Review of Golden Age Server

If you're looking for a server run by people with perspective, maturity, and consistency — keep looking.

Seth presents himself as the omnipotent overseer, shrugging off concerns unless they come with “hard data,” all while applying rules with a level of double-standard artistry that should be studied. Community feedback? Ignored. Balance? Improvised. Accountability? Not for him.

Then there’s Meekles — a self-appointed moral compass who treats leadership like a stage for virtue signaling, not stewardship. Every disagreement turns into a performance piece, and every system gets filtered through the lens of someone who's clearly been overprotected from how real group dynamics work. If you’re not aligned with his worldview, don’t expect fair treatment

The server could’ve been great. The players had ambition. But leadership turned it into a sandbox for ego instead of community.

As a player on Golden Age Eco for 5 seasons and a moderator for the Discord community, I would like to provide the reader with some context for the above remarks.

The only overinflated ego in the room this (unprecedented) cycle was the Vitric-webhead-canadajebus group. They joined on Day 24 of the previous cycle, and 10 days into this cycle are billing themselves as "LONG-TERM" players, despite playing for as much time as one typical cycle takes us. We are on our 19th cycle.

The primary cause of this player's unpleasant experience on this server was their ambition to dominate the world, and the fact that world wasn't standing still for that. Vitric and one of our regulars created twin towns,
- used laws to control which citizens could receive rep (always the 2 mayors plus 2-3 rotating artists),
- used laws to prevent negative rep being given to those citizens,
- strongly encouraged their citizens to give max rep to the opposite town daily,
- ran a complete dictatorship where the citizens didn't even have the ability to propose elections (in fact, the constitutions gave rights to the named players instead of their roles as Mayor etc.),
- tithed products and controlled the flow of their iron into the rest of the world,
- attempted to strongarm other towns into joining with a "it'll be nicer if you join willingly than if you don't" threat,
- forcibly annexed one strategically located town that two other towns could have formed a country with,
- "declared war" on another town for minting another currency,
- brushed it off as "role-playing" when they were first asked about it a few days ago,
- and tried to reverse victim-offender when they were called out on it the last couple days.

The reason these folks weren't immediately banned is that there are no server rules against their specific actions. While we don't welcome this behavior at all, it was fully enabled by the players - their citizens voted for constitutions that gave them no rights, and non-citizens supplied them with materials (and I was one). I believe their citizens found the appeal of carefully designed cities and the various "quality of life" laws more important in the moment than their rights.

Concurrently, there have been concerns about some modding of recipes to include leather hide. The modding was done at the request of last season's butchers, who accumulated an excessive amount. This season, concerns were expressed about Tier 3 materials all requiring leather hides at some level, and the scarcity of hides or imbalance of meat supply to hide supply. The majority of those expressions took a turn into personal attacks on the admin (as you can see a flavor of here) and attempts to guilt the admin into doing it by conflating an imbalance with "something really busted" that merited a mid-cycle fix. They also veered into patronizing territory, expressing regret that the server owner didn't rectify their "mistake", and that they "would have forgiven [him] for the mistake", and attempted to use community-wide polls to prove that the imbalance was a major issue.

So yes, this is not a server that welcomes immature behavior or attempts to strongarm the admin. This is also not a server where the majority of players will stand for world domination by a dictatorship that gives its citizens no rights. If that, combined with the general awesomeness described in other reviews, appeals to you, come join us!