Discuss the massively-multiplayer home defense game.
You are not logged in.
^ Within wooden walls near the front door is best - the people who come in with 5 saws are usually some of the most entertaining victims
Just to be clear I was only disappointed at you coming back after being in the house previously and still brute forcing the solvable section.
As much as I'd have been happier to see the guy who solved it win he came in with no tools and I certainly did not have a solvable house.
Sorry about the bounty, though I'm pretty sure noone corrected me on the implicit notion that receiving bounties increases ones own bounty.
Obviously this contest thing can't really work in future unless I pull of an awful lot of robberies first...
I could always buy more paintings but that going to the winner is intrinsically within the game mechanics anyway.
Regarding solvable houses, it all depends on your preferences. Unless I decide to try to survive at the top of the money leaderboard I'm always going to have sections of my house that are built more for novelty than effectiveness.
I'd like to build a house with ever-increasingly difficult puzzles and then finally a very strong set of combo locks at the end.
Speaking of novelty I highly recommend filling your walls with dogs.
(Edit: let's use words correctly)
Well it's done...I have a sinking feeling the bounty may have been many times less than expected...unless I can't see the updated value yet.
Please let us know how that turned out, jere.
Or should I say Charles Jeffrey Penn
Thanks for playing, everyone. Especially the 24 new victims and those who lost tools just poking around.
I'm quite pleased with the response.
I particularly want to congratulate whoever was Stanley Michael Richmond, as he's the only one...
THE ONLY ONE...
to get past the puzzle section of the house properly. Basically this: http://castledraft.com/editor/15TjNW
To be fair it was possible to gain line of sight to the first dog an odd number of tiles away, but you could see that dog from the doormat without him seeing you so that's fine I think.
You could also see enough to know that you could get out of the leftmost gauntlet without tools and that there were plenty of dogs to use.
Frankly I'm a little disappointed in the successful robber to be honest. Nevertheless I will deliver.
More to the point the fact that it's taken so many people before someone got past this one puzzle without tools is disheartening.
I think next time I will make a puzzle house and only reward the bounty if someone completes it without tools...though I don't know that I can design a house full of puzzles that are tricky...and in any case I'd have at least one combo lock at the end until I'm ready to aggro the entire world again so don't get any ideas there =p
No dogs-will-eat-you-if-you-don't-get-the-3-digit-combo-lock or anything though.
That part was originally there purely as a commitment trap. When the wiring was less visible I believe it was the most effective commitment trap I've ever had.
I thought I had finally found paradise: a Hackerless online pc game. Guess I will have to keep dreaming.
I'm going to attempt to rob this guy with no tools. Depending on how his house is built there is probably a 99.99999% chance I will die in it. My bounty is the prize, as well as the paintings.
At the time of writing I have a $0 / 0 / 0 house with two paintings: Keep and Mountain, and if I counted correctly 234 kills (and a handful of successful robberies).
I will make no changes to my house.
I will attempt to steal the paintings back from whoever takes them.
I will not use tools.
No doubt I will be donating a bounty of over $117,000 unless there's a cap or something.
Would the first person to find my player name kindly post it?
Good luck!
Update: while I was writing that last post my house's value shot up from ~$400 to over $4000. . .
Story time.
I started a fresh house several hours ago, had a very lucky over-sized early bounty, made it into a very good unfinished house, finally succumbed to the need to sleep and...got robbed by someone with tools and lost almost all my money. Oh well.
To my delight the first person to come in with tools vastly overpowering my house's value at the time of going AFK died stupidly, and the next robber to come in managed to rob me with a starter kit. Well done him.
Damn! If only I'd played until I finished extending that pit, or decided to extend that electric floor one more tile in each direction after all, or used a sticky button there instead of a regular one (how that detail of all things escaped me in such an over-engineered monstrosity of a last line of defense is beyond me...
If only I'd played slightly better . . .
then my house would have been utterly destroyed while I was away instead of being left in a position to make a few cheap repairs and wait for the next wave of poor robbers . . .
. . . because the updated value is posted to the world while I sleep.
Now, who can say that this is either untrue, or true and not utterly absurd?
If you want less people dying in your house overnight then do precisely that, make less people die in it overnight. Make your traps less deadly. If you don't want people to die, don't kill them. Pad the walls, muzzle the dogs, reduce the depth of your pits, do whatever is necessary to stop all these fools dying. Think turtle, think bitlock, think boring!
Still leaves a house vulnerable to a value explosion caused by suicide griefers and/or disconnects.
...you don't want people who play more than others to achieve things simply because they are playing the game more.
Correct. The key word there is 'simply' - as in 'only'. If one assumes 'achieve things' implies surviving the all important first night if they don't fuck up, because that's about where the snowball is well and truly rolling and the challenge for a defensive player vanishes as long as they can avoid killing themselves or letting the value of the house go beyond..or equal to, the prepared defenses. After that a defensive player can pick his own difficulty by allowing or not allowing the value of the house to increase (more or less).
Again that's the other side of the issue and not what I'm addressing with my suggestion.
Given two otherwise identical players with different frequency of checking the game the only advantage the more frequent player has should be intrinsic - learning faster, having more earning power because they're robbing more often or updating their house more frequently and killing richer robbers (again - obviously there'd have to be some minimum frequency that one needs to check in before the listed value explodes, but it should not be five minutes or whatever it is currently).
Any competitive game where the more skillful player will not necessarily win on average is broken.
I value high skill ceilings and fair competition - always. I find tactics which generate considerably more success than they take skill to implement offensive.
So yes, you are absolutely correct in assuming I don't want anyone to have an unfair advantage.
maybe i am still half asleep but this just sounds like:
it is an unfair advantage that people who have played a game longer might be better at it
Fallacious to the point of being unworthy of proper discussion. Reeks of the all too common desire for one to believe they are better than others in some way without actually being able to back up the idea and anyone with a working brain knows it.
Agreed, the robber should probably get the same reward if he reaches the vault as if he'd collected all the money as well.
Bait.
Encouraging a robber to leave before they reach the vault by sacrificing a smaller amount.
You'd probably have to have the owner collect all of the money to validate the house, and not force the robber to do that.
Time played is NOT the only factor for house survivability..
No, it isn't. However, it's a CRITICAL factor for house survival, which is why the game is stacked so heavily in the favor of someone willing to glue their eyes to it for as long as it takes to make a house that will probably survive for 8 hours against attacks that are far, far stronger than it's listed value in tools.
The only reasons to favor this situation are that you are one of those people and you enjoy the unfair advantage, and/or you suffer from Stockholm syndrome with this game, and/or you'd much rather continue to have houses out there that are massive free money dispensers for whoever (who can afford tools) finds them first rather than have the challenge of robbing a house be proportional to the (minimum) possible reward. Even if my suggestion were implemented, attackers could make guesses at an inflated hidden value of a house by looking at it's visits and kills. So no, you wouldn't be able to log off to achieve victory. This would merely buy some time for the house owner and stop giving moderately rich robbers free lunches. Attackers just wouldn't be able to throw a huge amount of tools at a poorly defended house with as much confidence that it would pay off.
The way things stand now: scrub friendly.
Conversely the situation required to survive the first night is rather unfair to robbers who are willing to take risks. The calculation involved in their calculated risk by crossing the first commitment trap that they don't have the tools to get out of is no calculation at all because a house with almost no money in it (and no other indication of threat) could require a minimum of four ladders to brute force.
Risk:Reward. They should be reasonably close and vary depending on the skill of the design of the house, not depending on when the owner last logged in or at what house value they reset their kill counter.
The premise that my suggestion only makes the game easier only looks at the experience of people trying to start a new house. It ignores the effect on the difficulty of continued existence and money generation for houses that have survived at least a day - which in my opinion is currently far too easy once you get that snowball rolling if you're willing to keep the listed value at only a few thousand and be patient while your house grows to take up the entire map.
Cheap houses being executed by copious tools is just one side of it. I think the house listings should include a separate figure - the value of the house defenses themselves - unless there's a better way. Some indication of the threat of a house in any case.
Robbers should have SOME idea of what they're getting themselves into and meat grinder houses with low value listings should not be able to chew on (COMPLETELY uninformed) tool-less robbers all day and gradually grow fat.
so the key to victory would be spend to $2000 and never log in again. sounds like a plan
People can do this sort of thing already. A house can be full to the point where the owner has nothing left to buy except paintings and tools and still have the house appear as $1000 / 0 / 0.
That is a separate issue. In fact it's the exact inverse of this problem. An very rich house can look like a scrub house and kill tool-less or nearly tool-less robbers all day just by keeping it's listed value low and having a couple of screens of wooden walls.
Conversely, I'm talking about relatively defenseless houses having a much higher listed value than they 'deserve' - before the owner can do anything with the money.
What's your definition of victory anyway? As far as I'm concerned money in this game is a means to an end. 'Victory' is killing robbers in whatever hilarious and novel ways I've thought of recently, or throwing tools at unlikely heists, or reaching (non-fresh) vaults with no tools hopefully without making any mistakes that should have killed me.
In any case there could easily be a limit to how long the public listing would wait to update.
who is the delayed list for?
People who sleep. People who have lives. This is normally a juvenile, ignorant point but in this case it is actually 100% accurate. What's the key to 'victory'? Refresh your security tapes 86400 times per day so that bounties you collect are an advantage rather than simply making your house more vulnerable. Such strategy.
What I'm talking about is unfinished houses inevitably being ganked - and I do mean "well that certainly took absolutely no care or intelligence" - by robbers with tools that vastly outweigh the value of the house the last time they were updated - because they are successful.
If I had any fucks left to give I'd be afraid of BOUNTIES rather than robbers.
I once felt like a restart and bought all the tools I could with what money I had and dropped something like 100 kills worth of bounty on a random ~$200 house. I imagine it lasted several seconds.
I've had less egregious versions of this happen literally faster than I could get back into my house at a time when all I was doing was watching security tapes.
I can scarcely give a shit because my house WILL get ganked unless I spend literally everything and then go robbing without tools the next time I log in (and even that is not enough because for some reason I've had people come and die in my house when it's value was at zero (no I didn't have tools)) or play from fresh house to full house in one sitting.
I am not suggesting a vacation mode, I am suggesting the listed house value should be whatever it was when the state of the house last changed. The house would still be able to be robbed, and a successful robber would still steal the same amount based on the actual value of the house. The only difference would be that if you log off with $500 in money and tools, that's what robbers will see. A cheap house left afk that snags a $7200 bounty would appear to have $500 value while actually having $7700 value, until the owner logs in or the house is successfully robbed. This would mean the house is vulnerable, not forfeit.
Addendum: Worrying about your house being robbed is rather pointless when you KNOW that it will fall to a robber with tools that dominate your house after a few bounties. In my opinion the almost total certainty that this will happen cheapens the 'thrill' of your house being vulnerable.
I don't have a problem with having to worry about my house being robbed while I sleep,
but what I do find obnoxious is the way the value of a starter house can explode and attract thieves with far more tools than your house can possibly deal with, sometimes literally before you can get back into your house if you're actively playing the game at the time.
My suggestion is simply to refresh the listed value of a house only when it is robbed or when the owner returns to their house.
If the second case is unapproved then at least delay refreshing the listed value until the owner is logged into the game.
This would resolve the legit reasons (in my opinion) players desire a 'vacation button' without making the house invulnerable to attack.
It should go without saying that one should not have to play from fresh house to fortress in one sitting just to reduce the chance of a robber with quadruple the house's value (at the time of logging out) in tools attacking, sometimes minutes after one leaves the game.