How Humans Broke the Game

this video was made in partnership with curiositystream [Music] [Applause] oh humans are the current number one build in the meta but they haven't always reigned supreme in fact at first they were one of the least powerful builds in the meta and it took several buffs refinements and tweaks before the human became even remotely threatening within its home server of africa so today we're going to break down all the different variations of the human build throughout the history of outside and discuss their unique traits stats and abilities with the hope of demonstrating why some of these skill-free choices worked while others couldn't compete the first players to unlock the human class were a group of african primate mains that switched from the knuckle-walking quadrupedal build to a bipedal one it's important to note that at this point they hadn't sacrificed their arboreal mobility perks yet and relied heavily on their ability to climb to escape danger the top tiers at the time were all large terrestrial mammal builds far too strong for australopithecus to challenge them so their only option was to avoid them it might seem counterintuitive to switch to a bipedal build when your playstyle is centered around the arboreal zone but the reason this was so crucial was because it freed up their hands to be able to carry items back to their tree this was the first step towards refining the cooperative loot sharing playstyle that have made humans so dominant in the current meta now you might be surprised to learn that the devs have nerfed humans in the past the tree dwelling strategy was seen as a cheap way to avoid dealing with other players and so the devs decided to reduce the number and size of trees in the africa server this forced humans to ditch their arboreal strategy and spec into ground-based abilities and for a while humans got absolutely bodied by other players even with the ability to use items and create tools the other builds in the region like saber tooths and giant hyenas were far too strong for humans to deal with they had to rely solely on the thieving skill to get by but this disadvantage was slightly mitigated by their newfound ability to crack bone using tools letting them scavenge for marrow after big cats had finished with a kill once humanity had scraped together enough evolution points by scavenging they finally got to level up some of their stats and give themselves the ability to survive by hunting rather than scavenging they specked into longer legs and less body hair allowing them to finally unlock one of the human's most powerful signature abilities sweating sweating allows the player to recharge their stamina even while moving whereas other builds are forced to stop and use the pant ability to recharge stamina they could justify putting all of their evolution points into mobility rather than power because by this point they'd also leveled up their crafting enough to make spears the staple best in slot two-handed weapon until the invention of gunpowder a sustainable source of meat is worth a lot more xp than fruit or scavenged marrow so much so that this let humans finally start leveling up their intelligence to a truly staggering level promoting both cooperation and innovation but once again nerfs were on the way just before the ice age balance patch hit a faction of the human player base migrated servers establishing themselves in the europe server most of the others stayed in africa the ice age patch hit and it led to two very different changes in the two servers that the humans were playing on in europe as you probably expect the overworld temperature dropped and ice damage became a threat the humans as well as most of the other top players there specked into bulkier builds that could survive the cold better in short the update didn't really affect them too badly this group became known as the neanderthal faction the humans that remained in africa now known as the sapiens faction faced a much worse update ironically during the ice age africa got hotter and drier the large herbivores humans had such a good match-up against all left and the human player base in africa was reduced to the brink of extinction with player counts below ten thousand they survived by leveling up their fishing skill scavenging for shellfish and other low xp sources as they too made their escape from africa when they finally escaped africa they were finally back in a server they could thrive in but they had competition neanderthals had the highest stats of any human build in history they had bigger brains more girthy bodies stronger muscles just undeniably a more viable build compared to sapiens so by this point i'm guessing you're wondering well if neanderthals were more powerful why is it that eventually the neanderthals lost the faction war to the sapiens it turns out that their physical superiority was actually their downfall neanderthals and sapiens had a very different hunting strategy when it comes to taking down large herbivores neanderthals had the strength to defeat them with melee combat and had the defense and hp to be able to take a hit or two even from some of the ice age's strongest herbivore builds they were also fast enough to be able to close the distance between themselves and their targets this all sounds awesome but there's one key detail in this plan that you might have noticed since neanderthals were fit enough to take on these herbivores face to face they didn't have to invent ranged weapons sapiens on the other hand would get one shot if they tried to take on behemoths like mammoths or wooly rhinos in close combat thankfully even though their brains weren't as big as neanderthals it was still more than enough for them to be able to use the aforementioned crafting skill to create the first ranged weapon the atlatl atlatls are a relatively simple yet effective item that allows the user to launch spears over twice as far this was critical for the survival of sapiens as it allowed them to match the dps of the neanderthal but also stay out of range of a potentially devastating counter-attack sapiens also tended to have bigger party sizes neanderthals were less social and tended to stick to small tight-knit groups while sapiens formed much larger communities that could control much larger territories eventually even though neanderthals were the better fighters they were the ones failing to find enough xp to survive and this is where their physical might became a huge detriment the bigger you are the more energy you need to survive and so the neanderthal's strong powerful bodies eventually became unsustainable most of them were defeated in combat or starved although a few did end up actually switching factions and joining with the sapiens but finally after defeating their most dangerous opponent humans were free to dominate the game as the new top tiers they mastered several key advanced techniques such as agriculture archery and sailing allowing them to push them at a far past what other builds ever thought possible you'd think that they would all work together to rule the game but unfortunately many of them ended up engaging in pvp with each other it kind of makes sense given that other players are hardly even a challenge but nonetheless infighting is their biggest weakness right now anyways hopefully that gives you a better background on the history of the game's most overpowered build [Music] oh by the way i bet many of you noticed the incredible footage of ancient hominins that i used in this video this footage is from a brand new documentary called out of the cradle which was animated by square enix the masterminds behind the final fantasy and dragon quest video games it's available right now on curiosity stream a streaming service that has over 2400 titles including many of my personal all-time favorites like walking with dinosaurs ice age giants and of course out of the cradle the subscription is only 2.99 a month but if you go to curiositystream.com tearsu right now and use the promo code tearsu you can get a whole month for free so please go check out out of the cradle i can genuinely say that it's got some of the best animation of any prehistoric documentary i've seen anyways thank you all so much for watching and thanks especially my patrons on patreon until next time good luck out there [Music]

Channel: TierZoo

Views: 9,012,084

Keywords: australopithecus, ardipithecus, neanderthal, ancient human, primate, evolution, hominid

Id: BJzJtm7OfdQ

Length: 8min 12sec (492 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 14 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/DukeHorner]

There are rumors that some Neanderthal players are still active. I'm pretty sure a friend of mine is one of them.

[u/[deleted]]

Humans don’t need a nerf they’ll eventually nerf themselves lol

[u/Calintares]

I'm hoping the next video in the human series will be about how they unlocked the [domesticate] ability and used it to force other builds to become support, going from top tier to god tier.

[u/Wolfy21_]

What documentary is the footage from?

[u/Lapisdust]

Uuuuughh ... why is it that when humans come up everybody's common sense goes out the window? This isn't how they came to dominate the current meta, this is how they came to be half-way viable. Their current unholy dominance comes from the abstract language special. You CANNOT have snowballing crafting so out of control that the devs make a climate patch without abstract language breaking the wisdom acquisition mechanic. The fact that the devs haven't patched out abstract language is a clear refection of their anthropocentric bias and it will continue to destroy the games balance, mark my words.

[u/Serial-Killer-Whale]

Actually, you kinda missed the real reason.

It's the same reason there's no elephants or equivalents in Europe.

With both Neaderthals and Sapiens in the same area, the meta there became too oppressive for any large tank build players who were simply getting bodied out of the server by the large Human playerbase. The playercounts of these builds went into freefall until they simply disappeared. And humans, with their large appetites to feed that high INT, not to mention a build best suited to fighting tanks, were now out of one of their most important loot sources.

In the end, while both builds were Omnivores, Sapiens were better adapted to purely gathering and living off a few prey, as well as having a build better suited to low loot runs, thanks to the conditions they faced in Africa. Combined with the relative similarity of the two builds, most Neanderthal players eventually just respecced closer to the Human Build, which has remained in meta ever since.

[u/John-AtWork]

From the wiki page:

Three-dimensional computer-assisted reconstructions of Neanderthal infants based on fossils from Russia and Syria indicated that Neanderthal and modern human brains were the same size at birth, but that by adulthood, the Neanderthal brain was larger than the modern human brain. They had almost the same degree of encephalisation (i.e. brain-to-body-size ratio) as modern humans

[u/[deleted]]

Neanderthals might’ve have been killed off due to disease rather than just simply starvation and fighting. 80-95% of Native Americans died off due to exposure to disease they never had been exposed to before during the Columbian Exchange, and those humans migrating up north might’ve brought disease with them.

In addition, he mentioned that some did interbreed with the humans, explaining the 1-4% guestimate neanderthals DNA in humans.

[u/lard7727]

One of the best human players in the meta is player bear_grylls, do you think you could review his performance?