The Castle Doctrine Forums

One of my good friends also just stared playing, and he told me some of the same things you're saying:
"How do these traps work?" and "How can I not be robbed so often?"
Of course, I helped him out, and tried to catch him up on all the stuff we as a community has learned about the game since v5. I told him about how to make dog-activated electric floors, and how voltage triggered switches work. I'm trying to teach him how to use blueprints to come up with a comprehensive solution to a house, and how to make his house, in turn, harder to crack with blueprints. Now that he understands the basics, he's been looking at the richest houses, and, as he knows what each individual component in their house does, he can deduce how they work together to make a trap. The moral here is that it's really useful to have somebody to ask your questions about the game to. And, if you don't know personally any experienced players, ask you questions here on the forums! We're happy to teach you about the mechanics of the game, and we truly want you to enjoy playing it.

It's an interesting concept, considering that I'll be even more paranoid about robbing than I am in the normal game with a good house. But I'm not sure if anybody would even try robbing each other in pemadeath; ukuko didn't rob me, and I haven't robbed him, and probably won't ever, from the looks of his house. It might be a long wait until easy houses show up before any robberies happen, especially when there's also the normal server as an alternative.

I just realized...
There seem to by two versions of the painting "Sky", of which I own both.
However, one of them is by Jason Rohrer, but the other is by Jason Rhorer. I wonder why that is? Care to explain, Jason?

The thing that I loved about your original house, zed, was that you were using pulses to conduct power across the electric floors without turning them on, something that took me some time to figure out how to do. I had tried robbing your house before, but the chihuahuas threw me off. I'm terrible with dog-based electronics, and I also misread the concrete walls as steel. At the time, I didn't realize you could mouse over blueprint tiles for info.
Also I finished my secure read-write lock. It should keep people out, though I don't have too much money in there now. I had to leave it unfinished last night, as I had something in real life to do (but who needs real friends when you can rob people?) and somebody robbed my out-in-the-open vault. This morning I got some more money, and finished it. It is 9-thick, but, at the moment, there's no family protection. They all died during my open-wiring experimentation, when I had no defenses at all. Though, considering I have no room for them, they might be better off dead: no save-states for you robbers!

Actually, this house's state could not be due to a previous robbery. If it was, the first, supposedly successful, robber would have first walked right and to the vault. For that switch to be inactive, as it is, it would have initially been active, before the pit bull would walk over it. This means that the electric floor would have power initially, making the house unbeatable by its owner. Therefore, they must have used a modified client to verify their house, before there was a safeguard against it. I bet that, if Jason checks the tapes, that's what he would find.

So I died and had to start over, and I'm realizing that this change makes it incredibly difficult to start out, as all the houses that have any money are protected with electric floors, so the only thing to do is brute force the rich houses. Here are the big problems:
1. Before the change, a big part of making money was grinding through poor houses, which wasn't much fun.
2. Now, making money entails brute forcing rich houses, which is also not very fun.
Therefore, I've concluded that we need a way to make money while still having fun playing the game. In v6, maps will help with this, allowing you to deduce the solution of a house and then trying it out, adding in thought to what was just brute force before. But for now, a fix might be adding these "NPC houses." They would be designed fairly, with proper rewards for their risk. The only problem with this would be shifting game focus off robing others and towards robbing NPCs.
Alternatively, a temporary fix for the magic dance could be derived; the ability to make one for so cheap is a big problem now. Combo locks didn't break the game this badly because so few people could afford them, while a magic dance can be made with the starting 2000. Whether this can be fixed without a new client I don't know, but if it can be fixed, even imperfectly, before v6, I think it would keep players unhappy with the impossibility of nearly all houses now from leaving the game.
As a last resort, salary could be added back in for all houses. That, however, is Mr. Rohrer's decision and not mine. But at least it's interesting to see how big an impact a small change can have, despite my clashing opinions on both sides of this issue.

I completely agree that people will try to obfuscate houses, but that won't really help them much. It still has to make sense to the viewer, despite a lot of excess components. Obfuscated code, on the other hand, is completely changed in look. Making a house overcomplicated would be like adding a lot of useless lines of code, not obfuscating it.

I really like the idea for more tools, especially the wire view. I feel that a wire or electronic view would fix magic dance houses while leaving many other designs possible. And the "splice wires" idea is ingenious; manually toggling power to wires or conductive walls would be very useful. I think a battery would also help; electric floor-based magic dances could be toggled on and then beaten with water. I also think that the sticky pressure pad should by un-stickable with a crowbar, to help fix the "locked in by 9 doors" strategy.