Open Letter from an eEconomist To Admin re Economic Module (Day 1018)

Day 1,018, 17:58 • Published in Canada Canada • by Addy Lawrence


Although this is a game, it is a society. This society has an economic value system predicated on the utility of clicks and the exchange of in-game currency. It takes time for the natural forces of ebb and flow in this society to realize what the true economic utility and value of these clicks are. When you significantly change the parameters that the society operates in, there are immediate reactions and delayed reactions and reactions to those reactions. It takes time to digest these changes.

I'm an eRep economist and I've been tracking the economy and managing businesses for close to a year now. I have been tracking the strength of the eRep currencies for a while and I can tell you that when you make changes to the game, it affects the economy and the changes take weeks to take root. Check out this profile of my economic index, Sum of Currency.



This is the sum value of $1 of each currency in terms of gold.

When is was announced that you could only heal the amount of damage lost in battled, the economy started to tank.

When it was announced that diamonds would become titanium back in December of '09, the world economy took off.

When the announcement that V2 migration was imminent, the economy when into a major tailspin.

When the battle module went live, there was a momentary strengthening of the economy, and then it resumed its tailspin.

When the food mechanism and house mechanism changed, this slowed down the tailspin. It created demand for both houses and food.

The most recent change proposed to eliminate professions is ill advised. This will be akin to migrating to V2 as people flood the raw and food companies and the overproduction problem will be compounded. The irony is that the economy appears to be stabilizing, a huge change like this will only undo the progress made to date.

Have you considered how "in process" components will be treated in the one profession system? How will existing component inventories get resolved? How will jobs be posted? Will we still be able to customize our products if there aren't different types of professions to build the components? I was very surprised that these items weren't addressed in the insider and I am concerned that these will be "Oops, didn't think of that." bugs when this goes live.

I don't think that the prevailing issues with the eRep economy stem from professions at all, leave this alone, it is only a programing bug waiting to happen. In my opinion, one of the major problems in the economy is overproduction and a lack of demand for weapons.

Please consider one simple solution to curtailing production; change the product modifiers for raw materials by doubling them (high regions = 2, medium = 4, low regions = 100). Think about it, this is a very easy change to make in the game, very little programming required. Also, it will devalue harvesters by 50% overnight. This profession is one of the highest paid and can easily sustain this impairment.

Please consider one simple solution to creating demand for weapons; change their modifiers so that they are all the same, and set them at the air unit level of 9. Furthermore, change their battle behaviour in game so that they all behave like tanks. They should cost the same and behave the same in battle. Then, ENSURE that the rock/paper/scissor effect really has a material impact on a battle by making it a 50% booster or something like that. These are simple changes. Creating parity in weapons will create demand for rifles, air units and artillery. Making them "cost" the same will also make sure that their utility in game is consistent with their performance on the battlefield. Let the rock/paper/scissor effect manifest itself. Online co-ordination will be required to take advantage of rock/paper/scissor and this will achieve the traffic that you want in this game to generate RL dollars.

There is a whole demographic out there who are sore about their migration of skills. You built a utility so that companies could change the customization of their product at the cost of forfeiting work in progress, please consider providing a utility for people to customize their professional skills at a cost. It could be 5g or 10g or maybe it could be sacrificing 10% of your existing skill points so that you can reallocate the remaining 90% the way you want. The cost from the customization change can't be much different than the profession change, run with it! This is another great way for players to sink gold into the game which means RL cash for you.

People have invested RL money in this game. Your contemplated change to the economic module will forsake these people. These are the people you want to keep because they are paying the RL bills for the RL eRepublik business. Membership is half of what it was four months ago, don't burn it all away in the next four months.

I do not have a suggestion to deal with the lack of demand for weapons that are less than Q5 but when I come up with a simple and meaningful improvement that is practical to implement, I will share it with you.

Addy Lawrence