for the victim.  You GASP, the killer looks and sounds angry, you can track the killer off-screen, the killer must wait 12 seconds, and the killer runs more slowly than you.  In practice, given all these advantages for the victim, solo kills should be all but impossible.  But I've seen it myself:  the victim just standing there for 12 seconds, like a sitting duck.

This means that most victims of solo kills are new players who don't know how these warning systems work.  This means that most victims of killing are brand new players.  That is really bad.  Being killed is one of their first experiences in the game.

And like I said, the presence of solo killing does not help with the philosophical point of killing in the game---it doesn't help us vote someone off the island as a group.

So why not remove it entirely?

There are still two cases of solo killing that are dear to my heart.

First, we have the wilderness situation, which I've come to call the Two Hermit Problem.  If you're one-on-one in the wilderness, and someone is bugging you, I want you to be able to protect yourself.  I want you to be able to say, "scram," and mean it.  Even if the person isn't bugging you, the fact that you CAN kill each other is part of the magic of the game.  You can kill each other, but choose not to, and that's beautiful.

Second, we have the guarding scenario.  With 1-v-1 killing, a guard with a bow can get a bead on a would-be intruder outside the gate, and then open the gate to let people pass through, while preventing the intruder from passing through the guarded area.

The way killing works now in the game, I've been able to preserve the first case, the Two Hermit Problem, but I've had to sacrifice solo guarding, at least for now.

Here are the changes:

In order to kill, you need to form a posse of the minimum size, given the population in your area.  In higher population areas, that size is 3 people.  But in places with less than six people, the posse size is half of the area population, rounded up.  The area is a 30-tile radius around the killer.  So if there are only two of you out there, 1v1 killing is still possible.  But in a mini-camp of three people, two of you need to conspire against the other in order to kill.

This min posse size is capped at 3, which is what you need in higher population areas.

When you try to kill someone, you still go into murder mouth mode, but you also get a DING message explaining the minimum posse size in your area.

With this change in place, we'll see what happens to the murder rate over the next few days.

Still working my way through the list of reported issues.  Sometimes it seems like the list is growing faster than I can chip away at it, but I am making progress, and the game gets better each week as a result.

The biggest change this week is that you get a hint when you pick up an unlearned tool about who around you already knows how to use that tool (look for the + speech bubbles above their heads).  No more wandering around asking everyone.

A bunch of fixes have been made to the reflector so that it makes better decisions about when to start splitting the game's population up between two separate servers and when to go back to using a single server.

Animals no longer walk through spring-loaded doors.

When you issue an order as a leader, you now receive a confirmation that your order worked.

Let there be dung buckets.

Let there be stacks of empty buckets.

My wife was out of town all week, so I was left with the task of being a full-time parent as well as a game developer.  I did manage to get a few things done, though.

First, there was the question of Eve frequency, and how that tends to spread civilizations out over time.  Eve placement is related to baby placement (we place an Eve instead of a baby under certain conditions), and in thinking about the baby placement code, I realized it had grown into a multi-scarred monster over the years of trying different methods inside and outside the rift.  Seemed like a good time to start clean and really think about what baby placement is supposed to accomplish.

Our highest priority in placing a baby should be to make sure there's at least one family in each of the specialist skin tones, and if all of them are already present, bolster the population of the weakest skin tone.  After that, our next priority is to bolster the population of the weakest family, and place girl babies when the number of potentially fertile females in a given family gets too low.  Of course, we also want to respect each mother's birth cool-down when possible, and also each player's previous-life area bans (so they don't get born to the same family over and over).  But we should also be willing to ignore cool-downs and area bans if there are no other mothers available.  No one should be able to area ban themselves, through suicide, into being an Eve, and we'd rather overload a mother on cool-down than spawn an Eve.

Finally, we need to make sure that the server is never overloaded with babies relative to the adult population (more than 2/3 babies), nor that a few remaining mothers are overloaded with babies (more than 4 babies per mother).

And of course, through out all of this, we respect curses, never placing a cursed baby near a player who cursed them, ever ever ever.  If there's no place for a cursed baby to go, they are sent to donkey town.

With those priorities cleanly stated, we can see that we only place Eves in two situations.  First, if there are too many babies for the existing adult population or population of mothers.  And second, if we're missing one of the specialist skin tones.

Those cases should be relatively rare, which means that new Eves should be rare.

With the simplified code in place, the behavior is much easier to reason about.  If there seem to be too many Eves in the future, I'll be able to figure out exactly why.

Next, the Genetic Fitness leaderboard has clearly been getting out of hand, with top scores climbing into the 500s.  In looking closely at the top-scoring players, I found something distressing:  many of them had very low average lifespans themselves.  By keeping their own lifespans low through regular suicide, the were able to farm points whenever they lived an occasional long life.  Furthermore, they were essentially handing out free points to everyone else through these occasional long lives.  It was also clear that quantity was trumping quality.  When scores are potentially infinite, playing a lot of lives is the only way to reach the top.

Implementing a suggestion from Wondible, we're now back to scores that are asymptotically capped at 60, while still solving the problems that the older capped system had (where you got punished for having a new player as a baby).  You now gain points whenever you help an offspring player live longer than expected, but the amount you gain is scaled relative to your own score.  Thus, the closer you are to 60, the less you can gain from each offspring, but the more you stand to lose if you actually hurt an offspring and cause them to live a shorter life than we expect for them.  You also gain points for yourself when you live longer than expected, with your score approximating how long we expect you to live.

Thus, there's no longer an exploit possible through suicide.  The best way to get a very high score is to live very long lives yourself, and never suicide, and help all of your offspring to live as long as possible, too.

Returning to a capped score demands a new formula for mapping score to tool slots, which can be seen in this graph:

As part of this investigation, I made more of the leaderboard data public.  You can now click on the top-scoring players and see the recent lives that contributed to their score:

http://onehouronelife.mythiclair.com/fi … eaderboard

Thus, if another exploitative way to boost score emerges in the future, it will be easier for everyone to study and identify it.

But looking at the data now, we're off to a good start.  All of the top-scoring folks have very high average lifespans themselves.

There are also a bunch of little fixes.  More stuff can be bottled, and bottles are a bit easier to work with.

Still plowing through this list, with only 168 more to go:

https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLifeData7/issues

Some of the fixes this week involved quite a bit of new content, as I fleshed out the dye possibilities for knitted clothing and roses, and patched some gaps in hat decorations.  Over 135 new things, but most of them are the result of combinatorial explosion (red hats with blue roses and blue hats with red roses).  Regardless, there's a lot more visual variety in clothing now.

Tables are useful for storing a few things even when you're not feasting, way stones no longer block movement, grapes can be removed, and a bunch of things that weren't containable are now containable.  Rabbit holes can be dug up.  You can no longer dump fresh water back into a water source, so there's no more confusing situation where you gain or lose a unit of water by doing that.  Drunkenness has been refined a bit and clarified with a blushing emote.

The little photo icons in the family tree are back, for anyone starring in a photo.  A few cases of spurious tool learning have been fixed (you no longer learn the knife when taking it apart, for example).

And most exiting of all:  another cause of the bouncing-forever (wild bug appeared) has been found and fixed.  Hopefully, that's the last one (this mysterious issue has been lurking for more than a year now, it seems).

I gird my loins to plunge back into that list of 168 and make another dent next week.

this is a tale of one of my last lives, sometimes I live very mundane and uneventful lives but other times I find one that stays with me and makes me think about it...This was one of those lives.

I was born a baby boy to a woman named Samantha Silverthorn in a tiny settlement, as I was born my older brother Lason was visiting, my mother had six children before me and had one after me, surviving to adulthood there was only me, my big brother Lason, my big sister Freyja and and my younger sister Liza. When I was born my mother gave me a single snake skin boot.

My mother told me that she had been kicked out of the settlement south of us when she was still small and was trying to set up our camp by stealing supplies from the south and that when I was old enough I would have to do the same thing for the good of the camp, not something that me at the player would normally do but I found it an interesting plot point for this life.
the first thing I stole for my mother was a pie on a plate and I carried it back to camp like a filial son and she praised me but when I got there there were angry villagers from the south berating her.

I wanted to make my mother's life easier for her so I went out into the wilderness to collect materials so we could do things for ourselves and we wouldn't have to resort to stealing, I made myself a basket and collected things, I made some ovens for food and collected some carrot seeds for our farm and made my last theft from the south village of a single wheat seed so we could produce our own.

during one of my returns home from the wilderness my mother was bleeding and screaming at a woman, she screamed out at her that she had no choice and they were the ones that had abandoned her in the first place, her last words were to kill the woman. at the time and long after I believed my mother had been murdered and contemplated revenge but held back, we had been stealing from them for a long time, longer then I had been alive and all debts must be paid. I can only hope that my mother was proud of what I did with the camp that she started.
Shortly after mother died, Freyja came to the camp but died of starvation upon arrival...she had four children but none survived passed infancy.

I was now in my 20's, I found a discarded seal skin to the north and brought it back, fashioning it into a seal fur coat and while journeying west I found a knife lying between some trees, I found a patch of desert and killed a snake so I could have a pair of boots and used some left over wheat from making bread to make me a hat, I lived to 57 years and not once did I manage to wear a pair of trousers.

I continued my simple life now self sustaining, sometimes when I wasn't busy I would walk to the south village, there was a man named Nevah there, he was still there but very old. during one of my visits I noticed that no one was there anymore so I asked him what happened to everyone and he said that apart from me, there was only him and one other guy left, the last guy was called Edgar and he was busy building up the village while Nevah worked on the farms.

by my next visit the village was bustling again, there was a woman named Darah there who had three babies in quick succession and asked people to help name them all, I took one and named her Umi, she became Umi Silverthorn II...I was nearing the end of my long life and gave all my clothing to little Umi and wished her a good life, I told them my camp was to the north and that what was there was now theirs since there was nobody to take it over and then I returned home to die.

All in all I really enjoyed this life, it was really interesting to me and made me want to live as long as I could just so I could see the end result, after checking the family tree page I found out my mother hadn't been murdered but attacked by a wolf but its amazing how a scene can play out when you literally just walk in on it, whelp good thing I didn't try and take "revenge" on the south village people xD

Original thread here:  https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=4313

I was born in a village with most tasks already done ... my mother raised me, dressed me and gave me a backpack .. I even let me choose what kind of hat I wanted to wear ... she named me "Dennis"

My first years I dedicated myself to compost, and to the raising of the sheep

a grandmother before she died she gave me her knife to continue my work with the sheep

I spent a few years raising and killing a lot of sheep and creating more and more compost with the help of my relatives

when we had excess compost (you never have enough) I started to create a small hospital ...

First create pads and needles with thread for the sutures and after creating 2 bowls full of pads, I made a small construction to store and have controlled the medical supplies

When I was about to finish construction, I heard a conversation from afar where someone was threatening someone who was going to kill her

I approached and was a girl with a seal coat that was threatening another for no reason ... anyway not having listened to all the conversation did not know if this person was right or not right and I decided to continue to mine and look from a distance this girl, she was called "Birdie"

When the clinic ended, I saw Birdie doing nothing, turning the city senselessly ... it seemed that I was looking for something, but I was not doing anything

I decided to follow her and review her movements ...
Suddenly she realized that he was watching her, and started to scream that he was chasing her to kill her ... that I was a murderer and wanted to kill her ...

Here I realized that this person was not looking for anything good ...

the people of the town did not pay much attention to her, I never threatened her, did not talk to her, did not even take the knife out of her backpack ... but she knew that I was watching her and that prevented her from doing anything bad.

After a while I saw her trying to forge something, but she gave up (I do not know very well the reason, but I think someone hid the Steel File)

imagine what would be happening to plan B, the bow ...

When I got to this point I knew that I would try to hurt the city and I began to warn people, sisters, brothers, children ... all who could avoid a mass murderer

I was already getting older, and here I realized that I could not fight against her ... I was beginning to have the risk that she would steal my backpack and my knife ...

What I did was give my backpack and my knife to a girl who was building a road: "Zebulon"

I had noticed her since she was a child, and she had been working hard for everyone

I was 56 when Birdie came with his bow trying to kill people ... first he tried with a girl, then with a woman ...

I knew I was going to kill someone, and I was not going to allow it ...

I noticed that in this game people do not realize the real problems of murderers until they see blood ....

I was 56 years old and I could not contribute much more to the city ...

I got in front of Birdie and I stayed still, without moving, so I was an easy target ... I just had to shoot, and of course that's what he did

she was in the middle of the city when she shot me and everyone saw it, that's what I was looking for ... that everyone is aware of what happens when this type of idiots is let loose

When she was relaxed, I told everyone not to worry about me, to kill her and Zebulon, she nailed the knife without mercy ...

The whole city surrounded me and I was fed during my last breath, I saw the idiot die ...
they wanted to cure me but I did not want them to heal an old man of 56 years ... they should not worry about me ... I'm happy to have fulfilled my obligation to sacrifice for mine, for my family, until the end

http://lineage.onehouronelife.com/serve … id=1019726

Original thread here:  https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=3698