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#1 2017-10-23 10:50:21

jasonrohrer
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Registered: 2013-04-01
Posts: 1,235

Improved Chill Timeouts for smaller populations

In working on my new game One Hour One Life, I've been doing a lot of thinking about how to make the game function well for smaller player populations.  I've realized over the years that for multiplayer games, low population playability is crucial for building and maintaining critical mass.  If the game isn't interesting for one player, it will never grow to two players, because that one player will leave before the second player has a chance to join.  Even if you start with a larger population (during the Castle Doctrine launch, there were 3600 players on the peak day), the game will generally get slightly less interesting for each player that leaves, resulting in a mild vicious cycle that affects all multiplayer games.  But if the game really falters for very low populations, once the game hits the bottom during a lull, it can never recover.

The Castle Doctrine and Cordial Minuet both suffer from this problem in a big way.  Neither game is playable by a solitary player.  The Castle Doctrine is a bit better, because it can be played asynchronously by a small population of players that are not online simultaneously, but Cordial Minuet absolutely requires two simultaneous players to function at all, and even worse, it requires pairs of players.  A third player is stuck without a game partner and is thus motivated to leave before a fourth player arrives.

All that said, I've been thinking about how to improve The Castle Doctrine in this regard.

One of the biggest problems with low populations on the server involves chill timers.  After you rob a house and die trying, the house has a chill on it that prevents you from re-entering it in your next life for a while.  The standard setting on the server has been a two hour chill.  The point of this timeout is to prevent you from spam-robbing a house carelessly across multiple lives.  You can't just randomly try every corridor while dying and respawning over and over with additional throw-away lives.  The chill timeout is long enough to make each attempt matter.

However, there's a problem with this long timer when the house list is very short:  you very quickly run out of houses to try robbing.  Aside from building your starter house, robbing is the main activity, and when you run out of houses due to chill timeouts, you essentially are forced to stop playing for a while.  When the list is very short, this can happen in just a few minutes.  Bam.  Content of the game exhausted.  Better quit and come back later.  This only serves to strengthen the vicious cycle described above.


So, I've implemented a simple solution to this problem.  The chill timers are now adjusted based on the number of available houses, with five minutes added per additional house that's available to you, up to a max of 2 hours for very long lists of houses.

It works like this, for the number of houses not including your own:

house_count    chill minutes
 1                   5
 2                   5
 3                   10
 4                   15
 5                   20
 6                   25
 7                   30
...

The idea is that, if you are conducting legitimate, non-spam robberies, you will spend about this many minutes working your way through the full house list, and by the time you've tried every house, the chill timer on the first house that you tried will be about ready to expire.

Thus, the game's content pool won't be forcibly exhausted for you as a robber, pretty much ever.

That is, of course, unless you successfully rob every house in the neighborhood.

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#2 2017-10-25 17:36:28

jere
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Registered: 2013-05-31
Posts: 540

Re: Improved Chill Timeouts for smaller populations

Wow, awesome! After two newer games, I didn't expect you to touch TCD again at all. The change seems like strictly an improvement. Not seeing any downsides here.

It's really bummed me out that, while I had so much fun with this game, it's really difficult for me to recommend. Basically because of the reasons you're saying. A tiny playerbase combined with nothing to do ruins the whole thing. And you see that pretty clearly pointed out in Steam reviews as the primary reason people didn't enjoy it (with high difficulty being a close second). That sucks! With no exaggeration, The Castle Doctrine is like nothing else out there and has made me feel so many intense emotions again and again.

With the playerbase issues, it becomes one of those games like Dwarf Fortress which everyone enjoys talking/writing/reading about but is way too inaccessible for most people to actually engage with.

I'm sure the chill update is going to improve things. I logged in and saw a solid two pages of houses. But I wish the game could return to something closer to its former glory.

This has been weighing on my mind for a couple years now....

You could think about TCD like a puzzle game with user generated puzzles. I bet you've basically received something like 10,000 user submitted houses. This is an amazing situation to be in because that content provides pretty much limitless challenge and entertainment. And to top it off, those "puzzles" are already of varying complexities (i.e. difficulties), which is pretty great to support varying levels of skills. And then what happens next is all those puzzles are just thrown into the trash. neutral

So I figure this has been thought about before. I actually just saw it being discussed in another thread. I basically agree with the idea of bringing back salaries (with a few tweaks) and keeping old houses around. Both of those together totally solve the problem of the game being a content wood chipper.

I've thought about keeping "abandoned" houses on the list until they are beaten.  I'm not sure how to keep the owner away, though, because obviously, they'd have a huge advantage in the race to get to the vault in the house that they designed.  Yes, I could hide it from the original owner's account, but this would just further encourage multiple accounts.  Imagine dying and losing a week's worth of loot in your house.... you'd be pretty motivated to cough up another $16 for a second account to get that loot back.

Sure, but there's a simple fix! Wipe out the loot in the house. Isn't that the first thing police do when an infamous criminal dies? Now you may be asking what good is a $0 house? The thing is houses aren't valuable to the game because they have money, but because they are good puzzles. Adding a salary (or a social security check or whatever you want to call it) eventually fills up the house with money again. Yes, the original owner knows how to solve the house, but they can only abuse that if a) they don't create a new house (which I assume would remove the old one) b) they wait around for the house to accumulate money and c) no one else gets to it first. You could also consider preventing someone from repeatedly robbing a house provided it sees no update and has no living family members. With that change, you could keep the house around forever. Why should the community lose out on content because one player stopped logging in?

Keeping old houses around not only gives players more to do, but provides a shallower learning curve. Back at the peak of the game, it was a totally reasonable thing to farm low value houses and slowly improve your finances/knowledge of the game. For the past couple years, a new player logs into one page of houses and most of those are practically impossible for them. And they're not able to gather enough money to make any interesting house (and learn about nontrivial electronics). I think the game should be brutally difficult of course, but having that vertical cliff of difficulty is a nonstarter for most people.

Remember that amazing Rooster Teeth video? That video was so satisfying because, even though they failed repeatedly, it felt like they actually had a chance at that early stage of the game and they eventually succeeded.

I'm sure there would be some design decisions to make about how many old houses to keep around and how fast to grow the salary (maybe it should accumulate faster the longer the house remains unbeaten), but nothing especially complex.

In any case, this chill thing is good stuff.


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#3 2017-10-26 16:16:17

jasonrohrer
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Re: Improved Chill Timeouts for smaller populations

You're right about all that lost content.

Some of it is cached in the database (from the last 30 days or something), but eventually, it's purged.  So I'm pretty sure I don't have 4+ years of houses in the archive somewhere.  That would be pretty cool.

And you're right about the great curve that was present in the old days.  You could go low down on the list and find easier houses to try, which is what they did in that Rooster Teeth vid.

Keeping abandoned houses around is also problematic because once you know how to beat it, you can keep beating it over and over later, after more money builds up.  Or are you allowed to beat it only once?

There are certainly some interesting design problems there that would be fun to solve.


HOWEVER, it still cuts to the core of the game, which is that everything is real.  When you rob a house, someone real is hurt by your actions, and they may potentially watch the security tapes and take revenge on you.

Keeping abandoned houses around will reduce that feeling.

Of course, it seems clear that keeping that "real" feeling around is at odds with a game that actually functions over the long term.  Seems like there'd at least have to be some kind of separation.... like the abandoned houses would have to be on a separate list.



There's also the problem of ever-growing wealth that will naturally make houses harder and harder.  Abandoned houses keep injecting more money into the game.

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#4 2017-10-28 07:02:20

zed
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Registered: 2013-04-16
Posts: 171

Re: Improved Chill Timeouts for smaller populations

I still quite like the "competitions" I implemented for the cheatproof server
as a way of using old maps and preventing the game seizing up when there are
few players. Details are in another thread, but basically they work like this:
you see the blueprint of the map, and try to get to the vault in as few moves
and using as few tools as possible. A competition is open for a certain length
of time, and at the end whoever found the best solution wins some prize money
(the idea being that you're developing the plan for your local crime
syndicate, and the prize money is your cut).

So competitions are clearly differentiated from the rest of the game, and the
amount of money they inject into the economy is easy to control. Because of
the blueprints and the optimisation aspect, the original owner doesn't have
much of an advantage. In my implementation, the maps also had some random
noise applied to keep things interesting.

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#5 2017-11-07 08:58:12

jasonrohrer
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Posts: 1,235

Re: Improved Chill Timeouts for smaller populations

That sounds like a great design there, Zed.

But the question is this:  what are we trying to do here?  Give bored players something else to do when the "real game" isn't happening currently?

I guess that helps somewhat with player retention, which may fight the vicious cycle and lead to eventual player growth over time.

But, any of these solutions (including abandoned houses, or challenges) also takes players out of the real game for a while.  They aren't part of the real robber pool while they are robbing an abandoned house or competing on a contest house.

This is the equivalent of adding AI or dummy practice opponents in Cordial Minuet.  It would give the lone player something to do, but have the unfortunate side-effect of occupying them, potentially indefinitely, so that even when they are "needed" by other players, they aren't available.  Imagine a 3-player situation in CM.  Two players match up, and the third is waiting around.  Now engage that third in a heated AI practice match.  Now the fourth player shows up... now what?

I've been working for months improving the single-player experience in One Hour One Life.  But it's fully integrated into the multiplayer experience.  It's just a facet, not a separate mode.  So if you're playing the "single player game," and someone else joins, well, they're born as your baby.  You're always there for them when they need you for their multiplayer experience.

In other words, there is no "campaign" mode.

And it sounds like these fixes involve essentially adding a campaign to TCD.

(Also, you can imagine in TCD or CM some sort of "real player is present" alarm that pulls you out of your campaign mode when a real opponent is ready or a real house is added to the list.... but that's a whole additional user experience design problem.)


So can we imagine a fix to this problem that doesn't feel so campaign-like?



We have talked about ways to make one piece of content last way longer.

Multiple vaults is one way.  Say you get 5 vaults to place, each of which holds 1/5 of your money.  Obviously, this lacks the design clarity of a single vault...

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#6 2017-11-10 00:23:06

jere
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Registered: 2013-05-31
Posts: 540

Re: Improved Chill Timeouts for smaller populations

I understand the concern about not playing the "real" game, but I'm not sure I see a distinction. With the current rules, what's the difference between houses from A) a player who has logged off for the night and B) a player who is never coming back to the game? Until they get solved, nothing. Ostensibly, there's no repercussions from B) but we of course don't know who is and who isn't going to return. Maybe you rob a house and a week later the owner comes back and watches the security tape?

So keeping around houses that have already been robbed down to $0 doesn't seem any more fake than parts of the existing game. They're real houses made by real people. And not clones or anything, but the original house (presumably kept around until the owner returns to start over and make a new house). It isn't "dummy content", but real content with new rules about its lifecycle.

That's half the equation (the reason we don't see 10,000 houses on the list is a combination of both players getting robbed down to $0 and other players dying). I suppose keeping around houses for the latter (again, until they restart) makes it less "real" because the owner will never see the security tapes.... but why not? It's not impossible to keep security tapes from past lives and then those people could take their sweet revenge. Again, maybe less real since it's a separate "life" (maybe it's the same address, who knows?).

In either case, you would probably want to minimize the prominence of these houses (e.g. higher salary for active players) and maybe cap the total number that can show up. Not because you're certain those owners won't return. They might! But because it's simply less likely. You could just say those players are less active and have less of a chance of interacting with others (robbing/watching tapes).

zed, competitions sound neat, but those blueprints were real brain burners!

Last edited by jere (2017-11-10 00:26:14)


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#7 2017-11-10 15:37:54

jasonrohrer
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Posts: 1,235

Re: Improved Chill Timeouts for smaller populations

Well, by "not the real game" in the case of TCD, I also was referring to ways to make money and climb the home defense ladder through income sources that aren't real.

When I look at the existing house pool, I already see that most of the houses look way too well-funded and well-built.  Those kinds of houses aren't that interesting to poke around in.

And that's WITH the conservation of money that's currently in place.

If there's some "campaign" source of money (even if it is real houses that have been abandoned, but we're adding state money to them over time), then players can grind that campaign indefinitely and build up however much money they want over time.

The game will then become, "Who can play the campaign the most/fastest/best," because that will be the real way to get a lot of money and build up your house.  And there's no end to it.  Even if you're the only player playing, you can keep running that treadmill until your fingers fall off.  Come morning, your house is going to be an impenetrable fortress.  AND you're going to have so many great robbery tools that you'll be able to wipe out every house on the map.

And yeah, money could trickle into these houses at a very slow rate or whatever.

But it still violates a conservation of money principle that keeps things from getting out of control in the game.

And the "real" players would be getting so much money from this that all the real houses would be impenetrable fortresses, making robbing the abandoned houses the only game in town...


Anyway... the interesting thing here is that all those "abandoned" houses aren't gone!  They're all still there, all the way since the very beginning.  They're just unlisted, waiting for their owners to return.

Guess what?  There are 4,045 of the things....  hundreds of pages worth of houses.


And listing them all would involve a few lines of code.


My intuition would be to just list them all at 0 and then trickle money into them.


But here's the thing... most of them would be cake-walks, having their main walls cut.

I don't know how to turn them into "good" puzzles.

Their last self-test map is also saved (the last time they actually got through their own house without tools).

So this could be used instead of the final state.  But that definitely doesn't feel as real.  Abandoned houses should feel abandoned, not squeaky-clean again.


The other idea is to hide something in each house.  The vault is empty forever, but there's a state-sponsored treasure in each house, in a random location, that grows in value over time.

Over time, people will cut through all the walls looking for it... but houses still reset as usual when a robber leaves without reaching the vault.


The other idea is to just start by showing all the 0 houses and see what happens.  People may poke around in some of them and die, getting bounties started there...

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#8 2017-11-10 15:56:57

jasonrohrer
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Posts: 1,235

Re: Improved Chill Timeouts for smaller populations

Oh, but randomly-placed loot in abandoned houses...

...which makes some thematic sense--squatters have lived there over time and left something behind, separate from the vault...

...has the side-effect of making the abandoned house game a kind of randomized egg hunt.  Which feels very different from the main game.  In the main game, you're going into a real person's design and trying to analyze it, looking for patterns, weakspots, or clues.  In a random egg hunt, you're just cutting every wall randomly, hoping to find the right spot.


Anyway, I still don't see how putting money back in the vault is going to work, because the vault is usually easily reachable...


Also, the vault is reachable again in exactly the same way later, once the house re-appears again.  So players who memorize all the abandoned houses can farm them repeatedly with no trouble.

Given that there are 4000 of them... I guess they could be cycled through in an order that makes memorization unlikely.  Only the oldest houses get money added to them, and a house that is successfully farmed goes to the bottom of the list.  But if we do it with vault-reaches, then the damage will accumulate in these houses over time... they'll get more and more run-down and easier to get through.


So, I'm looking for some smart ideas here.



Remember, these 4000+ houses still have living owners!  They just haven't been back in a while.  So there's still someone who can see the tapes, eventually.  So that's better than ghost houses or contest houses.


And the conservation of money will be an issue, but it'll just push the game up to a higher level.  Both robbers and home owners who are farming will have better stuff.  I'm not thrilled about that prospect...  it could be reduced by making money accumulate in these abandoned houses at a very slow rate.

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#9 2017-11-10 16:00:19

jasonrohrer
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Re: Improved Chill Timeouts for smaller populations

What about dog houses?

Over time, stray dogs move into these abandoned houses, making them more and more dangerous.

Instead of placing a random egg, we challenge players to get to the vault, but place random extra dogs around the house.

If the real owner ever comes back, they get to keep/move/sell these dogs.

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#10 2017-11-10 21:22:52

jere
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Registered: 2013-05-31
Posts: 540

Re: Improved Chill Timeouts for smaller populations

If there's some "campaign" source of money (even if it is real houses that have been abandoned, but we're adding state money to them over time), then players can grind that campaign indefinitely and build up however much money they want over time.

If you mean the same player robbing the same house repeatedly, that's very easily solved by preventing players from repeatedly getting to the same safe at least until a house is updated. If you mean the metagame of climbing the ladder by starting on low value houses, I thought that was just part of the game.

And the "real" players would be getting so much money from this that all the real houses would be impenetrable fortresses, making robbing the abandoned houses the only game in town...

This already appears to be the state of things. The top houses are practically impenetrable (I'm especially confounded by the popular clock-walkway that makes any sort of exploration basically impossible), but if people could climb their way up they might have a shot at dethroning the top players.

And the "real" players would be getting so much money from this that all the real houses would be impenetrable fortresses, making robbing the abandoned houses the only game in town...

Ah! Didn't know that. Figured most of the burn rate was from people dying. 4000 houses is a huge amount of content and you don't even need to worry about keeping around houses from dead players.

But here's the thing... most of them would be cake-walks, having their main walls cut....I don't know how to turn them into "good" puzzles.

Perhaps many won't be great puzzles. I think this could be automatically solved by having a very small starting salary that only grows when houses resist being solved for days. The no brainer houses would only be worth a few bucks, but the really good puzzles would start accumulating money fast.

I feel like $0 houses with no salary is a nonstarter. You'd have to be pretty bored to go in there.

The stray dog thing is also interesting though and frankly quite terrifying!

I'm thinking that any issues with too much money in the economy could be scaled automatically by having the salary respond accordingly. Though it's hard to say ahead of time what "too much" money even looks like.


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#11 2017-11-10 21:49:24

jasonrohrer
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Re: Improved Chill Timeouts for smaller populations

Yeah, you're probably right.

Can you think about this (and anyone else who wants to) and report back with any lightningbolt ideas?

I'm tempted to just put all 4000 of them online with $100 each in them and see what happens.

I think the harder ones will naturally collect bounties, just like real houses, right?

So that's how to get it started.

But how do we keep it going?  When do the houses get more money after they're cleaned out once?

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#12 2017-11-10 22:41:03

Immhotep
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Registered: 2014-02-05
Posts: 66

Re: Improved Chill Timeouts for smaller populations

jasonrohrer wrote:

Yeah, you're probably right.

Can you think about this (and anyone else who wants to) and report back with any lightningbolt ideas?

I'm tempted to just put all 4000 of them online with $100 each in them and see what happens.

I think the harder ones will naturally collect bounties, just like real houses, right?

So that's how to get it started.

But how do we keep it going?  When do the houses get more money after they're cleaned out once?

Well, we can maybe put it this way... Not everyone is a robber, some of the people have a job & they will go to work & bring back X amount of money every X day


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#13 2017-11-11 16:27:31

jere
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Registered: 2013-05-31
Posts: 540

Re: Improved Chill Timeouts for smaller populations

I'm tempted to just put all 4000 of them online with $100 each in them and see what happens.

I think the harder ones will naturally collect bounties, just like real houses, right?

Whoa! Solving this could be a lot simpler than I expected. Instead of a one time thing, just treat it as ongoing. Pick a number of houses that represents a solid amount of content to see at any given time. Let's say 100 houses. 4000 at once isn't really needed. Run a job that loads up $0 houses with $100 randomly until the house list has 100 houses. If the community takes off again and there's 100 active players, nothing happens and there's no need for the extra push.

With less than half a percent of the total $0 houses back on the list at any given time, things should always feel pretty fresh. And you don't need to worry too much about houses getting studied and repeatedly robbed because 99.75% of the time, they won't be in the mix.

I think you're right about the bounties sorting things out elegantly without the need for some complex salary calculation.

The only real question is: how many of these houses are way too easy to solve and is that even really a problem? We're only talking about $10,000 extra (for 100 houses) in the economy and stepping into these houses isn't necessarily risk free. I would though be worried about how many are default houses where the last thing people did before they logged off for good was start over, confirm their house, look at the list, and then close the game. It would be easy enough to check for and remove these houses if you wanted though.

This is exciting!


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#14 2017-11-11 16:31:51

jere
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Posts: 540

Re: Improved Chill Timeouts for smaller populations

Just wanted to say, if you wanted to maintain the original puzzles then you could in theory totally reset the house. Not all puzzles would be back to normal though (because of panic buttons) unless you also replaced the family members (e.g. a godfather steps into take care of the children now that dad is on the lam). I don't think this fits into the game, but it's possible.


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#15 2017-11-11 23:54:02

jasonrohrer
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Re: Improved Chill Timeouts for smaller populations

Hmm... I think I could only use abandoned houses that had at least one robber death.

There are 1574 of those.  Which is enough!

Your method of picking them is sound.  While there are less than N houses with > 0 value, pick a 0-value robber-killing house at random and add $M to it.

Yeah, probably not going to reset the puzzles at all.


Not sure where the money is coming from, exactly, story-wise.

One idea is to put extra money into houses that have orphaned children.  Either they are out scrounging, or maybe receiving state aide?


There's an edge case where someone commits suicide in a starter house, logging a robber death that will put a too-easy house on the list.  But players can (and do!) do that anyway with their real houses by running out to rob before building anything.

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#16 2017-11-12 02:20:52

zed
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Registered: 2013-04-16
Posts: 171

Re: Improved Chill Timeouts for smaller populations

Making abandoned houses (intermittently) robbable like this actually solves
another problem with the game: currently, if you take seriously the goal of
trying to keep your family alive, the surest way to do it is to get down to $0
and drop off the list. Then as long as you don't do anything more in the game,
your family is safe.

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#17 2017-11-12 12:25:43

Immhotep
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Registered: 2014-02-05
Posts: 66

Re: Improved Chill Timeouts for smaller populations

zed wrote:

if you take seriously the goal of
trying to keep your family alive, the surest way to do it is to get down to $0
and drop off the list. Then as long as you don't do anything more in the game,
your family is safe.

Not really, sometimes I just club or even shoot at someone's family member not because of their money, just because I can & wanted to tongue


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#18 2017-11-12 16:18:06

jasonrohrer
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Re: Improved Chill Timeouts for smaller populations

Immhotep, I think what Zed is saying is correct.  I'm pretty sure that a house with exactly $0 left in it drops off the list, even if it has never been robbed.  So, to protect your family, build exactly $2000 worth of walls and then exit the game.

Zed:  I'm not sure that my proposal would solve this problem.  Currently, I don't know that any such houses exist:

select count(*) from castleServer_houses where value_estimate = 0 and rob_attempts = 0;
+----------+
| count(*) |
+----------+
|        0 |
+----------+

Whoops... both Zed and I are wrong here.  A zero-value house that is freshly edited WILL go onto the list.  From the WHERE clause:

AND ( houses.value_estimate != 0 OR houses.edit_count > 0 )

So it tracks how many times the house has been edited, and flips negative after a robbery, but flips back to positive after it is visited by the owner and edited/tested again.

And edit_count is defined thus"

// times edited since last successful robbery                       
// = 0 if never edited (and not robbable at all)                    
// > 0 if successfully edited and robbable                          
// < 0 if successfully robbed at least once and still robbable

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#19 2017-11-12 19:00:05

jasonrohrer
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Re: Improved Chill Timeouts for smaller populations

Okay, this is done.

A few little wrinkles:

1.  Only houses that haven't been touched by the owner in more than a week are considered abandoned.  So if you're actively playing, you won't have your house seeded by the state.

2.  The amount seeded in a house is a random value between $50 and $200 (so there's not a list of 100 houses all with the same value).

3.  A random tool item is included in each vault.  The value of this item is NOT included in the displayed value estimate, so it's a surprise.  The $50 house might contain a $2400 crowbar...  This is a bit of a slot machine element, and goes against my usual sensibilities.  However, robbing a real house always had this element, because you never knew what was in the vault.  In terms of hiding the true value, which is NOT done for real houses, it was too weird to see an abandoned house way high on the list when it got seeded with a $2400 item.  Better to leave the item as a surprise.  It is also fitting thematically.  Some squatter was in the house and left a bit of money around... and oh look what else they left behind!  I've explored abandoned buildings in real life, and it does have that surprise feeling to it.


The game currently tries to maintain a list of 100 houses.  In the first run, there were 14 houses around, so 86 abandoned houses were seeded.


And, messing with the game myself, some of these houses are still great houses!  Some have no walls cut, and are still the same puzzle they always were.  Some are scary and risky.


Can you folks check it out and see what you think?


If it's good, I'll post a Steam update and also email the player list.

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#20 2017-11-12 19:10:23

jasonrohrer
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Re: Improved Chill Timeouts for smaller populations

And by the way, Zed, if you're reading this, your SDF mailbox is bouncing... out of disk space?

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#21 2017-11-12 20:37:58

Immhotep
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Registered: 2014-02-05
Posts: 66

Re: Improved Chill Timeouts for smaller populations

Hopefully this will bring more players back... Happy robbing fellow TCD players!


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#22 2017-11-13 00:02:09

zed
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Registered: 2013-04-16
Posts: 171

Re: Improved Chill Timeouts for smaller populations

Looking forward to trying this out...
as for the previous game-breaking strategy - yes, it wasn't just a matter of
getting down to $0, you also need to be robbed once. Sticking the vault by
the door has worked for me.

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#23 2017-11-13 00:48:46

LCI
Member
Registered: 2014-04-15
Posts: 12
Website

Re: Improved Chill Timeouts for smaller populations

jason, I messed around with a few of the newly introduced houses and enjoyed checking out the designs. Personally, I think this a great update to maintain some active objectives for the remaining players, and to lure new players in. Thanks!

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#24 2017-11-14 13:44:46

zed
Member
Registered: 2013-04-16
Posts: 171

Re: Improved Chill Timeouts for smaller populations

Amazing what a huge effect such a tiny tweak can generate...
Good thinking, jere and jasonrohrer.
And the "squatter" theming is perfect.

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#25 2017-11-14 19:26:37

ukuko
Member
Registered: 2013-04-06
Posts: 334

Re: Improved Chill Timeouts for smaller populations

This is great. Some of these houses are super creepy, and they're all fun to explore.

I can see having broken walls in your house to fool people into thinking it's squatted (and not taking due caution) being a viable new tactic!

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