Okay so I’m just wondering what people think of the current prison system is compared to the old WoM one.
WoM system:
Placed players into a small camp if they’re not that big of a threat, giving players an easier time to break them out, it also utilises the generating structures system.
Players who were very dangerous would be placed into the magic council tower with higher level NPCs, this helped provide a harder challenge when breaking players out if they’re a notoriously dangerous criminal.
NPCs weren’t ever held in prisons in WoM to my knowledge.
AO’s system:
Has one prison per sea that holds all of the criminals in it.
Npcs are held in the prison as well.
Players and NPCs are executed if they’re meet the requirements to trigger one.
Execution npcs scale with the player’s bounty (however before the execution even occurs you can break them out without the worry of powerful NPCs spawning in).
I prefer WoM’s system just because it was a lot easier to break out of than Ao’s system and also because it scaled with negative rep (as mentioned) so there wasn’t someone with -200 rep sitting next to someone with -3000+ rep. Although ao’s execution system was better in my opinion because you weren’t just immediately executed and stripped of your negative rep and were instead given a chance to have someone break you out.
Yeah the only bad thing about WoM’s system was the jail time being incredibly long, and how it only scaled to a certain amount when it comes to the NPCs guarding the tower. (also as you said there wasn’t an execution system)
For players? Both jailing systems are dogshit, though I feel like AO’s is leagues better. It’s mostly the shortened jail times for smaller bounties, but it’s also nice knowing exactly where you need to go if you want to break somebody out.
For NPCs… uh, I guess AO wins out on account of WoM not having NPCs be jailed whatsoever.
any game design expert will probably tell you that forbidding the player from playing for up to ten minutes with literally nothing to do is a terrible idea
i dont care about immersion or whatever bullshit is used to justify it
im just gonna tab out and do something else anyway
tbh i think we’re comparing horseshit to dogshit here, neither are good because the inherent point is to strip the player of agency for losing a fight. Sure, it is possible to go the entire game never interacting with the system, but for bounty players it’s just a pain in the ass because you don’t even have any say in the matter. it’s just waiting to be let out, or die, or be freed by someone else.
one thing i wish either system had would be a way to get out early. Either break out by pickpocketing and picking your cuffs free, or bribe someone some amount of money to be released on good behaviour.
So this is a bit weird but, what if prisons didn’t jail players, but they imprisoned NPCs, and you could get quests to break NPCs out of jail or something, that way the prisons still have a reason to exist, and players who have bounty are encouraged to engage in prison breakouts for activities?
I get that this’d probably be more feature creep but it’s just an idea for how the prison system can be reworked without scrapping it entirely.
And then we could have optional activities where you do stuff like transport prisoners for the gravy, or even attend some sort of local execution like in shell island or monos island where you have some criminals attack you and attempt to free the criminal being executed. Just so that we don’t give bounty players too many activities while starving the fame players from activities.
It truly is an astonishing design to say “hey, so what if we literally gave the player nothing to do as they eat on a timer as a consequence for playing the game as it was intended?”
Jail time is a terrible system. That’s the end of it. You only think this about WoM’s system because most of you were probably only jailed once or twice for a few minutes.
While prison time sucks, I think the feature otherwise could’ve been nice. I like the idea of the law-enforcing organization having multiple prisons, and only the worst criminals are locked up in the central prison, while the rest are sent to prison camps. It’s also cool that you can break out other criminals, even NPCs, like in AO, perhaps WoM just didn’t get to live long enough to have AO’s criminals.
This is the kind of stuff I was looking for, since it does suck that you get put in time out for just playing the game, but it does add some nice detail to the game.
Like you got straight to the point and kept on track with the original question and didn’t talk about obvious problem that prison time brings to players (yes we all know that jail time is bad for players Sherlock, but that isn’t the question in the first place)
Jail could be a cool feature if there was actually anything to do while in jail or literally anything of note even some lore would be nice although that would get stale after the first time
Prison time sucks because as previously stated you do nothing. Both systems suck. Back in AO development positive rep players also faced prison, but it was removed because it was “annoying”. One could argue that it could be returned, maybe only happens if you are defeated by criminal organizations.
Either way, you should be able to do something while you are in prison. Perhaps somehow allow the player to escape with a minigame. The suggestions category here has good ideas, but of course it’s non existent in the eyes of most people
I’m sorry but this has strayed way off topic for too long now, I wasn’t ever trying to ask if people thought that jail time is bad, I know that it is, but the question at hand was which one you thought pulled off the prison system better, so this’ll be closed due to people misinterpreting my question.
idk why youre surprised when you might as well have been asking people to compare the smell of a cubic meter of stinky shit to a cubic foot of stinky shit