...albeit my bad past acts probably taint the honesty of the statement. There will always exist a QHCF, an IRC channel, a boat-load of IM friends, Russian comrades, and much more to spread any type of "secrets". Revolving door coding to handle this doesn't exactly work or takes time away from adding to the game to compensate (aka wands). You can't take any knowledge-based gain out of the game but you can limit the power that it gives. We've all seen what someone with full knowledge of the Tower can pull off or with even sub-optimal knowledge (fountain abuse).

In all three types (ST, Inferno, Lairs), you know my vote for style but I wouldn't think Silent Tower should be purely fight/skill-based. It needs some intrigue - you put a lot of time into a great area that needs to mix more of the two goals and not include the ability for abuse of one person. Depending on the size of the group you want to focus on, that group needs to have the knowledge and the skill to throw around - just not the extremes of both. Maybe even have a fixed size limit of three people with no more/less possible. If my rambling makes sense, I'm summarizing by saying remove the single man aspect but keep some of the puzzle-y.

If anything make it knowledge on-the-fly, and not something a written doc can keep up with. I know that requires a crazy amount of options but for comparable example - that riddle outside the Pyramid....if there were say twenty riddles and you had one tick to answer, it'd be a lot different than it is now ;) You would have to greatly condense the encounters but they would be a lot more challenging.