Join the new world

...or why I stopped tanking and went on vacation (and you should probably go too)

No, it won’t be a surprise if I tell you this game is boring. There have been a lot of articles blaming the developers and Plato for innumerous flaws in it. I’m not going to whine about how pathetic eRepublik (hereinafter referred to as ‘This Game’) has become so far. Here’re just some thoughts I’ve come up with while being a part of the community for about a year and a half.

This Game is imbalanced. Everyone knows how important it is to keep gameplay well-balanced. The superiority of old players (frequently gained and maintained by paid content) makes it pointless to play for those about to start.

1. The way one accumulates their strength is one of the aspects that make This Game uninteresting. I don’t think I’m the only one who finds arithmetic progression is way too ordinary. However, this is exactly what lets the developers keep the cash cows permanently appeased. The hegemony of the old players remains inviolable, as the newcomers have no way to bridge the huge gap in strength. Current scheme makes it pointless to create an account and start playing. The new citizens quit as soon as they realize how long it usually takes to get relatively strong. And it’s not like they don’t have time to train and wait. It’s more like it doesn’t make sense to wait until you’re strong enough to compete with the others. You’ll never be. So the thing is the constant gap. As long as it’s not decreasing, the newbies will be nothing but punching bags for the old players.

2. As for training grounds, they should not be personal. Seriously, how is it possible for private soldiers to have their own training facilities? And of course, the soldiers should not spend their own money upgrading those ranges. I think it’s quite logical to assume it’s a military unit leaders who are responsible for the training facilities’ condition.

3. Travel time… is what This Game keeps defying. I wonder what kind of transportation takes me from Nazareth to Arizona (~12,000 km) in a couple of seconds. But… let’s not forget This Game needs to appease the cash cows by letting them win Battle Hero medals in several places at the same time. And no, it won’t be possible if we all have to wait till we arrive at a destination. Who cares about the distance? One only cares about posting 20 battle hero notifications in the row to friend feed. So you better not bother yourself with such a nonsense as the speed of travel.

4. The Battle Hero award, in fact, has nothing to do with heroism. The regulations for obtaining the medal have corrupted morals to the point where people no longer care about honor and decency, but easy gold and fame, which is in turn exactly what most of the cash cows want. To obtain the medal you just need to show up on the battlefield and deal the amount of damage you believe no one will trump. It’s absolutely unnecessary to care if the side you’re fighting for is winning or not. If I had to set the rules, I’d award a medal to the one whose efforts help to push the wall and start earning domination points. In that way, anyone could become a hero regardless of strength and ranks. Wouldn’t that be more enjoyable?

5. And the fact that moving between divisions is still based on experience points is what I hate most. I bet everyone (except for the cash cows) hate it. This is an indirect extortion. Either you purchase the Infantry Kit or you stop fighting. Or... you just level up into the next division and thus exponentially reduce your influence. In short, the experience-based model is designed to embarrass the people unwilling to pay. With that attitude, it doesn’t make sense to call This Game free.

I’m not mentioning the economy module mostly because I can’t find any reasonable explanation for why it works the way it does. The developers must have decided to use the most primitive scheme to establish something that vaguely looks like an economic model in order not to scare off the folks with complexity. Yeah, I know there is some kind of changes being implemented at the moment. But something tells me it’s not going to explain where the money (one spends on coups, revolutions, resistance wars, or just changing location) go, as well as what exactly generates gold one gets from medals. It doesn’t take to be a good economist to comprehend that money can’t be created out of thin air. Even when it can be, there are always banks, loans, currency swaps (and so on and so forth) involved in the process. If you just generate gold out of nothing to provide the cash cows with packs, and then you have to increase the cost of coups and revolutions just to get rid of money excess, it’s anything but the economy.

Taking the above into consideration, I’m not going to invest my time and effort in This Game anymore unless/until the developers decide to upgrade this lowbrow stuff into something worth spending time and money.