The roadmap is showing what we currently work on and a voting page for all the features we plan to include in the game until final release, the order of the items does NOT represent if or when they are implemented into the game - that's also written on the roadmap page. We don't have a long-term roadmap, we are introducing the planned features for the next patches via our dev-newsletters. Decision on what is implemented next takes serveral things into account, not only the roadmap votes. We also regularily put in small stages of one of the roadmap items, so quite some of them already have a lot of it implemented, but not everything.

Sorry to hear you don't seem to like the new ore concept - it'll introduce a lot more things to do and new professions. Eco is a game that tries to resemble realism, which the new features offer.

For fixing tediousness for single player, we'll have new configuration options for resource needs and crafting time, too.

Awsomeman1089

Thanks for the information about the roadmap. The part I don't like about the new ore system is that you would have to spend a lot of time building stuff just to get rid of the waste. That is super boring with tailings already. It feels just like smelting except you have to do it over and over.

Eco is meant to simulate real life to a certain degree and ecology is one of the basic game pillars. I know that it can be very tedious for players to store those things away, but on bigger servers that ususally works quite good with multiple people collaborating. For sure, in singleplayer we'll give you the option to adjust resource needs and therefore waste production, but in the end there will be a use of storing the new waste products - because in opposite to tailings they WILL be dangerous and not storing will cause major problems.

Sure, we need to balance the game between fun and realism and we do that - but waste is a major problem in real life and there just is no way for the some of the new waste products to be used. In the end it is supposed to be tedious to make you think twice if you really need that much of a specific product. I know that given the professions and goods not being nearly completed it doesn't feel like that in the moment, but in the end it hopefully will. Quite some people play Eco due the ecological part and would like even more and more dangerous waste products that actually have impact - and that is also what our vision is. I know that not everyone will like that, but the game is based on three basic pillars and designed around them and getting the design to resemble those is the top most priority while developing the game, as this makes the game what it is.

We'll introduce uses for some of the waste products, though, so you'll only be left with things you really cannot use. You'll also get different amounts and different waste types out of using differente processing machinery - so you will have alternatives. Probably take a look on the video when it gets presented, that'll show you how it works exactly. I cannot tell you every single detail yet, as those could still change.

And sure, we'll need to adapt the amount of the waste products, too.

FungusGungus

I think the problem is that they have a roadmap suggestion and haven’t bothered to work on the #1 thing on there

We just can't. The game is not in a state where it could support the fast chunkloading that would be needed for trains - it was clear to us that this will be one of the last and most optional features of all the things we want to do, no matter how many votes it gets. Votes alone don't decide what is implemented, they tell us what people think would be really cool. And trains would also be really cool for us. But there is no way to implement them at the moment, that is something you might see after the end of early access. I've already told our web developer that he might want to clarify what the roadmap is - a way to show what you find most cool to us and a way to show you what we plan to implement from us, not a vote on what we do next. I'm quite sure that will be part of the website relaunch that is planned for the future.

spiritmammoth

I live in a city founded on extensive mining. There are huge mine dumps, and of course they are ugly and very little grows near them 50 years later. The rivers downstream are polluted still. Every so often a dam near the mines breaks and kills more of the environment.

There are entire companies whose sole job it is to transport the tailings and waste from the mines.

Don't worry, you have the realism quite well modeled.

And it's still a lot of fun.

That's what i see working best ingame too. On some servers i play on some players that are loving mining, mine stuff, sell it and offer tailings storage as a company for the whole server. That works best and the miners are mostly rich given what they sell the ores for and take for the tailings. Still, i'm totally aware not every server has such dedicated people that are into mining anyway and don't feel any tediousness, so we'll surely try to balance it out so it is fun for most people.

hitzu

Oh, don't please use the "realism" argument in the game full of cubes, when the ecosistem we should learn not to destroy happily destroys itself, the game where you have to build robots in order to make a light bulb, where the mass magically appears or disappears based on the skills of whoever turn the ON button on a workbench, where the law of energy coservation doesn't work, where some animals population reproduces in the seconds after raid hunting, where the more people observe the rocks the more they forget about gravity and solid surfaces, where human footprints traverse through layers of rock and soil from the deep underground to appear on the surface, where the world depth depends on the ocean depth, where the planet's curvature doesn't depend on its size, where water can be basically dug out, where wild plants can grow in hostile environment but the same cultivated plants can't, where all gases and liquids can travel any large distance trough pipes, but only if the pipe is made out of the same metal the whole its length... I can go on an on. Yes, some of them are bugs, but most of them are game simplifications purposefully made against realism. So please, don't use "realism" argument to defend a game mechanic. The only thing matter is whether or not it serves its purpose in a fun and interesting way. If not - it's a gameplay disaster.

I've see two premature deaths of two servers because of how tedious and unfun the mining, ore extraction and tilling storing currently is. And most probably I'm not gonna play maybe a year or how long it will take to release 9.0, but my guts tell me I will be bored even faster with now two types of tiling! Sofisticated politics? No! Thou shall dig! Dig or die! :D

That's not my argument but the reason for the choices we make and therefore i need to make this aware to you. I cannot refrain from telling you this, given it's the exact reason why we do some things. Our design is based around realism, with simplifications of course, but many of them over the course of development will be gone, too. Obviously for different reasons some parts are more realistic while some are less. The sweeping hands talent for example is as unrealistic as the carry weights - but still way more realistic than other games offer. The production chains is something we want to make more realistic than other things, giving the benefit of a use for a lot of different professions and the economy and the impact for ecology - which are two important pillars of the game content.

Sure, you don't need robots to make light bulbs, but in the future we are going to introduce different tiers of machinery to do things. For the ore processing we'll introduce that and have several machines representing different stages in technology. We do not have this for light bulbs - but that's a yet.

Crafting working like it is is obviously a simplification in game design. But it's a different thing than a production chain. We actually thought of having more immersive crafting methods and you might see some of these in the future. But yes, we decided against crafting being a tedious thing, because we are happy with how it works and that it is fun. Protecting ecology is MEANT to be a tedious thing, because in long term you are supposed to need to make a choice: Do i really need these additional resources in this amount? Is it worth it? Can i keep up with keeping the ecology safe? Will i need to get help in doing so? Is there a place where i can dump the stuff without much work but also without much harm? Am i just going to make a mess and let others clean up behind me or hope it will not destroy my world? Those are real life chocies. I totally know that noone has these thoughts for tailings at the moment, but those aren't dangerous. And at the moment the complete game is not yet complete enough to allow a choice of if you need something. You just need it. This won't stay like that forever. Please keep in mind this is early access and not everything we want to do is done yet. But we know what we want to do and are implementing that in stages. So the game will develop in a direction of more realism in total. That it is not yet as realistic as we want it to be IS the reason why we improve on that and listing things that are not yet realistic as counter-argument to realism just doesn't work, because a lot of the stuff you listed is not meant to stay like that. Not everything will be equally realistic, as we need to do tradeoffs. But there are game design pillars where we want to do less tradeoffs, as the game is meant to make you think and work hard or find a solution to work around it. You can dump your waste somewhere - but might get problems with other players. This is intended!

The issue with the trampled ground above mines is fixed in 8.2, by the way.

And i do feel sorry and bad that you don't seem to like the direction the game is heading towards - that is what i got out of your messages. But does that mean the game is bad? I totally love the government system and will make great use of it. It is the only game i know of that allows to do that and i totally love it for doing so. It's why i started playing Eco. And i totally love having complicated and extended production chains. (GregTech, anyone?) And i love to have to work hard and together with others to get faster and constantly asking myself what impact this and that will have on me, others, the economy and the environment and how will government react? And there are other players that do think exactly the same. We need to balance that, but we also need to make a design decision on what kind of game we want to make. We cannot make a game that everyone likes, so we are focusing on what our vision and design concepts for Eco are. And the new mining system resembles that. Not everyone will like the results, but it's still a game you can play and have fun if you are into it - just like with any other game.

This does not mean we would not try to fix obvious issues. 8.2 will have a lot of improvements for the mining vehicles and this will go on for 9.0 to make them a viable choice, cause i'm well aware that they are very hard to steer and most people just go back to manual mining. But it does mean that things will ultimately get more complex, require thoughts and awareness and collaboration to succeed in the most optimal way. (Whatever that way may be)

Our goal is not to make Eco a game that everyone likes and loves to play. Our goal is to make Eco the game we want it to be. That will cause new players to be interested and others to no longer be interested. But what goals we have is and has ever been quite clear, we are communicating those pillars regularily. The game is about ecology, economy and government first and foremost. It's meant to be teaching, it's meant to be based off collaboration to reach goals. And those parts are meant to be as realistic as possible and having as much options as possible. While obviously other parts of the game will be focused on bringing the best general user experience you can have. But as i said, the experience you should have when playing eco and working with waste products IS tediousness and the need to think about what you are doing. If we would make all waste products being the resources for some other products it would loose all it importance and not be a interesting mechanic at all. You would produce the waste and produce the product out of it. That's it. That will not teach you anything about ecology and raise no awareness. You just put up some craft orders and ultimately forget that waste is any danger.

FungusGungus

They might be something to look forward to, but he called it an optional feature, like it’s not confirmed

The list on the roadmap is a list of things we ultimately WANT to have in the game, not what WILL be in the game. It seems this is not clear enough, so i'll make sure that our web developers adapt what the roadmap says for this to be understandable.

The roadmap is there to show you where Eco could head to, what we think that we want to implement over the course of development - not only early access, but in general. Eco will never be stopped to be developed and get more extensive as long as people play it. You likely see new major features in five years, just like now. There is unlimited possibilities on what you can add to Eco given it resembles real life and real life is limitless. Trains are a thing we think is cool and want to have in the game. But it's also one of the hardest and most time consuming things to do. But that does not mean it will be in the game soon or at all, nor does it mean it will never be in the game. And as far as i read the roadmap it's not stating that either. Where the dishonest advertising is supposed to be is therefore a mystery for me - and i'm from Germany, we hate dishonest advertising and get very itchy about that.

When you look at the roadmap, treat it as a list of features we want to do over the course of the development and let you vote if you agree with us and how much. But that's it. We get your feedback on what we think and this is one of the factors (an important one!) on which we decide what to do with the game. But this is not some kind of "The Community develops a game" experiment. (Which would be totally cool, but given that everyone likes different things would probably be a game i would not like to play) The game still has game designers that ultimately decide how the game develops and when.

You are not voting for us to be forced to implement this or that and the more votes, the faster. That is not what the roadmap is about. It's about you being able to see what we want in the game and tell us if you also would like to have that. Probably "roadmap" was a bad choice to name it, but that was done way before i even played Eco. I can propose to change that, if that clears things up.

A good example for all that is government stuff. It only has 300 or so votes, but still is getting developed very extensively. Why? Because it is one of the three major design pillars for Eco and therefore deemed very important. If we would not care about it, Eco would not be Eco. Eco is advertised to have those systems, it's advertised as a game to make you think, resemble real life systems, encouraging collaboration and having laws and government to set boundaries to the economy hitting the ecology. Eco is not advertised to have trains. Also, while i know not many people actively use the law systems - all players on multiplayer servers are ultimately affected by them and will have to deal with them. So it's a lot more players using them than have voted - even though passively. But that is also real life. How many of us do actually do politics? How many do still vote? Not too much. And in comparison: How many of us are affected by laws and government? Everyone.

hitzu

Good luck with that. I just remind you that in real life you have no exit button as an option to leave boredom and giving feedback to life kinda makes no sense.

That's totally clear. But if that exit button would be a reason to stop us, we wouldn't have needed to develop Eco at all but could instead have made some kind of 20 minutes lasting game. Thankfully, the systems we implement are not boring for everyone.

FungusGungus

The false advertising perception comes from calling it a roadmap even though it neither follows no particular order of popularity nor is anything even guaranteed. Just because it doesn’t say the listed items will be in the game doesn’t mean that anyone viewing it would infer that it is. It seems heavily implied that these features are going to be in the game, especially given the screenshots descriptions, and it seems to me it’s not just me that initially thought that. The roadmap was one of the reasons I bought the game, because the most popular voted things on there were things I thought would be fun to play with. I don’t understand the point of a roadmap if you’re going to do it in the order that the game devs want to and seemingly completely ignore all the things the people want. I get having a plan that you want to follow but pleasing the community is important for retention, but I doubt there’s even a strong plan, I remember seeing an old video from eco of an orca in the game, but that isn’t anywhere anymore. I’m never excited for updates because they rarely add anything anyone asked for.

As i said, i'm also quite unhappy with how it was named, but that was long before my time. I've forwarded that feedback and we'll see what the people caring about it will decide for it for the future.

But you also need to see that this roadmap does not state dates for the features anywhere like a normal roadmap would do. I'm sorry that your decision to buy the game was mostly due to the roadmap and two of the top-most voted features and that those are not yet in the game, but i'm still wondering how people could get the feeling that the only thing we do is working the roadmap from top to bottom, we never communicated we would do that. Actually, at least i didn't even think people would expect that, as i never would myself. When i started playing Eco and saw the roadmap, i read through the points, found a lot of them interesting and some not, voted for my favourites (which are all more to the bottom of the page) and forgot of the roadmap. I never saw it as something that tells me when things will come, as i never saw dates on it. I see that this needs to be made more clear and already forwarded that.

On the other hand, a lot of the roadmap parts ARE implemented and therefore also things what people want:

#1 Trains: On the backburner due to technical reasons and no forcing necessity to have them.

#2 Bugs and Performance: Being worked on since two patches and going on, due to being a everlasting thing. But we did put focus solely on this for two patches now.

#3 Pipes: Implemented basically. Oil pipes will come later and making sewage an important problem will be worked on together with or after the new waste products.

#4 Waste: Garbage is implemented. More Waste Products is in 9.0, as Recycling will be. Composting is implemented basically.

#5 Mining: Elevators are implemented. Big machinery is on the backburner to be implemented later, but is being worked on. This is due to it ever was supposed to ship in multiple stages - the real big machines coming when we do have a lot of stuff to do in the game.

#6 Boats: On the backburner, due to time, priority and technical reasons.

#7 Farming: Vehicles are implemented. Overhauling Farming is something we'll be likely working on in the nearer future.

#8 Housing: Being worked on right now and long-term. You'll likely see the first progress for that with new building materials in 9.0,

#9 Taming Animals: Animal Husbandry is planned for 10.0.

#10 Technical Objects: Being in development, some of them already being in the game, but not yet usable.

#11 Terrain: Implemented in 8.0. Nameable areas coming later with another patch. This is a long-term project, too, biomes will further increase and 9.0 will have a lot of new animals, even insects. Orcas are a part of this task and they haven't been cancelled!

#12 Economy: Implemented despite renting house space. We definately want to do that in a future patch.

#13 Logging: On the backburner, but all big vehicles have been worked on from the art side.

#14 Skills: Sleep Mode is implemented. Profession work is part of 9.0 and all ongoing patches.

#15 Modding: On the backburner, and yes we definately need to look into that more.

#16 Government: Implemented in 9.0, different government stages either in 9.0 or later on, depending on time.

#17 Culture: Not yet concepted, but with the government update we'll start having the first buildings that have a use and give benefits, so that is a precursor to that.

#18 Criminal Justice: Kickstarter Milestone, requiring law system to be flashed out first, which will happen in 9.0.

#19 Ecosystem: More influence being implemented in 9.0. The web part of it will come back later on with some minor updates focused on the educational side of the game.

#20 Clothing: Part of the profession work that needs to be done first.

#21 Vehicles: Implemented, this was the stage for the vehicles that are now in the game.

I actually feel we've been implementing a lot of the features on the roadmap, both on the side with high as well on the side with lower vote count. But that's what we want to do - we want to get everything of that in the game catering to ALL of the community. I still don't think we have failed to do so. What do you think? What are the things you want implemented, that the community wants? ff it's part of the roadmap, we have been likely working on it, as you can see above.

hitzu

And since my other comment was deleted for no reason I quit. Started with hope, ended regretting.

I did not remove any comment. The last removed comment as of mod log was from 28 days ago, which was a mere advertising post. I know that a comment is missing though, as i actually replied to it this morning with my response being gone, too. No idea where it has gone, i'm not experienced in reddit, so i don't know where i could look that up.

I know it was about you wishing us good luck, considering there is an exit button for games when they become boring and there is no way to give feedback to reallife or something like that.

I pretty much responded that we're aware of this, but if that would stop us from developing the game, we could have done one of the 20 minute round games, which we didn't. I also said, that thankfully not everyone is bored by the mechanics we implement.

All in all, as i stated - the game is not for everyone but it is clearly communicated about what the game is. I'm sorry you don't like to seem the direction, but i'm glad that a lot of people do like it and am one of them.

FungusGungus

I think my point is not many people really know what’s going on, and that it feels like the devs don’t listen at all, since large features that are heavily wanted don’t really get addressed. I mean clearly it’s not just me that thinks that, quite a few posts here discussions on the game are about how the roadmap is ignored. It feels like there isn’t much to do, and almost every game goes the same as the last one, it feels like there isn’t much to discover in the game, or mechanics to really play with.

I still don't know which large features you are talking about explicitly, despite boats which for sure have been asked for since a long time, but i also already stated why those are not top priority right now. We're constantly developing the game and constantly posting updates about what we are working on and thinking. Scrolling through the posts i also do not find anything else than boats being an obvious shared request.

9.0 will definately expand your options in gameplay quite a bit. Keep an eye out for more news on it in the following weeks.

LoSboccacc

where it could support the fast chunkloading that would be needed for trains

just make... like... slow trains?

Do you really want trains that are around as fast if not slower (to avoid issues) than trucks that are extremely expensive and limited to tracks?

LoSboccacc

I was honestly half trolling. but I think the fascination with trains is the complex system required to organize and run them, not their speed. but who am I? just do a poll, the player base can help!

I can see horrible accidents happening already. ;)

Snoberry

I'd be more than happy with trains being as fast as if not a little faster than trucks. I don't care how expensive they are and whether or not they're limited to tracks as long as they hold vast quantities of material and look amazing. TRAINS ARE THE BEST.

Keep in mind IRL freight trains don't usually go between 50-60mph. Speed isn't their thing. It's higher efficiency transit of mass quantities of goods. Steel on steel is way more efficient than rubber on asphalt. Smaller coefficient of friction. Plus train engines are capable of far more power/torque on a more cost effective scale than trucks.

I'll keep that in mind.