The Castle Doctrine Forums

Trying to keep it simple, so... no, I wasn't planning on that.

Good point, Setz, there are certainly some interesting abandoned houses.  I just went through one myself, going after $240 or something, that was indeed very tense and cool.  Seemed totally de-toothed by previous robbers, but then I found myself in this very scary maze, and uncertain about whether I'd come out alive.  A nice "press your luck" feeling.

What I'm more worried about are the abandoned houses that are empty except for a safe, or are only half-built.  The ones that have 0 deaths.  Those were still earning money, too.  And it is indeed weird to hinge salary on death-count in an abandoned house.  It makes sense that salary is earned only by people who are still playing the game in some way (even if they are playing by designing a really good house that no one has gotten through yet).

Salary was originally added as a kind of band-aid for an over-time money drain problem.  Money only enters the system when someone dies and starts a new life (+ $2000).  But over time, people spend money on tools and house stuff.... the average person WANTS to spend more than $2000 on their house.  So, the amount of money in the system shrinks, in general.  A rich person dying with a bunch of money adds to it.  And then the game becomes paralyzed.

There needs to be some slow drip of money into the system beyond what is injected every time someone starts a new life (because they will likely spend all of that on their house, anyway).

And yes, one-in-a-million guessing game houses are really broken!  Those will be fixed soon by maps.

Well, the ban-hammer isn't needed anymore.  They don't need to respect it, because that kind of cheating is now impossible, so no one will ever be banned in the future!

Even if I remove the debug output, the client still has the map, so a hacked client could easily spit out maps.  Or the protocol could be sniffed.

The way I'm dealing with this in v6 is that maps (blueprints) will be available for ALL houses.  This, of course, will have a substantial impact on house design (pushing it away from "guessing games with 1 million possible answers" and toward "real puzzles").

In the mean time, it's a little weird for robinhood to post this.  On the other hand, it kinda makes the current game more like what v6 will be.

Also, I believe that lots of people are quietly sniffing the protocol anyway, and using it to their advantage.  So, everyone should beware:  if you design a house with a guessing game, someone might use an illicit map to help them with their guess.

I figured out why this happens sometimes.

If someone cheats (their robbery-end is blocked), or they quit mid-robbery without finishing, then they are force-killed.  But no tape is saved in theses cases (the tape would be invalid in the case of cheating, and the tape isn't even sent to the server if they quit mid-robbery). 

Still, they died while in your house, so the death counter goes up.

It's also part of the aesthetic, the mystery about who these other people are, and the mystery about who you are. 

Thematically, it's pretty strange to not know your own name.  On the other hand, we don't refer to ourselves by name very much in real life.  It's not like I have my name painted on the wall of my house in real life.  But anyway, the aesthetic is, "It doesn't matter who I am, because I'm just like everybody else."

Other people obviously need visible names so that you can revisit the same house, and so on.

In terms of explaining it inside the game.... I really like to avoid as much explanation as possible.

I'm helping Prisinor by email.

When we figure out the solution to this unusual problem, I'll post it here for future reference.

At the start, the Wiki database was about 500 MiB in size.

Spent all afternoon dealing with this mess, which was less than ideal, but it's done now.

4300+ accounts and spam-laden User and User Talk pages deleted.

And how to prevent this from happening in the future?

It's strange that the spammers don't ever touch any of the "real" pages in the wiki.  They always make their own, new pages.  Probably to stay under the radar, while still showing up in search engines somehow, maybe even through the Random Page link.  Orphaned pages are actually a lot harder to deal with (and delete) than wayward edits on the real pages.

So, the first step was to disable page creation, but only for accounts that have never made at least one edit.  And no account is needed at all to make edits (though you can't create pages without an account).  This seems like the thinnest, weakest spam prevention imaginable.  Any anonymous person---or bot---can edit anything on the site!  But it seems to work, because the spammers don't want to actually edit something.

This stopped the spam pages cold.  But new accounts were still flowing in.  About 10 accounts every 30 minutes or so.  Yeah, they weren't able to DO anything, but the were still clogging up the changelog (and taking space in the database).

So, I put a simple question in front of the account creation screen (how much does the gun cost?), and the spam account creation has stopped completely (much like it did on this forum with that simple question, when even a CAPTCHA wasn't working).

This experience has been absolutely baffling.  How can MediaWiki, the most widely-used wiki software on the planet, ship with a default setup that is an absolute spam sponge?  How can it NOT have any way of mass-deleting accounts, at all, not even with an extension?  I had 4000+ accounts to delete, and the only way to do it was to muck around in the database.  At least there was an extension (Nuke) that helped me bulk-delete the posts.  But they still lingered (archived!) in the database until I cleared them manually from the command line, and even then, parts of them still lingered (search indexed!) until I mucked around in the database some more.

Have the anti-spam features turned on by default, please.

After all this:  total wiki database size, uncompressed, is 7 MiB.

I wouldn't exactly call it a "good feeling" though.

Actually, I figured out how to fix this server-side.