Door decay

[pjf]

An improvement for the game that has been discussed is having a form of "door decay", where the more often a door is locked, the less often it remains locked for. A simple equation for this would be having a lock length of l * d^n, where l is the standard time a door is locked, d is the door decay factor, and n is the number of times a door has already been locked. For example, with d=0.5 a door will only lock for half as long each time it is used.

Important things to note with this system are:

• This naturally penalises players who always "do the same thing", and rewards players who get creative with their efforts.
• Doors can have different decay weightings. Important doors (eg: adjacent to the players) could decay faster, whereas guest room doors could decay slower. This further incentives creative play.
• Our powerful "lock room" and "lock floor" codes have a real downside, in that they degrade all the doors in a room or floor, even those that aren't at risk of being used by guests.

While the door-decay factor should be set on a per-door basis, we'll likely want some global default that we start with, and tune from there.

It would be nice if messages went to the secondary display when doors start unlocking early due to door decay. (Eg: 'Malfunction on door ####: unlocked.')