I managed to repeatedly wander

These messages are almost overwhelming at times. They make prison servers feel less like being incarcerated and more like visiting a casino.Once you've made your fortune in the mines, you can spend your hard-earned cash buying gear to Buy RS Gold compete in the PvP arenas. Until I learned to recognise the places I shouldn't go, I managed to repeatedly wander into these PvP zones, where I was summarily executed by flying players who appeared to be firing nuclear warhead-tipped arrows.


There is no equity of any sort here, no attempt to level the playing field for new players—the richest and most established players dominate these spaces, wielding god-like power to lay waste to their enemies (when they can be bothered to compete). In addition to prestige and bragging rights, surviving the arena can get you free loot from fallen foes, special titles, unique resources (at least one server offers bounties on player heads), and a chance to advance on the leaderboards.


Competition for the best items and advantages is fierce, with the richest players aggressively bidding (with in-game currency) on overpowered gear.If PvP isn't your speed, some servers also offer plots that you can build on and decorate, once you've saved up enough from mining. You can even set up shops and sell your extra gear and items to other players, or simply show off your wealth by building statues from diamond blocks or something equally ostentatious.In this sense, prison servers aren't so much giving you a prison experience as, well, a sort of savagely objectivist one.


Prison servers present a world where the richest wield essentially unlimited power and everyone else strives to join their ranks. This is reinforced not only by the in-game mechanics of the mines, but also by the donator structure that makes it essentially impossible to advance and compete without opening up your wallet.


Prison servers remind me a lot of the heady early days of Ultima Online or Runescape, where you could pretty much expect someone more powerful to come along and take your stuff—but it is interesting that prison servers have stripped away all of the trappings of the genre and reduced the formula to its constituent parts. I mean Old School runescape gold, sure, all you're doing in most competitive MMOs is grinding followed by fighting, but the visual and procedural gloss that we place over those actions are what keeps us playing. Prison servers have done away with all that pretence.