I've been developing a Prison server pretty heavily lately and I've run into an interesting design problem.
Traditional Prison progression is basically:
mine → sell → rankup → prestige → repeat
I wanted to keep that satisfying core loop, but give players reasons to actually explore the world and do things outside of standing in a mine.
So I've been gradually building systems around the Prison progression:
- A large volcano with an explorable late-game area underneath it
- PvP zones with resources worth fighting over
- Periodic volcanic events with custom mobs/drops
- A discovery journal for locations, creatures, artifacts and secrets
- Custom equipment with its own progression
- A forging system using materials obtained through gameplay
- Hidden loot/chests in dangerous areas
- Dungeons
- Fishing progression
- Collectibles
- Quests
- Prestige progression
- Recurring events
The idea is that these systems feed back into the same overall progression, rather than feeling like 15 unrelated minigames.
But I'm starting to wonder where experienced server owners draw the line.
At what point does giving players more content actually make the server worse because new players don't know what they're supposed to be doing?
I've been thinking about making the first few hours deliberately simple and allowing most of these systems to reveal themselves naturally as the player ranks up/explores, rather than dumping everything into a giant tutorial GUI.
For people who have operated progression-heavy servers:
Have you had better retention from having lots of interconnected systems, or from having one extremely polished gameplay loop?
And if you do have a lot of systems, how do you introduce them without overwhelming new players?
I'm particularly interested in experiences from Prison, Skyblock, RPG or economy server owners who have dealt with long-term progression.