About Roo Prisons

I used to play Cosmic back in the day, starting around 2018. I really enjoyed the server in that state — where Divine Lightning was very rare and valuable, or any energy enchant was. I watched as slowly they started adding more and more stuff just to cram into lootboxes and P2W. It started with pets, then more OP pets that would effectively decide who wins the map and were only realistically obtainable from P2W lootboxes or CCs. Then they added skins, masks, crystals, triple crystals, then quad crystals. Then more OP skins that gave you 2x of everything, then even more OP ones that gave 3x everything and movement speed — and the only way to get them was through P2W or buying from someone on the secondary market via IRL trading. This is when I stopped playing, and the server ended up shutting down a few months later in late 2023.

When they opened up their alpha in December of last year, I was pretty excited to play. I logged in, started playing, and it was fun for a few days before it got boring since there was really nothing to do and the server had quite a few performance issues. In the first alpha, the only real addition they made to the game was lootboxes — I guess that shows where their priorities are at. I believe in the second alpha the only additions were pickaxe prestige, CCs, and possibly clue scrolls. Then Map 1 comes out and they just added merchants. So in almost four months, they added four pretty minor features.

Throughout Alpha 1 and 2, I made many bug reports and suggestions — I’d guess close to 100 bug reports if not more, and tens of suggestions. 95%+ of my suggestions never saw a reply from any of the staff despite some becoming very popular. The ones that did get responses were just brushed off as “we can’t enforce this” (IRL trading, verbals, etc.) or they just flat out disagreed with things a huge number of players wanted, including myself — smaller truceships, some solution to the energy pick meta, issues with sets costing thousands of real dollars to make.

After all of that, I thought to myself — surely it can’t be that hard to actually make a good server. And it turns out it wasn’t that hard. I started working on Roo Prisons at the very end of January, made the map in about 30 minutes, had a few of my friends get on the server I hosted locally to build the mines, warps, and a few other things like outposts, KOTH, etc. The basic version of the server was up in less than a week, which we called pre-pre-alpha.