[2019] Feedback after playing 250 hours during April

So as said in a title I have played 250 hours during april in Eco. It was my first time I did that and I had a very good time. First of all I had a good time because I like to explore mechanics of a game and I like a crafting games. Here is my feedback:

Stores - are ruining a socialization on early stages of the game same as auto-craft. People don't even need to be online to make a trade, they don't need to socialize to make a trade, they don't even need to ask if there is an item they want to buy because you can highlight an item and the game will show you all stores where its may be bough or sold.
(I think the store should be moved in late game and stores should be a profession so only a professional store master can craft different kinds of stores and their quipment and on early stages we need some kind of 1x1 trade window like in WoW)
Skill Scrolls - ruining an early economy. People sell infinite amount of scrolls and earn a credit from air.
(I think that skill scrolls has to be removed from game, and instead only skill book has to give a skill and do it once. So every time person want to sell it, they will need to craft it. That will be fair)
Auto-craft - ruining an early game because people start multi-task and earn things faster and progressing faster to next "era". And because of auto-craft they can abuse system and build many crafting stations to speed up a process. So that abuse economy too because you can produce more than other player per moment of time.
(I think that auto-craft should be a 'automation' perk for late game crafting stations like Assembly Line or similar, but for early stage crafting station the player should be standing in front of station and watching a long cast bar while they craft something. This is will slow down a will save a game from over-production. Its too easy to produce early items right now and usually the server is spammed with logs, chairs and things in early game)
Bricklaying - is underpowered. Its less valuable as Lumber which has same tier. You can do lumber efficiently in almost any biome because you only need 1 material - Logs, but Bricklaying require 2/3 items to craft it - Clay&Mortar and Shale. In addition to that, Logs can be moved with 20 in hands and Clay only 1. So this is disbalance too.
(I think we need to add special Mortar receipt from Shale and make Bricks craftable only from Clay+Morta)

I have more ideas to share but want to start from these.

External link →

Hey there,
thanks for your feedback. I'll also give you some dev-feedback :)

Stores:

As some people have already said, they are an essential feature of Eco to be able to bring people with different playtimes, timezones and other things together in a very basic, but at least some form of collaboration. Eco is not a MMO and forced socialisation is not what we want - we want to promote collaboration, in an as easy as possible way. Sure, not everyone will talk in the chat, not everyone wants to do, but still everyone can participate in basic collaboration by selling their goods and taking part in the economy. A game like Eco - that you can shutdown at any time and still tries to resemble real-life in quite some ways - couldn't work if we didn't offer options for players that do not have as much time to actually participate and have fun in the game. So while i understand your suggestion and see where you come from, it just doesn't fit the game as we are envisioning it.

Skill Scrolls:

We actually lately debated this in the team and while i personally agree with your opinion and have changed this on my servers to work like you suggested to benefit the economy, the vision of the game is that knowledge should be an "easy" to distribute in the sense of free knowledge that is reached in a collaborative way for everyone. We may remove the claim papers as rewards from them and give them a different way to be distributed and we are also working on making research more of a community project in general that benefits all players instead of being an individual thing for future releases, but we won't change how Skill Scrolls and Books work until then.

Autocraft:

I'm personally a fan of doing things manually and in a immersive way but given that Eco is already a very complex game and for a lot of people too grindy we are not planning to do manual crafting. We do have plans to require "upkeep" for workbenches (like you need to exchange the sawblade for the sawmill every now and then) and we want to try out some staged machines, that require some kind of manual labour but can be upgraded to better machines later on.

Bricklaying:

I sort of agree. Thing is we try to make products using realistic ingredients as far as we have them in the game and given that it'll ever be easier to make lumber. In the end it's a choice of design and probably could get an resemblence of importance to use, given you don't see that many lumber houses anymore, which is not only but also due to the fact, that bricks have better properties to build stuff depending on where you are and what you want to do. But i'll give that suggestion to the team to have a look on how we could balance it more.

Greetings,
Dennis

Community Manager

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