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