Contents:
- Introduction
- Map
- Items
- Mining
- Events
- Outside
- Progress & Achievements
- Free & Famous
- Ways to make money
- Staff & Moderation
Introduction:
I always feel like I have to make an introduction because I’m not that well known, so here is a short one for the guys who don’t know me. I’m a 20-year-old Austrian who enjoys playing some Minecraft in an on-off style which means that I don’t really play games for long times, rather try to achieve my set goals within a short time period. My goal with this post is to address the main issues prison is fighting at this very moment. I don’t want to make this post a pure rent but I will address some negative things that I experienced whilst playing. Other than that you guys probably should know that I will mostly compare this map to map 4 because that was the only other map I played.
Without further ado … let’s get into straight into … the rant?
Map
This is probably not a concerning problem but I still want to address it. I personally think this Maps theme kind of is a missed opportunity. I get that the base concept was/is Space … but mixing it with “Mythical Creatures” for item theme is not really fitting. There could have been more fitting Item-Set-Names like “Solari” “Mercury” "Lunari " and many more.
I think the map itself was built without much thinking behind it. Of course, it’s playable when u just use warps to get around the place but if you want to find a warp going by foot you won’t be able to find it because the map is basically a maze in disguise.
What also could’ve been an interesting design choice would be the need to have some sort of oxygen supply if you go outside. Would actually make sense because there is not much vegetation on the outside which could result in non existing oxygen in the atmosphere.
Overall the concept was a good choice but execution and translation to the game were rather lackluster.
Items
The main issue of this map.
Items that get released are not really playtested or have been questioned if they improve the experience prison players have or literally destroy the fun & economy of the server.
Of course, we all know what items I’m talking about, but most of them could’ve been easily trashed or pre-nerfed to avoid insane power spikes for players to abuse. I get that the server has to make money to stay alive but releasing items that get removed within 1-2 weeks with the community enraged doesn’t really make players happy. Even those who were enthusiastic enough to support the server for a long time ( @TheRealEasy cough cough ) don’t want to further donate to this server because the people behind it actually don’t understand what it means to release items like this. To explain what I mean with this let us talk about the “Aphrodite Chestplate”.
The concept of the chest plate was to avoid close combat and reduce it to only ranged. But pretty much anyone knows that using a Bow doesn’t really do damage if players wear Protection 8 diamond armor which reduces all incoming damage to 0-0.5 hearts worth of damage. That’s the point where common sense should be able to determine if items like that are worth adding to the game or not.
But the problem doesn’t stop there because it also influences the economy in a bad way if people first spend millions in in-game currency to obtain said items and later on it just gets removed.
I know it might be hard to balance items to be according to some sort of guideline but Prison is not a game mode that starts over in a short period of time like maze runner does. Prison is more of a permanent mode with it’s restarting followups having months in between.
What that means is that the team behind this just can’t add items into the game and “see” if it works out or not because it heavily influences the economy and pisses many people off if the said item gets removed or “adjusted” after not being in said guidelines.
My suggestion here is to add some sort of playtesting team to actually verify if those items are worthy to be added to be added to prison. For example, if you guys want to introduce a new pickaxe talk to the “Top 5” of the leaderboards who have mined the most blocks. Those people should be able to actually tell you if the money/hour is in line with other items or if it’s just a power creep like most of the recent items. That could be applied to other item categories as well.
This list of items that are questionable include:
- Hob Gob Sack (i will address it in more detail later on)
- Halo (obviously not really in said guidelines if you can just protect 100 million worth of items with an item that still can be obtained)
- Genie Pants (not an obvious one but having speed 9 outside just gives major benefits that other items can’t give)
- Zeus Crown
- and some more
Furthermore, you guys should tone down on “Seasonal Special Items” which are basically overbuffed versions of normal obtainable items that give ridiculous advantages to those who have them. In my opinion, those items should be somewhere between Ultra Rares and Legendaries but not beyond Legendary. We all saw how much damage those items can do to the server not only economy whise but also give unfair advantages like lasts maps “Witch Broom” for example.
Other than that I think item names should be more in line with the map theme and shouldn’t be named after mythical creatures when the map theme is space. Furthermore, I don’t think “Throwback Items” should be a thing because those are a recycled item of an old map and mostly don’t fit the map theme or is in line with the balancing (for example blue saber with speed 7).
I’m fine with concepts of items being recycled but they should at least be named accordingly to the theme.
Mining
I’ll try to keep this one short.
Mining overall is a lot more fun comparing to the last map because of the number of pickaxes out there.
But a thing we need for sure is more variation when it comes to mining oriented armor which adds up to the experience. Both map 4 and map 5 only one set of mining armor was viable. I personally think that’s not a lot of variation that is needed to actually make mining a more fun experience
What would also increase the fun in mining would be some sort of upgrade system which would be included in every pickaxe. For example, you start out at “Level 1” or “Tier 1” and can upgrade your pick just by mining. The durability bar would just slowly fill up so display your progress and after you reach your level up you gain certain benefits like added efficiency levels or fortune. This way players won’t be stuck with their “lame” pickaxe until they buy a new one and rather upgrade your current one to a semi-satisfying level.
Make the main mine larger. Reason for this is simply the space you need to mine is way to small if 20 people warp in to participate in the event and use dragon pickaxes or jackhammers.
Reintroduce Legendary Crates at the Thrift again because it’s hard enough to reach 250 levels and legendaries shouldn’t be restricted to only one branch this server has to offer.
And last but not least increase the consistency of mining events happening.
Events
Lottery: Seems kind of pointless because it usually results in a spam of random numbers and 5 minutes later some guy will type the correct number in chat by accident and will receive a sum of money which most people don’t even care about. My suggestion would be to make it like a ticket system where you can pull one each day and at the end of the day or week on will get pulled and this person receives a meaningful price.
Gravity Pass: Probably one of the most useless things that exist this map. I mean it would be cool if there was some cool twist or something happening if someone uses this pass but all it does is simply disabling flying for 10 minutes which is not really intuitive.
Golden Grass: Either needs a heavy buff or should get removed completely. It’s fine if that’s just a random event in between other events to help out newbies but if it resets the random event timer so no other events that are meaningful can start makes this one a waste of time.
Outside
The addition of the safe zone and the mines was a good move.
But what bothers me the most is that there is almost quadruple the number of chests to open which makes it mandatory to actually have a “Hob Gob Sack” to loot fast enough to make some sort of progress. The item itself would not be as strong if we still had the same amount of chests as the last map.
Also the “Hob Gob Sack” single handily caused the Thanos scandal which many people were annoyed of. Basically, the Sack allowed people to get more Ultras and Legendaries then intended. That added up over time and after a while, the devs thought about how they can fix it and introduced the Thanos update to solve that problem. After the community enrage they eventually did a rollback and gave out a lot of free crates which just added up to the problem because it just added more and more items to the already broken economy.
I also think that the walking distance outside should be reduced by at least 50% because people with items like “Genie Pants” or “Blue Saber” cover those distances in seconds anyways.
Edit: Chest Refills are in my opinion, not something that should be easily spammable because it adds up to this broken “META”. If some1 runs around the major spots with a Hob Gob Sack and a friend spams chest refills it easily can result in Ultra Rares, Legendaries, and Specials. An easy way to fix this would be to add a cooldown of at least 30 minutes to tone this down
Edit v2: Also a problem which i find obnoxious is the endless “found semi-rare” spam that occurs when chest refill is spammed in such an abusive way combined with the Hob Gob Sack.
Progress & Achievements
Also an overlooked topic in my opinion.
What I imagine in this category is some kind of Achievement & Reward system to add another thing people can work towards to. Those quests can include many things such as:
- Blocks Mined
- Kills (Killboosting have to be looked close at)
- Chests Looted
- Zombies slain
- and so on … I guess you catch my drift
Achieving said achievements then could be rewarded with something valuable like some normal crates or ultra crates for example. Some achievements which are extremely hard to obtain could also be awarded legendary crates or other special things.
I also want to address the idea again of adding the possibility to “level up” your pickaxes because that would add another layer of progress to the game.
Free & Famous
In my opinion, it’s the better alternative to the last maps prestige system but this system also got some flaws.
I think that the 100M for FREE can be justified but having to save up 500M for FAMOUS is just repetitive, boring and not very intuitive. My suggestion is as follows:
Make being FREE mean something big. You’re a prisoner when you are starting out and when you actually got a rank saying FREE you should get some perks that actually mean something. With that, I don’t mean some sort of mine but rather give something that actually makes sense. Like for example if there is a prison inside some sort of city you should be able to rent an apartment/house inside said city when you actually achieved FREE rank.
And with ranks that follow up after FREE, there should be a different process on how you achieve those rather than spending ridiculous amounts of cash. Make it more like some sort of Conquest system (similar to Diablo 3’s season journey for those who know that game). That means you gotta complete a bucket list filled with quests and get a rank up after. Obviously, those will be hard tasks that can’t be completed within a day and need hard work and dedication, perfect for those who actually want to push beyond the limits.
Ways to make money
There are currently 2 ways to make money. Mining & going Outside and selling found goods. But what I always have wondered that you can just buy potions and food inside a prison which actually doesn’t make much sense if you would compare it to a prison. Prisoners would always have to make those kinds of forbidden goods themselves instead of just buying them from some random NPC.
That can mean that people would actually have to find certain things across the map & outside to craft and brew said items. Of course, that’s just one example of things that could bring more variety to money making.
But let’s be honest diversity is always good and can be also interesting if people want to recruit member for a gang.
Staff & Moderation
Is speaking from my play experience this and last map (about 200 hours of playtime) more than just lackluster.
You can literally see at least twice an hour some sort of alting kid spamming in chat and literally insulting everyone which is within sight. Of course, it wouldn’t be a problem if there is staff on at least a couple hours a day but not even that’s the case. When I play for about 4-5 hours straight and I have to see about 10 of those kids spamming, cursing, death spamming all the time I ask myself if the moderation staff is ever online or even cares about that kind of things.
Most people when they think about staff in action they probably think about some hacking kid getting banned. But there is the miss concern that this would be the main problem on the prison server. I mean I get it when this is the main reason why staff gets recruited for Kit PVP but the main problem on prison is not the hackers but rather the way people speak to each other.
I know most people like to hide behind their internet persona but this shouldn’t allow them to curse at people just because they are bored.
Even though that is only the internet there should be a clear line between what is allowed and what’s not. And in my opinion that line should be drawn ASAP. Because I don’t think it should be allowed to wish people to literally kill themselves… neither should it be allowed to make some sexists comments or anything similar.
I get that staff is also just human and that those people have a real life like everybody else. But when staff is literally never online I question why they are even on the team in the first place. For example, I literally have never seen people like @Kalendor, @TheCyberCreeper, @bikeski, @Cookiedough777, @Gould on the server.
So my suggestion to actually solve that problem is to either recruit more moderators or add a helper rank to solve this annoying pile of alt spammers.
Helper rank wouldn’t need many perks to deal with those “small” problems. Some basic functions like /mute, /v and /gm3 would be enough to gain evidence if they are hacking and just mute them if they clearly don’t show any way of behavior.
Those people could easily be recruited because there is not much damage that could be done if people actually abuse those perks. Of course, there would be some sort of punishment for people that do so. Other than that Helpers would be rather easy to recruit and should be recruited from mature people that actually play a lot and can actually limit death spamming, spamming and cursing with adds up to the main problems that are existent because of missing server moderation.
I think that pretty much wraps up my thought on the game. If Staff wants to get in touch with me they can do so by adding me on discord (i’ll send tag in dm). This is totally open to discussion and I want to hear peoples opinion on above-mentioned topics because this doesn’t only affect me but all of the prison players base there is.
If you actually read all of this … PROPS TO YOU!
PS: I know that some topics are not fully addressed but I think the basic message is included. If you want to talk about a specific point i can get into more detail.
