I'm sad...

Killer Mosquito · 2014-03-19 22:13:31

My house is two pages from being on the top. I'm honestly not interested in being on the top page. I want my house to do well, though. I want to see my house solved... but I'm dreading the point where someone comes with enough money to brute force the house. I've tried to make it as bruteforce-proof as possible... but I'd really like to see my house solved instead of broken.

I know this post won't really solve anything, but I just felt like saying this aloud (relatively speaking)...

Lord0fHam · 2014-03-19 22:23:17

whats your name? i'll try

Killer Mosquito · 2014-03-19 23:10:09

I don't know my name... but I'm on page 3 (20,000's) with 50 kills. There's another guy with 49, that's not me.

Killer Mosquito · 2014-03-19 23:11:14

If it's ever robbed, I want to post for feedback. Everytime I've reached this stage of the game, I've died to a self test

shlam16 · 2014-03-19 23:11:37

Do you have one painting? Black background with colourful squares?

Killer Mosquito · 2014-03-19 23:12:16

Yep!

shlam16 · 2014-03-19 23:24:50

Get more art and I may be persuaded to have a crack . Though I only brute force. With a 6 week old house and 50 paintings, I'm not standing a single step out of place.

Killer Mosquito · 2014-03-19 23:26:26

I tried. I looked today and there were no paintings.... I certainly understand why you wouldn't be looking to rob people though. That's a lot of paintings...

42dustman · 2014-03-19 23:30:25

Ah... the middle class blues.

shlam16 · 2014-03-19 23:31:54

That is my fault I'm afraid. I was engaged in a battle with a top pager, trying to steal his 15 paintings. He retaliated and died in my house. I used the 40k I got from him and snapped up all of the cheap paintings that nobody seemed to want.

I rob people all the time, just today I robbed a couple of nice paintings. You can follow the saga of it over in the "Sarsparilla showdown" thread. I was just saying that when I do rob people I am super prepared and cautious; I would never risk placing myself in a puzzle without protection.

By the way, your name is Anthony Hugh Miller.

Killer Mosquito · 2014-03-19 23:39:44

42dustman wrote:

Ah... the middle class blues.

Wow... that describes me perfectly at the moment. I've put too much work into this house to risk robbing it. One of the comments made a lot of sense about the fact that no one will ever solve your house unless it's easy.

Although, I've always wanted to have a messload of money and build a really difficult, non-threatening puzzle. I build a house with three modules to pass. I wanted the third module to be completely non-lethal, but something fun to solve after making it through my other two relatively tough modules. I didn't have the space or creativity to make it work though.

LiteS · 2014-03-21 14:35:42

I'm rather sick of these "I want my house to be solved" posts, especially when your house is full of doors that a robber can't possibly know if he's supposed to open or leave shut. And yes, gyuri, I'm calling you out. "Solving" a house almost always requires the robber to have one exit strategy, the vault, and one misstep can easily render a house unsolvable. That's why brute forcing, self-test death, and carelessness are what take down the top houses.

gyuri · 2014-03-21 16:31:35

LiteS wrote:

I'm rather sick of these "I want my house to be solved" posts, especially when your house is full of doors that a robber can't possibly know if he's supposed to open or leave shut. And yes, gyuri, I'm calling you out.

You're right, my house was literally full of doors.

Killer Mosquito · 2014-03-21 20:20:06

LiteS wrote:

I'm rather sick of these "I want my house to be solved" posts, especially when your house is full of doors that a robber can't possibly know if he's supposed to open or leave shut. And yes, gyuri, I'm calling you out. "Solving" a house almost always requires the robber to have one exit strategy, the vault, and one misstep can easily render a house unsolvable. That's why brute forcing, self-test death, and carelessness are what take down the top houses.

I didn't mean to offend. I didn't realize it was in bad taste to have a post like this. The post is honest, however. I really do want some one to solve my house. Every time I watch a tape, I find myself rooting for the robber. I'm not after bounties or racking my price up. Honestly, if I get on the first page, I highly doubt I'm a skilled enough builder to protect my money.

LiteS · 2014-03-22 12:11:56

Killer Mosquito wrote:

LiteS wrote:
I'm rather sick of these "I want my house to be solved" posts, especially when your house is full of doors that a robber can't possibly know if he's supposed to open or leave shut. And yes, gyuri, I'm calling you out. "Solving" a house almost always requires the robber to have one exit strategy, the vault, and one misstep can easily render a house unsolvable. That's why brute forcing, self-test death, and carelessness are what take down the top houses.
I didn't mean to offend. I didn't realize it was in bad taste to have a post like this. The post is honest, however. I really do want some one to solve my house. Every time I watch a tape, I find myself rooting for the robber. I'm not after bounties or racking my price up. Honestly, if I get on the first page, I highly doubt I'm a skilled enough builder to protect my money.

Cylence wrote:

My first complete house pulled from the archives:
-Redacted for security-
It was a puzzle house. Not meant to stop brute force attempts. It actually gave as much vision as possible.
The whole bottom 3 rows was spent telling you how to get to the vault. I used panic buttons as a number system and used lights to indicate which buttons should be on and which ones should be off. The lights were also in specific orientation (i.e. lights vertical and on the left, etc)
It also had a demonstration of how to move the dog using the cat in the final section.
Unfortunately, no one ever picked up on the clues. Although they did like interacting with that dog/cat demo in the corner.
I made as much wiring visible as possible and you only really committed when you opened the door (on the south) to see the cat and dogs. The dogs would block your exit, and the cat would turn the electric floor off after two steps, then back on after 4 more steps. Sadly, most deaths would occur from a robber stepping on the false button, thinking he turned off the grates, only to walk on to the grates and die. The player base is more educated now though.
The house would eventually fall to being worth too much money and having someone brute force through it.

Cylence's house was rather elaborate, and even after seeing the whole layout it was still difficult to tell exactly what the lower portion meant and how it lined up with the rest of the house, but the idea was the same. A grand majority of his wiring was visible, and he used windows instead of walls everywhere he could in an attempt to get people to solve it, but the result was the same.

Every 2k suicide robber has tried to solve your house in one way or another, and I'm sure you've noticed trends in which traps tend to kill them, which doors they're most likely to open, which traps they disable, etc. They're not busting into your house to play around with your traps and die, they're breaking in to try to get to your vault. It's important to remember that Jason's intent in making the game was specifically not to make a puzzle game, although it can be treated as such.

Edit: gyuri's house was actually "solvable" after a bunch of scouting attempts, minus 2 50/50 guesses at the end, if you ignore the fact that I didn't know exactly how many cats to send down the tubes and just guessed by sending all of them. Really the only reason I solved it was because the whole entrance half of his house was 95% safe, and his house didn't lock you in until you chose to be locked in. Your house on the other hand locks you in pretty quickly in comparison, specifically once the cat stops blocking the entry dogs.

Last edited by LiteS (2014-03-22 12:16:40)

Cylence · 2014-03-24 04:00:10

Lite S, As the title from the post you pulled it from, it was my first complete house. Which means I had little experience building and knowing what kind of players are out there. Also chills were not so long back then (pre-steam).

I'm better informed now, only because of my attempts and trial and deathly, deathly errors.

While I know the game is meant to instill paranoia, I still like watching the tapes to see how people approach the problem presented. So now, I just make a nice puzzle with no commit until you solve it. The rest of the house is for making it expensive to brute force.

I understand that designers try to bring their theme across, but as an individual, I like to bring my personality to the games I play and strive for my own goals within the system provided by the designer.

Your best contribution to this post is in your edit, mentioning exactly the same thing I've learned: If you want people to play with your puzzles, you have to make it easy for them to survive while doing it.

Killer Mosquito , if you want more robbers who work around and try to solve your puzzle without tools, make it so they feel safe not using any tools. If you don't know how to do that, you should do some more robbing so you know get the robbers perspective on when they are "safe."

PsyBlade · 2014-03-24 06:03:51

When I designed my house the goal was to show of a specific trap mechanic. I made it deadly to show it to as many people as possible. I assumed the specific trap I used would be worthless after a few hours because a handful of robbers would know it then (I planned to rebuild it a few times). That was four or five weeks ago. Only one person ever solved it.
I rebuilt it a few times because of dying/bruteforcers. But my first trap is still that ~1k starter trap reinforced against tool use.

Yes, when you do it wrong it kills you, but there are only so much ways to approach it. And you can clearly see when it is save to continue. (If it is not clearly save it will kill you unless you bring the right tool.) Any possible danger before that point can be disabled using 3 water and two meats (or simply avoided).

I can understand a dying from it one time, maybe two. But anything more I don't get. Something about it makes people go stupid. There's a corridor with powered electric floors. With a pushed toggle switch on your side. You step on the switch to turn it off. You step onto the now unpowered electric floor. You throw a brick at the switch. You die. Arrrgh. Why do that? I don't get it.

I suspect most players are simply not interested in figuring out how a trap works and instead try to get the robbery over as quickly as possible.

Well I'm not going to pull the fangs of what proofed to be a really effective 2k killer. But I would love to know why it is one.

Killer Mosquito · 2014-03-24 21:48:42

Cylence wrote:

Killer Mosquito , if you want more robbers who work around and try to solve your puzzle without tools, make it so they feel safe not using any tools. If you don't know how to do that, you should do some more robbing so you know get the robbers perspective on when they are "safe."

That definitely makes sense.. but the issue is that 2k isn't nearly enough money to do something like that. I'm a very poor robber. I've only had one big heist (which for me was about $6000). So, I build a decent 2k proof house. I was robbed, then the guy came back and killed my wife. I restarted and did the same. I lucked out and got a guy with a 3k bounty to die in my house, so I built it out from there. I had to build a death trap to collect money to build a better house. Now, my house is kind of stuck in death trap mode, and I'm using paintings to keep my worth at a reasonable level. The only way I could make my current house "safe" is to replace everything with non lethal tiles. It would be fun to have people walk around and look, but I'd probably end up losing all of my money as well. In any case, I'm stuck with the legacy death model until I get an obscene amount of money to rebuild.

LiteS · 2014-03-24 22:08:55

Cylence wrote:

Lite S, As the title from the post you pulled it from, it was my first complete house. Which means I had little experience building and knowing what kind of players are out there. Also chills were not so long back then (pre-steam).
I'm better informed now, only because of my attempts and trial and deathly, deathly errors.

Woah woah, I didn't mean to be insulting, I just thought the house was really cool and I respect the design. And your current house is pretty ballin' too. All I meant in bringing up the old one was that intentional communication to a robber is difficult, and even with as many house elements visible as possible it can still be difficult for a robber to work out exactly how a system works, especially when most builders are trying to be deceptive and deadly.

It is (as it should be) in the nature of the robber to distrust the builder.

FreeLove · 2014-03-24 22:59:26

Cylence wrote:

While I know the game is meant to instill paranoia, I still like watching the tapes to see how people approach the problem presented. So now, I just make a nice puzzle with no commit until you solve it. The rest of the house is for making it expensive to brute force.

Is your house by chance the one with all the dogs behind a massive wall of powered doors? I LOVE that house! Still haven't solved the second part.

Cylence · 2014-03-25 01:00:02

PsyBlade wrote:

Well I'm not going to pull the fangs of what proofed to be a really effective 2k killer. But I would love to know why it is one.

PsyBlade
My recommendation isn't going to lessen the number of people who throw themselves onto the trap, or just try to run through it quickly. But it will allow those willing to scout and learn, a safe and repetitive environment to do so.
It may also be that my puzzle involves a powered trapdoor, so they kinda can't get around it unless they actually buy a ladder. Who knows? All I know is I've had way more people solve it, even in different ways with tools which I'm fine with. Just watching them work it out is fun.

Killer Mosquito
I agree that 2k is tough to start with, which is why I normally don't. Next time you have to start, invest in a scary house with dogs at the front and not much money in the vault (this will keep people from making you re-validate your house all the time). GO SCOUTING 3-9k houses. You'll eventually find a house where you might get a decent chance, and you'll have more than the initial 5 minutes. When you are ready, suicide, start fresh, visit the house to make sure it's the right one, and then come back with appropriate tools with your new $2k. You won't get chills from visiting houses without tools. And, you'll have a better sense of what the robber point of view trying to solve a house on limited funds. Then you can start mimicking the sections you felt "safe" in. Consider them using tools part of the puzzle, because it is.

LiteS wrote:

Woah woah, I didn't mean to be insulting ... All I meant in bringing up the old one was that intentional communication to a robber is difficult, and even with as many house elements visible as possible it can still be difficult for a robber to work out exactly how a system works, especially when most builders are trying to be deceptive and deadly.

LiteS
There was no offense taken and I didn't take you as insulting. I agreed that I was naive at the time. I agree that even with vision it's tough to work out, and so I made my puzzles smaller and more in line with the common traps. The robber knows how the standard trap works, and just to needs to figure out what I've added to the equation.

FreeLove
I think I've come across that house, it isn't mine. And I like to refrain from putting a target on myself. You could always ask LiteS, he seems to believe he knows my current house. You probably could figure it out by the way I've described how I build houses.

The Castle Doctrine Forums

#1 2014-03-19 22:13:31

I'm sad...

#2 2014-03-19 22:23:17

Re: I'm sad...

#3 2014-03-19 23:10:09

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#4 2014-03-19 23:11:14

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#9 2014-03-19 23:30:25

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#11 2014-03-19 23:39:44

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#14 2014-03-21 20:20:06

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#15 2014-03-22 12:11:56

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#16 2014-03-24 04:00:10

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