To Gnilraps's "League of Allies Post-Op Debriefing"
William Thomas Riker
How I got pissed and how, in the middle of this rant I call a journalistic article and which strayed away from the topic a lot, I got an idea for project with the Plato's Foundation.
Basically, this is my way of trying to say thank you, Gnilraps!
Musical background. You'll figure it out by the end of the article...
This is a response to Gnilraps's article League of Allies Post-Op Debriefing. I wanna say right at the start that I've always personally appreciated his analytical and journalistic skills. This is valid for the aforementiod article as well, but I don't agree with most of his conclusions.
Nice hair, Gnilraps!
His math is sound, and it's all good read, until he says that League of Allies event was a profound success all over the eWorld. According to his math, 2881 players received a decoration for fighting all day for 5 consecutive days. And that was fun?
Nope! I read dozens, maybe a couple hundred of shouts of people saying that having to be online all the time recharging energy and fighting is tedious, not fun. And that was 5 days! Imagine if this kind of "fun" were introduced permanently. Oh, wait!
The real McCoy. Yes, there is a pun.
You stick electrodes in a rat's brain, give him an orgasm button, he'll push that thing until he starves to death. - Leslie Winkle, TBBB
That is what has become of 2881 active players in eRepublik: dumb rodents! No offense, seems like I've become part of the crowd, too.
Gnilraps goes on and writes how the number 2881 is really low, and we should be having more people active like that. People who play "hard”. We need better than that for eRepublik to flourish.
I seriously hope he's joking? Hitting Recover Energy and Fight buttons every hour for 5 days is not playing hard; that's players sucking at life hard. That's eRepublik sucking hard.
Should've registered as a doctor, since I'm small and clearly bitch all the time.
I admit, Plato's Foundation is one of the best things introduced so far. Albeit too late. Just take a look at Gnilrap's project Meme Wars. He had all that money to reward about 20 people who could come up with some good memes. Some categories had no memes submitted at all. Back in 2010, he would have received hundreds of those, now: a couple of dozen. I loved his project, but in my book, it was a failure. Simply because there aren't enought people left in this game interested in matters that aren't fighting.
And that's just one example. I've read about other projects, which in my mind would have been great 7 years ago. But, unless they are about military isues, they barely receive any attention from the Community. And even then it's not much better. Even when endorsed by Plato.
Anything else besides fighting all the time?
Why are 10 medals out of 15 dedicated to military affairs? Why were there never:
- Tycoon medal for owning 5, 10, 20, 50, and then for every 100 companies,
- Employer medal for employing 5, 10, 20, 50, and then every 100 workers,
- Outstanding Journalist medal every time an article hits International Top 5
- Benefactor medal for donating X amount of QX items to new players
- etc.
If you can get Super Soldier medal faster when training in 4 Training Grounds in one day, why isn't the same applied to Hard Worker medal?
Do you remember when Plato deleted our dead subscribers? Which died because they left the game when eRepublik Rising took over? My numbers fell from 2500 to 1500. Not because I had dead subscribers. But because Plato made them leave. I will never reach that 3rd MM medal this way. But why doesn't Plato take into consideration that since these days it is tough to get subscriptions, he should lower the number of subscriptions for a single MM medal? To, let's say 200?
Or, hear this: make an active number of subscribers counter (turning it from passive into active). Whenever our subscriber gets a Dead Citizen status, he gets deleted from our subscription list. But then you have to set MM medals to 100 subscribers.
Just compare, I have 2 MM medals, and around 50 votes and 2 new subscribers per article. So, to reach that 3rd medal, I need 250 new subs, and that's 125 articles. Seems fair to get an MM medal after 125 decent written articles!
It's not about medals and gold, it's about giving players, who play something else than military, a sense of achievement at least ONCE in 3 months!
So, you hit for your CS country? TP medal. You hit in RW? FF medal. You hit for other countries? M medal. You have the highest damage? BH, CH, SH, TF medals. You have no life? Prestige Hunter! Wow, so prestigious! These players get around 100 medals weekly!
In real life, a country can sustain less than 10% of its population in a permanent militarized form. Real Life physics just doesn't allow economical production on a scale greater than that. Soldiers have no time nor energy to work, workers have no energy nor skill to fight.
eRepublik V1 was like that, people had to work for a month so they could earn enough to buy tanks just for one 24-hour battle. eRepublik Rising had time management, you got 24 hours in a day, which you allocated to studying, working, training, even resting!
eRepublik Rising time management
People were codependent: some were soldiers, some were managers. That's a natural division, even in other species which develop larger communitites: some defend it, some look for food, some care for the offspring. If they switch roles, chaos takes place. That's how peoples, nations and countries came to be!
Introducing "Work as Manager" started the downfall, then erasing various worker skills and skill ranks. Making the possibility for soldiers to win 10 medals a day which they used to create companies for themselves, instead of being supplied by managers ruined it. Everything is oversimplified, everybody's the same. Everybody is disposable, because nobody is special.
Just Check Gnilraps's stats and winnings he stated in his article. Whom does he need? A one man army.
Do you know how people become so powerful, rich and independent of others in Real Life? By enslaving others! Working as Manager option is basically you getting free work from a non existent citizen, a slave. Ancient Athens, Rome... they were all once mighty, just like eRepublik V1. With the rising of slavery politicians and soldiers became even mightier, independent from small farm workers, their food and products. But for a short time only, and then they collapsed just like eRepublik did.
This whole League Of Allies event was just an eRepublik version of panem et circenes: Plato trying to pacify players by giving them free gold and a tournament, just like Roman emperors gave the mob free food and bloody tournaments so they wouldn't rebel.
Have you figured out the music yet?
This game is dead, and will stay dead, until modules others than the military one come back into play.
As in: go **** yourselves sideways
with a telephone pole.
WTR
PS The idea for the Plato's Foundation will be published in a separate article.
Other recent interesting articles:
Weekly firepower rankings, Day 3591 by TheJuliusCaesar
[ENG/ESP] Economía del Estado [Abril] by Sir Cocodrile
[CP] About The Air Strike And Future Plans by Swiss Federal Chancellery
Plato Foundation: First Month Overview by Adinushk
What We Have Learned So Far by RF Williams
[DC] World in flames by Don Croatas
Plato Foundation - Weekly Awards for the Best Aviators [EN/PT] by Raphael Louis Habsburg Bourbon
[UK] The Gunners are news & where is the UK going? by Foreign Office
[Weekstrom]League of Allies results and analyses by Weekstrom
And, like always, those which shout the article and send me a message with the link of the shout will receive a free list with RWs in which to win the RH medal.
Comments
If you can comment mine last article it would be cool 🙂
Zašto ne izbriše one banane i umrle kod prodaje firmi i svega ostaloga ? 😛
Zašto ne izbriše igru ? 😃
Good questions. o7
Ovog si brzo napisao
Ah, kad ti netko pogodio žicu, il' tu osobu ženiš, il' ju javno prozoveš 😃
This is a good article. The game is still, and has during the last years consciously progressed towards, a state where one module dominates the others. Both mechanically, but also in society:
- Best economic RoI's are achievable through military module in form of inflated amount of medals, combat orders and the like. There is little incentive to build companies nowadays, unless you plan to go straight from Q1 weapons to Q7 weapons. This means that the players with most funds are generally tanks, as it is a self-reinforcing cycle, rather than company tycoons who invest in the economy.
- In political module, much mechanics have been simplified their raison d'etre annulled. However, in this module a fortunate fact is that you can't bribe and tank yourself brains and diplomatic skills. They are still independent from domination of tanks, though you can see them a lot in this sphere too.
- In media module, as you mentioned, mechanics are from the heyday of the game. It is extremely hard to get a (legit) Media Mogul award starting now (or starting even in 2011, as I have, with under 400 subs), most certainly it is not in any meaningful or likeable relation to the SS every 4th day, as you mentioned.
Recently we've gotten steps to the right direction, but it is a long, damn long way to go.
Good stuff!
true story!
Interesting and some very good remarks. eLife must be more than (a bot) using all the energy (with packs). o7
Vote 🙂
I am also to blame for meme wars. It was my administration and I could have done more to get the word out.
Great article though
nah, somewhat active people knew about it. If there was no more participation is cause peopled didn't want to. I found prizes ridiculously high given the amount of effort you need to put to create a meme, and still, people didn't participate.
It's not always to blame the organization, the consumers also have part of fault, in the case of meme war, all the fault.
I didn't say it was on organizational fail, I said it failed because Plato drove away the kind of people that used to be interested in that sort of thing. Current Community doesn't have as diverse interests as the one 5 years ago. Most of today's players are here for the war module. Journalists, economists, politicians... most of them left long time ago.
If I may add,
journalistic module is also dead because of no content nor for troll nor for serious business.
people ain't active, communities dying, and battles are usually boring.
jordic+1
plato's lack of creativity is evident
[removed]
o7
Some good ideas here..
v+s
Ja sam za Klingonce
Full support.
The suggested medals could be a nice addition indeed.
If it would be wise to make the subscribers amount one has dynamic I wouldn't know. If they do one that may suggest other medals become dynamic as well. Super soldier for instance did not change the moment they introduced the option to upgrade your training facilities while the amount of that medals gained increased significantly. Or what to think of TP medals giving a medal every 100mil. When you reach the first time to reach 100 mil you had to do way more hits then you need to when reaching #100. I'm rather sure the majority of people won't benefit from that changing. Simply lowering the amount of needed subscribers, preferable somehow preventing subscribers to count that only subscribed due to a shout or payment program for votes/subscribers, would suffice I'd say.
Lol. I got a capcha to subscribe. Neve had that before. So at least bots seem to be blocked for subscribing.
I have it almost every time I want to subscribe 🙁
LIPA NASA RVACKA JEZIKA ! nema je ni na vidiku,tkd nebi ni trebo onda ovakve clanke objavljivat u KROJEJŠNA nego u engleška
....nice...o7
18th in my league, no medal - because the first day starting on a Monday and happened to have virtually no hp left so 1/2 the daily target for one day, even though every other day was like 5 times the daily target. Ok so I got a pot of gold, but the medal would have been nice. It's kinda like in sports saying the seeded players get winnings but no medals if they don't play the preliminaries.
Just stop buying everybody for a month or two and game will fix itself... 😛
Voted, endorsed and subscribed, and it's still a fart in the wind compared to the military crap going on in the game. And no matter how good these articles are - about the poor state of anything-other-than-military -, there's precisely zero hope for improvement in the lacking areas.
As someone who doesnt fight almost never (about a year since last time) I have to agree with you. Unless you like clicking in that red button you won´t find thing to do ingame. In the past you could compensate it with outgame stuff but with less players every day now it´s almost imposible.
Voted and sub, ofc
V&s dos dobar članak, bez obzira slagao se sa nekim napisanim stvarima ili ne.
Pa napiši slobodno sa čime se ne slažeš 🙂
Voted.
Spot on.
the game gives more variety than is used to, but it has low population growth for quite some time now and thats what erepublik needs the most (this is for a good reason though, not a single dime was ever spent on advertising it)
time management in rising was pure bs and the reason of the biggest exodus an online game has ever seen. but those who are still here stayed due to an awesome military module
v1 was the game most of us loved (and 100% of those who couldnt stand rising) but its a bit late to bring it back now when most of those who survived v2 left after v3 bs was implemented 🙂 not to mention the problem of discrepancy between the number of factories and workers (where #workers
a bit of change would be nice tho, things are stale
ps. awesome st gifs are awesome
btw it makes sense to intorduce some medals that are not related to military module
wow
Great article, nice suggestions 🙂
o7
Nice 🙂
o7
Good article. But, as you may know, there are scripts that stop you from loosing energy, you just need to let your pc on. For exemple, i didn't log to erepublik for 4-5 days without loosing strenght, work days, etc you get the picture.
That's the point, people don't play. They want all the benefits, but are not willing to invest in the game. That's why this game is dea😛 you can have a script or a bot fighting for you, but they cannot run countries and companies, nor write articles.
Great article. agree 99%
Once my game was economy, now just war module has left.
too much medal can transform eRepublik into eMedalubik
and trust me, they (pla** cs) dont care about it..
:v
I was one of the few who actually enjoyed the 'Rising' project. Too bad they got cold feet and chose the simplified pay to win route instead.
V&E
v
nice
(r)evolution
v