Stagnation at Home and Abroad (PART ONE)

Day 2,050, 08:38 • Published in Canada Canada • by Auk Rest
Stagnation at Home and Abroad (PART ONE)

First off I'm writing this article mostly because the Canadian media space has been pretty dry recently and I hope this article will inject some vitality into the country and get some people thinking.

Anyway, with that out of the way, time to get to the meat of my article. I don't think anyone should be surprised to see that eCanada and the entire eWorld are slowly decaying away. The problem in Canada has been exacerbated by 6 months of perpetual occupation and many formerly active individuals leaving the game. (Plugson if you're out there buddy, this one is for you)

But the decline at home in eCanada underscores the complete decline of eRepublik in general. eRepublik is bleeding players at an amazingly fast rate. I cannot find the newspaper article (link, anyone?) but some article was published recently in the international media which detailed an alarming drop in the number of players of almost all countries.



To see it more clearly. all you need to do is look at Colombia, still in the top five nations in terms of population but significantly dropped from its peak. Colombia had a large baby boom and many new players joined that country. I would guess the population peaked at ~25,000 citizens. Of course, in any large baby boom like that many players do not stay with the game, but a good percentage should stick with the game. Colombia now sits at 9700 citizens, a decline of over 15,000 citizens. I don't know Colombia's population before the baby boom, but I would assume around ~6000-7000.

This means the country gained close to 20,000 new players in a baby boom (good!), but the poor mechanics and the entire 'game' in general of eRepublik caused 75% of those new citizens to quit (bad!) between now and January/February when that baby boom occurred. A 25% retention rate (this is being generous) is AWFUL for a game like eRepublik. The concept of eRepublik and static mechanics ensures a certain percentage of players will always be leaving the game, and a small number will be joining the game just based on ads, word of mouth, etc. That means large baby booms are the primary driving force of populations, and for eRepublik only to be retaining 25% is not good.



That percentage of players leaving the game has certainly increased in Canada recently and we've seen it happen in many countries who have been occupied for a long time. Occupation and the staleness of eRepublik combine to make a retention rate for new players to be negligibly small here in Canada. This is exacerbated even further by Plato favoring large countries over small ones. Plato apparently is only interested in retaining citizens of the large nations.

eRepublik used to have a good amount of large countries, a good amount of small countries, and also a good amount of medium countries. Now, medium strength countries are extraordinarily rare, because of the way Plato has favored strong and large countries, 'medium' and 'low' strength countries are able to be occupied by larger ones, causing the citizenry to eventually quit (as seen in Canada).

Well what can be done about this problem, then? First let's remember Colombia's baby boom in today's eRepublik, and look at some other baby booms in the past (the benefit of a long e-life). These examples come from V1, the eWorld had many more citizens back then, Canada was home to about ~6,000 if I remember. Back in those days, Poland was a country of ~10,000 citizens, but an invasion of Germany lead to plenty of real life advertising of the game and Poland experienced the most massive (to my knowledge) baby boom in this game's history. At it's peak Poland was home to 60,000-61,000 citizens. A large percent stayed with the game for at least several months, but then about 6 months later the population had stabilized at 35,000 citizens, which means eRepublik retained 50% of these Polish citizens, very good considering the sheer numbers attracted to the games.



Another example was the USA and Canada in the previous summer, we were invaded by many countries of an opposing alliance and occupied. Occupation was a lot harder back then and the struggle to liberate our regions lead to a baby boom in both of our countries. I wasn't around back then so I can't tell you the numbers, but I remember many people born around this time in the USA and Canada, and I myself was born in November, a few months after the war, I had heard about the war and was going to join the game but wasn't sure what it was and decided against it. Several months later and I finally decided to make an account, so I can personally attest to this.

I know what you're thinking right now, "That's great Auk, but how does this relate today?" Well, let's see what Plato and the admins of eRepublik were doing differently those days. Because this article has become insanely long I'm going to split this into two separate parts.

Stay tuned for more

-Auk Rest