Crown's jailbreak - whats the appeal?

Author Topic: Crown's jailbreak - whats the appeal?  (Read 4408 times)


im already thinking of how to do it UGH goddamnit forget y'all

im forcing myself to work on farming instead, maybe i'll consider it after farming burns out/this summer

It's an okay server but gets boring kinda fast since it's a simon says: prison edition server

I preferred Tezuni's or Conan's Pload style server

tezuni's, conans and pload's were all more chaotic, arcade-style jailbreak games that took all the good parts of the standard jailbreak and distilled them into something fast-paced and fun.  it still floors me to this very day that a single server not only survives them all, but consistently thrives on power fantasy alone.  hell, the same kind of setup beats out everything else time and time again on every multiplayer sandbox game under the sun.  it honestly feels like the server version of cheating, in a way -- you attract all the children and young teenagers who crave five minutes of power like another hit of dope and have all the time in the world to get it.

Jail RP was fun specifically because it was not balanced. If you want to escape you (ideally) have to be a loving genius, so when it works out you feel accomplished. In order to do so you had to explore the map, find resources, find weak points, find exploits, do whatever you could to even the odds. When you got gunned down and killed, it felt bitter, but you most likely ended up learning from the experience, so you're that much closer to escaping next round. Crowns server used to be really good for this, the map was open and nonrestrictive, you could develop creative ways to get over the walls and on the roof and in places that made it hard for the guards to keep track of you.

nu-Crown's jailbreak is a loving travesty. It took away the single benefit of being a prisoner: The guards can't just murder you for absolutely no reason. It's soulless, boring, childish, tacky. It loving sucks. You can tell yourself "different strokes for different folks" if you want, but it doesn't change the fact that the new gameplay design is objectively worse than it's predecessor by a massive margin. You can say "it's fun when you epic rebel against the evil warden!" but there's absolutely no reward or incentive to rebel, 9 out of 10 times you'll just end up dead. That's several minutes of your life vaporized because you didn't type /sit on your bed fast enough. You didn't learn anything, you were just a tool for some handicap's power fantasy. Why anyone would base their server off a game that still sucked when they were 5 years old is beyond me.

The Simon says stuff isn't necessarily the problem either. Jail RPs that don't have it still all have the same stuffty pitfalls. All the maps are built for a specific linear gameplay design in mind - Prisoners amass weapons through whatever means necessary, then go on a rampage to kill as many guards as possible. It almost always results in a stuffty TDM, but the ROE for one team is all forgeted up and if you get it wrong you can get banned from the entire server for free-killing. Map design is really key here.
« Last Edit: March 19, 2019, 01:51:20 AM by Naruto Uzumaki »

ideally guards start off more powerful than prisoners but as the round progresses prisoners gain power by taking important items and weapons and eventually surpass guards by numbers. this should be the way a jail escape gamemode works; it promotes things like distracting guards so that your teammates can sneak into wanted areas to get better items and share them with you later. or working fast to find items or even escape before the guard notices. and then capitalizing on this huge power gap with a coordinated sneak attack or riot

when you have stuff like simon says and you're intentionally stuck in your cell for a whole minute this entire dynamic is lost immediately. there's no progression in the game at all and guards are actively getting exponentially more powerful as they kill of more of your team. it's just not an actual feasible gamemode, its just simon says in a loving prison

thats why you rush armory

most of it is probably becase people know jailbreak is gonna get a load of players, so they just join it anyway. Then people join it because it has the most players

most of it is probably becase people know jailbreak is gonna get a load of players, so they just join it anyway. Then people join it because it has the most players
I agree, but people should try other servers. Not the same one everytime.

it's just not an actual feasible gamemode, its just simon says in a prison
i actually have said this exact thing before

When Crown first hosted the Simon-says style jailbreak, I absolutely loved it. But as the gamemode evolved, I found it increasingly tedious.

The appeal of prison break / jail break gamemodes for me has always been the balance of the power dynamic. Guards have to maintain control while prisoners try to take it. If you skew this balance toward one side or the other, the game is no longer fun in my opinion. If it's too easy to maintain or gain control, then it's boring. If it's too hard to gain power, then there's a larger reward when you do prevail but at the cost of an hour or more of frustrating or boring gameplay waiting for an opportunity.

Crown's server was initially fun because it was essentially balanced, only slightly skewed in favor of the guards. Most players treated it as a classic prison break, so they were more keen to rebel. But eventually the game mechanics caused players to being more complacent, giving almost all the power to the guards. This was compounded by the introduction of larger, more open maps where it was virtually impossible to slip past the guards.

As someone who doesn't have hours to spend playing videogames like I used to as a kid, I don't have a lot of patience when it comes to playing videogames. I want immediate reward to help me relax after a busy day. I don't want to wait an hour or two to get a dopamine hit that may never even come.

If I could propose one fix, it would be to make maps less open, or just generally easier to slip away in. Maps with big open fields where guards can see players for hundreds of blocks without any effort make it nigh impossible to escape. There should always be a realistic chance for prisoners to escape regardless of how the warden engineers their minigames.

In defense of jailbreak, it does bring in players. Maybe I'll never enjoy Crown's jailbreak, but it doesn't have to be for me. Anything that facilitates and grows Blockland's player base is a net good in my opinion.

to me it is about outsmarting the other players or working with them in more ways than one, the prisoners can either compete against each other for the lr, or they can riot to defeat the guards. though wardens might usually be playing for power even though they suck (and they know they suck) some of them just try to make the game fun, maybe innovate on things, do activities that prisoners want. People look at this server and compare it to prison escape but they're two different modes, the goal of the former is to riot or stop riots but jailbreak has different outcomes all depending on how the players conduct the round

I only enjoy when the Wardens do fun stuff. If you don't want to have fun with the prisoners, then being Warden isn't for you. :/

People look at this server and compare it to prison escape but they're two different modes
This, basically. With the absence of classic prison escape servers, people are judging jailbreak as a supplement.

I'm glad Apak has been hosting his revival of Tezuni's Prison Escape recently. Forgot how much I missed that map, as clunky as it can be.
« Last Edit: March 24, 2019, 06:32:09 PM by Platypi »