Player Logic and an Idea

fondfoat · 2014-02-11 18:50:01

As per usual, it is human players who can make the game fun or not. I really do wonder what is going through some people minds sometimes!

I like to keep small houses. I like to make them very solvable for people who do not have tools, and also allow people a chance to get out if need be. Generally, I try to make the house build the pressure on you bit by bit until you get rewarded or you leave, or you get flustered and make a mistake. I think of my houses as "fun for the beginner player" type.

This means my houses generally have a low value. This is why I wonder about the logic of some people. I have one dog, that you can skip around with a bit of footwork, a wife down an alley with a shotgun that you can easily avoid, and a couple of simple touch pads to open and turn things off. The house had a value of $400.

A guy just came in used drugged meat on the dog, shot the wife, and cut wires to a easy trap, spending a lot more than the house is worth. You know how much the value is, so how in your right mind do you justify those action. For the life of me, I don't get it. I don't see how the robber had fun, and how can you just go about making a loss!

I would like to see a game mechanic that means as soon as you have spent more on your tools than the house is worth, you can no longer open the safe. It is locked to that player for 24 hours.

Gopher · 2014-02-11 18:55:51

I see quite a lot of these, people coming in with far more tools than my house is worth - and, even more strangely, often dying in some stupid noobish way. I can only assume these people are throwing their starter $2k into tools and making no real effort to accumulate wealth, instead just having fun throwing their starting money away over and over again trying to rob houses. I'd make a suggestion for changes to the game to discourage this, if I could think of any, but I can't. In general, though, when my house winds up with a value of around $500 or less, the only two types of robbers I get are cautious people who flee at the first sign of, well, anything but walls, and these over-tooled, under-skilled players.

re: your suggestion, not sure about locking the vault for 24h, but there might be something to be said for capping the total value of carried tools to equal the total value of your house design. Ultimately, though, this would mainly affect poor players, not rich, potentially widening the power gap there.

Last edited by Gopher (2014-02-11 18:58:35)

Pandamonium · 2014-02-11 19:28:23

Gopher wrote:

but there might be something to be said for capping the total value of carried tools to equal the total value of your house design. Ultimately, though, this would mainly affect poor players, not rich, potentially widening the power gap there.

Here is the thing, tools sell for 50%, meaning if your house is worth $400, it's still "worth it" (mathematically anyway) to spend up to $750 "worth" of tools if they were dropped by others into your home.

Which makes it possible (not sure how likely, but possible anyway) that it might be newer users that don't see the "Sell tools" button.

As far as solution goes... No idea, everything I can think of has a serious downside.

fondfoat · 2014-02-11 19:41:10

Thanks for the replies.

I think the player can still enter the house with as many tools as they want, but as soon as the value of what they have used goes over the amount in the vault, they will find that the vault won't open for them. I guess then they would just go around the house smashing things. Another strange thing some like to do.

Gopher · 2014-02-11 19:41:59

yeah, no fix that's not a worse problem in itself, at least, that I've thought of. I can deal.

My main point of frustration with the game, really, is with my inability to monitor my house 24/7. When someone finally drops a sizeable bounty or pile of tools, it invariably happens when I'm afk for long enough that I'm looted by someone competent before I get back to do something with the money/tools. Grumblegrumble. But I know that's not really the game's problem, and again, fixes would make worse problems.

JoyOfTrapping · 2014-02-12 00:11:42

fondfoat wrote:

I would like to see a game mechanic that means as soon as you have spent more on your tools than the house is worth, you can no longer open the safe. It is locked to that player for 24 hours.

Fondfoat - It sounds like what you are angry about is not so much the "lack of logic" in players, but rather the sense of violation you are experiencing at your current value level in the game, which you feel is unwarranted. I can understand those feelings and have experienced them myself. I think they are justified.

Moving forward from that point, I think this is all part of the package deal that comes with the "point" of the game that Jason has often cited when describing its development process. There are definitely a lot of ideas, rules, concepts and tweaks that could be made to this game to make it more "balanced" or more "logical" from a traditional competitive online gaming perspective. As much as I sometimes inwardly wish for these tweaks myself to allay the feelings of frustration I experience in this game, I also realize that some of these ideas would very much undermine the "point" of the game.

This is a game about a number of things, but it's very centrally a game about violation. It's about giving players the power and freedom to cause other players to experience violation, should they choose to do so. I feel the game makes its point very solidly, in that, as you describe, that violation is often reckless, impulsive, illogical, or totally unnecessary. I do not think limits ought to be imposed in order to make the crimes of the game make more "sense."

I myself try to celebrate the game's themes in both building and robbing. That very well could've been me in your house. I will take starter bundles and break into low-grade houses all the time, just for kicks. I will scout things out and find out what I need to mess things up, and then I will go buy those things and return. I will club a kid, brick the pets, saw uselessly through a random wall and get to the vault. If the contents of that vault enable me to barely scrounge together the $1200 it takes to buy a revolver and shoot the shotgun-toting wife with $168 on her, I will come back, and I will do it. And I will short the power supply that I missed and dance on the bodies. Just to totally grind that few-hundred dollar value house into a zero-dollar value house. Then I will go and kill myself and do it again somewhere else.

That is the nature of the beast. I do these things after one of my houses gets taken, and I am a little bored. That is, in real life, why a lot of really horrible things end up happening. Because some total jackass was feeling "bored."

Who are we really kidding here? Are the robberies we pull off which are preceded by a sound and reasonable cost-benefit-analysis of tool to house-value ratios really that much more "logical" than those where we leave our family totally undefended, waltz in somewhere with a bandana on our face, throw a brick at a cat and club some lady for $143 dollars? To me it all looks like the same thing- acts of senseless violation that are meant to induce feelings of frustration, paranoia, and powerlessness in other players. I accept that. It happens to me too, so I decide to go out there and play it up.

I think you're experiencing the game equivalent of the real-life, "Why did he shoot that old lady who was only carrying $5, so he could get a quarter pounder at the McDonald's across the street and get arrested 5 minutes later?" In real life, asking the question, "That man's action wasn't logical; why didn't he wear a mask and rob a convenience store's cash register with that gun?" is never relevant enough to keep that old lady from getting shot for $5. And I think that's something we, as players, are supposed to be experiencing.

Last edited by JoyOfTrapping (2014-02-12 00:15:08)

Gopher · 2014-02-12 00:23:50

eeeh, I see what you're saying, but where it seems to me it crosses from the violation that is, by design, part of the game and into something that feels irrational, unfair, and exceptionally frustrating is for starter homes. Almost any starter home built within the initial 2,000 budget ca be quite easily raped by a 2,000 starter tool kit. The starting robber might not benefit, and the builder can just rebuild, but the difference is the robber going into a house with $500 or less in total value carrying a $2000 starter tool kit expects and intends to die, whether to carelessness during a robbery or suicide when their spree exhausts their tools. The starting builder, on the other hand, is trying to crawl out of that starting position, and while they certainly shouldn't expect guaranteed success every time, they also don't intend to be bankrupted and start over without making any forward progress every time, either.

One robber using starting cash to destroy starter homes could fairly easily crush dozens, if not hundreds, of starter homes in an hour.

No idea how this could be resolved in the general case, or I'd've suggested it before, but it does seem like a legitimate issue worth at least considering solutions for.

:edit: feel like I've exaggerated a bit, wanna add that it's certainly possible to build a starter home that can't be trivially brute-forced with only $2k worth of tools, at least not without some scouting first to select the right tools, but building such a starter house isn't trivial for the average player, either.

Last edited by Gopher (2014-02-12 00:27:18)

JoyOfTrapping · 2014-02-12 00:27:13

Gopher wrote:

One robber using starting cash to destroy starter homes could fairly easily crush dozens, if not hundreds, of starter homes in an hour.

I do my friend, I do. And that, is the Joy, Of Trapping.

The Castle Doctrine Forums

#1 2014-02-11 18:50:01

Player Logic and an Idea

#2 2014-02-11 18:55:51

Re: Player Logic and an Idea

#3 2014-02-11 19:28:23

Re: Player Logic and an Idea

#4 2014-02-11 19:41:10

Re: Player Logic and an Idea

#5 2014-02-11 19:41:59

Re: Player Logic and an Idea

#6 2014-02-12 00:11:42

Re: Player Logic and an Idea

#7 2014-02-12 00:23:50

Re: Player Logic and an Idea

#8 2014-02-12 00:27:13

Re: Player Logic and an Idea

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