Case studies of successful Eco servers

Tired of people giving you "tips" for your server while they never tried them, or worse, used them on a single server that failed ? This one is for you: detailed observations about two successful servers that lasted for several cycles.

I have roamed public servers of Eco since 2018 and played on or closely followed dozens of worlds: I am definitively past a serious hundred servers by now. I enjoyed a lot Guardian Gamings and few well managed Austrian and american servers. But I must say two servers really stand out in this crowd. This article is about them and what they have in common.

First thing first, there are very interesting scenarios in Eco and many can be called successful. But the successful nature of the cases here is because they were able to keep a high amount of active players for at least 30 days. A server is not considered successful here if he had 40 people at the beginning and it's population dwindled to 5 players after 15 days. Moreover, a successful server in my opinion is one where the community manages to keep a high number of players who spend an average gaming time less than the other players.

Sometimes I wonder...do the scenarios we put in place favor game-addicted people?

1. General description of cases

The first case is called "Le Village" and is mostly run by a player named Spouke, althought I don't want to undermine the positive contribution of players like Dark_NoTv, Apocalis, Biscuit and CrazyA here. They made 5 cycles so far, over a time period of 7 months. This server usually featured a single and very organized city with clear road designs and administrative sections (ex.: bank and parks) located at different places around the city. The server is based in Europe.

The second case is run by Plex and Powermax. They made few small cycles under different names, and recently emerged as "Les Franquois", bringing all their know-how for another 3 cycles. This is a primarly European/Canadian server based in Europe. The server also had a single city, but cycle 2 had a multi-city structure featuring a capital island, two islands with an independent government and a single island free of laws (almost free). Cycle 3 returned to a one city scenario.

2. Server settings

Both servers had cycles with medium collaboration or high collaboration settings. Collaboration settings are related to the number of specialty players accumulated over time and thus are closely linked to the number of people as well as the length of the game you expect. However, higher collaborative settings tend to worsen the scenario if your players are choosing a competitive approach. In short, collaborative settings tend to increase with the number of players and time, but should decrease if your players have not yet learned what it means to collaborate.

I recommend medium settings if you have no idea how many people will come and if you aim for 30 days. If you make good publicity and at least 10 people say they are ready to join before you open the server, consider high collaborative settings. But again, consider high settings if these players understand what it takes to play in a collaborative fashion, which doesn't mean trading by the way.

As an example, the first cycle of Les Franquois kept an active population about 20 players for 65 days at medium settings, but the final satisfaction survey revealed a majority of players suggesting higher collaboration setting. No surprise here: people had learned to work together for 65 days. Cycle 2 had about 40 active players at high collaboration settings for the first 20 days and players began to discuss even higher collaboration settings after that. In cycle 3, they choose to make a law preventing players from taking 4 or more specialization stars. However, the law was quickly removed as many collaborative players had taken a break from the game new and competitive players began to show on the server.

Figure 1. Activity of Les Franquois, cycle 1. This server lasted until day 65.

3. Map

Le Village kept small maps (mostly 0.52 km), but went higher with each cycle. This required a very high level of organisation to make sure space was used well with so many active players. Their solution was to map the entire downtown with land papers created before the server opening. Players were then allowed to buy lands later. The result is a full map that gave great pictures. With about 20 active people in a small world, they were also able to affect CO2 levels and had to plan accordingly. This led to an original system of automatic pollution quotas.

It should be noted by novice world designer that mapping the world with land papers previous to server opening requires a very high understanding of the game and an untainted goal to satisfy every type of players. Sadly, most of the time, this method leads to the admins' benefit  at the expense of visitors. I myself steer clear of these worlds and look back a few days later if they survived, and they don't. I believe this is linked to a phase in the learning curve of Eco admins where they experienced difficulties in the previous game and seek to apply a robust controlled environnement as a solution. Hopefully, le Village had the right kind of management.

Figure 2. Example of pre-set map on a failed world. The admin section in purple was originally made of smaller squares of different colors but the large purple edit shows who are real owners of the claims.

Les Franquois were on the upper side of map sizes between 2 and 3 km. The multi cities scenario took place on a 4km map. Creating land papers was considered cheating by the admins and management of the map was made by creating road districts on which no one could claim. Players are naturally drawn to roads and settling went well. In cycle 2, island leaders created settling districts arranged in blocks of 4x4 along roads districts with the clear intention of making 2 or more high density areas on their respective islands. These settling districts were cosmetic and no law enforced them: players were simply asked to settle there first. This worked well, but island leaders were carefully guided at this step by 3 veteran admins.

About large space, I am not convinced the large 4 km size was useful in les Franquois cycle 2, since at least 65% of the useful land mass map was still uncharted after 40 days (we are talking about 15 all-day players and about 40 active players during 5 weeks). You also have to consider carefully the risks of having a big map (people live too far from each other and huge biomes far apart). Hopefully, island leaders promoted settling in high density areas (zones of 400 m in diameter or less). A mod allowed players to teleport between islands for the 30 first days (using a teleport obelisk). These two solutions eliminated many distance-related problems that usually plague maps bigger than 2 km.

These two cases suggest that tight organisation is required when the ratio of land mass to players is small. A simpler loose organisation with road districts works when players have more breathing space and time. Creating districts is fairly quick and easy if you have an hour and a good starting community: you don't need to cheat your tables and town hall. Also, it seems useless to consider maps bigger than 2 km unless you have an exceptionally high amount of active players.

4. Research

In short, both servers used community and paced research : there was only one player allowed to craft skill books (admin or elected) and he was unlocking scrolls in a way that serves the community. The role was made possible with a simple law preventing craft unless the player had the required title or demographic. This librarian was expected to release the scrolls according to a calendar or once community objectives were achieved. Crafting was also a community effort for both servers: the librarian bought research papers or resources from players and created workparties too.

Scrolls were available at the research station, owned by the main treasure, for a price that usually ranged from 1/5 (high tier) to 1/20 (low tier) their value. Both servers also released the books according to their tier. This meant, and this is important, that smelting was made available far later than what you see on most servers. Tier 2 scrolls were usually available after day 3 or 5, while Les Franquois in cycle 2 pushed this up to 10 days. The server kept their players, despite this 10 days delay and with at least 15 players with a daily gaming time well above 8 hours. This lead to a lot of terraforming and buildings in cities: people with less time were able to work on their home and those with more time dig their infrastructure and worked on roads.

You may want to look at the technological tier to plan your own research calendar. As for community goals, both servers had objectives related to road path, availability of upgrade modules and completion of administrative buildings. 

To sum up research here, I have though for a long time that the way research is handled is a strong indicator of the quality of a server. It doesn't come as a surprise here that both these successful servers choose collaborative, central and paced research linked to community objectives.

5. Economy

Common currency

I really like the personal credits barter period in Eco and I have seen its benefits on new players and development of trust. The barter period is, in my mind, a key element in understanding the true role of trade and why accumulating money is not a good objective in Eco. However, both cases had a lot of success and I admit they used a common currency from the start (although it was not always minted money). The common currency allowed many balancing laws and early governmental contracts for a more complex and nuanced structure.

I am not done...I will return with ideas for the barter period...long live player stone pebbles !

Le Village put in place minted fiat money from the start in all the cycles I had the chance to observe. 

In the cycle 1 and 3, Powermax, the admin at Les Franquois, proposed his own personal currency and ruled the server with laws and contracts using Powermax credits. This trick, the Lord's money, works well with admins or natural leaders of small teams. He later allowed players to change their Powermax credits for the official currency once a mint was available. While we can appreciate the skills of Powermax to establish a stable economy without cheating currency from the start, it is still a common currency in many ways. It also made thing difficult for him to play as a normal player. But he is Powermax after all.

My instincts now tell me that we could have even more success in worlds where there is no minted money and where small clusters of players progressively adopt one or few Lord's money to improve their neighborhood until minted money is naturally available.

Minimum prices

Putting rules for price is a popular way to prevent dumping in Eco servers. Typically, a player with more time and who get his own resources will gather a large stock of items. He will next lower their price at a level that is under the cost of production, thereby dumping them in the market. This tends to make other players leave because of unfair competition, especially when players have less time to play. Likewise, players who own monopoly can set their store to buy resources at a very low price, thereby making other players work for them in an unfair way.

Both servers had a relatively balanced price between basic resources that you'll also find on many experienced worlds. For instance, when wood is worth 1 credit, stones and crops will typically range in the 0.5 region while medium and large animals will be 16 credits and 32 credits respectively.

Le Village had no rules on price, but there were suggestions. The compact community could react quickly to unfair changes and the clever administrative structure allowed good control over unfair prices. For instance, if the government buys iron or stone road at 2 credits, it is less likely other players will set their price under this level. In fact, Spouke's exceptional skills as an administrator and the use of government spending to control prices were key elements to support the economy in Le Village. This is an essential element failed by many worlds in Eco.

*Edit october 2022: Now le Village just finished it's 6th cycle and well known heavy and competitive players joined in the last game The wise council of elected leaders decided to put laws and impose a minimum limit to price of resources after witnessing several cases of exploitation and attempts at dumping. Server's activity was faltering and it went up again. On another spin off of Les Franquois, players have a law where buyers attempting to get resources under the minimal price are taxed by the difference between this minimal price and what they paid.

Les Franquois had a reference sheets for players containing the minimal prices of basic resources that players can gather, such as rocks, wood, plant fibers, carcasses, etc. Note these were not the official prices, but the lowest price possible. There was a strict rule to not go under this level and moderators watched prices regularly. Surveillance was hard as population grew through the cycles and players tested the system by lowering prices by a dime or a cent. It's only a cent, they won't warn me. Despite regular frustration about prices (which are frequent in Eco), the minimal prices system prevented many attempts at agressive dumping of items (ex.: road blocks, meat, iron).

Dumping is a true problem in Eco and a possible cause is the large gaming time difference between players and the small populations (50 is a small number of people). Both cases act upon this problem using two different solutions. They also both used the government as a key consumer of goods when making community projects. In the future, I would like to see more experiments using exhaustion. But anyway, I feel the keyword here is to try to do something about it.

Taxes and money circulation

Cycles in Le Village were shining examples of competent economy management by the admin Spouke. The server made rich use of laws and taxes. Balance between government vs personal holdings was carefully monitored.  

Fig 3. Government holding vs personal wealth in cycle 2 of Le Village. The government was constantly spending money through public contracts but money went back via taxes. Notice the smooth balance obtained. The spike around day 16 was a "day without taxes" event.

Although equally successful, Les Franquois has a more diversified picture. For instance Power did not used taxes in cycle 1, but he was able to return funds to the government through various projets, like research and a very successful government owned module upgrader. In cycle 2, an original and complex money and minting tax structure was put in place by Power and it will require another post. But taxes (from 10% to to 50%) were definitively used.

Both servers experimented the AVT tax system  (added value tax) which was published by Spouke. In short, this law stores in a local variable the amount of money obtained from selling an buying items. Each time a player sells more than he buys, tax apply to the extra sales. So this law doesn't really aim sales, but rather the lack of equilibrium between selling and buying. This system made closed teams and skills that feed into each other more difficult and promoted exchanges and healthier networks between players. The AVT worked well with tax percentages of 10%, 15% and 20%. It was quite common to hear players say things like: I will buy things from you because the money will end up in the government's pockets anyway. As with any tax system, you have to look for tax evasion such as direct transfer and direct "gifts". When you tax sales, always look to tax contracts, leasing fees and direct transfers as well. Direct tax on sales were also tested. 

I feel many servers suffer from sound money management. Just think about this: in real life, if you have money, it is easy to find a business to spend it. In Eco, there are many cases where you have money in your account, but no one is even remotely interested in selling you resources because they keep them for their personal projet. So money in Eco is not the same as in real life. Moreover, Eco has a clear non zero sum game component and reciprocal exchanges, rather than outright sales, are the real target of healthy worlds. Both cases here understood this objective and used money as a tool to promote resources exchanges through a relatively stable equilibrium between the price of basic resources and low margins on crafted items.

Community contracts

The cases here indicate that, overall, public call to contributions and strategic division of projects through contracts (in-game on on discord) is a good way to manage a community. In short, the government writes about the objective (ex.: make an electric plant) and leave time for players to prepare. In some cases, players were allowed to propose their own design and prices. Then, contracts are made using the contract board or via discord. Le Village and the first experiments of Les Franquois all featured careful planning and efforts to make contracts available to as many players as possible.

Interestingly, things changed for Les Franquois at cycle 2: new island leaders were now in charge of their local projects and used different management strategies. One city in particular failed miserably at contract management and we were able to see the return of nepotism as well as common inequity and frustration issues that plague a lot of Eco worlds.

Following this approach, I suspect servers could have more success by making some contracts only available to players who are at risk of leaving (to little income in the last days, too little time played compared to the average, XP bonus lower than median, etc.)

6. Modules

Both servers experimented with upgrade module stores owned by the government. Note that no law on Les Franquois prevented players from crafting and selling their modules, but the government store became a focus point, probably because there was more chance to find every modules there and the profit margins were either small or near zero. Le Village made personal selling of modules illegal and they were crafted and sold at a government contraction. Modules are a major cause of inequity on public servers and the compound profit margin once you get to the level 4 module really hurts the game of players with less time and less experience of the game.

These stores contributed to a certain stability, especially on les Franquois during cycle 1 where the server was able to keep a surprisingly high amount of newcomers while bringing back others in the game shortly after the module store was build. Every newcomers at this point were spending their welcome money on new modules and quickly became active members of the community. They later made money back by selling basic resources at the module store. 

Interestingly, things changed in the multi city scenario in cycle 2 and there was a clear correlation between the general health of a city and the percentage of it's players with the latest modules (which is the result of module distribution efforts). The most successful island was the only one with an official module store and the next was where the leader was actively encouraging module distribution. In cycle 3, the solution of an upgrade store for everyone was chosen after few days and again, inequity due to module availability returned to a low level.

7. Government structure

The cases are similar in the sense that admins, or players designated by the admins, were in charge of the game at the beginning. Laws were made before the server opening or shortly after by dedicated players. Both cases also held elections once titles were available. About 2 to 5 elected officials typically ruled for 4 to 7 days. The admins always had an option to intervene in case of problems. In the multi-city scenario, cities had only one elected official and they chose 1 to 3 players to assist them (officially and unofficially). The world rules and server monitoring were made by 3 admins.

Briefly, a common aspect of these successful cases is the early presence of laws as well as players with the official role to manage the community. It should be noted that teams which work from distance in real life usually take longer to find leaders. However, you do not have this kind of time in Eco : the day 1 to day 3 period is crucial to find new citizens and you have people who may not use the same communication tools and are not playing at the same time. This is why admins should make it a priority to find players willing to take charge of their community as soon as possible, or else suffer from a lack of leadership and vision.

8. Communication

Both servers strongly encouraged the use of Discord for text and vocal communication (ex.: repeated messages in-game as well). In both cases, discord was neatly organized in channels for specific purposes (ex.: public announcement for admins and officials, general discussions, funny screenshots, special requests for items, useful links, etc.) Both servers linked game chat to a channel on discord and had many players in voice channel as well.

Players used discord on a regular basis. Teams who wanted to discuss privately could use an extra channel, so they stayed in the same discord community. For any major in-game event, server-related information and crisis, text messages were send to players. As said before, many public contracts were managed with discord channels. On that note, I found interesting that cycle 2 of Les Franquois featured different island leaders and various communication-related problems arose depending on their ability to consult and promote discussion on discord.

9. Special events

Both servers created teasers and special events before the game. For instance, there was a video teaser before the beginning of cycle 5 in le Village and a interviews of city officials (real voices, but avatar speaking in-game inside the press building...really nice). Both servers also featured pictures of the map and districts before the opening.

Another example of event outside the game was seen at Le Village. They made a weekly newspaper featuring funny facts about the server as well as pictures of buildings and funny moments. The journalists randomly accused the government of various mischief with made-up stories, but using in-game references or discussions. They added advertising as well.

In-game events were many. They ranged from competitions (ex.: the rabbit contest in Les Franquois) to long term realistic events in-game (ex.: the labyrinth in Le Village). They were official and non-official contests for original building creations. Here is the huge modern hotel from Fripouille (my favorite on cycle 1) and my toaster (with it's smelting factory in the basement and the smoke coming from between the toasts)

Fig 4 Examples of big budget and small budget projects to break the routine in Eco.

10. Rules

Both servers, like many others, had written rules of conduct on discord and recruited moderators. Players were banned for misconduct on both servers. Banning in both case was done in two steps, beginning with a temporary ban to let the player rest, then final blocking if mediation failed. Eco servers are great places for drama and it's not a bad idea to be extra careful starting from day 3 when players begin to accumulate long nights without sleep.

Multiple accounts were not allowed and were monitored. There were no rules against teams, but the strong sense of community on Le Village coupled with the AVT tax virtually eliminated negative closed-loop teams. On Les Franquois, the high number of players coupled with contracts and AVT helped as well.

Both servers enforced realistic designs and town planning rules such as no floating structures and hiding of stockpiles (behind buildings, shielded or underground). Also, both enforced realistic use of waterwheel (when Eco's version still allowed them to swing in the air without water). The government in Les Franquois built underground and public aqueduct to allow every industrial player easy access to water (instead of fighting for land with access to water). Le Village had similar community projects as well. These rules usually provided more opportunity for public projects, increased production of items and promoted collective endeavors. Since cities needed a lot of material for these projects, city managers could set prices at the government stores that became references for everyone on the server.

Fig 5. Realistic rules still allowed fun structures such as the "Trojan dog" from A6D-A7X

11. Mods

In general, there was none to very few changes from the original game in terms of stockpile distance or number of items you could get in your hands. These types of changes tend to make the game faster and I have seen them increase the gap between players with different daily gaming time, which was not in the agenda for both servers.

As for mods, Elixir was installed on both servers at some time as well. The excellent mod with bees also added "flavour" to the game.

Le Village fiddled with the value of food in it's last cycle (increasing calories for tier 3 and 4) and added a mod with crushed coal as a new item. Normal coal could no longer be used as fuel and provided an additional role for miners in the first part of the game.

Les Franquois modded the vehicules in an original way: Plex and Powermax changed the fuel consumption and load size of vehicules according to their color. For instance, in blue trucks or blue carts, you could put more stuff. On the other hand, the vehicles needed more calories to pull or more fuel to work. In the last cycle with a 4 km map, teleports were introduced during the T1 and T2 era. They were removed after 30 days, once asphalt roads and trucks were readily available across the map.

12. Conclusion

This article is already too long, but I tried to insist on key elements in each of the previous paragraphs. 

Many admins state they won't interfere or need laws on their server. Others spawn money at day 1, distribute it, lock laws and money in place and hope for the best (lock and load). Now look at these servers on Eco right now, pick a dozen randomly on day 1 and see how they fare 10 days later. What we can conclude for sure is that successful servers don't just happen: they require skill, a good understanding of the game and people engaged in the process. In shot, they require collaborative energy or pressure.

From my ongoing exploration of Eco worlds, I can say there were other successful servers who shared many similarities with the cases here. Guided/community research, module availability and sound government spending seems to be key elements. It is interesting to note that everyone of them is linked to the idea of balance between players and giving fair chances (not equal, but fair). But let's not dwell...

Finally, I encourage new admins with some ambition for their server to begin their journey by sharing the management burden as much as they can. Have these players invest a small amount of time on welcome structures and ideas to foster collaboration. And most of all, don't listen to too much advice that is not backed by graphics, pictures, clear calculations and objective facts.

- We did this on another server and it worked well. We should do the same here.

- How many players were on that server?

- We were 20 at first, but at the end me and my friend destroyed the asteroid without the whiners

- I see...