[President] Last 10 days, a sordid farewell

Day 2,683, 14:52 • Published in Sweden Sweden • by Valnad
I hereby announce that I will abstain from running for re-election in the president elections, April 5th 2015.



Earlier this month, when I announced my 9th candidacy as President of Sweden and Snow, I did so with the goal to preserve democracy in Sweden and help achieve political stability that minimize future threats from hostile military coups.

Three weeks later I have to admit that Sweden may not need my help at all.

We have a decent set of resources, pretty much no enemies and an impressive stack of solid MPPs. We have even improved our economy, balancing rather slim expenses by increasing our tax income and remaining in a state of peace. One might argue that our biggest problem is that we seem to have no problems at all.

The world is in limbo right now, and I truly believe that we may never have gotten the "Spring rush" missions had it not been for the failure of the dictatorship change and resource wars.

The world wars are long gone. In a game where nations can never truly lose anything permanently, a swap of resources is a change of such magnitude that it cannot be tested or evaluated prior to being released to the community. Basically, admins tossed a quarter and hoped that it would land on the right side.

Unfortunately, it didn’t.

Most large countries now have a very decent set of resources safely secured in their core regions, and what they lack can often be found close by, in much weaker countries. Even Sweden can nowadays enjoy a decent set of production bonuses, especially if you consider our comparably small population. If Sweden had been a bit more organized, we could probably have had an even better set of bonuses from region swaps with some of our not-so-possessive neighbors.

All in all, the world is much too safe for my liking. This results in an extremely boring meta game right now. Even the trolls have gone silent.

Without conflict, eRepublik will inevitably wither down and die.

The game is designed and built around conflict. Not from the start, where we had both a political module and economy module that attracted different player types and helped create a more diverse community. Preferably, admins would revert these modules back to the V1 version. But I doubt that it could be done now. It may be too late to invest in anything other than the war module. There are 2-3 year old accounts that have never even seen another module in live action (aside frome tha fight button module).

To tell a 2 year old eRepublikan that “we used to have a stock market and each nation had their own currency value” is like trying to convince your kid that cell phones, home computers and the internet didn’t even exist when you were their age.

I know that this has already been said time and time again, in various ways and in lots of languages, and I apologize to all readers for repeating the process. But in my defense, I must admit that I doubt that we have seen such a complete lack of interest - even for the war module - from such a broad spectrum of players and nationalities. Ever?

In Sweden we're actually finding ourselves in a situation where the government must turn down a few decent MPP offers. We are allied with most of Asteria, most of Pacifica, the former star of Sirius plus a range of other countries. Had it been up to me, we might have been allied with Spain as well.

With our current MPP stack, I truly doubt that a hostile country would be able to invade and keep hold of our territories. At least not without funneling tons of CO’s through stolen VISA card transactions. But I invite Italy to have a go at it - we desperately need a war and have to invent conflicts to get anywhere at all (*nudge* MaineCoon *nudge😉.

To be able to write that and mean it, given the history of oppression from Asgard’s enemies in recent years, is perhaps a bit ironic. This country was permanently wiped for the lion part of 2 entire years.

We wanted stability, but what did we get?



Tranquility.

Simply put, my dear gents, I don’t want to be invited to dance after the music has already stopped playing.

I hope instead that you start looking for a new, funky street musician.
Someone who can find something charming in this new political landscape and start building from that and inspire the rest of us. At this point, I can only see the flawed remains of something irreparably broken and that is not a mentality suited for a president.

I promised myself so many times not to rant like this in public media. Makes me look too much like Iain Keers.

And yet here we are. A sad day, it is.



Valnadicious
President for 10 more days
Keeper of The Cake
Loser of The Faith