TRAPPED IN YOUR OWN LOCKED ROOM
by Hazed
You know that phrase “painting yourself into a corner”? Well, one PO demonstrated the Fed version of that last week.
The player, who shall remain nameless to spare his, her or its blushes (or equivalent emotional indicator) decided his, her or its (oh, let’s just call him a he, although he may actually be a she or an it – we’re not saying) planet needed a makeover. He worked diligently on the files to refurb his map, then sent them to feedback. Alan duly linked them into the game and they went live at Sunday’s reset.
Excited by his redesign work, the player set out to explore, running his fingers down the shiny new paintwork, admiring every room and feeling satisfied at a job well done.
Until he found that he couldn’t get back out of a location, for it had no exits. He’d failed to click on the movement arrow to provide a way out of the place.
He was trapped.
Hoist by his own petard, you could say.*
Now there are a number of ways to get out of a no-exit location. You can ask a member of staff to help you and they will call the Nightwatch, transporting you to the dormitory on Earth. But there were no staff online at the time.
You can fix the problem with the files and send them to us, but it’s likely to be a few days before they get linked into the game.
Or you can do what this player did, which is to commit suicide and wake up in the hospital. Fortunately, he was insured – if he’d managed to kill himself dead-dead that would have been a grisly end to the story!
Having effected his escape, he quickly added an exit to the errant location and mailed off the files to fix the problem.
But the story doesn’t end there, because shortly after this, he discovered another no-exit room on the map! He had to make another fix, and send in another set of files.
Presumably he has caught all of the traps lurking on the map, so it’s safe to explore his not-so-shiny new planet. Tesla doesn’t check for rooms with no exit, because there’s perfectly legitimate reasons why they would appear on the map. Apart from the storeroom in location 0 which generally has no entrances or exits, it’s quite feasible to have a room that you enter using the normal movement mechanism, but where the exit is provided by events.
This whole story made me think of somebody putting an electrical sliding door on a room, with no switch to operate the door on the inside. Perfect as a prison, but not so great if you accidentally get locked in.
Or a security system which not only stops people getting in without the right passcode – but stops you getting out if you happen to forget the PIN.
I am sure the unnamed PO will be much more careful about any further modifications he makes to his planet.
* The phrase “hoist by your own petard” means someone who is hurt by their own actions. A petard is a small bomb that is used to blast down a door or make a hole in a wall. Being hoist by one means being blown into the air because it detonates prematurely – so literally, it’s being blown up by your own bomb. I suppose using the phrase about this player is overstating things slightly; it would be more appropriate for a PO who built a deathtrap on his planet and then got killed by it himself.
