An Open Letter To Andrewkm.

Hello andrew, and fellow users of EcoCityCraft. Let me start this letter off by saying thank you to andrewkm. Thank you for providing a community where I and many others spent countless hours becoming lifelong friends, making great memories, and providing the best economy experience on Minecraft for years. To be honest, I'm pretty sure this server inspired my pursuit into Business Statistics, and I've learned so much about myself from playing here and being an admin here. I know that running a server of this magnitude for 10 years is physically and mentally exhausting, and we all appreciate and cherish the community you have spent so long building and solidifying.

However, I genuinely believe the introduction of magic and ECC tools completely undermines the notion of a 'hardcore economy' and has destroyed the ECC that many of us knew and loved.

Star tools were one hell of a change for ECC when they were introduced. They became the prime way of making money, and all users wanted to own one. The concept of an OP tool has proven to work, because Star Tools didn't break the economy. Although perhaps things were balanced around them, you could still reasonably make decent money with max tools as compared to Star Tools. Secondly, Star Tools were 100% obtainable in-game. Sure, spending real money on XP heavily benefited you and yes, you could technically 'purchase' them, but anyone could obtain them with enough hard work and grinding. The same goes for features; sure, you can purchase them, but I know a TON of users who have MVP+ in donation rank and yet have spent very little of their own money on ECC. It was, for the longest time, completely possible and doable to acquire the best tools and the best features using nothing other than dedication and time.

However, the ECC and Magic tools changed this. Magic tools and ECC tools have two main issues:
1. The gap between Star tools and Magic/ECC tools is MASSIVE, and invalidate star tools.
2. The only way to obtain Magic/ECC Tools is to spend real money. There is no other way.
Max tools and star tools do have a gap, but it's not 6x (for example, one user reported to me about 130k/hr fishing with Magic Rod versus about 25k/hr with the Star Rod).
Sure, you could theoretically spend millions and millions of dollars for users to purchase keys and drops, but the amount of money it would take to acquire even one of these tools far surpasses the in-game balance of the vast majority of the users who play here.
Now that you can simply just buy God Drops, users who have thousands of dollars can just buy tens of God Drops, and acquire the best tools.
Due to the dramatic difference between Star and ECC/Magic tools, the few users who do have these tools can monopolize the economy; the best way to make money is controlled by a few users, and some of these users have generated hundreds of millions in the last few months, far surpassing the highest balances of yesteryear.

Magic/ECC tools, which are only obtainable by spending real money or such large quantities of ECD that basically no one can reasonably obtain with Star Tools, make exponentially more than anything else, and allow users who spend real money to control the economy.

Finally, let's explore a future scenario: Let's say that, over time, due to renting magic tools, people generate enough income to purchase God Drops/Keys off others, and more Magic/ECC tools become a bit more obtainable. What about the people who have poured hundreds of hours into obtaining Star Tools? Is their work completely invalidated because the 'meta' has changed? And how does such inflation impact the economy? If tens to hundreds of millions of dollars becomes the new norm, how is this a hardcore economy server anymore?

Overall, I'm simply saddened and frustrated that the best money generation tools on ECC are essentially locked behind a paywall, and that the few users who can spend thousands of dollars (who, in my opinion, play no fault in this and are simply benefiting from a broken system) to obtain a set of these tools now control the economy. I'm saddened that the years and years of work that people have put into this server are null, and that the community we have so strongly built is being torn apart by the destruction of the main element: the hardcore aspect of the economy. I am not alone in these feelings either, as we have seen many leave in these last few months; surely, this has some part to play.

I want to finish by saying that I love ECC (hell, I'm a Sponsor, and have spent thousands of USD), and that I've been a loyal member of this community for 8 years. All I want to see is for this community to flourish and succeed, but with the introduction of these tools, it just seems the economy is accelerating into a downward spiral, and quite frankly feels like a cashgrab.

-killrdarknes, a longtime loyal ex-ECC player.