New Admin Education: A Little Something About Change

Day 1,125, 09:44 • Published in USA USA • by Blank Keating

http://forum.erepublik.com/showthread.php/106105-New-Admin-Education-A-Little-Something-About-Change

Hey there, I'm Blank Keating and I'm the Secretary of Interior and Education in the eUSA. I write tutorials about the game on behalf of the eUS government. I had some free time and I wanted to do another tutorial, but not for new players - for admins. I distilled criticism I often see around the game and IRC and wrote it into bullet points. Here they be:

- Gauge community response.
There are people who complain about everything. If something seems to have an overwhelming opposition and you remove it, continue to follow that change. If the removal has an opposition greater than that, contemplate undoing the change.
i.e. Some people complained about article spam, about ten times the people complained about international publishing restrictions. The smaller group still won.

- Punish fairly.
A lot of shouts and articles are suffixed by a comment about how they have a FP incoming. Recent changes have changed insta-ban offenses such as Pornography spam and multi accounts to single-digit FP offenses, but offering rational criticisms will still net you a FP. Offering an idea is not an offense, ruining the game experience with multiaccounts is.

- Let people appeal again.
We're all human, players and mods. Players slip up and earn an FP sometimes, just as mods will sometimes let bias cloud their judgement. Appeals give players the ability to keep moderators in check, as moderators are naturally allowed to keep players in check.

- Don't try to outsmart the players.
The playerbase of eRepublik harbors some extremely bright political and economic minds. If you think something will be an unpopular decision, consider not doing it, because all the sugarcoating in the world won't stop the backlash.

- Don't remove features while there are still features to be added.
There are still several things that can be added to improve the game. Removing features in general is moving backwards.
i.e. Battle of the day was a great idea. Removing organizations is a bad one.

- Augment, don't cut.
Just because a feature isn't working, doesn't mean it needs to be deleted. A recent victim of that mindset is hospitals. Hospitals were subjected to a series of odd and poorly explained changes that hamstringed it's usefulness, leading to it's impending removal. Instead of doing away with them, you could have made them usable in all rounds instead of the placed round, or fixed the bug where they disappeared from the food button slot.

- Players should not be able to get "stuck".
While we're talking about hospitals, it's far too easy nowadays for a new player to lose all of his or her health and be out of money, completely ruined without begging for food. Consider raising the min health cap for players under level 20, raising the minimum fighting level, or introducing an easier form of free fighting.

- Observe player-created content.
Things that the players create themselves are often what the players want to see you do. A popular Firefox script, eRepublik Advanced, has many little tweaks that people have been suggesting on the forums for 2 years. There are several other scripts and articles that might help guide your next move too.

I hope one of the admins out there reads this and sincerely considers it before making their next change to the game. Sign if you support the content. 🙂

Blank Keating
eRepublik Citizen



I posted this on the forums here. I ask my readers to go there and show their support so we can keep trying to end unpopular changes in eRepublik. For all the crap we give it, the game has more potential then what it's getting. Death by mismanagement would be wasteful way to go.

http://forum.erepublik.com/showthread.php/106105-New-Admin-Education-A-Little-Something-About-Change

Until next time,