In Eco by Strange Loop Games, most servers have 30 days to destroy the asteroid. However, it is not rare for worlds to be taken over by enthusiast players who attempt to defeat it within a week.
I'll start with an image: it is a profile taken from a community crippled by a rushing team.
You can see in blue the activity on the server (actions per hour). While the activity remains high, at day 3, more citizens arrived in the server (green line) but did not translate into increased activity. Moreover the number of active citizens (red) is falling rapidly : something may be wrong. In fact, competitive behaviors are already palpable in-game.
Behind this graph is the story of 3 friends who logged in a server described as a "friendly place where we can learn and collaborate" with as asteroid of 45 days. They unlocked pottery and glassworking at day 2, gave gifts to the admin and put in place trades with high profit margins for the others. On day 4, they were trading steam trucks in exchange for land papers. The new admin was so happy to see all the cool toys, that he missed what was happening. A week later, his new friends were complaining about the fact they need to do everything alone.
Rushing in Eco is referred as rapid unlocking of skills (by research) and key items (ex.: upgrade modules, blast furnace). This is typically done by playing each day a number of hours that is much higher than the average play time on the server. Small teams of players who share stockpiles may rush to complete specific projects too. So rushing is first a question of balance and expectations: the same pace can be considered rushing on one server and normal on another. Although a 15 days asteroid vs 45 days asteroid should give a hint...
Technological differences between players naturally introduce an increasing amount of inequity since those with access to better upgrade modules and machines can achieve more in the same amount of time. Quickly, the idea that everyone has the same chance is not holding. Rushers also benefit from other advantages such as the burst of interest and activity around new items. In short, there is more to inequity in Eco that you may see.
To avoid rushing, no need to go to war: "protection" of the server is mostly a matter of putting guidelines and sharing a common view about how this specific world could go. On the other hand, we cannot dismiss the problem by saying rushers deserve to have more because they worked harder or better. At least, not without ignoring basic motivation and collaboration tenets as well as some unique game mechanics of Eco.
Most detrimental case of rushing are coupled with focus on individual goals and failure to contribute to the community around. In fact, those who are putting every bit of brainpower in the rush are not likely to stop to think about how they can make their skills available through trade and contracts or find ways to make the community around them better. Since Eco has a strong cooperative requirement, it is expected we have a fair chance to contribute and work together. When independent rushers are putting an excessive amount of hours in the game while the rest have real life jobs and attend school, the ideas of collaboration fade. In this context, I even heard players talking about how rushers created a pressure on the server and how they would woke at night to thing about their next move or add few hours to catch up. This is bad, but we are often looking at cases of players who adopt an independent approach and perhaps don't see yet the impact of their actions in the rather unique context of Eco.
This is a different story when your server face an organized team of players who plan to use their advantage to lure others toward greedy trade patterns. Constant demands to new players, manipulation and bullying stem from a competitive and ill-oriented approach. While you go to sleep at the end of day 1, your perfectly good server of 30 active players can easily be hurt beyond repair by a small team of 2 rushers. The worse part is they can also create the next generation of players who will think this is how we succeed in Eco.
If we compare rushing to a disease, we can say the first cause of rushing is a large discrepancy in play time between players. Close teams of friends sharing stockpiles and alternate avatar also behave like single players with a lot of time and many more skills than the average citizen. The gap between players seems even greater when server settings and mods allow rushers to make things rapidly.
Next, symptoms of rushing are rapid unlock of skills, huge economic inequity and unavailability of advanced items. Early rush can quickly cripple the organization of collaboration on the server. With more research and more land papers, rushers can claim large area of strategic lands. Heavier symptoms are high profit margins and trading patterns intended to fuel rapid advancement of rushers at the expense of the other players.
The first step in Eco is always information and communication. Your server and discord channel could have a clear description of the expected progression rate. You may refer to technological eras and community goals to explain your vision. You can even put a range of hours per day by setting the exhaustion parameter. As an admin and server manager, you have the right to put in place these community guidelines. They will lower the chance of recruiting some players but they are likely those you want to avoid in the first place. Overall, you might end up with people with similar expectations and less friction on the long term. I wrote similar, not identical : diversity is good.
Information can also be available in-game with a law that periodically sends an individual message to each players about time played (ex.: in the last 24 hours). You can also create alerts using laws and demographics to identify those who go over a specific value.
For one, saying to a player that he spend 12 hours on the game in the last 24 hours is a favor. #VideoGameAddiction
Rushing behaviors are expected in Eco since there is a positive feedback loop where the more you play, the more you get and the more you can do. The easiest and fastest way to break this loop is to insert checkpoints in the progress of the server. Research and crafts are good target for this.
For instance, you can prevent research of certain skills unless the server reaches a specific day or unless certain community conditions are met. One outstanding server I noticed few months ago is making skills available by tier at a public library (Le Village). The thing is, the skills are not released until the community provide research papers for all the books of that tier and not before a specific day (ex.: smelting, bricklaying, glassworking, milling, cooking and bakery together). So on top of pacing research, they eliminated competition for selling scrolls, parallel crafts and even created an extra positive interdependence structure between smelter, farmers, masons and cooks.
A small group of citizens can easily make a town hall at day 1, without cheating, and make laws to achieve this goal. Similar checkpoints preventing the craft of key items (ex: bloomery, iron bars, assembly line, lasers) have been used to protect against rushers and wasteful crafts. The good thing from this is some rushers began to spend time building roads and helping their neighbors: different structures brings different behaviors.
My favorite pacing law since 9.0 prevents research of smelting, bricklaying and glassworking before day 3 (up to 6 on slower servers). You can couple it with road requirement or similar community goals. It allows a community to relax and establish a solid base with quality campfire food, stone roads, housing, etc. Early items are easier to get and you avoid wasteful smelting and destructive lumber rush by novice carpenters and smelters.
I found out that early pacing laws coupled with a clear server description practically eliminate rushers: they simply choose another server where fast progression is welcome or where there are no protection in place.
A problem with rushing is it creates a huge economic inequity gap. Rushers have advanced tools and recipes to make items cheaper. When they trade, it is easy to retain high profit margins that make them advance even faster. A new server may have serious troubles to build an active economy in this context.
If a common currency is in place and you didn't already distributed large amount of currency to every player, it is possible to create a store that buys key items. The items can then be distributed to players who struggle via a distribution station or stores open to a specific demographic (ex.: demographic based on citizen age or avatar level). Upgrade modules and research scrolls are particularly powerful economic equalizers here. Money distribution is very useful when coupled with real work like this and it is even better if it aims to reduce economic inequity.
Players can also reduce economic inequity by sharing access to crafting tables. This way, even those who struggle or play less have a chance to work with the best tools available on the server. In this context, funding via the distribution of a common currency can help speed up such projects. I am particularly fond of Fab Labs and community workshops and used this strategy many times.
Rushing players that use their advantageous position to prey on others can be stopped by simple economy-related laws such as laws taxing rich players (with a low threshold). A wealthy server in Eco is all about resource flow and collaboration. One-way accumulation of currency in Eco is detrimental and the goal here is to make excessive wealth unappealing.
The wealth limit is below the price of steam trucks and industrial machines? This is not a problem if your mechanics also buy iron from their neighbors (fairly) and allow resources to flow. By the way, they are not costly at all when your smelters and mechanics play in a collaborative fashion from the start.
I also fell in love with a clever taxation law that directly targets the process by which rushers, close team, alternative accounts and skills that feed into each others bring unfair fiscal advantages. No need to control skills taken by your players! Click on the previous link to see it and learn more about it's effects.
You may settle in a region or a world where a biome is limited. Since rushing players usually have more land papers, they are likely to claim entire strategic areas for themselves. I have seen part of worlds and entire servers crippled because one player manage to claim all the desert in the region, all the land available for wheat or all the mountain area. Once laws are in place, make sure a leader survey key lands and create districts for them. If some lands need to be protected, you can prevent claims altogether or limit the number of claims owned by a single player in the district.
Rushing has negative impacts on servers mostly because Eco remains a game where we are linked to each others and where players expect fair chances to contribute and collaborate. Rushing often comes with independent and competitive behaviors that quickly ruin the mood and fragile communities of the first days.
If you look closely at the means by which rapid progression is possible and target them early, you can protect your server. You can also attempt to alleviate common impacts of rushing using laws and economic-based strategies. In all case, clear information and communicating your expectations about the server is a basic and efficient mean to avoid excessive rushing. Most players just mean well and do not get the complex dynamics happening in Eco, so information and clear boundaries are key.
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