[2022] My feelings for the game

Original Post — Direct link

Now I'd like to start by saying I love this game but it has some issues I keep hoping will get addressed and they never do maybe someone can give me some insight I might be missing or mods that can fix these issues. The game has insane potential but lacks in execution right now, there's a hunter and tailor for example that have no real function outside of being craft bots and no real interesting things to play with compared to miner and engineer, this goes more so for some classes than others, some key features mentioned before such as animal breeding/domestication and boats would be a start to great additions to make those gameplay loops better. We also need more classes but that's only after we've expanded current ones to acceptable levels. Theyve spoken on eco infinite and town bonuses, I feel town bonuses could make a great current addition. I'll come back on this. Water, I believe they recently fixed waterwheels to need water, good start but we need water to be more essential, from drinking (expansive hunger and food system but no water? Why?) To crop farming, this would allow cities to form around water and further cities need robust infrastructure which could be a good project and function well with previously mentioned town bonuses. All in all, cool game that I love and keep coming back to but always disappointed when not playing the "fun" classes (the ones with actual branching tech and interesting growth). I really hope this game manages to pull itself by the bootstraps and solidify it's base gameplay and then from there it could become one of the greats. To strangeloop games, thanks for this interesting experience but don't waste such a beautiful piece of media, keep updating and making it better.

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over 2 years ago - /u/SLG-Dennis - Direct link

My colleague Jens has been working on a total profession and talent overhaul for the last months, so that's already coming, though as always expansion of some professions also necessarily goes along with adding additional content to them, which is a different thing and takes more time, especially since we got other new features as well.

Boats have already been confirmed for 10.0 (for real!) and Animal Husbandry is on the list, but does not have any planned scheduling yet.

We do not plan on introducing a thirst system to Eco. The hunger and food system is there as it has intrinsic value and links to the gameplay loop for it to provide increased skill gain speed and is supplying a whole industry on servers, while water would not do either, but rather be a menial task to do additionally to all other things with little benefit and little value. It surely could get some added importance, but it would never reach the depth the food system already has and does well, so introducing a system for systems sake is not really what we want to do.

Water for farms via aqueducts is a planned thing for a later farming overhaul update, but that's also not scheduled yet.

over 2 years ago - /u/SLG-Dennis - Direct link

Originally posted by salbris

I love this game and have the same qualms. I'm feeling pretty motivated lately to work on a mod to try and rebalance the game, it's recipes, and professions. I really dislike how some professions like fertilizers are required but are almost completely useless. There are similar problems with tailoring. As you said, it seems to stem from everything smelting related being the main path for the game and anything that isn't related to that or food/housing is just not that interesting. Even though tailoring is obviously important to housing it's also a one time cost that basically ends in the mid game. Once people have 3 stars they stop caring about high quality housing unless they are rich and want to splurge.

It also doesn't help that mining is quite interesting. You have to dig a ramp or elevator shaft to the ore and deal with tailings. Tailors can run around and cut grass for a few minutes then sit and craft.

Other games by this point have at least one or 2 really high quality overhaul mods. After doing a bit of modding it looks like the problem is that modding is really time confusing and frustrating. I just spent like 10 hours over the last few days trying to do the most basic thing and even the experts on discord have no idea what's wrong. The documentation from the devs is non-existent and the documentation by dedicated modders is constantly lagging behind the latest releases. I don't blame them, it's a mess right now.

We've only lately begun to massively expand modding capabilitites and start with a documentation, as we originally didn't even plan to do that before the game would be more feature complete and stable - the downside of that is, that it is not feature complete and stable and stuff unavoidably will break often.

over 2 years ago - /u/SLG-Dennis - Direct link

Originally posted by PinkTigerDG

Most of this game relies on players having a cooperate and selfless mindset. My experience is that players tend to profit maximize, which is natural. This works fine in the real world and is just capitalism. Many players do sometimes forget that unlike the real world, people getting poor in a game means they quit and the server dies.

This also reflects to profession picking. Players tend to go for the good and fun professions, effectively making an elite of people with good professions. This again leads to the same outcome as before. The best solution is for players to pick only one good profession and then have the worse professions as secondaries. This is unlikely to happen without ingame restrictions on professions. I have tried it though, playing on a server with a admin setup government with laws restricting certain profession combinations.

It's not that different though, poor people IRL also 'quit' the society - it just has different consequences governments need to deal with and more severe ones they try to avoid with basic securities.

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