Ultimately this seems to be an issue with VCE as VCE namespaces all the variables by the brick owner.
That's because this only works with the old version of VCE.
EDIT: Just added this to the VCE topic.
Important Notes:
The old version of VCE (prior to version 5) stored everybody's variables in the same place. Which basically meant that anyone could modify each other's variables, breaking things a lot, granting themselves money on the server, breaking other people's contraptions because they used the same variable names.
The new version of VCE (this version you're reading about) stores variables per brick group. That means that you and only you can modify variables in your scope. Simply put, if you made it so you needed 5 cookies to enter a door, then only cookies granted by your bricks would work for the door. Your friends won't be able to grant themselves cookies by their own bricks and open the door. If you and your friends want to make a contraption together, just one of you should build the bricks with events on them and then you can both edit the events via the wrench and it will work, because your bricks are the one processing the events.
This might sound lame, but prior to this implementation things just broke constantly. I am working on making global variables, which will be available on all brick groups (with an option for it to be admin only).
