Insurance

ukuko · 2013-10-28 05:55:54

Two big problems with the game right now: Content destruction and recovering from zero.

I know the wife is supposed to be a kind of insurance, but she doesn't really function that way. It's usually easier to brute force your way to the wife than the vault anyway. Return home to zero and there's not really anything you can do. Sure, you could suicide, try a few robberies and then quit, but you're unlikely to contribute any content to the game until the next time you play. (It can take a long time to build a house)

So, how about every time you're robbed, you receive an insurance payout. Perhaps a percentage of your house value or something.

Once you rob someone or murder a family member, you can't return to that house until the owner has reset it.

You can't return to this house... the police are still there.

This way, the insurance payout keeps the house on the list as content for the other players. Should someone else rob it, you receive another payout, house goes back on the list. When you return home, you have a guaranteed bit of cash to sort your house out — and add more content to the game.

colorfusion · 2013-10-28 06:24:27

So far I haven't actually found getting started back up after a robbery to be too hard. It seems that people are still for some reason drawn towards a house with $0 after I've done the self test, and normally I can make my house still somehow deadly.

Although I guess when there are 50 houses or so on the list in the future a $0 house will no longer be even worth visiting. It will probably be quite hard to repair your house into, not just a state where it can protect the vault like you had to do when wages were around, but a state which will be able to kill someone. All you can do is move pets around, and you have to somehow tempt people to steal your $0.

That's going to be pretty much impossible, so in the future the only real way of getting started again will be to rob someone else and put them in the same situation as you just were. That's probably going to lead to a shortage of homes.

I think some small funds to help recover could work. Perhaps you could just keep 10% of your home value in your pockets, up to a limit of $200 or something small. Just enough to attract some robbers and put up some wooden walls. You'd only get it when you log in and it wouldn't show up in the vault until then.

Last edited by colorfusion (2013-10-28 06:27:50)

joshwithguitar · 2013-10-28 06:30:31

I don't mind that the game can be punishing when you are on $0. It means that the wife is useful for something. With the decrease of the gun range to 2 wife defence should become easy enough early on to make sure getting to the vault is less expensive.

So far I have been surprised how little effort people have been putting into wife defence. With the way building prices are people should be putting a lot more dogs between the robber and their wife than they currently are. Then as long as you leave the house with a decent amount still in the safe you should be fine to build up again after you are robbed.

Broken houses are generally not the kind of content you want around in large amounts anyway. They are either extremely easy or extremely hard to rob, depending on how they were built and robbed in the first place. I don't think content will be too much of an issue once there are more players.

The game is meant to be punishing. Players are meant to feel violated and desperate after they come home to find their wife dead and vault robbed and so the whole $0 in the account is important.

ukuko · 2013-10-28 06:40:59

I guess it just feels like there's nothing to do but sit and wait for two hours for another $500 to roll in so I can buy one more dog. I want to play the game, but I can't.

jasonrohrer · 2013-10-28 09:42:21

You are supposed to be able to devastate other players in this game.... to salt their earth and make suicide their only option.

I think the content inflow/outflow issue can be dealt with separately without affecting this part of the game. Essentially, how long does a given piece of content "last?" Robbing has been made harder, and building easier, which means that each house lasts longer, and serves as content for more robbers. The house list hasn't been "almost empty" in quite a while now.

ukuko · 2013-10-28 10:04:03

I guess when confronted with a bit fat zero and no way of progressing from there I don't feel like suiciding and starting again, I just feel like not playing and often don't. But maybe that's the point!

jasonrohrer · 2013-10-28 10:19:35

Yeah.... that is part of the point. I feel that way too when I play, and I hate my own game because of it. I think that it's okay for me to let the game make us feel that way. I mean, how would you feel if your house was trashed and your family was killed in real life?

This game has a ton of potential to be an addicting game that people just can't stop playing. That makes them say, "Just one more try!" long into the night. A life-ruining game. An FTL.

But in order to make this game work that way, I'd have to sand off some corners that make this game interesting and worth playing in the first place.

I'd have to stick carrots in there, so that when you hit rock bottom, you see the sweet carrot hanging up there and are tempted to reach for it again right away.

But this game has no carrots. It's 1991, after all.

The Castle Doctrine Forums

#1 2013-10-28 05:55:54

Insurance

#2 2013-10-28 06:24:27

Re: Insurance

#3 2013-10-28 06:30:31

Re: Insurance

#4 2013-10-28 06:40:59

Re: Insurance

#5 2013-10-28 09:42:21

Re: Insurance

#6 2013-10-28 10:04:03

Re: Insurance

#7 2013-10-28 10:19:35

Re: Insurance

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