The Castle Doctrine Forums

Okay, thanks folks!

Both issues have been fixed now.

First, the value of the tool is no longer a surprise at first (it was a weak surprise anyway, because the value estimate was recomputed after the first visit).  I don't want to muck with the code that checks houses back in, so instead I'm just getting rid of the surprise.  The value estimate is correctly computed for abandoned houses from the very beginning now.

Second, for every 24 hours that an abandoned house lives on the list, extra seed money is added.  So, they will eventually become "worth it."

Maybe 24 hours is too slow, but in the first batch update, 33 abandoned houses got extra money.

I don't want it to climb too fast, because I want players to be conducting a careful value calculus.

So, see how it feels now.

Okay, I joined.

Needs a logo and such.

Okay, this is done.

A few little wrinkles:

1.  Only houses that haven't been touched by the owner in more than a week are considered abandoned.  So if you're actively playing, you won't have your house seeded by the state.

2.  The amount seeded in a house is a random value between $50 and $200 (so there's not a list of 100 houses all with the same value).

3.  A random tool item is included in each vault.  The value of this item is NOT included in the displayed value estimate, so it's a surprise.  The $50 house might contain a $2400 crowbar...  This is a bit of a slot machine element, and goes against my usual sensibilities.  However, robbing a real house always had this element, because you never knew what was in the vault.  In terms of hiding the true value, which is NOT done for real houses, it was too weird to see an abandoned house way high on the list when it got seeded with a $2400 item.  Better to leave the item as a surprise.  It is also fitting thematically.  Some squatter was in the house and left a bit of money around... and oh look what else they left behind!  I've explored abandoned buildings in real life, and it does have that surprise feeling to it.

The game currently tries to maintain a list of 100 houses.  In the first run, there were 14 houses around, so 86 abandoned houses were seeded.

And, messing with the game myself, some of these houses are still great houses!  Some have no walls cut, and are still the same puzzle they always were.  Some are scary and risky.

Can you folks check it out and see what you think?

If it's good, I'll post a Steam update and also email the player list.

Hmm... I think I could only use abandoned houses that had at least one robber death.

There are 1574 of those.  Which is enough!

Your method of picking them is sound.  While there are less than N houses with > 0 value, pick a 0-value robber-killing house at random and add $M to it.

Yeah, probably not going to reset the puzzles at all.

Not sure where the money is coming from, exactly, story-wise.

One idea is to put extra money into houses that have orphaned children.  Either they are out scrounging, or maybe receiving state aide?

There's an edge case where someone commits suicide in a starter house, logging a robber death that will put a too-easy house on the list.  But players can (and do!) do that anyway with their real houses by running out to rob before building anything.

What about dog houses?

Over time, stray dogs move into these abandoned houses, making them more and more dangerous.

Instead of placing a random egg, we challenge players to get to the vault, but place random extra dogs around the house.

If the real owner ever comes back, they get to keep/move/sell these dogs.

Well, by "not the real game" in the case of TCD, I also was referring to ways to make money and climb the home defense ladder through income sources that aren't real.

When I look at the existing house pool, I already see that most of the houses look way too well-funded and well-built.  Those kinds of houses aren't that interesting to poke around in.

And that's WITH the conservation of money that's currently in place.

If there's some "campaign" source of money (even if it is real houses that have been abandoned, but we're adding state money to them over time), then players can grind that campaign indefinitely and build up however much money they want over time.

The game will then become, "Who can play the campaign the most/fastest/best," because that will be the real way to get a lot of money and build up your house.  And there's no end to it.  Even if you're the only player playing, you can keep running that treadmill until your fingers fall off.  Come morning, your house is going to be an impenetrable fortress.  AND you're going to have so many great robbery tools that you'll be able to wipe out every house on the map.

And yeah, money could trickle into these houses at a very slow rate or whatever.

But it still violates a conservation of money principle that keeps things from getting out of control in the game.

And the "real" players would be getting so much money from this that all the real houses would be impenetrable fortresses, making robbing the abandoned houses the only game in town...

Anyway... the interesting thing here is that all those "abandoned" houses aren't gone!  They're all still there, all the way since the very beginning.  They're just unlisted, waiting for their owners to return.

Guess what?  There are 4,045 of the things....  hundreds of pages worth of houses.

And listing them all would involve a few lines of code.

My intuition would be to just list them all at 0 and then trickle money into them.

But here's the thing... most of them would be cake-walks, having their main walls cut.

I don't know how to turn them into "good" puzzles.

Their last self-test map is also saved (the last time they actually got through their own house without tools).

So this could be used instead of the final state.  But that definitely doesn't feel as real.  Abandoned houses should feel abandoned, not squeaky-clean again.

The other idea is to hide something in each house.  The vault is empty forever, but there's a state-sponsored treasure in each house, in a random location, that grows in value over time.

Over time, people will cut through all the walls looking for it... but houses still reset as usual when a robber leaves without reaching the vault.

The other idea is to just start by showing all the 0 houses and see what happens.  People may poke around in some of them and die, getting bounties started there...

I have thought about this.

There are two problems:

1.  It obviously makes everything "way less real," in that some of the houses you're robbing no longer hurt a real person.  No one is watching the tapes, etc.  Of course, if there simply aren't enough players, then the "real" thing goes out the window anyway, so perhaps I'm clinging to a wasted vision of realness here (how real is it if no one is playing?).

2.  This would have the effect of injecting a bunch of extra, "free" resources into the game.  People could rob one of these abandoned houses, get some money, spend it on tools to rob another, and repeat, forever, until they had as much money as they wanted.  They would obviously use all this extra money to reinforce their own house.  This means that all the "real" houses would get harder and harder very quickly.  And if the "real" houses served as the pool of abandoned houses later, then even the abandoned houses would get harder and harder.  I'm pretty sure things would spiral out of control pretty quickly.

TCD has a very tight and fragile balance.  You want people to be heavily constrained when it comes to building their houses.  Something as simple as salaries throws the balance way off.

Yes, in the old days, there were 100+ houses to rob---wasn't that a limitless pool of free resources?  It seems like it might have been, and the very best players certainly built monster houses.  However, that pool was always connected to the number of players.  Not only more houses, and more resources, but also more robbers!  And more wealthy robbers.  If there were suddenly 30 extra houses, there's also be 30 extra robbers trying to get into your house.

The suggestion of adding extra "content" to the game in isolation means more resources for building defenses without an increased threat to go along with those resources.

And yes, the few extra players who also have access to the extra resources would be more formidable as robbers, so maybe it would balance out somewhat.  But more likely, the whole thing would just stagnate into fortress-ville.  Why would you go after one of these top houses when you could farm abandoned houses forever?

Right now, money enters the game through two sources:

1.  Fresh life players get $2000 (but to prevent farming these repeatedly, a player's next house is invisible to you for a while if you robbed their last house).

2.  You get bounty payments for tricking other players into dying in your house.  More money based on how successful they were elsewhere before they were tricked by you.

Notice that both sources are accompanied by a proportional threat from other players.

Perhaps this discussion is academic at this point, given that very few people are still playing the game.  But I worry that a quick fix won't work.  If it throws the balance off, we'll be right back here in a month or two trying to fix it again.

If we really want fake houses, I'd suggest that we need fake robbers to go along with them.  Anyone interested in taking a crack at a TCD bot?

Hi there, Storm!  Thanks for trying to revive the game.

I've been busy with One Hour One Life, so I haven't been checking these forums...

But I just happened to check them today BECAUSE I just implemented a server-side fix to TCD that should help with the small player pool.  It changes the way chill timers (purple houses after you die in them) work.  I'll be posting more about that in a minute.

ANYWAY....

Regarding your suggestions.  Way back in the day, we DID have "salaries," and there's a server-side switch in there for turning them back on.  However, we found back then that they didn't work, because they encouraged people to build "scary" facade-type houses and just "turtle" until they built up a lot of money through salary.

An example facade house is a solid wall with just a single, simple commit gate.  No one is going to try walking across that gate to have a look around.

Those scary facade houses aren't interesting content for the game.  So, the game was changed so that the only way to earn money was by tricking people into dying in your house and collecting their bounties.  Thus, you had to make a house that looked inviting and was filled with psychological tricks if you wanted to grow your wealth as a home owner.

Of course, you could still rob to get money, but there WAS a viable "homeowner" path to wealth through a very well-designed house.

I don't know that small-vs-large player pools changes the effect that salaries would have in terms of encouraging people to turtle inside scary, uninteresting houses.

As for your second point about second chances....

Well, one of the main points of this game is that "everything is real" and that permadeath is waiting for you around every corner.  That amps up the tension and drama.  It was a core aesthetic of the game from the very beginning.

I don't doubt that it makes the game "worse" in terms of retaining players or keeping the world populated with player-generated content.  It causes people to rage-quit, etc.

However, I feel like I need to stick to my vision-guns on this one.

The main problem that I see with it is that it destroys game content along the way.  If you build a great house and then die due to a robbery mistake, that piece of content that you made is removed from the game along with you before other people get to experience it.

I've thought about keeping "abandoned" houses on the list until they are beaten.  I'm not sure how to keep the owner away, though, because obviously, they'd have a huge advantage in the race to get to the vault in the house that they designed.  Yes, I could hide it from the original owner's account, but this would just further encourage multiple accounts.  Imagine dying and losing a week's worth of loot in your house.... you'd be pretty motivated to cough up another $16 for a second account to get that loot back.

There's a general problem in the game that's even bigger than this content loss issue, and that's a general content shortage.  Everyone makes only one house per life, but most people would like to successfully rob many houses per life.  That means that there aren't enough houses to go around.  So, keeping abandoned houses on the list would help a bit, but it wouldn't completely fix the problem.

Aside from the content loss to the rest of the game world, the incredible pain of losing everything is part of the game.