[EN] Eclesiar isn't designed about valuing community

After playing for a few months, I must sadly admit that the way we (open economies) manage our community is ultimately entirely pointless. Geopolitics, diplomacy, NAPs, newspaper wars... all of this is theater. Anyone can throw big, strong, agressive statements, but it is completely irrelevant, because there are fundamental game design issues that make the whole exercice extremely unbalanced. These are not new, and will stay in place for a long time.

Open vs. closed: respective strengh and goals:

Open economies sacrifice immediate profitability for an ability to include new people and help them grow, even if they don't know anyone (IRL) in their current country. Their key driver is demographics, and the ability to help people learn the game and thus be more efficient than a 2 clicker (and hopefully not taking decisions directly sabotaging their whole country).

Closed economies, if properly managed obviously, are all about funneling wealth. They rely on a few (< 5) individuals who are very involved in their community and who know how the game works, and everything else is irrelevant. Their weakness is security: if they lose a key member or if they get invaded on their cores, they crumble and it's hard for them to properly recover. Their strengh is that they literally print >2g worth of goods per NPC per day for literally free.

Then, they can:

1) Funnel these goods on their core members to be extremely hard to defeat (gear progression, virtually unlimited supplies);

2) Sell them to outsiders for gold. Outsiders think they got a good deal, but these goods would still be pure profit even at 25% of the price.

3) Use these goods to get gold (medals) or use the gold from sales to reinvest in new factories, increasing NPC amounts and thus future generation of goods and gold.

You need to cap your tax rates, control your currency to make sure outsiders are in no way profitable, and make sure you are liquid enough to outsustain a potential agressor trying to penetrate your shell, then you're set and you can collect.

Game design weirdness and issues:

A usual assumption when playing games like eclesiar is that they are about community. It's obviously true, to some extent, but eclesiar sadly doesn't really encourage community building.

The main issue is that the incentives to get more active people are not worth the hassle of managing the inactive ones and the grind of helping active people catch up.

You do not need a lot of people to wage wars. You need a few so you can manage different fronts / different timezones more easily, but that's it. For every individual who could help by generating his own resources and his own untradeable medkits, you need months of work to help them gear up & rank up.

Meanwhile, funneling resources allows to more or less ignore stamina limitations (since medkits ultimately can be purchased, AND the historic stockpiles of meds were never turned into untradeable ones), and there is no soft-cap or hard-cap to their use, and obviously gearing up 4 people is much easier than gearing up 300 people (and you have less interpersonal drama to deal with too).

It's been a while

These issues have been here since day 1 and are not going to be fixed, realistically speaking.

You don't need a year of work to soft-cap stamina regeneration.

You do not need a year to disable NPC pollution advantages entirely, at the very least.

You likely do not need a year to make sure that NPC efficiency is correlated to their actual purchasing power (no actual player will work for months without getting anything in return, outside of multies obviously).

These issues have been voiced again and again, even before I started playing. During my months here, I've also added my grain of salt. And honestly, even now, I'm not sure if these issues are ignored because they aren't grasped entirely, or because they're actually considered fine for some reason. And considering some of the remaining rules are sparsely enforced, I'd tend to think they're considered fine, which is an issue for me, as a player interested in game mechanics.

Fundamentaly speaking, eclesiar is designed like a harem fantasy anime: a few very strong overlords with their entourage of servants (NPCs, inactive players, multies, whatever), which feels frankly bad to the rest of the crowd and can partially explain player retention issues, but might make sense economically if the revenue pyramid is akin to a gacha model, aka a very few large spending players, an insufficient amount of light spenders (battle pass...) and a mass of F2Ps. Note that I'm not hostile to economic arguments: we're adults, making and maintaining a game takes time and money, and getting some revenue isn't a sin. I'm just thinking about why it feels frankly bad.

It's not getting better

As a result, I don't think future patches will help. I honestly kinda feel like I've been strung along for a few months with promises of balance, but future ideologies will absolutely not help, without changed issued to the abovementionned fundamental problems. Properly managed closed loops, that have no political dissent, will simply pick the stongest ideology to print more. Open countries, which generally have political pluralism, will inevitably be at least unintentionally hampered by parties picking a mediocre one for the feels, let alone openly sabotaged by insiders working for outsiders.

Considering there are multiple ways to play eclesiar and so this isn't an issue is simply putting one's head in the sand, or being a bad-faith actor. The biggest existing systems, by far, are war and economy, both in terms of features and in terms of player engagement. The rest is theater. And if these modules aren't properly balanced, the whole game suffers (unless you're the one winning from the situation, obviously, I guess).

Final note: this isn't about politics. Politics is a catalyst making painful longstanding issues even less bearable, that's it. And it's useless to name people. These are game design issues. You can't blame people for playing the game optimally, at some point. But if you need examples of successful and properly managed closed loops for your own scientific research, both Saudi Arabia and South Korea are good examples.

Peace