People should not be able to set the risk category of prisoners.

[Ian Poggers]

So, I was reading all of the biograpys of my prisoners, when I noticed that you can set the risk categores of prisoners, and I began to play around with this mechanic. So, as we probably all know, high risk prisoners bring in more money than medium risk prisoners, and medium prisoners bring in more money than low risk prisoners. Now, I did a little research, and I found that, according to the Prison Architect Wiki, the risk levels are not representations of how dangerous your prisoners are, but are simply estimations of their potential danger based on their crimes, and their crimes commited are based on a set of traits that every prisoner has, and the TRAITS are what determines the danger of the prisoners. So, if the traits, and not the risk level of the prisoners determines their danger, then I could bring in a bunch of low risk prisoners with low risk crimes, whom likely have low risk traits, and convert all of these prisoners to high risk, and their traits and crimes would not change, but I would still get the same amount of money as if all of these prisoners were high risk to begin with. So, as a result, I have high risk prisoners, with low risk traits and crimes, whom SHOULD be low risk prisoners, and they would still bringing in WAY more money than they should be. I don't know if this makes any sense to anyone, but if you do undersand, I'm sure you can also agree that this likely not intended to be in the finished game, even though I'm exploiting the fudge out of this right now. If any devs are reading this, please fix this.

[chalked.up]

Two things:
1) Changing prisoner classifications from Low to High is extremely laborious
2) Low Risk prisoners have shorter sentences than High Risk. You cannot change sentence length.

Given those two facts, it's an effort in futility to exploit the game that way. The few extra hundred dollars you get is not worth your time, especially since all those prisoners are leaving before they generate any useful amount of revenue.

[Hentaisocial]

Yes, they never dealt with this when they finally implemented the different values for prisoner types. Needless to say the balance is far from finalized at this stage.

[|KoR| Metroidude]

I agree with the OP's point and Chalked.Up's.
I think we should be able to change their category, but I do not think that the amount of income for each prisoner should change because we do it. IE, I would still like to be able to change a low-risk prisoner who keeps acting up to a medium-risk prisoner. But I don't think people should be able to do this maliciously.

[Proteus]

I agree with Metroiduded ...
before we got paid differently for different categories, I often changed prisoner category ro reflect the prisoners behavior in my prison.
Prisoners who seriously harmed (or even killed) wardens, for example, would automatically be put into the highest risk category ... even if their risk assessment upon arrival would just be low or medium risk.
Likewise, low risk prisoners who tried to tunnel out would get their risk assessment updated to medium risk.

So, well, IMHO it is by design that you can change the risk category ... just as it is bxy design, that prisoners show a variability of behavior, that often leads to the conculsion, that some of them were misclassified when they arrived.

Dunno if our internal risk assessment should result in a different pay however. There are Pros and Cons IMHO ...
Con surely is the potential to abuse (by just classifying everyone as High Risk)
Pro however is that, if the tool is used right (i.e. people are reclassified according to their behavior in prison) it makes sense to get more pay for prisoners who behave like high risk prisoners (even if they were brought to prison as low or medium risk prisoners).


Perhaps, if / when we finally get the feature that prisoners could be sentenced to additional sentences for crimes commited during their time in prison (like attacking/harming wardens or other inmates) it would make sense to change the pay per prisoner into something that is based on the sentences of the prisoners (seriousness of crimes commited / length of sentences) and readjusted accordingly, when there are additional sentences added to the total for this prisoner

[Ian Poggers]

Publicado originalmente por chalked.up:

Two things:
1) Changing prisoner classifications from Low to High is extremely laborious
2) Low Risk prisoners have shorter sentences than High Risk. You cannot change sentence length.

Given those two facts, it's an effort in futility to exploit the game that way. The few extra hundred dollars you get is not worth your time, especially since all those prisoners are leaving before they generate any useful amount of revenue.

Actually, what I do is bring in medium risk prisoners, not low risk, and change them all to high risk. And it dosen't bring in a couple hundred dollars, it brings in many thousands. Plus, it only takes a minute of your time, and I don't consider it labourous at all.

[chalked.up]

Sounds laborious. Every game day you get a new set of prisoners and have to change them. If that's how you want to play the game, good for you. Why not just go into the savegame file and give yourself hundreds of thousands of dollars?

You're wasting time when you could be learning actual management skills. What are you going to do when the obviously exploitable loophole is closed?

Maybe I'm missing the point of cheating in a single player game in development that lacks an ending.

[Felixblucher]

Though it does seem strange to be able to change the danger level of prisoners right now, may be more useful later. Just think of the minimum security prisoners that become violent. Would you want them to stick around with the other minumum security prisoners? I would scoot them up to minimum security, and eventually High security if they were that much trouble.

I would like to see a mechanic similar to how prisoners are treated for contriband, or violent acts.Setting it so that their sentence is extended if they are violent, and they are moved up to higher security levels. This would need to be something that can be researched, and would possibly require a case review staff member. This would help automatically separate the violent criminals from the non-violent ones.

I guess the point that I am trying to make is that prisoners should only be able to have their security level changed based on their behavior. That said, it should be fine for players to change the security level as they please. It adds an element of corruption to the game. What if players were fined if they were caught changing the security level of prisoners for no good reason?

Have an outside agent of the government come in to check on some things every now and then.