Updates for April

Day 519, 08:13 • Published in • by Plato

Dear citizens,

Our team has been working on several improvements during the last month, some of which are ready to be implemented tomorrow, day 520 of the New World. These include optimizations, bug fixes, and new features, including a ticketing system. You can find out more details about this new way of communication between our team and eRepublik citizens in an article tomorrow.

The homepage has been optimized, both in logged in and logged out state. The entire media module has also been optimized. This means that starting tomorrow, news pages should load faster. Some bugs affecting these modules were also fixed.

Further optimizations were also done to the war module. Besides this, two new rules regarding wars will be implemented.
A while ago, it was highly requested by the community not to allow presidents to retreat their armies when they are defending the last region of their country. This means that, starting tomorrow, armies defending the last piece of a country's territory will have to fight until the last second.

The second improvement to the war module has already been announced a few weeks ago, as a response to a few open letters on the forum. Until now, allied countries could swap regions amongst themselves in order to prevent other countries from conquering them. It was requested by many citizens to implement rules or features that would reduce the usage of this tactic. This is exactly what will be achieved tomorrow - a defending country will be able to retreat only from the first battle opened in a region. This means that if two battles are opened in the same region, the defending country will only be able to retreat from the battle which started first. If there are three or more battles opened in the same region, the rule remains the same, and the defending country will not be able to retreat in front of the second or third attacker. If the first opened battle is a resistance war, then the defending country will not be able to retreat from that resistance war, nor from any of the battles which started at a later time.

Starting tomorrow, events concerning country administration, such as new laws, will be listed in the latest events section. This way citizens will be better informed of the decisions taken by the country's politicians. Also, citizens will be able to share the news they like with their friends using a “ShareThis” button available under each article. You can choose to share the worthy articles using the most popular social networking sites on the web.

Party presidents will not be able to support presidential candidates from other parties, unless they have been proposed as candidates by their own party president. This will prevent members of the same party from competing against each other in presidential elections.

New citizens will find their way around eRepublik more easily due to the new tool-tips that will be implemented. Besides this, some of the potentially confusing copy in the interface will be replaced, and the “Human Resources” page will be renamed as the “Job market”. Also, a red, highly visible text will warn citizens when trying to create a raw materials company in a region with low productivity. This is a common mistake made by new citizens, and experienced citizens have complained about the large number of such useless companies being put on sale.

A major “under the hood” improvement consisted in rebuilding the module responsible for “feeding” your citizen. This means that this process will be done more efficiently, and it will be less likely for server errors to cause a negative impact.

A major bug affecting alliances was also fixed. In some circumstances, it was possible for the allies of a defender to incorrectly join a war as allies of the attacker. The consequences of this bug have been reversed on a few occasions by our team. Other major bug fixes address:
The fatal error which appeared when trying to create an organization with a name that already used
The hotmail address book for invitations is now working
The bugs causing the subscription alert icon to stay permanently on or permanently off was fixed
Donations to countries with names consisting of two words (ex: South Africa) are now working

A requested improvement that will be deployed is the ability for citizens to be able to see their eRepublik birthday. The exact date of birth will be displayed in the “Bio” tab under each citizen’s profile, and will also include the day of the New World when it occurred. We would also like to wish a happy eRepublik birthday to all citizens who celebrate one year in the New World.

Finally, following the recent events involving the usage of exploits in order to obtain Gold, we have increased the security of our systems. This issue will be covered in a future article after the entire investigation is over.

In order for all of these cool changes to take place, the site will need to be down for a couple of hours. This will occur on the 520th day of the New World at 5 a.m.

Regards,
The eRepublik Team