Where We At/What We Doing

[Rise Above]

As we know jailbreak had a sick resurgence over the summer and it was a blast for a ton of people either coming back or experiencing it for the first time.  I personally had a great time and wish I could still pop in every once in a while and get that experience. 

This is bringing me to make this post.... where we at?

I understand we could list many factors (as always) as to why jailbreak is not popping currently, but what's going on?  I haven't heard anything or seen any posts with plans, ideas, brainstorming or anything regarding how we can revive HGs former most popular game mode.  Have I just missed these initiatives/been out of the loop?  I'm just asking for some transparency from leadership as to what the plans going forward for jailbreak are, and how they are planning on executing them.  Do y'all need help? Is there something holding you back?  All I have heard so far is "less people play games in the fall what are we supposed to do?" and "leadership has less time than over the summer due to school."

Again I want to stress, I may just be out of the loop and there could be a ton of stuff going on that I am just not aware of.  If so please let me know. 

Love,

Rise Above (aqaq)

Edited October 4, 2021 by Rise Above

[SPlink :)]

Frankly it seems like people have moved on to other games, like New World

It also seems staff, mods, and the dL are too busy or burnt out of playing CS:GO. Not calling them out, just stating matter of factly, I think they would agree with me on that

Also I personally don't plan to play it anymore, it got stale. There was a steady shift in Jailbreak culture, where all of the little kids came in and were annoying. The good leads left. I felt like a stranger in the server, so I didn't go back. I'd rather play with my actual friends than play a server that really isn't fun.

None of my friends play it either, so I've got no intention of trying to populate a server, especially when there is only 4 or 5 people in it, with people who I don't know or people who annoy me. Sorry if it's harsh, but it's the honest truth.

[Rise Above]

4 hours ago, SPlink said:

Frankly it seems like people have moved on to other games, like New World

It also seems staff, mods, and the dL are too busy or burnt out of playing CS:GO. Not calling them out, just stating matter of factly, I think they would agree with me on that

Also I personally don't plan to play it anymore, it got stale. There was a steady shift in Jailbreak culture, where all of the little kids came in and were annoying. The good leads left. I felt like a stranger in the server, so I didn't go back. I'd rather play with my actual friends than play a server that really isn't fun.

None of my friends play it either, so I've got no intention of trying to populate a server, especially when there is only 4 or 5 people in it, with people who I don't know or people who annoy me. Sorry if it's harsh, but it's the honest truth.

As far as your personal opinion about the server, I have seen it before and think it is a fair take.  I get what you're saying completely. 

In terms of the burn out/transitioning away, why hasn't this been communicated?  Why don't we rather than make like every leadership member/mod is perfect and trying their best instead actually communicate with the community on what the fuck they plan on doing/what they feel.  If leadership doesn't care about jb then tell us is all.

[IronClawZ]

Hey! So I'll be the person to respond to this since I guess it's more appropriate given I'm more informed than my Divisional Staff simply because I'm more aware of what's going on in the community.


To start off, Jailbreak was revived I believe in ~August 2020. A lot of people came back (including myself) and hadn't played JB in multiple years as it had been dead previously. Everyone was super stoked to see JB alive and well again and so we had like half a year where we had max pop almost every night. 

Multiple people (including myself) just started off as a normal player and grinded JB to the point to where we were considered for mod, then global mod, then staff, and so forth. 

While I thoroughly enjoy JB, I will acknowledge that I have burnt out to the extent that I have debated stepping down for about a month now. I have tried over the past month or so to get JB populated whenever I'm available in the evening and it seems that the drive and dedication to popping JB just isn't there anymore. This and some changes with how JB functions such as being able to purchase rep has really changed the mentality a lot of players had regarding JB. Using myself as an example, when JB first revived it seemed like the competition for gangs had redeveloped as they wiped all of the gang database and reset everyone. It turned into a year long competition to see which gang would rise to the top and win the "Gang war" that developed naturally in JB. After the rep shop came out there was no point in grinding JB or AFKing in the server, because think about it- you get like ~3 rep every 5 minutes for spectating in JB (I could be a little off- I haven't checked the actual number in a bit). Using that estimate you get around 36 rep a hour, and 864 rep a day. In the shop that equates to ~$1.30. So in a hour, you could get a dollar and thirty cents worth of rep. Why would you AFK grind when you can just go buy rep? The rep shop basically eliminated the eagerness to grind rep by AFKing in the server, and to get to my point, this effictively killed like 8-15 people spectating every day. That REALLY hurts our server population because when you look at the server list, it counts spectators in the total pop. So even at 4am, you would see our server with around 10 people on, which would entice people to join the server. 

Moving on from that point, another thing that I think changed my will to play would be how the JB environment felt after a year of playing. In the beginning there were TONS of old players who knew how to lead and were experienced in the "roleplay" aspect of JB. They were knowledgable about the rules and how to lead days or rebel well. This added a lot of spice and exciting moments into the gameplay of JB. Over time, what always happens is people grow out of specific things- in this case, Jailbreak. Over the year we lost a lot of great players who made (in my opinion) jailbreak more enjoyable. That was a major hit to our population because they were the main people leading days as well. A big contributor to our lack of server pop is the lack of people wanting to lead days in JB. I personally enjoy leading for about 2-3 hours, but then I like to relax on T and rebel. This is fine if you have 6 people who want to do that, but when you only have 1-2 it becomes more complicated, because then you have to rely on those two people to carry the CT side in the leading aspect, which burns them out way faster than when they can just lead for some time and then vibe on T. Another issue was our general lack of CT players. Jailbreak is enjoyable because the 1:2 ratio that's implemented. This however, is not enforced in terms of forcing an equal CT to T ratio. The 2:1 T to CT ratio is enforced, but not vice versa. What this means that while you can have 30 T's and only 15 CT's, you could also have 30 T's and like 8 CT's, which, is most of the time going to result in the CT side getting demolished, and people not wanting to play CT, and with no CT's you have no JB. 

To continue on, let me state that I am in no way defending the CS:GO Leadership right now. We are all burnt out, and we have a severe lack of drive (if any) to populate Jailbreak right now. I'm unsure what Gaming+ wants to do about this, as I've made it clear that we've felt that way for over 3 months now.

With that being said I'm hoping that something will be worked out for JB sometime soon, because while I'm burnt out, I still want to see JB succeed because of how enjoyable it is and how many hours I've spent relaxing on it. 

Thats just my two-cents. If you have any questions or want me to elaborate further please ask. I love JB and I'm sad I'm this burnt out, but there's nothing I can do about it other than take a break. 

[Jeri :)]

It’s kind of funny that this post happened today, because  very recently there has been chatter internally that JB has been dead for to long with nothing in the works. Below I’ll kind of write up my thought process with what went well with the JB relaunch and why I think JB is struggling currently.

For all intents and purposes JB is a RP Server in my eyes. With that said, it’s important that there are good guards/leads to facilitate good RP and that there are internal systems in place to help continue to facilitate conflict/interaction in the server.

Other than the round to round interaction, the best facilitator of interaction in our JB server is gangs/gang identity. With the relaunch last year and gangs having been reset all the way to 0 there was a huge surge immediately to claim a gang and begin grinding so you could be the top gang on the server. For me personally being in Rebooglites at the time this was some of the best weeks/months personally I have ever played on the server. The amount of time and energy we put into grinding/idling for our spot on the top of the leaderboard against Bald Men was truly something to behold. We actually at one point had a spreadsheet tracking our rep vs. Bald Men’s to see how close they were to their next level compared to ours. Some other gangs that have since made a name for themselves followed behind us on the quest to be on the leaderboards. 

Along with the groups and gangs grinding rep for their gang, there were also individuals that wanted to cash in on this wave of rep grinding by collecting rep and selling it to gangs for cash or steam items. This was totally fine in my eyes as rep was only able to be collected at a fixed rate and rep was limited by those willing to sell it and how much rep could physically be collected by an individual before it could be sold (besides people who used a vpn to play on multiple accounts to double their idle rep per hour. Who were then banned btw lmao), but once the cash shop rolled in for rep, I feel like that’s the moment the element of gangs was essentially depleted. Why would I grind/idle for weeks when I could buy the rep with a few hours off of my paycheck? With the cash shop rep became completely meaningless in the matter of a few weeks. Gangs with more money than time started climbing the gang leaderboards and the people that had spent hours and hours for their gang felt obsolete, because they could never afford to keep up.

With the grind/identity of gangs being wiped out what incentive was there to play JB? Well we were simply back to round to round interaction and the hope that the leads would stick around. Unfortunately, by burnout or other means people started to not get on. People also seem to forget that we had a couple bad weeks of database issues (no one at blame just acknowledging it) that I think did more damage to JB then people realize. This along with leadership not being around as much (no way to sugar coat this one, they've been kind of mia one way or another).  JB has fallen into a rut. 

I do really want JB to come back and be great again and I want it to be as fun as it was when it got relaunched. We have awesome devs and a kickass map, but when there aren’t any players playing why would they do any dev work on the server? Spawn/I and others have a lot of work to do, but I can say publicly that I really want to work on getting our JB back on top. A lot of what I wrote is from personal experience and might not apply to everyone on why they feel like JB is dead, but this is why I feel it has really taken a hit in the last couple months.

[Rise Above]

16 minutes ago, Jeri said:

It’s kind of funny that this post happened today, because  very recently there has been chatter internally that JB has been dead for to long with nothing in the works. Below I’ll kind of write up my thought process with what went well with the JB relaunch and why I think JB is struggling currently.

For all intents and purposes JB is a RP Server in my eyes. With that said, it’s important that there are good guards/leads to facilitate good RP and that there are internal systems in place to help continue to facilitate conflict/interaction in the server.

Other than the round to round interaction, the best facilitator of interaction in our JB server is gangs/gang identity. With the relaunch last year and gangs having been reset all the way to 0 there was a huge surge immediately to claim a gang and begin grinding so you could be the top gang on the server. For me personally being in Rebooglites at the time this was some of the best weeks/months personally I have ever played on the server. The amount of time and energy we put into grinding/idling for our spot on the top of the leaderboard against Bald Men was truly something to behold. We actually at one point had a spreadsheet tracking our rep vs. Bald Men’s to see how close they were to their next level compared to ours. Some other gangs that have since made a name for themselves followed behind us on the quest to be on the leaderboards. 

Along with the groups and gangs grinding rep for their gang, there were also individuals that wanted to cash in on this wave of rep grinding by collecting rep and selling it to gangs for cash or steam items. This was totally fine in my eyes as rep was only able to be collected at a fixed rate and rep was limited by those willing to sell it and how much rep could physically be collected by an individual before it could be sold (besides people who used a vpn to play on multiple accounts to double their idle rep per hour. Who were then banned btw lmao), but once the cash shop rolled in for rep, I feel like that’s the moment the element of gangs was essentially depleted. Why would I grind/idle for weeks when I could buy the rep with a few hours off of my paycheck? With the cash shop rep became completely meaningless in the matter of a few weeks. Gangs with more money than time started climbing the gang leaderboards and the people that had spent hours and hours for their gang felt obsolete, because they could never afford to keep up.

With the grind/identity of gangs being wiped out what incentive was there to play JB? Well we were simply back to round to round interaction and the hope that the leads would stick around. Unfortunately, by burnout or other means people started to not get on. People also seem to forget that we had a couple bad weeks of database issues (no one at blame just acknowledging it) that I think did more damage to JB then people realize. This along with leadership not being around as much (no way to sugar coat this one, they've been kind of mia one way or another).  JB has fallen into a rut. 

I do really want JB to come back and be great again and I want it to be as fun as it was when it got relaunched. We have awesome devs and a kickass map, but when there aren’t any players playing why would they do any dev work on the server? Spawn/I and others have a lot of work to do, but I can say publicly that I really want to work on getting our JB back on top. A lot of what I wrote is from personal experience and might not apply to everyone on why they feel like JB is dead, but this is why I feel it has really taken a hit in the last couple months.

 

29 minutes ago, IronClawZ said:

Hey! So I'll be the person to respond to this since I guess it's more appropriate given I'm more informed than my Divisional Staff simply because I'm more aware of what's going on in the community.


To start off, Jailbreak was revived I believe in ~August 2020. A lot of people came back (including myself) and hadn't played JB in multiple years as it had been dead previously. Everyone was super stoked to see JB alive and well again and so we had like half a year where we had max pop almost every night. 

Multiple people (including myself) just started off as a normal player and grinded JB to the point to where we were considered for mod, then global mod, then staff, and so forth. 

While I thoroughly enjoy JB, I will acknowledge that I have burnt out to the extent that I have debated stepping down for about a month now. I have tried over the past month or so to get JB populated whenever I'm available in the evening and it seems that the drive and dedication to popping JB just isn't there anymore. This and some changes with how JB functions such as being able to purchase rep has really changed the mentality a lot of players had regarding JB. Using myself as an example, when JB first revived it seemed like the competition for gangs had redeveloped as they wiped all of the gang database and reset everyone. It turned into a year long competition to see which gang would rise to the top and win the "Gang war" that developed naturally in JB. After the rep shop came out there was no point in grinding JB or AFKing in the server, because think about it- you get like ~3 rep every 5 minutes for spectating in JB (I could be a little off- I haven't checked the actual number in a bit). Using that estimate you get around 36 rep a hour, and 864 rep a day. In the shop that equates to ~$1.30. So in a hour, you could get a dollar and thirty cents worth of rep. Why would you AFK grind when you can just go buy rep? The rep shop basically eliminated the eagerness to grind rep by AFKing in the server, and to get to my point, this effictively killed like 8-15 people spectating every day. That REALLY hurts our server population because when you look at the server list, it counts spectators in the total pop. So even at 4am, you would see our server with around 10 people on, which would entice people to join the server. 

Moving on from that point, another thing that I think changed my will to play would be how the JB environment felt after a year of playing. In the beginning there were TONS of old players who knew how to lead and were experienced in the "roleplay" aspect of JB. They were knowledgable about the rules and how to lead days or rebel well. This added a lot of spice and exciting moments into the gameplay of JB. Over time, what always happens is people grow out of specific things- in this case, Jailbreak. Over the year we lost a lot of great players who made (in my opinion) jailbreak more enjoyable. That was a major hit to our population because they were the main people leading days as well. A big contributor to our lack of server pop is the lack of people wanting to lead days in JB. I personally enjoy leading for about 2-3 hours, but then I like to relax on T and rebel. This is fine if you have 6 people who want to do that, but when you only have 1-2 it becomes more complicated, because then you have to rely on those two people to carry the CT side in the leading aspect, which burns them out way faster than when they can just lead for some time and then vibe on T. Another issue was our general lack of CT players. Jailbreak is enjoyable because the 1:2 ratio that's implemented. This however, is not enforced in terms of forcing an equal CT to T ratio. The 2:1 T to CT ratio is enforced, but not vice versa. What this means that while you can have 30 T's and only 15 CT's, you could also have 30 T's and like 8 CT's, which, is most of the time going to result in the CT side getting demolished, and people not wanting to play CT, and with no CT's you have no JB. 

To continue on, let me state that I am in no way defending the CS:GO Leadership right now. We are all burnt out, and we have a severe lack of drive (if any) to populate Jailbreak right now. I'm unsure what Gaming+ wants to do about this, as I've made it clear that we've felt that way for over 3 months now.

With that being said I'm hoping that something will be worked out for JB sometime soon, because while I'm burnt out, I still want to see JB succeed because of how enjoyable it is and how many hours I've spent relaxing on it. 

Thats just my two-cents. If you have any questions or want me to elaborate further please ask. I love JB and I'm sad I'm this burnt out, but there's nothing I can do about it other than take a break. 

I appreciate both of your insight(s), and your responses prove my point more than anything.  You guys, HG leadership, know what you are doing and are very capable to undertake, understand and communicate a task eloquently.  This is what we NEED more of and I greatly appreciate your insightful responses as I have told you both in private.  The root of the issue is not that JB is dead, it's that the community has no idea what's in the works for JB or CS:GO in general.  I would rather somebody tell me "we're getting rid of the JB server, it's lived out its lifetime" than have leadership just not care about the server and leave it around with 0 players.  If you guys EVER need any need help with brain storming, populating, event ideas, content creation, incentivizing etc. LMK.  I am always down to help the community and always have been but never get contacted for reasons I won't get into here.

At the end of the day, I'm extremely appreciative of your responses and I hope we can get together as a community to come up with ways to improve HG for the betterment of us all.  

Edited October 4, 2021 by Rise Above

[sqnch]

Here's a few reasons I can think off the top of my head.

 

There's pretty much zero reason to grind rep, therefore an even smaller reason to afk, which leads to less players (What Iron said). Why would i grind rep when i can just buy it for 10 bucks and get 10k? Along with rep problems, there is no reason to level up your gang, after level 23 or so the prices for rep are fucking insane, for an extremely small reward. Even if you do become top gang, someone can just buy rep to level their own gang above your own.

There's been little to no events to help maintain population, i.e. there is a lack of re-playability with lack of fun and new leads. X-mas in July was a good event to help keep people playing in July. We don't need an event every week, but to have one once a month would be good to keep people playing on the server.

Like SPlink said, there was a drastic change of the way JB was played while a bunch of (i know their kids but shit) annoying kids who aren't even old enough to have CS trying to lead while micspamming. If i have to mute someone more than 20 times in an hour for mic-spam you shouldn't be talking, which makes me as a mod not want to moderate, let alone play the server.

I've heard absolutely nothing from staff as to plans to help revive JB, or really and CS gamemode and everyone has lost the will to play again. I want just as much as everyone else to join a 48/48 JB again, but if as a mod team we aren't communicating let alone playing, we all shouldn't be mods+. 

Of course i don't know really whats happening with leadership, but it seems like practically everyone in staff has IRL stuff keeping them occupied.

 

But who knows, cus I sure as hell don't  

Edited October 5, 2021 by sqnch

[Rise Above]

4 hours ago, sqnch said:

 

I've heard absolutely nothing from staff as to plans to help revive JB, or really and CS gamemode and everyone has lost the will to play again. I want just as much as everyone else to join a 48/48 JB again, but if as a mod team we aren't communicating let alone playing, we all shouldn't be mods+. 

Of course i don't know really whats happening with leadership, but it seems like practically everyone in staff has IRL stuff keeping them occupied.

 

This here is the root of the issue and my main reason for making this post.  We can all list 1000 reasons why JB has issues, but this is far more important than all of that to me.  I had some good conversation with Jericho and Iron today regarding this; they seem to have the same opinion I do.  Going forward hopefully we see more transparency from leadership as they have assured me they plan on providing.

[sqnch]

5 hours ago, Rise Above said:

This here is the root of the issue and my main reason for making this post.  We can all list 1000 reasons why JB has issues, but this is far more important than all of that to me.  I had some good conversation with Jericho and Iron today regarding this; they seem to have the same opinion I do.  Going forward hopefully we see more transparency from leadership as they have assured me they plan on providing.

im happy to hear this  

[SwiftBadger]

I really hope that JB can get a resurgence at some point soon. This game mode is so near and dear to my heart. When I get back from my fire season which will hopefully be in either a few weeks or December at the latest I would love to try and help revitalize the server in some way. 

[Rise Above]

this aged like bread

[Aaaaaaaaaa]

I left after being banned over some bs and I know others who have had similar experiences with the staff across HG. After being banned, friends of mine didn't play b/c I couldn't, maybe all the poor moderation and power abuse lead to the fast discouragement of playing/having fun on JB.

[Straws]

2 hours ago, Bronson said:

I left after being banned over some bs and I know others who have had similar experiences with the staff across HG. After being banned, friends of mine didn't play b/c I couldn't, maybe all the poor moderation and power abuse lead to the fast discouragement of playing/having fun on JB.

I can assure you and everyone else that you were not banned over "BS". What you did was shameful but go off I guess.

[Aaaaaaaaaa]

3 hours ago, Straws said:

I can assure you and everyone else that you were not banned over "BS". What you did was shameful but go off I guess.

By replying to me and defending your actions you prove my point. Staff are stubborn, annoying, and won’t hold a conversation. This is why your play base left among many reasons. I still firmly believe I was banned from victim bias but, go off I guess.

[Aaaaaaaaaa]

3 hours ago, Straws said:

I can assure you and everyone else that you were not banned over "BS". What you did was shameful but go off I guess.

 

23 minutes ago, Bronson said:

By replying to me and defending your actions you prove my point. Staff are stubborn, annoying, and won’t hold a conversation. This is why your play base left among many reasons. I still firmly believe I was banned from victim bias but, go off I guess.

I also wanted to add, I hate to see the server go down the shitter bc it was fun and enjoyable, unless something that’s fairly obvious changed at hg, it’s going to stay that way…

[Straws]

58 minutes ago, Bronson said:

By replying to me and defending your actions you prove my point. Staff are stubborn, annoying, and won’t hold a conversation. This is why your play base left among many reasons. I still firmly believe I was banned from victim bias but, go off I guess.

Staff had to act objectively to the situation at hand, if you call that victim bias then go ahead I wont argue with you about this further.

Our leadership has made many mistakes but banning you was not one of them.

[AllmyhomieshateEmma]

On 12/21/2021 at 3:11 PM, Bronson said:

I left after being banned over some bs and I know others who have had similar experiences with the staff across HG. After being banned, friends of mine didn't play b/c I couldn't, maybe all the poor moderation and power abuse lead to the fast discouragement of playing/having fun on JB.

Right mhm…

[sqnch]

Just now, AllmyhomieshateEmma said:

Right mhm…

0.0