Now that the Kickstarted Legends of Aria has gone all-in on the ultimately superfluous integration of the blockchain, the game is further lauding a feature arriving in its upcoming build as something completely new: a jail system that’s trumpeted as “the first ever metaverse prison.”
Criminal players that are killed will be sent to a jail area where they’ll await sentencing. Once a criminal is jailed, multiple players in town will be pinged to act as jury members. Once three such players accept jury duty, the offending player will hear the list of charges and then be able to plead their case either through text chat or voice chat. The judge, who is a selected member of the game’s community until a governance system is in place, then determines the sentence to be carried out.
If jailed players are convicted, they are then sent back to jail, where they can fraternize with other criminals in a yard, work off some of their sentence by mining ore, or even try to escape if they’re daring enough or have the right set of skills. If a jailbreak is successful, those who escape will effectively have their sentence length reset, serving the time once again if they’re caught.
Of course, veterans of other sandbox MMORPGs have likely already guessed how this will work without even reading the associated “whitepaper” – penal systems have been in MMOs as far back as Ultima Online and as recently as Star Citizen – but since Aria’s is associated with a P2E game, that makes it the first of its kind.
Further reading on what happened to Legends of Aria:
Perfect Ten: MMOs that have fallen to the dark side of cryptocurrency
Lawful Neutral: How is an NFT MMO even supposed to work?
Vague Patch Notes: NFTs in gaming are a bad, dumb idea
Vague Patch Notes: Why play-to-earn is a garbage idea
Vague Patch Notes: The metaverse doesn’t exist and isn’t a good idea either
GDC 2022: Control, revenue, scarcity, ethics, and the human challenges of the gaming ‘metaverse’
Vague Patch Notes: No, Little Orbit has not solved the MMO blockchain problem
