Great taxation law in Eco

A great aspect of the game Eco by Strange Loop Games is the ability to make laws. This one is about a clever and quite sound taxation law aimed at frequent problems on servers.

By the way I write and speak french, mostly. This is why writing this blog is a challenge and you'll see weird sentences...

About laws in Eco

I am always curious to see people write down laws in Eco. There are so many options and opportunities to better balance the server, incentives to care for the forests, easy ways to avoid animal extinction, plan roads and dense town centers, etc. There are also risks. I mean, I have known my lot of iron and food shortages because some player fiddled with smoke or skill-related laws. Even a complete shutdown of all land activities (harvesting, digging) because of a missing condition in a law. Remember to vote...and read before you do!

There are resources on the official discord server of Eco if you begin with law making and you want good examples. However, making laws requires a minimal level of knowledge about how the game works. I mean by this a clear understanding of what cause problems (potential problems) and which mechanisms will be affected by the new law. For instance, if you don't know about fertilizers, you can easily make laws to prevent littering that cripples the ability to make compost fertilizers. If people are leaving the server and you don't really know why, giving money to players based on number of hours in-game is likely to precipitate the failure of your server. Understanding the real cause of problems can be tricky if you don't take into account the context of Eco and bluntly apply general theories of the real world.

This previous paragraph is why I particularly like the following law. It calls for specific aspects of the game and address some problems directly at their roots.

Ze taxation law

The following value-added tax law was written by Spouke and posted first on the official discord server of Eco. 

So basically, when you sell, the law takes 16% of your sales and put in into a variable called VATCredit. However if you buy something, the law puts 16% of the currency involved and deduce it from your VATCredit. Each time there is a trade and your VATCredit is positive, the law takes it all as taxes and reset VATCredit to 0. 

Basically, if you buy as much as you sell, you won't pay any tax. But if you sell more, 16% of your profits is taken.

What is the fuss about this law ? Well it has at least 3 advantages.

First advantage: continuous

The taxation law works on a continuous basis. Daily taxes based on total wealth, for example, tend to create episodes of stress, since the richest players will attempt to spend their extra money before the tax happen. They may rile the players around for not putting enough things on sale and it gives opportunities to temporary rise in prices. Scheduled taxes are companions of tax avoidance strategies such as putting your assets in other currencies and hoarding expensive items to sale them back later. Basically, the advantage here is taxes are continuous, so you avoid staggered impacts on your community.

Second advantage: promotes flow

The second advantage is this tax doesn't aim at the richest players directly, but rather the process by which they get rich. I have read so many comments about how players felt they were punished for being "successful". Bouhou...getting rich in Eco is easy : never buy and sell a lot. If your skill is rare or unique, you may buy more and compensate with large profit margins: you'll get rich without effort.

Eco is best viewed as a continuous flow of resources where players buy the resources needed for their craft and where there are as many opportunities for exchanges as possible. Stores in this case are the nodes of a network : their goal is to mediate the flow of basic resources (in and out) and crafted items (in and out). A good flow makes a robust community able to take new players without driving out the old ones and absorb large discrepancy in gaming time between players.

A good example of problems related to flow is given by many bricklaying enthusiasts at the tier 2 era. Since bricks are quite cheap to produce and are easily made alone by masons, the latter can quickly make hundreds of bricks. Once they have so many bricks, they make a store that sells bricks and buy few trinkets in return. Or maybe a bit of clay...at a very low price. However, the stockpiles stay full simply because players around are not able to sell enough items, will not engage in exploitation trade given by the brick/clay price, or do not have enough currency to pay for them. Many will prefer stores with smallest profit margins and the opportunity to bring logs and sand in exchange for lumber and glass: they will go where a flow is possible. 

Therefore, a central advantage of this law is that people will try to reduce taxes paid by buying resources and items as well. Their store will naturally convert in a way that creates a flow of resources. More players will have a chance to contribute to the crafting effort of items that are needed in high amount or are only available at rare stores.

Third advantage: reduce inequity created by nepotism

The third advantage of the law is that it aims to break the unfair benefits of close teams, picking skills that feed into each others and alternate accounts. While playing with your friends and sharing stockpiles seems like a good thing, it also make it easy to put in place an unidirectional resource flow where only your close ally is providing the basic resources and your team make money by selling crafted items without intention to buy items and resources in return. For many players, close teams of friends are morally fair in the sense that anyone can invite their friends to play. But the collaborative mechanic of Eco and the required balanced network of continuous exchanges just doesn't agree...

Picking skills that feed into each others has draw a lot more attention in the server ads on discord. In the last month, I have seen more administrators put forward rules that prevent players to pick both smelting and mechanics, for example. In this popular combination of skills, a player can funnel all the iron into his own projects, then sell machines, trucks and tools at the highest price possible. Miners and smelters settled around have no chance to contribute fairly, however, and either leave or attempt to create competition instead of collaboration. Advanced smelting and industry or cooking and skills from both butchery and farming professions are other common examples. Instead of restrictions and rules, this law makes it financially less interesting to combine them in order to gain a an advantage on sales, but combining them is still possible to make personal projects.

Alternate accounts, bots or mules are additional accounts used by the same player. They are considered cheating compared to the expected one player / one in-game avatar. However, they can be tolerated when their use compensate for a missing skill in the community or when your neighbors are bad players. In some case, their impact is very small, but they quickly become a problem when they are actively used to avoid collaboration and create trade patterns that benefit the player. In that case, it gives a similar effect to closed teams of friends.

In conclusion, no one can guarantee this law will work on your server. It is, however, a shining example of a law targeting specific problems, with a sound knowledge of how the game works and without the need to unilaterally forbid and control what players choose to do in-game.