New changes in four days! (?)

Day 1,301, 10:59 • Published in United Kingdom United Kingdom • by Danie Fox

"While the gold can be earned during gameplay or bought with real money, buying gold is restricted to certain times and amounts. This is to ensure that eRepublik remains a strategy game rather than a shopping experience." - Alexis Bonte, CEO of eRepublik


There's a worrying article here that details of how the game is about to get much worse in four days. With notable gold spenders advertising for rival games and admitting to account sharing openly in the international media (because they know that their credit cards matter more than the rules) it seems the end of days is drawing nearer. Whilst many people say these changes are 'obiously fake' due to how bad they seem, I ask you to think back to what we would have said if the admin had announced all of this in advance:





Tomorrow, we will give everyone three free grain companies and a free food company. We will take away work skill and the ability to sell raw material companies. We will make Mutual Protection Pacts nothing about Protection, let the API die and use a bot to mass purchase your products and devalue your currency. We will limit you gold transfers per day, remove most of the gold rewards for levelling up, make licenses worthless, make you pay to store your company produce (previously free) and then give RL spenders a secret loyalty programme which you can't know anything about, on top of unlimited wellness packs that allow them to do more damage than 95% of countries.

We will increase productivity repeatedly despite everyone asking us to do the opposite, and not allow presidents to perfrom any meaningful strategy, such as region swaps or retreats. Wars and battles will be never ending and free, with no defensive bonuses of any sort. Newspapers will only be able to publish in your citizenship country. The forums will be removed when we don't want you to moan on them, articles will be deleted for 'public debate' when there is no longer a rule against this, and permabanned accounts can return if we feel like it (see: Emerick). Buying an account is fine as long as you keep spending gold, we will no longer let you see donations so as to find multis and then we will ignore them if other things are happening, such as the weekened.

Organisations will be removed, millitary units will remain useless, and there will be no features to allow co-operation because people don't want to have to 'beg'. Everyone will be allowed to work up to 50 times a day for no extra cost and therefore income taxes will become obsolete. Colonies will become impossible, as will fortifying regions and using any resource far away due to trade routes being required. These will happen in randomly placed updates with no prior warning to anyone, not even presidents. There will be limited information even after they happen, which will then become inaccessible when we decide we don't want to hear you moan anymore.


sadface

What you'd have sai😛

"OBVIOUS FAKE... THIS IS OBVIOUS FAKE... THIS IS OBVIOUS FAKE... THIS IS OBVIOUS FAKE... THIS IS OBVIOUS FAKE... THIS IS OBVIOUS FAKE... THIS IS OBVIOUS FAKE..."

Or maybe you'll say:

"If that happens I quit! We will all quit and stop buying gold and boycott the war module. They'll have to listen to us then!"



Except we won't, will we? Not when we get another juicy new mission. This game will not end with a bang but a whimper. Alexis Bonte was not that long ago counting on increasing the 400,000 player base to over one million... but we're just about to dip below 200K as it is. I'll leave you with another quote from the CEO himself:

"I was even told that 250.000 players was the absolute maximum we could hope to reach for this type of game. Well not only we have more than 1 million registered users (all banned accounts have been excluded from this total), 320.000 play regularly and over 50% of those every day. So thanks to the doubters for encouraging us to prove you wrong 🙂 "