The problem with eRepublik

Day 3,049, 06:52 • Published in Romania Romania • by Nicolae Crefelean

Instead of a simple comment to this article: eRepublik[.]com where we really are... (BB-code rendering bug here - I linked to the article, and enclosed the whole title with the URL tags but it only picked up the eRep domain - changed it to [.] to trick the BB-code parser)

First of all, Alexis, thank you for reaching out to us.

The overall feeling that "eRepublik is dead" is a constant in years now. Being afraid not to ruin the balance is justified, because of the past of the game. However, everything you said starting with your blog post should be backed with facts. By the way, try to click your own link (to your blog post) in the article to understand what issues we confront with in the eRepublik media and how we have to avoid using "https" in links in various places (articles, comments, shouts etc) just to allow people to reach our links.

Back on topic now. While the "balance" fear is justified, there are a lot of places where eRepublik could've been refined but were ignored in years. The number of characters in article comments are not counted properly, the dreadful "CSRF attack" is still not being properly taken care of, and multiple small bugs ("thousands of paper-cuts") make eRepublik bleed all over the place and no one seems to care. But then we got new buttons.

We need a polished game, a properly balanced and stable guerrilla module, and why not an overkill of attention to the small bits and pieces of every module that would never ruin the balance of the game but make things easier for everyone, from new to old players.

There's no MU storage, there's no custom daily rewards set by the commander(s) for the MU members. How about settings DO rewards based on strength, division, whatever else? The old players are getting tired of manually handling donations that could be so easily automated in-game.

How about a media module that makes more sense? You should love it when you start writing, not hate it because of the poor CSS integration in the preview or the CSRF issue while writing longer articles. Regenerating the token in the back-end and picking up the article content in the front-end automatically would be way more civilized.

How about a proper clean-up of the HTML/CSS/JS? The game gets more and more bloated with stuff that's really really old. I've complained about those things in the past and many of those issues are still present today. While the mobile UI is rather useless than useful, loading the desktop UI will take a huge toll on mobile data because of all the relics in the front-end code.

Can you believe this message still lives on? It's in the code, along with others:
var company_create_same_industry_error = "You cannot own two companies in the same industry.";

Mobile? Most people wouldn't bet on eRepublik Labs fixing that. We appreciate words/plans, be we need facts. It just doesn't make sense to have components in BETA stage for years. That's not an excuse for such a long time of poor functionality. Unless there's a concrete plan to actually finish and polish those components in a reasonable time-frame, there's no point in releasing something that only adds to the existing problems of eRepublik. That's because it only shows again and again (read "proves") the lack of proper interest in the future of eRepublik. The mobile version of the game should've been spotless by now, but no resources have been allocated to that and this game is stuck in a desktop browser. With so many people on mobile devices today, the game should run flawlessly on mobile.

The new users would rather go to similar games (clones) than staying here, because they have a chance to be relevant on the battlefield. The divisions were broken from day 1. Anything non-variable is meant to "break". It's simply a matter of time. The game can generate money even if the divisions are based on strength or they are "dynamic", based on multiple parameters. I'm sure you kept noticing how a lot of people are here for the community. A key component in retaining new players is easy communication. Make it easy for them to get useful information from players. The private messages are not flexible enough, the chat is not good enough, the mentorship program is not good enough. Then what?

Communication is not just messages. The media module can serve as a communication platform. You can notify/alert the players when a subscribed newspaper has a new article. You can make it easy for all the players (old and new) to view the welcoming messages set by the president. You can help everyone contribute to ideas and/or decisions by national/international referendums. You can make it easier to MU commanders, party leaders and presidents to communicate more easily (broadcast) messages to the people under them. Keep the community alive and it will be easier to keep the new players. You can keep the people more interested in the in-game activities by creating a user-competition module, where people can participate with articles (links) and the others can vote. Set some custom rules or start with a small set of predefined ones (based on feedback from the community) and make it easy for everyone interested to donate money into a competition wallet, from where the prizes will be awarded automatically at the end of the competition. Makes it as easy as possible for any user to organize a competition in this manner and you will see the value of that pretty quickly.

Integrate eRepublik with online streaming platforms. A minimum would be some BB-code buttons to link to twitch, beam and other platforms, then some tags to automatically get the number of viewers/subscriptions per show/recording. In the competition module make sure you can add a link to the stream, another one to an online poll, another one to a blog post or a forum - whatever. Again, you know you can ask for feedback and the players will be happy to reply.

Stay transparent. With the epic/dictatorship/determination formulas you have entered a gray area by not making the formulas public. We know, that's yet another metric of the game's activity and it would be sad to see the decline. But on the other hand, taking the eRepublik development seriously would only make a lot of people happier. We're still here, a lot of us. We are still hoping for refinements (yeah, we've been burnt too many times dreaming of bigger changes). But again, we need facts, not just CSS3 buttons and words. Come back wide open with all the formulas, make it easy for people to calculate their resources, to develop strategies based on those. It makes it easier to start a war, and quite difficult to predict what will happen considering "the other side" can use the same data to prepare themselves. Great strategies have been developed in the past based on the published game mechanic. Today, you just come in, take a look at the Wars page and mindlessly click where you think there are chances for an Epic, or where's a nice CO and so on. Provide the information and tools for the players to become strategists again.

I didn't even scratch the surface here. There are plenty of small fixes and new features that won't alter the balance of the game but rather improve the user experience and help the new users to be heard, seen and get hooked by eRepublik. There are plenty of great ideas in the press. And it's terribly hard to find them. What about a search component specifically for the media module, to find valuable information? It would probably take 2-3 days of development time for a good BETA release and a few more days to gather feedback and take it out of beta for good. We're flooded with BETA stuff on the web. Bugs and flaws exist in "final" products as well. Just quit using that label for too long. And please back your statements by facts regarding the future of the game. OK, it's not just the community. It's also the game. It's nice, but we're so tired of the long-standing bugs and so little effort on eRep's side, that it doesn't take too much to focus on something else and one day just ignore eRep. We might come back for a while, or not. But we all know the game is better with a lot of people. So making us believe you're interested is really easy. Just start picking up small stuff and keep going.

If you actually read all this, carefully, I'm impressed. So thank you for still caring.


The problem with eRepublik: https://www.erepublik.com/en/article/2589421