Australian Census - June 2011
Adam Von Templar
Over the past week we have been having a robust conversation about the future direction of the country, as war rages around us I think it is wise to take an accurate as possible look at our population.
There are a couple ways to do this; track total population given by our citizen count, total votes in the country president elections or total votes in the senate elections.
I chose the latter two for the reasons that I don't believe total population to be accurate considering the wide held belief that multis make up a large portion of erep pop. I am also interested in the active population, not the population that signs up and then never logs back in and slowly dies.
The errors present in my method are the fact that I cannot prove whether all the votes are from active players and not multis, I can also not prove all active people voted. These factors however I will assume are relatively constant in the data set and so the overall trend from the numbers can be taken to prove if our population is increasing or decreasing.
The Data
Below is a graph tracking the number of votes in both Presidential (Prime Minister) and Senate elections over the last year, I have also put on our Leaders terms.
The Analysis
Until November 2010 Australia was under the effect of an Indonesian PTO, therefore numbers from that time cannot be used to judge the relative strength of our population as it is widely held that massive cheating was used at the time.
I think we can begin our analysis from Wally's term as PM, although there still may have been some fraud at the end of the PTO especially in the senate elections. Comparing the Prime Minister election numbers to the start of SC's term (through the PTO) we can see a significant jump in the number of voters, this was probably due to returning expats after the PTO.
Sir Constant's three terms as PM were dominated by a stagnating trend, Senate election numbers seem to be relatively constant, with Prime Minister election numbers showing a levelling off towards the end of the term and into Venjas.
Venja's two terms as PM saw constant warfare with Indonesia and periods of occupation, we can see a corresponding drop in both election numbers to all time lows.
Tim's term saw a slight rebound in PM voting numbers, whether this is anomaly or a new trend will only show in time.
Conclusion
The data presented above indicates that when Australia has periods of peace our population has tended to stagnate (remain the same) where as in periods of occupation we lose population.
What Now?
I think it is safe to say that if we continue with open warfare and occupation by Indonesia we will continue to see a loss of population, if we make peace we will likely return to the stagnation that we saw before, both options provide a bleak outlook for the country.
If we are to experience population growth in the future we are going to have to do something different, so I put this article forward as a way of stimulating conversation about serious attempts to change our demographic trends.
Comments
Please discuss : )
attack new zealand.
o7
We have 22 new cits today! welcome! all is not lost!
The population is in decline because multi numbers are going down.
It's obvious they are. It's ridiculous to think we actually have over 100 real members. We have never had 100 real members. The majority of people in eAustralia are multis and the majority of votes are multi votes. I remember elections where we would get 250 votes even though we have like 50 active people. multis get banned over time, some multis get lost, their owners dont use them anymore etc.
You can't seriously say we had 1200 real people playing. The maximum number of real people in eAustralia would be 80. MAX. The rest are multis.
there are things which is beyond our control, indonesia is strong because they have more population,and strong allies. Current changes to the Health + and the natural resource bonus is definitely a negative situation for us.
THE END IS NIGH!
I'm not asking you to do this but it would be interesting to see these results compared with global population trends. Is it only eAus that is experiencing population loss or are there other factors at play like people getting sick of the game, or maybe the motivation to run multis is lower. There was that whole global revolution thing that happened during SirC's term and a ton of people seem to quit the game after every major rule change. Not solutions, but a bit more to think about than the eAustralian experience.
The reason we keep losing population when there is war is because we keep losing- Nobody likes losing and nobody wants to play a game where you are constantly crushed. Peace is boring- so we need war, but a war that we can win... The outlook is bleak for eAus
I just might do that Chris if I have time!
@ DocterDry
I have 49 people in my MU, at least 30 are RL actives, so by your outlook i have half the population just in my MU lol.
I think we have at least 100 people prolly closer to 200, remember there is the 2 clicker population which is literally 5 min a day people that log on then log off and couldn’t really care less what happens in the game.
Indonesia did a survey and found maybe (all approx estimates from results) 1000 RL players, 2000 2 clickers and over 4000 multis.
This game is maybe 20% RL people the rest are multis or dying cits with houses still, so total erep population would be 20k worldwide.
AVT good article and hope to see if you can get some accurate results
Also our population has dropped with region bonuses, many have gone overseas if they owned companies
So either 2 things. nearly 3/4th players quit cause Indonesia keeps trying to take us or they have probably moved like "Henry the 8th" has said.
Now taking over EAustralia is easy for any insanity big country.
It is important for nus not to be wiped from the map for a couple of terms. It would be great to have most of the country back and start building up our finances and stability. We need to focus on creating a BB and use the fact that eIndo are occupying us. We have probably about 150 players in australia, not all are obsessed with the game, and that is ok. We are dying because we have had so much crap going on in this country and as a result we have not been focusing on international relations and making the community exciting to be apart of. We used to have soccer comps, lotto's, great military fun, great lulz articles and stuff that was happening. We lost so much through the political crap war that went on. Us, older players have ourselves to blame. we can turn it around. But, to frank, eRep is a shit game and when the admin do not develop the political and economic sides in a way that is fun and enjoyable, you will only attract and retain a certain playerbase.
Nice job AVT. V + S