SP and calorie system redesign

[Engimage]

Global issues to be addressed

• High tier building materials are not required
• Good food is often enough to level any skill
• Too much work can be performed by a single individual or a small group of individuals
• Playing 24/7 can lead to disgusting economic lead
• Many tasks can be performed by players not having the professions by bruteforcing calories.
• Early game can be speed runned by bruteforcing common campfire charred food by any profession, removing actual need for a cook.
• Some more

Introducing Stamina

From the beginning one of the main issues in Eco was the ability of a single individual to perform any amounts of work by himself. But we want to encourage people to participate in economy, showing them that reaching the global goal should be a collective effort. However we can see that the win on the majority of servers is actually achieved by 2-3 people no matter the size of the server.

There are several key issues leading to this - the ability to pick enough professions to do so, and the ability to actually perform the required labor by those several people. So the majority of game systems are just bypassed by this. Great examples could be taken from the playtest. I personally did cover all wood needs for the server, while being able to consume 50 stomacks of calories per play day. And I did not play too much mind you.

Here is one idea that can effectively prevent people from abusing this. Stamina.

Stamina is another limiting factor, which along with stomack calories will effectively limit players from performing obscene amounts of work.

The blue circle (house points one) will shrink the same way as food one does, representing the amounts of stamina left for your character. Stamina will be used along with calories while performing any work. If a player has depleted his stamina, he can still perform tasks, but will consume severely more calories on it, like x5.

Then I can see two ways on how the Stamina recovery will work:

1. Stamina will restore over time from 0 to full within 24h of real time. However the amount of work that a player can do within these 24h will depends on housing points.
2. Stamina has a fixed amount of work per full charge, like 10 stomacks. It recovers over time, but the speed of recovery depends on housing points.

Additional features:

• Beds can be used to increase the speed of recovery for your stamina. If a player logs off being in his bed then the bonus will continue applying during his offline time. Logging of otherwise will not retain the bonus restoration speed. This opens up nice RP side of things.

SP experience impact

So SP side of things will change accordingly, excluding housing points from SP gains while performing tasks. This will encourage players to use the best food possible to maximize their learning speed.

What to do with stars and professions

This is something to think about for the next post, which I will do separately. However the whole introduction of Stamina will actually discourage people from working on multiple professions at a time as it will be much more beneficial to focus on a single profession then spreading your effort.

Other benefits of the solution

• New players will be much appreciated as laborers on existing factories as factory owners will need much more product than they can produce themselves
• Great opportunities for economy and competitiveness as there will not be a way to create unmeasurable lead by playing 24/7.
• Building higher tier houses will be actually encouraged at all points of the game
• The whole game progression speed is highly predictable and controllable. You can not just make false assumptions on the pace of the game based on 2-3 individuals that play 24/7 on the 20 man server.
• Even players playing for a limited time per day will be desired on the server and will have their impact on reaching the common goal such as meteorite.
• @WeaselDog Look at your way to stop non-stop working refineries here. However while being a part of the latest playtest I can definitely state that you made a lot of false assumptions in regards to actual issues and their causes. We could probably set up discord call to discuss it if you want real deep analysis of stuff.

Things to consider

• All professions should be rebalanced around this so that every profession can actually work on its own. This is something Eco did never see happen from the start.
• Many costs should be lowered as before this point every delay in the game was artificially created by adding grind to it as opposed to adding other mechanics to play around. All costs should be revised.
• Some people who want to play 20 hours a day will not be pleased. However the Stamina limit might be configurable for a server and there can be some servers that allow high limits. However all that I see from server admins are unsuccessful tries to actually limit the progression by any means which ultimately fail due to "speedrun parties" of communistic friends who ruin economy and overall server experience.

[WeaselDog]

Nice feedback. Thank you for being so thorough. We have all your global issues marked as known issues and we have been in discussion how to address them. Some new mechanics are planned and a concept similar to the Stamina idea has been discussed.

I sent you a message in Discord to discuss the pinged comment.

[sasjafor]

While these suggestions all sound interesting, they would make the problem with server abandonment even worse. Currently, me and only four other players are trying to save SeaOtter, because everyone else just abandoned the server as soon as GiantPanda started a new cycle. The stamina mechanic would make this much worse, as now we just need to do whatever's necessary to still be able to win, which means a lot of work.

[Engimage]

While these suggestions all sound interesting, they would make the problem with server abandonment even worse. Currently, me and only four other players are trying to save SeaOtter, because everyone else just abandoned the server as soon as GiantPanda started a new cycle. The stamina mechanic would make this much worse, as now we just need to do whatever's necessary to still be able to win, which means a lot of work.

Server abandonment usually happens when there are no clear goals. For example meteorite has been destroyed, or is soon to be destroyed and it does not depend on thr player in question. When you feel no envolvement it happens. But if a player feels he is needed for the collective success psychology changes dramatically, and motivation does not go away that easy.

At this moment people ofter abandon servers as they can easily become not competetive which automatically makes their effort useless. With Stamina every player's effort is valuable.

[Dreepa]

I think this is another system that would encourage not playing the game. Fast progress is not an issue with the game, but an issue with the player base on a particular server.

Games that tend to artificially limit player activity always feel either grindy or weirdly constrained (such as browser games with limited activity currency).

The proper way to address this is usually to let people have meaningful interaction that does not progress the world state. Constructing a progression system that is based on game-play gates which requires global events to happen. In a team based game, or MMORPG, such gates are usually derived from the classes players utilize. Maps/levels have blocker that require the appropriate player class to continue.

I would hope there are no new mechanics added that reduce the ease of playing the game even more. The game is already full of limiting systems on every front. I don't think we need more and more and more. It's patchwork design. We need meaningful game-play gates that require qualitative collaboration. Not just numerical collaboration.

I believe the new research system is going in that direction as well.

Just my 2cents

[SatsukiShizuka]

Many above have already stated the valid concerns. Many servers (like Maiestas Haven, the fancy architecture, 60 day meteor, v. high collaboration) are experiencing abandonment as early as Day 3 and again another dropoff just after the discovery of electricity. The abandonment is not because the meteor is destroyed, but that the purpose of their job has disappeared after they've reached the end of their line.

Food points need to become a gate for higher tier production, or a bonus multiplier when converting calories into labor points (the better the nutrition, the less calories needed to be expended for high-quality labor, to denote the brainpower advancement).

Dreepa has already noted the phenomenon and mechanic needed to address this issue. This is where my previous suggestions on culture, war, and player contribution past pure epoch-making technological or infrastructure advancement come into play. While we may have intrinsically meaningful activities now, they are not actually integrated with the mechanics of the game itself. That needs to change.