The Castle Doctrine Forums

Done:

http://thecastledoctrine.net/forums/vie … ?pid=16631

Jeez!  You folks found the major hole in the general idea of a "big pending bounty building up on a house."

Yeah, you could harvest this pending bounty with an alt account (so the alt robber has a huge bounty on his head) and then kill the alt robber in the main house to give that bounty to the main.  I can imagine this being really tempting for owners of top houses (why let this built-up money end up in someone else's house?), especially as time passes and a breach starts to seem inevitable soon.

The super-simple solution of reducing the murder bounty to at or below the cost of murder ($200) is interesting...  Might as well just buy tools with the alt and dump them in your main account (for $1000 in value) instead of trying to build up a bounty.  Already, vault-reach in a dead house to build up a bounty isn't worth it, because it requires at least one tool-dumping death in the dead house first to make the vault reachable again, which is $2000 wasted, and you only get $500 bounty for hitting a vault.

So, I'll do that for now and see what happens.  Best to keep it as simple as possible.

I like some of the formulas that you folks came up with here!

Following Cullman's already-scored thread-hijacking, the ability to use abandoned houses as chill-avoiding wealth-transfer points... this is an issue.  If X such dead houses are available, that would mean $X thousand in free money per day from a single alt account.  Cullman, your solution would work, but I'd rather have something simpler in place...

Yeah, so someone with an alt account would "waste" a lot of tools robbing a not-broken house because there are a lot of deaths built up there, to nab the bounty and dump it into the main account?

I wasn't saying +$100 per death on the house on the head of whoever gets through.  Right now, hitting a vault increments your bounty by $500 no matter what.  In the new system, the average should be about the same... you know, so maybe it's $5 per person who died before you.  So by breaching a 1-death house, your bounty would go up by $5.... a 1000-death house would make the bounty go up by $5000.

Wait... so... what if I build up a lot of deaths in my house.... then that house because valuable to me to use with alt accounts, right?  I can leave the house sitting there, and never fix it to clear the deaths.  Then have one alt dump a $100 tool in there (so that the vault is robbable again).  Then rob the house with the second alt to put a huge bounty on the second alt.  Then have that second alt die to dump the bounty wherever I want.  I can wait until tomorrow and do it again.

So... maybe it needs to be "number of people who died in the house since the last bounty was placed?"  You know, so each time the vault is hit, the "bounty to be added" goes back to 0.  Reaching the vault gives you whatever bounty increment is waiting there and then resets it back to 0 until more people die in there.

Maybe "money you had at home when you died" is a good way to measure it.... a good measure of "killing a good player."  But it would also be rewarded for killing a good house-builder (I want it to measure good robbers, mostly, to fit with the thematics of a bounty---built up for crimes committed).  Still, money at home can't be easily manipulated, and it's thrown away when you die, so you'd have to burn money to inflate a bounty (might as well direct transfer it instead, if that's what you're trying to do, right?).  What if bounty is 40% of the value you have at home when you die?  Then, if you're trying to exploit bounties with alt accounts, what you'll make will be less than just buying tools and dumping them in your main account.

Still, I'm not sure about this.... would be better to find a good measure of a "skilled robber somehow.... hmm... maybe when a robber dies in the house, the home-owner gets a bounty payment (as usual) AND the bounty-increment of the house is ticked up too.  So if a bunch of "good robbers" die in that house, you must be a really good robber to get through, so a huge bounty should go on your head.  If a bunch of bad robbers died there, it's not such an accomplishment to finally rob it, so very little bounty is put on your head for succeeding.  It's like, robbing Fort Knox gets you a huge bounty (so many of the brightest minds have tried and failed)...

ANYWAY... just to get the ball rolling, I've turned off bounty increments for murders.

I agree about counting the number of people the wife has killed... that may work its way in there too at some point...

I'll weigh in on this very long thread here:

I don't WANT anyone to use dual accounts.  That's not the way the game is meant to be played.  In fact, if you're using dual accounts, you're really robbing yourself (of the intense emotional experience that the game can offer).  I've never used dual accounts myself when playing.

That said, there's no way to prevent people from using dual accounts (or friends from helping each other) if they really want to.

There's also no way to sort "paranoid reports" of suspected dual account usage from the real thing.  So a "report" button would jus generate a lot of noise.

Some people here claim to have discovered a simple way to prevent dual accounts.  I certainly may have missed something.  If you're onto something simple (that can be explained in a paragraph or two, not convoluted), please email me:  jasonrohrer@fastmail.fm

For those of you wondering about the status of the game:

I've worked on it for more than two years and put out 35 revisions during that time.  I see it as "done" at this point.  As far as I'm aware, there are no known bugs, and the game has gone through extensive balancing work.

Yes, I have moved on to working on game number 11 now, but of course I will continue fixing bugs as they arise in The Castle Doctrine (I do this for all of my games).

Well, sadly, there's nothing that can be done about dual accounts.

All multiplayer games are vulnerable to dual accounts, or friends cooperating unfairly.  Even online poker has this problem.  If we are friends, and we tell each other our hands in a holdem game, we have a huge advantage over other players at the table.  This happens in real life poker too (secret teams of players who signal to each other have a huge advantage over others at the table).

That said, early on, we did a lot of work to close any "free money farming" loopholes connected to multiple accounts.  Most of the remaining issues involve information sharing between accounts (or even between friends).  I think some people are not aware of exactly how difficult the world has been made for multiple accounts already (like, if your second account dies, you can't see its new house for 24 hours, etc.).

Really, there's no way to prevent people from taking advantage of information sharing.  Even if I somehow blocked dual accounts (impossible without a lot of collateral damage), friends could still email each other, or even call each other, to share information.

All that said, please be nice to each other in the forums! 

Well, I'm not so worried about the above scenario, because it still requires SKILL in defeating the C, D, and E houses which are not colluding with A and B.  The method you describe involves exercising skill, and skimming a little bit of extra money out of that skill (the bounty) than would otherwise be possible.  But to skim more money (from D or E's house) requires more skill to be applied, and more risk too.

All of my effort has gone into any skill-free and risk-free method of making unbounded money in the game.  Like, ways that A and B could go back and forth with each other, without skill or risk, and build up lots of money.

You could say, "Yeah, but, what if C, D, and E are in on it?"  I think the difficulty of operating a collusion pool grows super-linearly with the size of that pool.  Or even if you're operating N fake accounts yourself, that still costs N times as much money as one account...

Right now, the only way to gain an unbounded amount of money in the game without skill is:

1.  Collude with an unbounded number of other people.

2.  Wait for an unbounded amount of time (for chills to wear off, etc.)

Or at least, it should be that way...  I'm looking for loopholes that violate this assumption.

Yeah, I think the OpenGL headers have moved in later versions of OSX.  I'm building on 10.5, which I think had them in an OpenGL/ folder (this is not standard, usually they are in a gl/ folder).

So, I created  minorGems/graphics/openGL/glInclude.h  to deal with the mess of finding the OpenGL headers.

You'll probably have to edit that file in the $ifdef __mac__ section to tell it where to look for those headers.  Maybe just remove the OpenGL/ part... maybe <gl.h> and <glu.h> will work?

Wow... double ouch that everyone got access to the admin account....

This is a blunder to top all blunders.

But I think it should be fixed for everyone now.

So... I tried a captcha thing before (when I first launched the forum), but it didn't work!

Why?  Because these spammers are HUMAN.

Well, at least the people creating the accounts are human.

So, the only way to stop them was to make it too much of a pain for a non-TCD human to get through.  These human spammers want the most bang for their buck.  A captcha is fine.... having to go out to the wiki to look up an answer actually stopped the spam cold!

Well, until now.