[2021] Emerald Veil- Our first failed server (After Action Report)

Agreeing to all of them, but 2.

High Collab is required for any public server that has more than 20 active players. Otherwise you're done with the game in 9 days. It's nothing to do with hardcore. If you want hardcore, you'd want to see my official server config for White Tiger that is quadrupled High Collaboration as well as a Computer Lab Recipe requiring hundred thousands (!) of items - and still finishes day 24.

As far as advice goes:
1. We removed that on purpose as no matter how pricey we made respeccing it was always abused to switch around professions to gain advantage or otherwise impact the economy. It's therefore not coming back. No admin command for it either. Instead we rather work on making all professions equally useful, especially at the beginning.
2. I do totally agree, that's what we build Ecopedia up for.
3. I disagree completely. I'd suggest the other way round. Build organically with low player servers and low collaborations - use this on the maximum high ultra servers instead.

We already have this warning when putting in a specialization star - since Update 8.0 when respeccing was removed ;)

If an Admin really wants the possibility to respec people they can use a mod for that. Most of the commands we have are dev commands and made for what we need internally - and we have no use for such a command, nor any other desire to introduce one as we do not want to encourage people to respec.

I get your opinion on the pre-setup, but we will have to agree to disagree there. The intention of Eco is exactly that to be played out in game with all the consequences you see - they are intended gameplay. You're just skipping a major part of the game.

Big servers do it as progression there is extremely faster and the much higher user count linked with concepts these servers often have due to them being online for countless repeated cycles require it. They often make a government system before the game even starts via Discord based on their experience in the last X cycles, so the process is still done, just outside of the game, then refined more ingame. A progression over several game cycles. For a small public server without a big community behind it it's rather irritating to me when they already setup stuff and i have no say in how government looks, it's not a server i would play on.

A lot of the stuff you mention in the last pargraph is intended as well. Economics and many of the parts are meant to be discovered by you. Our tutorial is only supposed to teach you the basics of how the game works. (And yes, there is still stuff to do) How stuff works out in detail - is yours to discover, including failing. Failing is absolutely intended.