Desperately Needed Changes to Player Jailtime

Suggestions
Desperately Needed Changes to Player Jailtime
effort 4.384615384615385 13 quality 4.230769230769231 13 reasonability 4.428571428571429 14
1

Explanation:

Player jailtime has undeniably been a strictly bad and shitty mechanic since launch. It has just as much purpose ingame as limb loss, which people seem very fond of removing. As a game mechanic, it does literally nothing but tell players they can’t play the game for up to 10 minutes unless another player decides to be nice and let them out.

It does absolutely nothing but fuel hatred and toxicity within the game’s community as it currently stands.
I see only a handful of solutions to this, all but one admittedly fail to completely solve the issue, but they are all an improvement to the current system currently in place.

The only people who enjoy this system are bounty hunters and navy players who get a kick out of making people unhappy, that is NOT an audience to cater towards.

Potential solutions:

1: Complete and utter removal. If it does nothing but actively detract from the game experience and brew toxicity and hatered between players as it currently stands then it’d be quite difficult to find a single reason to keep it ingame.
Lore wise, you don’t get captured at all, there’s no big public display, they just execute you right then and there to eliminate any risk of you escaping and causing any more damage than you already have. (A completely logical move given what any high bounty criminal has done.)
Criminal NPCs would still be able to be jailed.

2: Player jailtime now only applies to leaderboard criminals and is much much more impactful.
It will still fuel toxicity and hatred between players this way, but on a much much smaller scale.

3: Player jailtime now lasts a maximum of 1 minute and the execution is over and done with within 2 minutes of the player being captured, the player cannot be jailed again for 6 real world hours.
This allows for jailtime and public execution to happen but much more infrequently and for a much shorter time.

4: You can now talk to an NPC after you get jailed that can get a handful of galleons and a message over to the syndicate to quickly and quietly break you out.
(no this would not be a stealth section, can you IMAGINE how old that’d get after being captured 3 or 4 times? Let alone 10 or 20?)

Which solution is best?
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0 voters

Please don’t use this poll as a substitute for actually voting like the last time I made of these.

Feedback is appreciated.

3 Likes
2

I should have made a 5th option where the assassin syndicate can hold positive reps and navy players in ransom just to see how much every positive rep hates that idea lol.

16 Likes
3

Another possible solution:
Players with fame should get some punishment for getting assassinated too and both sides should have a cap of 5 minutes.
The main issue is that fame players don’t risk anything except for some renown.

1 Like
4

well the whole reason I didn’t include that in the suggestion is because it would make the already existing problems substantially worse.
It’d turn the game into twice the toxic hellscape it already is at times and there’s be nowhere to go to avoid it.

I’d like to improve player jailtime (or completely get rid of it, preferably), not expand its already godawful reach.

1 Like
5

remeber: Fame jails were around during testing but were removed because it was “annoying”…

11 Likes
6

to be fair it is easier to grind renown as a bounty player, besides it would make more sense to just kill a hero then and there

7

and heroes don’t have to deal with an infinite swarm of navy.

there’s other downsides to being a criminal than jailtime.
there is absolutely nothing that justifies a mechanic that serves no purpose beyond preventing players from playing the game.

8

I’d say temporarily remove it and work on adding an actual prison island to the game which you could escape from

3 Likes
9

lo and behold it turns out the game was actually supposed to be infested with tons of clan wars 99% of the time in order for this “you can’t play the game” jailtime system to be justified

10

i was actually replying to the guy above me, i just forgot to double-click his name so it would show to anyone else

11

delete jail or let me pay to leave omfg

1 Like
12

I know AO won’t be dehydrated of players anytime soon and is multiplayer, but imagine if you had ten minutes of jail time, and because either the game was turned to single-player only or nobody bothered to join your server and was willing to sacrifice their fame/go to Silverhold to grab you, you just had to sit there mindlessly.

At the very, very least, let me view Socketed Jewels and Weapon Skills while jailed.

1 Like
13

peak wom.

1 Like
14

im shocked jail hasnt been changed yet

standing still for 10 minutes is a terrible way to punish death

1 Like
15

I don’t know why I didn’t think of this till BigKettle mentioned it

Let me bail myself out

16

Alas, opponents will see you loot and plunder in the astral planes and exclaim “he lacketh the patience and mastery to conjure mana crystals”

My brother in the arcane, we are merely pondering the orb and thy loins art in a twist, tower hath filled with stench, and nary a maiden in your bedchambers? Apprentice mistake. Go read thy tomes. Brew thy stew.

Thou art naught.

3 Likes
17

grand navy pigs will never understand

1 Like
18

image
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I ain’t making any more polls if ya’ll gonna keep doing this.

19

For the people worried that this suggestion might ruin the fun little adventure where you get your friends to break you out, I can confirm as someone who exclusively plays with friends this isn’t a problem.

In order for your friends to be able to break you out, they need to both be near Silverhold and not also jailed by whoever got you sent to jail. Both of these are unusual to begin with - there’s not a lot going on near silverhold, and you were probably sailing together on account of being friends, which means you all died together when you got jumped by a gravy player.

But assume both conditions are met, there’s a bunch of reasons why you don’t want to bother breaking out:

  1. If your friend isn’t very close to Silverhold, you’re not skipping the jail time, just reducing it. For shorter sentences (50k to 200k bounty), it can be faster (and is always easier) to regroup at Ravenna, especially if you already had to go there to pick up a dead positive rep friend.
  2. You’ll both want to immediately go to a town to reset your notoriety, because breaking someone out sets you to 5 stars and them to 3 stars, which means dealing with a bunch of olympic swimmer lieutenants and captains. Sailing to a port and cleaning up the swimmers who spawned before you got there eats into the time saved by breaking out.
  3. If you died to a gravy player, there’s a good chance they’re camping the jail, because if you break out your friend (which is a janky mess that involves temporarily enabling friendly fire for the party and swinging at your friend a couple times because this feature was never tested and never works first try), they can immediately arrest you again to double their gains.
  4. Also if you died to players, you’re probably busy hopping server. Why waste time hunting them down for revenge, potentially risking another jail sentence, when you could just hop to a server where you can get back to doing what you were trying to do with no risk of more jail time.
  5. The revenge isn’t even good revenge! If you kill them, you get your bounty back, but they don’t go to jail. You wasted time in jail and they didn’t - they still get the last laugh.

Despite always playing with friends who could theoretically break each other out of jail, the only time we ever bother is if we’re farming Commodore Kai. And even then we usually swim to Palo Town and back to reset our notoriety so we don’t have to deal with Lieutenants, so it’s not even saving time compared to just setting up a camp nearby.

Nothing of value would be lost if the mechanic was deleted.

8 Likes
20

THANK YOU.