Feedback about recent changes

It's a default moderative action to lock a thread when it is to be expected the moderative notice won't be followed or commented on, which mostly happens when someone insists on bringing real life politics into a debate, attacking other people on the basis of that. You are generally welcome to open new threads for any locked ones, we just generally try to avoid to use content deletion as a moderative action, so people can make their own picture. That would have been the only other remedy in that case to stop people interacting with that comment.

Given you have - in opposite to the other thread - asked about specific changes, I asked my colleague working on balance to comment here, which he'll do as soon as he gets time. Please note that other thread was not specific to profession intertwining to begin with and had tons of different matters discussed, many of which weren't related directly to game mechanics either.

Eco being a multiplayer game is also never intended to be an excuse for anything, but just a fact that seems to sometimes be forgotten when changes are talked about. We have these constantly communicated three design pillars all our development revolves around in addition to the base premise that players are a vital part themselves in managing their gameplay through the governance systems and communication - especially where issues arise due to the action or inaction of other players. We do constantly mention that, so players know what they can expect for Eco's development, which I think is only fair.

That does also include keeping things as configurable as possible for server admins to make their own unique experiences on their servers, as Eco also wants to be a framework for exactly that as that is the best way to allow the most cool things to happen in a society simulation. Such things are purposefully not set in stone by gameplay mechanics but intended to be dealt with by communication. We specificially implemented the discord tutorial step so communities can organize and always recommend to actually do that. An out-of-game communication system should always be used, it makes things much easier.

Hi and thank you for taking the time to come with this feedback!

I would like to clarify a few things just from the offset, there is a general goal to partially guarantee that each profession and specialty(skill) is relative throughout the game progression and this does require hard locks in different ways.

On the subject of smelting being hard locked behind farming is not entirely true though as it is locked behind Gathering which is a general collection skill available at minute 0 of the cycle start while it is semi artificial it is also a necessary requirement to involve basic non direct metal linear professions in the progression loop through out the cycle and at the same time using more of the misc. materials that don't necessarily get used in the capacity we would like to see.

As for the difficulty of trading and the quantified time it takes to get setup and workable for each of the starting professions is something we hope to remedy a bit with 10.3 as we have a new blockset that allows you to get on your feet quicker and get a store/house up much faster and cheaper than previously.

Now some current limitations due to the game not being finished does show a bit of its ugly face in these requirements as we are constantly changing, fixing and upgrading both the front end side of things (which is what the users see) but also on the internal side of the code which handles how the things work the way they do specifically for recipes and crafting as the subject is relative to the matter the entire architecture for the techtree is limited by the profession requirement being singular input currently (as in you can only have 1 recipe with 1 restriction + level so in our case say Clay Molds only craftable by Gathering,1 it does not support having different collab/presets using other requirements) and this is a fault/limitation that we have recently realized that we need to rework a bit but these things takes time and we have different staff working on separate systems and we are also a fairly small studio and have to coordinate and pick our fights accordingly (this is planned to change so we can have these collab settings actually change what professions are making what to allow players a better preset for what their servers fits with).

But as we have a lot of things planned for our roadmap to 1.0 you might see things that make little sense or maybe just feels weirdly prioritised i'll defer to the later statement in above paragraph and stay tuned to the changes coming (such as maintenance and repair and general balance changes).

As an outro i'll add that I agree with some of the feedback and it is something we are seriously taking to heart but will also note that we are building a framework and want to allow the customization (with ease) to fit most servers and communities so do not hesitate to add suggestions to our feedback list for any settings or adjustment you feel that might be missing that would help your experience.