The Castle Doctrine Forums

It is Jason's intention that this game die a natural death. It's plainly obvious to anyone that unless new players come in, it will be dead in a few weeks.  It is also obvious that the only way to get an influx of new players is to make it pocket-money price and run a Steam sale. Jason knows this already, but hasn't so far responded to any suggestion that he do so.

He's either letting it die because that's what he wants to happen (it's as much an 'art piece' as a game I guess), or he is refusing to change his mind about something he has already said publicly.  Either way, he's putting his own principles above the enjoyment of people who've paid him to play his games, which is why I too wll not be buying another of his.

Blip, in the guise of Mr Coats, did the following two things to me:

1) Successfully robbed me for around $25,000, in a house that was not bomb-proof but was fairly complex;

2) Came into my next house, which was not nearly as strong, and died to my initial commit trap.

If he was hacking and had a full view of the maps, then:

On (a) he brought entirely the wrong tools, went a roundabout way to my vault, and made it look like he had no idea where he was going;
On (b) he was unbelievably stupid, and inexplicably died to a trap, losing his own well-built house and dropping a $10,000 bounty.

My point being: Mr Coats was not hacking on any his entries into my houses.

Mine's gone, again.

Built a mean path to the vault, but neglected to fortify the approach to it by bruteforcing around my traps and paid the price. Then died to s self-test after repairing the damage, because the fucker put one of my magic dance cats into a pit and I hadn't realised!

Start again tomorrow...

Ah yeah, you are Wilburn Gabriel Burns.  Lotta burns there!

I've solved your entrance trap but it's also a commit-gate with a $2,000 escape price, so I have only gone past it with my alt,a week or so ago.

There's another one up now, with the vault on the other side of a row of pits, and some circuitry to the South including a rotary switch... that you?

Can't begin to think it out yet, lol

Yeah, that was me.

I was just probing, came in with a couple of meats to try and get a look around, realised I needed a meat for the uppermost dog in order to look around the corner. Came in, drugged it, then opened the door instead of taking one step to look over the drugged dog instead. Wasn't thinking straight - though I still don't recall seeing the wife flee in the first place!

Bit annoyed with myself, had a decent house going on! Back to square one...

A slight spin-off suggestion from what Gyuri says there - have some houses immortalised, with no money in the vault but with a substantial prize for solving it toolless. Perhaps once a house has been uncracked for X number of days, it is saved to the server and then, when the owner eventually does die, that house is either added to the main list as a 'challenge house', or alternatively added to a separate list which is only for challenge houses. Make it a prize of, say 25% of the house's build value for solving it toolless.  Normal rules re: chills apply, and it would be an awesome challenge to solve some of the big houses toolless.  Of course you can use tools to scout it, break into combo locks etc, but you would have to map it all out for your tool-free run to get the prize.

Just a thought... I'm sure there will be a thousand good ideas coming at you already!

Make the game £2.99 in a Steam sale. That's pocket money, people click to buy it just to try the game out.  Hundreds of new players. A lot will play it once and then not bother, some will play for a little while, some will play as long as the game is alive because they'll fall in love with it.

But this has been talked about a thousand times already, it's Jason Rohrer's little art project/experiment and keeping the game alive in the long-term isn't what he's interested in.

And to show my point:

My $2,000 house was up most of the night, and had a total of four robbers. It was worth $200 to begin with, then I found a $1,000 in an empty house so my worth was $1200 immediately.

I got one robber come in and find my wife, who I left unarmed, and he took half the money from her.  Then, nobody came. A wooden house, solvable (but you'd be lucky to do it on an untooled visit), with $600 sitting in it. No action.

Then I got one robber who came and left, one who died ($100 bounty, wooo!) then look what happened: some guy comes in and walks straight into my dog, dumping a $2,000 bounty in a $700 house, and then immediately afterwards he comes in with second account to collect the bounty money.

Now yeah, I see the argument that he's a dual, and this is why duals spoil the game.  My point is that now, unless you ARE a dual, you can't get started.

So - abusing dual accounts is unfair to single-account players, yes. But to me it's the only way to enjoy whatever time the game has left, and seeing as I paid good money for the game without realising Jason intended for it to die off pretty quickly, then I'm more bothered about getting my own value out of it than I am about being fair to single account players.

But when did you start your house? You've had that one for well over a week, possibly two, or more? Two weeks ago it was possible because robbers were coming and dying in houses with enough frequency to develop them properly. Now, hardly anyone is robbing the lower value houses. If you started a $2k house now, I can't imagine you would be able to develop it into anything like yours is now.  What is the build cost of your house? $70,000? $90,000? Where would that money come from if you had a $2k house now?

I just got about three corridors in with my alt account.  Brought tools but didn't use them.  I might come back on my main with enough tools to go deeper, but your house is potentially expensive to guarantee a safe escape, so it might be a while!