Economic Collapse

Day 1,160, 15:53 • Published in Australia Australia • by Savonrepus

Over the past few days and especially in the last 24 hours we have seen currency markets everywhere fall in a hole. What is going on????

Well it is all perfectly logical. The series of recent changes to the game have set up a perfect storm whereby there is every incentive to sell currency and no incentive to buy.


Productivity bonuses for citizen based companies together with the levelling of the land region bonuses killed off international trade. International trade flourished with orgs scouring the world for cheap raw materials - when the ability to donate raw materials died international companies were established to donate goods back to the home market. With some countries labour focused on land production then others could focus their labour on manus encouraging international trading in all goods.

With citizen based productivity bonuses international org based companies could no longer compete and with the levelling of the land region bonuses it became much easier for every country to produce all that it needs locally without the need for trade.

PTO activity whereby foreign dominated governments use their power to take over local communities print up currency and repatriate the gold on currency sale is a further on going issue in relation to currency value.

Gold training and production incentives have added to the problem. With production trebled with the use of gold there is further incentive to buy gold and sell currency. As the top tanks flat line in damage and the newer citizens catch up the emotional incentive to gold train is huge. The latter works like this - If a top tank had a strength of 3k a month ago and a minion 1k then was able to make 3 times the damage (assuming equal rank) - now that tank's strength has increased to 4k but the minions gone to 2k so the tank is now only doing double the damage. Slowly his influence is being ebbed away.

The final nail in the currency coffin has been manager work. With company managers able to produce any goods they like merely for the cost of 10 wellness they have every incentive to start investing in multiple companies further increasing the demand for gold to the detriment of currencies.

In the end it is the same old story - we all look at the cake and want a bigger and bigger share of it for ourselves basically though this profit motive is what makes a trading system like erepublik work. It does become a problem however when the managers of the game also take this particular view. Game managers should be focused on making a bigger cake to get their profit share not to be trying to take an increasing share from their existing players - do that and you stifle the game into obscurity.

How do we go forward from here. Well sometimes you have to examine what brings success and what brings failure. The core success of erepublik was and has always been where communication has been fostered between players. It is a bit like growing a garden - you need water, sunshine and to keep out the bugs. No matter how much mind power you will your plants to grow you need the basic components and work on the components and the plants will grow. .

The sunshine of erepublik is the fact that unique communities exist in real life and want to replicate themselves in an on line environment. To get more sunshine you need to increase your footprint. Multilevel marketing (gold incentives to create new citizens) has clearly been a failure. This is because 90% of us when it comes to friends do not wish to be exploitative. If we like it we share it for nothing certainly not for reason of profit. Clearly with the gold incentives - like gold for opinions or ring tones - erepublik has some sort of local marketing connection in unique communities - start using this network to attract citizens.

If you wish to relate the real world to erepublik - economic growth is fostered by product differentiation - the more products available the more opportunities there are to spend. Clearly this was the thought process behind rising and clearly this failed at the start due to the complexity but even under rising as citizens started getting used to the idea the product differentiation was stimulating growth. Why then did we return to product simplification that was even less diverse than V2. Citizens like identity wither it be community or profession. Once someone was proud to call themselves a construction, land or manufacturing worker. It meant that their talents at times were in demand over the other guy. That makes some feel good.

The water of erepublik is communication between citizens. Don’t implement change that kills communication such as the manager work scheme that means a manager can produce all that he wants on his own without having to bother communicating with employees. Consider reintroducing communication products. Part of the success of V2 was the gift product - It required communication to be effectively utilised. Much erepublik activity happens outside of the game itself in on line chat - like irc. Promote it and you breathe life into the place.

System bugs are not the bugs that destroy this place by making citizens lose interest. Bugs are those that infect and destroy communities like multis and ptos. Clearly the longer the game exists the smarter some become at finding those loopholes. Clearly much work has been done to reduce the incentives to create mulits but perhaps there is another way and this is just a thought in the same way a citizens strength increases with training - create a negative battle damage component as countries receive donations from non citizens (anti pto) and negative battle damage component as citizens receive donations from other citizens (anti multi).