[AREA 52] Short history of eRepublik

Day 1,340, 17:28 • Published in Croatia Egypt • by Ahileus

Area 52, July 2011., #22


Orginal article in Croatian is here. Thanks ShadowMJ for English translation.
ja4yk re-posted article in Ukraine, and Creon Mista re-posted article in France.



On this timeline, you can follow when each version of eRepublik was created, and when they disappeared, when the world wars started, the creation and termination of alliances, and most importantly - to see how all these things relate to one another.


* click on the picture to view it in bigger size




The beginning of the development concept was enabled by the investment of 200.000 euro ($ 263K) by Seed funding in February 2007. Later on the company eRepublik Labs was created.

The idea was to make a game that will be playable in the web browser itself, which means that there will be no need to install anything, but merely to create your account. The game is not technically challenging because it is text based, so you can play on any computer. The concept was based on the game Civilization, but here we are playing with real players from all around the world who are playing in real time, and they determine the course of the game and its history.

Here's how the founder of eRepublik Alexis Bonte describes the game:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Wzpg74-uNo
http://intruders.tv/en-tech/alexis-bonte-founder-and-citizen-of-erepublik-the-massive-online-social-strategy-game/




20th November 2007 was the start date of eRepublik beta which was available only through invitation ('invite only'). Rapid growth confirmed the great interest of players and the game potential. The game was not programmed to be capable of supporting a large number of players (scalability). Instead it was only a prototype to see if the concept would work, and to obtain the opinion of the community (feedback) on what the right product should look like.





On the first day there were already 200 registered players from around the world, and they were given the opportunity to invite their friends and acquaintances to also join the game (each player got 5 invitations). On the eighth day, the game numbered 1000 players, and later that number had risen to approximately 35,000 citizens. Over 3,500 companies, 13,000 newspapers and 150,000 pages of content was created by the community in that period.
http://www.alexisbonte.com/erepublik-public-version-pre-launch-and-full-launch-what-we-learned/

In that time the alliances were calle😛 Byzantine Empire (BE), Pan American Alliance (PAA), Northern Alliance (NA), FIST (Formidable International Security Treaty), Mediterranean Alliance (MA).

The map of the world looked like this:


Here is what it looked like:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMiThA61HKo




In June 2008 owners Alexis Bonte and George Lemnaru received 550,000 euros ($854k) investment to continue development of the game by Angel funding. With that money, they promised to start v1 in the fall of that year and reach 140,000 active players by the end of the year.
http://www.lemnaru.com/erepublik-angel-round-full-speed-for-v1
http://www.thomascrampton.com/internet/alexis-bonte-erepublik-online-strategy-game/

The game was receiving various awards for innovation, and the concept of bringing together people from all over the world, which made their company eRepublik Labs one of the most successful startup companies in Romania.
http://www.lemnaru.com/erepublik-the-most-promising-online-project-c
http://eu.techcrunch.com/2008/10/09/fowa-rocks-london-while-startups-pitch-to-techcrunch/





14th October 2008 eRepublik v1 was launched, for which the code had to re-written since the beta wasn’t planned for a large number of players to be simultaneously online, and it was hard to add new features to old code. So they had to work on scaling the game to size to be able to reach the game’s full potential.

The night before v1 was launched > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeUZQ7L86og
Welcoming article > http://blog.erepublik.com/welcome-erepublik-v1/

In June 2009. eRepublik gets another 2 million euros ($2.77M) from AGF Private Equity Fund (Series A funding) for the development of the game. This video was made then:
http://blog.erepublik.com/erepublik-raises-e2m-to-further-develop-the-new-world/
http://techcrunch.com/2009/06/17/new-funding-for-a-new-world-erepublik-raises-e2-million/

Before the start of V1, mega-alliances ATLANTIS and PEACE:GC were established. Most of the member states of other alliances joined these 2 alliances, and thus the other alliances died off. Among those smaller alliances were AHA, Fortis, SOL, Brolliance and Entente. PEACE:GC eventually disbanded and formed Phoenix from the majority of former members. ATLANTIS followed a similar fate: it collapsed and the member states formed EDEN. Some members states that were dropped by PEACE:GC founded Entente.

Many remember the epic battles of the Lion King and Hello Kitty, which were great fortress regions, and the last battle of the v1 - the invasion of Slavonia.

The technical side of the game was marked by often failing servers at the end of the great epic battles, and the common bugs, but many still fondly recall this time because of the simplicity and feel of real gameplay.

At that time, world map looked like this:


Here's how it looked in the golden age of v1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iie0uT57XI




In July 2010, after several months of testing on separate servers (v2 beta), and a lot of Insider articles (the official admin eNewspaper) which explained the new concepts of time management (time division) and the new military module (replacement of the conventional wall with a walking tour on the hexagonal field), eRepublik v2 arrived, which was pompously called eRepublik Rising.
http://www.erepublik.com/en/article/erepublik-rising-beta-is-open--1432014/1/20





Rising was not particularly welcomed by the community, for to perform basic tasks, especially the warring, it was necessary to spend hours instead of minutes, like in V1. The new economic module caused economic instability, since the once-profitable companies in v1 were no longer profitable, and daily living expenses had risen sharply. Boycotts and protests were organized, and a lot of players and left the game accusing the admins that in a race for profit profit they were neglecting their players. All this caused a large decrease in the number of players (officially from 400,000 to 186,000), which is partly the result of deletions of players who cheat (multi accounts).

In the short time of its existence, v2 was dominated by EDEN and Phoenix, and there was a small alliance of ONE*. Of the major battles in the short time I would just like to mention the Battle for Inner Mongolia, which the Poles lost to Serbia.

The world map looked like this:


Here’s how it all looked like in v2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzlCpuAzX90




In November 2010, just a few months after the introduction of v2, eRepublik team gave up on this concept and introduced a new version, v3, which was a combination of v1 and the new military module that can be best described as a 'pulling a rope'. They revoked the failed concept of time management, which proved to be too complicated and took too much time.




But then the Insider newspaper that brought the most important news about future game updates was canceled. They moved this info to the forum, which was used for community debate, but then the forum got terminated as well. This version is unfortunately characterized by very frequent changes to the game without informing the players about them, and poor communication with members of eRep team. Consequence of this is a drop in the perception of how interesting the game is, and a new wave of people quitting.
http://golderepublik.blogspot.com/2011/06/they-dont-really-care-about-us.html

Since the military module completely changed and the emphasis is more on the conflicts in neighboring countries (due to resources and Natural Enemies), the Phoenix alliance disbanded, and the strongest countries in the world formed alliance NWO (later ONE) to dominate the world. In that alliance there also a couple of stronger members of EDEN, which led to its significant weakening. There is also the TERRA alliance, which works together with EDEN against the ONE/NWO threat. Among other small alliances there are Luna, ABC, and the Arab Confederation/CAS which is now know as ICON/Islamic confederation of nations.

The world map looks like this:


One of the biggest blows to v3 was the introduction of 'working as a manager', because from then on everyone was able to produce as much products as they needed, and sales on the market declined significantly. This led to hyperinflation, and the value of currencies had fallen sharply. This suited the admins because the value of gold rose. Another big downside is the possibility of unlimited fighting with paid wellness packs, by which individual players can greatly influence the battle, even more than some states (by using your debit card ofc).



In the next chart you can see how the number of active players rising and falling based on significant events and changes to the game.

* source https://www.google.com/adplanner/site_profile?#siteDetails?uid=domain%253A%2520erepublik.com&geo=001&lp=false

From this it is evident that there were bad decisions by the eRep team and we hope that the admins stop thinking only about ways to earn more, and instead return life to our little community.

Personally, my favorite was eRep v1 where I remember a simple double-click mode (work/train), a lot of planning, strategy and tactics, and great epic battles.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KgCH43FOvE


I thank Tim Veltkamp for the excellent maps, Nickk for the charts of the number of players throughout history, and klkl, AlenDuia and ZYX1 for helpful suggestions. Thanks go to ShadowMJ for English translation as well.

PS: Sorry for bad English!

Game on! o/