Schrodinger's Cat

I will try to make a series of articles regarding the global state of gameplay in erepublik these days assesing all major aspects/modules of the game.

THE ECONOMY Part I : Wars

The economical module in republik is something i allways appreciated. It's one of the most realistic economical modules ever implemented in an online game and hat off for that. Unfortuantlly like any other new product, after 2 years you can see some major drawbacks that can evolve into something better or be improved technically.

Here it goes.
The eWorld economics are strictly dependent to war activites, as how the game was developed WAR is the only career-path that overcomes a 3 month cicle or is open for more than 4-5 users.

War can actively involve users with strength from all ranges, taking into considerations the tactical aspect of damage control and the supremacy of quantity over quality. A political career is rather short or unrewarding and appeals to only 5-10% the way it's made now. The media career is better than the political one, but the pro side attracts only under 5% of users, the other side is that people who check the media as readers have a higher chance of sticking in this game on the long run. The economical module is somewht challenging, it gives a new challenge for each user that gets to level 15-16, but to later stages it becomes repetitive and again rewarding for only a handfull of players.

This being said we have the WAR that can involve all users at any stages with the goal of ranking of taking sides in passionate conflicts.

And now the problem

WAR is 45% dependant on the iron industry, 45% on the weapons industry, and 10% for on gifts and tickets.

This leads to iron-weapons being by far the industry with most investmants.
Nowadays, eWorld is going through a massive over-production process. And this has been going on for the last 30-50 days.

Facts are shown HERE,
HERE
and HERE.

Why this happened?

1. Lack of major conflicts

The ro-ind and ro-hun wars depleted all stocks mainly because it was a balanced conflict that happened for more than 30 days, and polarized 2 countries to give enough firepower and consumption.. Now, even the german conflict that onvolved 7 countries was quickly resolved in a matter of days, without epic fights.

2. Mass server cleansing

The past 3 weeks, were the begining of a mass inactive users cleansing, which shown us that the number of new users per day is smaller that the number of dieing users.. or atleast it's a tie. Te deletion itslef is not a reason, but it showned us a factor.. growth factor is realatively down.

3. Maxing out

One of the most important reasons imo is the fact that almost 20% of erepublikans are generals or field marshalls, this means practically a cut in consumption, especially at FM level correlated with a daily increased production capacity. A FM that fights daily open-handedly will produce weapons for about 4-5 rookies.

4. Gold production

Too much gold enters the game via rewards, in comparisson with the consumption of gold these days. Why is this a bad thing? Simple. Companies have resources to produce on stock, as they decide to invest income in stocks than to tank for example.

5. Multiple accounts

This is a reality of all games. Multiple accounts exist, and will always exist as banhammer is not quick enough and can only find a reasonable number of these cases. I am not talking about a specific country, i am talking about every multyaccount. Clones consume almost nothing but they produce, another souce of major disturbances in the economical system.

Conclusion

In the end it's about supply and demand and consumption. Whith each day, every user produces more, but with each day he doesn't consume more. He doesn't consume more because of random events like no epic conflict and he doesn't consume more because the game has a design problem, people that max out in rank consume alot fewer products than the ones close to the max level.

Implications

Stocks will continue rising, but prices will stop falling, as all economies will find a 90% of production value sale point. Occasionally owners that had it with the low sales, will sell eveything for low prices but that will be rare.

Expect changes from the erepublik team to improve consumption, either the change of the ranking system, adding new goals and new means of spending or adding new factors that will favor world conflicts (see resource redistribution). Either way, something will be changed.

As for we erepublikans

Expect a status quo for the next 1-2 months or so, stocks will continue raising, there will be conflicts here or there, the usual PEACE at HOME liberating serbia, latvia, eventually some ex-ATLANTIS sparks quickly ambusehd by hungary and indonesia. I think that, highly motivated by increasing stocks a big conflict will rise, but it will last max 7 days as geo-politics are mismached in favor of the hungarian0indonesian alliance.

Next: Economy part II