Stuck

Eliijahh · 2013-06-07 03:21:26

I'm stuck in the game now. I made a little house with some traps but I can't go on.

The house is simple enough that many people can still break in. I can't manage to steal from the rich guys houses because they're too complicated for now and I can't steal from the simple houses since they're always at 0$. So my house is getting griefed by people and I don't have the money to replace the broken walls and traps. As soon as I earn the hourly wage I'm broke in and lose all the money.

What should I do? I don't want to suicide. I don't want to leave my dear family alone in this world of sharks.

DrNoid · 2013-06-07 03:43:34

Yeah, what you describe is one of the big problems with the game at the moment. I think it's mainly due to not enough players.

My suggestion for this was to automatically add NPC houses to make sure there is always something to rob.

Don't worry about your family, they'll be disposed off for you quite soon I think...

bey bey · 2013-06-07 03:48:00

I feel your pain, this is a real problem of the money coming in at the moment. In earlier versions, money was mostly gained by robbing lots of abandoned houses that kept slowly gathering cash and nobody was interested in robbing anything real anymore. This is why now only "intact" houses gather cash and thus there is incentive to rob the tough houses. After blueprints and the change in cash (together with upping starting cash to 6000), I have seen more top houses cracked within a day than were cracked in weeks before that. Sadly, the option might be killing yourself and improving your house design based on the weaknesses exploited by the robbers. Your wife will find somebody else, I'm sure.

Eliijahh · 2013-06-07 04:28:26

Nope. Even if my safe is vulnerable, my family is safe and sound! I don't want to kill myself. I'll just endure this painful winter.

Anyway it is clearer now. I thought it was something wrong I did, instead it's just the game being in alpha and stuff. Thanks for your answers.

bey bey · 2013-06-07 04:31:46

Eliijahh wrote:

Nope. Even if my safe is vulnerable, my family is safe and sound! I don't want to kill myself. I'll just endure this painful winter.
Anyway it is clearer now. I thought it was something wrong I did, instead it's just the game being in alpha and stuff. Thanks for your answers.

You're welcome!

But just so you know: a vulnerable safe is a vulnerable family since reaching the safe saves the state of the house, so somebody can kill 8 doggies / cut 8 walls, walk to safe, come back with new tools and so forth. If it's worth it, it will happen.

jere · 2013-06-07 06:14:52

Yeah, what you describe is one of the big problems with the game at the moment. I think it's mainly due to not enough players.
My suggestion for this was to automatically add NPC houses to make sure there is always something to rob.

I don't see that being solved by more players, since then there will simply be more robbers.

But you know, your idea is quite interesting. It would solve the problem that has been mentioned where everyone wants to rob a bunch of houses, but only provides a single house for others to rob. I'm not sure how those NPC houses would be generated though. Besides, it removes a fundamental part of the game in which you can only move up in the game (ignoring salary) by doing real damage to other human beings.

Still, the idea of providing more than 1 house to rob per person is attractive.

I have another idea on how to accomplish that: maintain all houses as robbable (and lucrative) targets. Instead of logging in to about 10 puzzles to solve, all of which are of course the most mind bogglingly houses left, you would get the full interaction of an MMO... thousands of puzzles. It would require a few small changes:

Reset each house every time no matter what, so there are no longer one-time robbable houses.
Continue to grant a salary to robbed houses.
Limit each robber to one successful robbery of each house, at least until the owner has updated it.

To keep the return home shocking for the owner, perhaps maintain a separate map that catalogs any permanent damage. However, the robbers see the original and solvable house each time (the only exception being family deaths). You may think it's weird that the owner sees a damaged house, while the robber sees the original. But it's no weirder or more arbitrary than non-permanent damage to a house: I blow up 8 walls of a house, leave, and the walls magically repair themselves.

There's the issue of house grinding, but the key here is you can't rob the same house over.

Players are still victimized... potentially many times in between play sessions!

To me, this knocks out a number of issues: not enough to do in the game, no viable targets for new players, and one-time robbable houses.

jasonrohrer · 2013-06-07 22:45:48

I have been thinking along similar lines.

Maintain one "damaged map" for the owner to discover on the next return home, and maintain just one tape to go along with it (the result of the last successful robbery before the owner came home).

Reset the house for robbers every time, until the owner comes home, and then the damage from the last robbery becomes permanent (for the owner to fix up, or not fix up).

(And obviously combine this with a mechanism to allow one successful robbery per player until the owner returns, to prevent one player from exploiting their discovered solution to the house over and over).

But the cash would still drop and drop over time as each robber takes a share.

A few problems:

1) Family becomes fully protectable (put them behind enough walls and dogs, and then robbers can't use accumulating damage through multiple vault runs to eventually reach them---though this is already a problem for one-time robbable houses)

2) How to deal with damage that occurred during family deaths? (what if the robber cuts through walls to reach the family, but that damage isn't saved, then the family being dead doesn't make sense to the owner who returns home later, after several more robberies that don't affect the family).

3) Family no longer can be instrumentalized to reach a hard vault (by killing one at a time to get damage to save). So, why will people waste money protecting the kids?

4) If the one tape saved for the owner shows half the money being taken, but the owner sees that a lot more has been taken, how is that accounted for? Seems like we'd need to still save/show all tapes, but only save the damage from the final one?

Hmm... though I wonder if some of this house scarcity stuff wouldn't just be solved by the one fix (preventing a successful robber from hitting the same house again until the owner returns). I believe that many of those $0 houses were brought to $0 by one robber hitting the same house over and over until nothing was left. Preventing this would leave at least something hanging around for other players to go after. Also, maybe if this were combined with all houses receiving salary (even broken ones), it could be a nice match.

There is something very powerful about returning home to find your house ravaged by multiple break-ins, and I don't want to lose that...

DrNoid · 2013-06-08 02:59:19

You should be able to simple check the robberies database to see how many houses are robbed by the same person twice in a row.

ukuko · 2013-06-08 04:06:15

jasonrohrer wrote:

Maintain one "damaged map" for the owner to discover on the next return home, and maintain just one tape to go along with it (the result of the last successful robbery before the owner came home).
Reset the house for robbers every time, until the owner comes home, and then the damage from the last robbery becomes permanent (for the owner to fix up, or not fix up).
There is something very powerful about returning home to find your house ravaged by multiple break-ins, and I don't want to lose that...

I think it'd be a real shame to lose the sense of your house being gradually beaten down over multiple attacks. It's also nice as a robber to enter a house and see the damage that those before you have left, and the tactics they used to get to the vault/family.

As you said, preventing multiple robberies by one person and reintroducing a 'minimum wage' for breached houses would likely go a long way to solving the house/cash scarcity problem.

bey bey · 2013-06-08 06:38:29

I think somehow much is related to the cashflow probably and the low acceptance of permadeath afterall.

If I start building a proper house with 6000, then it's too much to risk on an uncertain heist. If I go out robbing first, my family will be dead upon my return with cash after several attempts. So in the end, one starts building a house, scavenges off new players etc., OR one ends up committing robberies for the fun of it and dying with the cash. (Liberating paintings etc.)

This drains the cash out of the game. So probably, either starting cash should be at 15000 or so, or we need some scavenging option again for the people who need more cash to build a proper house.

I have plans on my mind right now but it's just not doable with the cash provided, and since everybody is waiting for half-finished houses to destroy, it's tough even for experienced players to put something together.

jere · 2013-06-08 06:57:45

Family no longer can be instrumentalized to reach a hard vault (by killing one at a time to get damage to save). So, why will people waste money protecting the kids?

I always thought this mechanic was somewhat arbitrary. I see how this emerged out of other constraints, but step back for a minute: does it make sense to allow walls to repair themselves magically upon unsuccessful robberies but not on successful robberies/murders? I'm not saying get rid of the no-safe>no-damage mechanic, but is there any reason to be attached to its corollaries?

I think you explained the kids things before: simply for emotional/irrational reasons.

Maintain one "damaged map" for the owner to discover on the next return home, and maintain just one tape to go along with it (the result of the last successful robbery before the owner came home).....
4) If the one tape saved for the owner shows half the money being taken, but the owner sees that a lot more has been taken, how is that accounted for? Seems like we'd need to still save/show all tapes, but only save the damage from the final one?...
There is something very powerful about returning home to find your house ravaged by multiple break-ins, and I don't want to lose that...

I wasn't clear on that! I meant the damaged map would have cumulative damage. Again, the robbers start with a fresh house, but they might damage different things. The resulting damage would function the same as it does now (all accumulated upon robbery/murder), but the other changes I mentioned (continued salary) may make it even worse... that's good, right? Your house would be like a treasure filled crypt... looted over and over again, graffitied, worn down to a shadow of the original. This might be brutal, but the extremely hard to solve house can still avoid damage altogether.

You could do it where each security tape starts with the original house (this makes less sense) or starts with the correct damage, but that takes more space.

As for the tapes, I'd hate for the game interactiveness to be limited by something like storage constraints. If need be, perhaps just store the last ~10 tapes? That's realistic, right? You can only store so much footage after all. I'd be happy with text entries for the missing ones.

And a technical question: how much space do the tapes take up? The way I'm imagining it, you should be able to store 4 moves in a byte. Tool use would be appended and would be negligible. So a ridiculous 4000 moves (circling the perimeter over 30 times) would only take up about 1kb.

Hmm... though I wonder if some of this house scarcity stuff wouldn't just be solved by the one fix (preventing a successful robber from hitting the same house again until the owner returns). I believe that many of those $0 houses were brought to $0 by one robber hitting the same house over and over until nothing was left. Preventing this would leave at least something hanging around for other players to go after. Also, maybe if this were combined with all houses receiving salary (even broken ones), it could be a nice match.

Just those changes would help immensely, but one-time robbable houses would still be a limiting factor.

Last edited by jere (2013-06-08 07:12:22)

jasonrohrer · 2013-06-08 11:02:06

Oh, tape storage isn't an issue as we consider this issue (we're already storing a tape for every robbery that does damage, so that wouldn't change).

jere · 2013-06-08 11:37:53

Hmmm... really? I was thinking the number of robberies that do damage would go up with these changes. It would switch from:

a) a given house usually being robbed by a single person a few times (or 1 time if the wife is dead) down to or close to $0

to

b) a given house robbed by LOTS of robbers (each limited to one robbery) because the continued salary continues to drive the house up in the list.

But I'm not sure exactly what the difference would be. It depends a lot on what you assume the time between owner check ins is (a day? a week?) and how worthwhile each salary pay out is to potential robbers (if $140 enough to visit a house).

bey bey · 2013-06-09 15:01:37

When houses kept gathering wealth despite being broken, I think the barrier of people scavenging houses was between 200-100 cash in it. (Meaning that at this point people would rob them.)

jasonrohrer · 2013-06-10 11:30:00

What I meant was that, as I considered reasons NOT to auto-fix all houses, accumulation of too many tapes was not one of my considerations. "Too many tapes," if that ever happens, can be solved in a variety of ways.

There are bigger gameplay and thematic reasons for not auto-fixing houses that need to be grappled with.

The Castle Doctrine Forums

#1 2013-06-07 03:21:26

Stuck

#2 2013-06-07 03:43:34

Re: Stuck

#3 2013-06-07 03:48:00

Re: Stuck

#4 2013-06-07 04:28:26

Re: Stuck

#5 2013-06-07 04:31:46

Re: Stuck

#6 2013-06-07 06:14:52

Re: Stuck

#7 2013-06-07 22:45:48

Re: Stuck

#8 2013-06-08 02:59:19

Re: Stuck

#9 2013-06-08 04:06:15

Re: Stuck

#10 2013-06-08 06:38:29

Re: Stuck

#11 2013-06-08 06:57:45

Re: Stuck

#12 2013-06-08 11:02:06

Re: Stuck

#13 2013-06-08 11:37:53

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#14 2013-06-09 15:01:37

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#15 2013-06-10 11:30:00

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