[2022] What do you think would help this game catch on?

We actually openly state that Eco is not intended to have any kind of 'end'. Also, that fire hurts! :D

I'm in touch with Kye personally pretty regularly - that also applies to Monzun, Nid and any other interested modder that reaches out or that I notice needs help.

I'm not a wizard, but I'm doing my best to support them. They're actually all extremely helpful and friendly to me as well and even supporting me with changes at their mods that I use on our official servers. (And test in playtests) I think we have a very respectful, friendly and mutually beneficial relationship there (I'd just call them friends), so my view on that is severely different.

For suggestions our suggestion tracker is what ultimately has the highest chance: https://github.com/StrangeLoopGames/EcoSuggestions
It will likely be replaced by a different system in the future.

How it basically works is that we're picking a few smaller and QoL suggestions every Update to address and whenever we work on a new feature we're searching it for user input that has been made that is relevant to that feature, then we line the featureset out.

So yes, it is not very likely we're introducing a major game system someone suggested based on just that suggestion, but it's likely we're weaving suggestions around game systems we in some kind have already planned into them.

That's one of the few things we're categorically not doing in the traditional sense, but there is mechanics that support such mechanics in economical and political competition.

That's already possible and 10.0 will also add the last mentioned point.

That's what we introduced exhaustion limit feature for, but it's not used as much as we thought. It's always difficult to bring together people that wish to play a lot with people that wish to play limited times - basically only respective servers can solve that and the options for that are there.

The elevator desync has finally been fixed in 9.6. As far as filters go, that is planned but still in design phase, as it goes into a bit of automation, something we only want to have in Eco very low-key and probably at cost. I do fully understand that to you that might only be a simple QoL feature, but in terms of design it's a bit more than that.

I can also assure you that we are aware of pretty much every public post (as I actually read all of them), but that we indeed need to prioritize things based mostly on internal factors and that we do have a planning scope and a roadmap of the things we want to do. Not every issue that to one seems like a major problem does actually to the majority of players either and we are still in a position where we sometimes will need to decide if we put one more person on developing a feature or on fixing issues.

As I mentioned in a different post, we are mostly integrating player suggestions when we actually work on features the suggestions were made around rather than introducing completley new systems based only on a suggestion - we already have a hell lot of things planned ourselves, it is hence not always obvious when player feedback has actually been implemented, as we adjust our features when we develop them around the feedback that has been given in regards to such or similar features.

That is planned but relies on a whole new master list system and the decision on if we want to make servers register with a SLG account (as we think about introducing server achievements) and if we expand it so far that players can rate and report servers (which they can already do via mail for ToS violations). People working on that would also be mostly from the backend team, which is extremely small, so that's a major feature.

Mind to go into more detail? Our goal actually is to slow down the game, so what you describe is not necessarily bad in my view.

Do you have an idea? :)

We do work on a lot of features at the same time, but most of those projects are bigger ones where different people work on different tasks, hence our major updates (9.0, 10.0) are typically the ones with major reworks, while the minor ones contain a single feature, bug fixes and adjustments, depending on the effort required for features. That being said we are working towards getting our internal management into a state that would allow a different approach and I personally prefer e.g. ONIs approach as well.

As for social presence that is stuff that is typically considered Marketing and it might surprise you, but we've on purpose been reluctant for active Marketing, as our priority at the current time is to use our resources on the game development itself. What I can tell you is that we are going to take a look on options for that towards release of 10.0. We currently don't have staff that could do this and the budget is mostly used for actual development.

I've always been part-time Community Manager and in that role specifically my job is to take care about our existing players and channels, deal with official servers, modders, community servers as well as customer support and any kind of business requests. That's already a lot, but I also am responsible for everything educational related, involved in Quality Assurance and several other things I need to do all at the same time, hence typical "Marketing" or "Content Creation" tasks are not part of that. Additionally, since half a year I'm working full-time, but mainly in Production as Associate Producer.

This "Jack of All Trades" thing is pretty common for supervising staff at indie studios, doing several roles at once. We'll definitely look out for dedicated people for that in the future, once we feel Eco is ready for that.

I'm also personally not a marketing guy, I prefer to talk openly and as part of the community. But as I said, we got something coming for that.

We've lately been adding a lot of such sliders and we'll continue to do where we see the need and compatibility with our design goals. For the Big Shovel specifically, that was actually once part of Eco, but we removed it on purpose, as it didn't fit our design goals. Every slider we introduce also means additional source of problems, more problems with players seeing unexpected stuff and maintenance. Hence some things we leave up to modifications that will later be displayed on servers and move them into a specific 'modded' category on the list.

I know that you might find the shovelling tedious - but that's exactly what we wanted you to feel in the beginning. And we promised to our kickstarter backers that we are developing the game of our vision - not adapt to a mass-market, loosing things we think is important for giving a specific idea. We've already integrated lots of options to adapt the game to your liking, but unfortunately not everything will make it to the base game - we always welcome every modification though and love when people use it, even though I would never use any of the 'easy mode' mods myself, as I'm personally convinced that the 'grind' is innate part of Eco, as is it's multiplayer focus on societal issues and the skill system requiring people to specialize.

Given Germany alone has 16 of those - one for each state, I fear that will be a hard task.

It was always part of our vision that you can use Eco to make whatever you want with it, so the ability to modify nearly everything will never go away. We just need to find a balance between what do we actually add as 'official option' and what do we not.

That is also relevant for our achievement system in Update 10.0 - both for players and servers. Some settings will disqualify the server and the player from getting such achievements and "Big Shovel" would certainly be one of them. Of course we could add additional systems to specify what official options exactly give eligibility for what achievements, but we always try to keep things as easy and straightfoward as possible to start with.

I also do totally understand that many of these things we need to think about aren't public knowledge and hence cannot be taken into account by players when they make their ideas - the achievement system for example hasn't gotten any public information so far, as it's simply in a very early phase still, but a lot in Eco is connected with other systems and so we need to take a look at the greater picture with every decision.

As I've stated before, we don't intend to have any kind of that type of PvP in Eco - sorry.