Our Commitment to Prison Struggle

We know the reset changes seem like an attack from staff on you, the players. This is by no means our intent but I personally acknowledge we have done a poor job in explaining why we decreased the rewards from both crime money and EXP. I wanted to take a moment to ensure you all on our commitment to Prison Struggle along with reasoning and more details on what happened and why.

Back story: On December 6th, 2020, we released a new update to crimes to make them more viable against other methods of leveling and money making. At the time points were scarce and failed mugging was the most popular method of leveling. We intended to increase the amount of cash in the game to increase the flow of points between players. We also wanted to open new opportunities in how to level your characters outside of existing features.

We felt as the game had grew and we had introduced other features it made natural sense to revisit this important aspect of the game. 

In hind sight: Combining the Santa suit with our original increase to crimes we made a critical mistake. We increased the potential earnings and EXP from crimes by 10x. As you can imagine this was great for players initially.

We never balanced other features around crimes, resulting in an unbalanced game economy which hurts everyone. Even those at the top of the food chain.

The problem: This caused a number of players to very quickly become extremely powerful and rich. Combined with the large amounts of PMC items available from boss fights we ended up creating a number of super players. This causes a number of problems as those people have no where to go in their game play as they've maxed their security level and level, resulting in these players having no real challenge.

This also hurts all other players, having big fish which could potentially harass and take over the game due to the games attacking nature.

The solution: When you end up with mass inflation there's a number of ways to fix it. Some are considerable harder and more complicated than others. We opted to cap the original issue which we had proven caused the inflation.

This was to reduce the crime EXP and money back down to a more suitable level. We did not return this to its original level and in fact is still considerably higher than it was prior to our changes on December 6th.

With these reductions we're also looking at other features which do not currently yield EXP or sufficient money, such as Boss Fights and Gardening. Our original intent of creating a variety of ways to level and progress still holds true. We fully intend to make opportunities for the many who are still levelling to do so effectively, in a fair manner.

Why now? The timing of these changes were never going to be perfect, but we've always wanted to see the game grow and we've increased our player count to nearly 2,500 at the time of writing. However, we see a lot of these players do not actively player the game once signed up.

We've been conducting a lot of research and studying in the background to analyze why our new sign ups don't stick around and we've identified a number of reasons. Notably issues with our initial onboarding and tutorial, along with the economical issues.

We have managed to finally acquire a large 40,000 email list of original players, along with the original Facebook and Twitter accounts. Along with our continued retainment of funds from all your upgrades we are in a stronger place than ever to grow the games player base, with active, engaged players. However, we cannot do that without first creating a strong economy, with a great play style, and ensuring our new and existing players are happy.

Our commitment to the game has not changed, we're here and will be for the foreseeable future. We intend to grow the game and invest as we always have done. We understand these changes are going to cause short term pain, but they're fully intended to create long term stability and growth in the game.

As always we welcome and value your feedback, and as always we do take this on board when determining our future together. 

We hope you'll work with us through these teething pains and hold your arms out to welcome to influx of new players and enjoy all the new features we intend to add over the following months.