The Castle Doctrine News

In low population situations, the available content of the game dwindles. Remaining players are left with very little to do, especially if the available houses are beyond their reach in terms of tool budget. For example, the top house currently contains $400,000 in value, but it's been robbed unsuccessfully 987 times, killing 594 robbers in the process. The existing player base simple cannot afford to rob it successfully. Other houses may have so little value that they're not worth the tool cost of robbing. When the population is low, there often is no middle ground in the content pool, and a kind of stalemate results.

In the old days of high population, the aspiring player could find middle-tier houses to tackle, and potentially climb the ladder toward being able to take down one of the top houses. There was no stalemate, and more importantly, there was never any shortage of things to do.

But how can I add more content to the game while still keeping everything real? The "realness" was a core design principle from the very beginning. Your success must always come through directly hurting another player in the game. A real person must be impacted by what you did to get ahead. So, no NPC houses, because they aren't real.

It turns out that there's a large pool of abandoned houses in the database. Houses that have been robbed down to zero, but houses that still have living owners who simply haven't returned in a long time. The owners could still return, so they are real.

I'm now seeding some of these houses with a bit of loot from squatters, padding out the house list to a respectable size. The abandoned houses function just like ordinary houses---they still have an owner, still log security tapes, still gather bounties by killing robbers. Many of them are still dangerous, and some of them still have significant puzzles in tact. Furthermore, and owner can return at any time and claim the squatter loot for themselves, so you are still stealing from someone, and further wrecking someone's house. There are lots of interesting philosophical questions about the status of abandoned property, of course.

But the neighborhood is now a bit like Las Vegas, post-housing-crash.

Full details are here:

http://thecastledoctrine.net/forums/viewtopic.php?id=3169


Enjoy!

Jason

In low population situations, the available content of the game dwindles. Remaining players are left with very little to do, especially if the available houses are beyond their reach in terms of tool budget. For example, the top house currently contains $400,000 in value, but it's been robbed unsuccessfully 987 times, killing 594 robbers in the process. The existing player base simple cannot afford to rob it successfully. Other houses may have so little value that they're not worth the tool cost of robbing. When the population is low, there often is no middle ground in the content pool, and a kind of stalemate results.

In the old days of high population, the aspiring player could find middle-tier houses to tackle, and potentially climb the ladder toward being able to take down one of the top houses. There was no stalemate, and more importantly, there was never any shortage of things to do.

But how can I add more content to the game while still keeping everything real? The "realness" was a core design principle from the very beginning. Your success must always come through directly hurting another player in the game. A real person must be impacted by what you did to get ahead. So, no NPC houses, because they aren't real.

It turns out that there's a large pool of abandoned houses in the database. Houses that have been robbed down to zero, but houses that still have living owners who simply haven't returned in a long time. The owners could still return, so they are real.

I'm now seeding some of these houses with a bit of loot from squatters, padding out the house list to a respectable size. The abandoned houses function just like ordinary houses---they still have an owner, still log security tapes, still gather bounties by killing robbers. Many of them are still dangerous, and some of them still have significant puzzles in tact. Furthermore, and owner can return at any time and claim the squatter loot for themselves, so you are still stealing from someone, and further wrecking someone's house. There are lots of interesting philosophical questions about the status of abandoned property, of course.

But the neighborhood is now a bit like Las Vegas, post-housing-crash.

Full details are here:

http://thecastledoctrine.net/forums/viewtopic.php?id=3169


Enjoy!

Jason

As you may have noticed, The Castle Doctrine's player population has dwindled since it's peak of 3600 active players back in January of 2014. Over the past week, for example, there have been an average of 10 players per day, with a min of 6 and max of 14. Not bad for a game that is almost four years old, but not exactly thriving, either.

Fortunately, the game is still playable at these low population densities because of its asynchronous nature. The game simply slows down somewhat. You can design a house and come back in a few hours to see if anyone tried to rob it, whereas back in the day, you'd have had dozens of robbers beating down your door in as little as a few minutes. Still, some aspects of the game were implemented back in the days of larger player populations, and those implementations don't necessarily make sense for today's small, asynchronous player pools.

With all that in mind, I just revamped the way chill timers work, reducing the possibility of you finding that all houses on the list are blocked due to chills. (Chills are placed on houses that you die while robbing, making you wait a while before robbing them in the next life). The summary is that the timeout duration now accounts for the number of available houses, getting shorter as the house list gets shorter. Full details have been posted here:

http://thecastledoctrine.net/forums/viewtopic.php?id=3168

This change should make the game much more interesting for sparsely-distributed player populations.

Enjoy!

Jason

As you may have noticed, The Castle Doctrine's player population has dwindled since it's peak of 3600 active players back in January of 2014. Over the past week, for example, there have been an average of 10 players per day, with a min of 6 and max of 14. Not bad for a game that is almost four years old, but not exactly thriving, either.

Fortunately, the game is still playable at these low population densities because of its asynchronous nature. The game simply slows down somewhat. You can design a house and come back in a few hours to see if anyone tried to rob it, whereas back in the day, you'd have had dozens of robbers beating down your door in as little as a few minutes. Still, some aspects of the game were implemented back in the days of larger player populations, and those implementations don't necessarily make sense for today's small, asynchronous player pools.

With all that in mind, I just revamped the way chill timers work, reducing the possibility of you finding that all houses on the list are blocked due to chills. (Chills are placed on houses that you die while robbing, making you wait a while before robbing them in the next life). The summary is that the timeout duration now accounts for the number of available houses, getting shorter as the house list gets shorter. Full details have been posted here:

http://thecastledoctrine.net/forums/viewtopic.php?id=3168

This change should make the game much more interesting for sparsely-distributed player populations.

Enjoy!

Jason

This is it folks, the last 10 minutes to EVER get The Castle Doctrine at a discount.