Stagnation at Home and Abroad (PART TWO)
Day 2,052, 08:50
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Published in Canada 
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by
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by Auk Rest
Stagnation at Home and Abroad (PART TWO)
In the previous article we saw many of the problems of citizen retention and the stagnation of eRepublik, but now it’s time to show Plato what he was doing right and what he is now doing wrong, and how to change so we can finally enjoy eRepublik again!!
1) Newspaper and Community
Back in V1, the admins operated a newspaper, eRepublik Insider - you can see its skeleton here. This used to be an actual newspaper with the ability to vote, comment, and published in the actual media space, not a random notification. If you look at previous articles made before the change we see now, we can see plenty of votes, plenty of comments and plenty of enthusiasm. Players at least knew the developers were tuned into their concerns and were communicating with them.
And then --- nothing. Notice the 800 day(!!!) difference between the publishing of the 'Daily Tasks' article and the eRepublik summit in 2012 when they changed the newspaper to a no-feedback announcement drone. The admins have stopped listening and stopped pretending to listen, feedback is meaningless and it seems like they don’t want to hear it.
My suggestion to Plato: Get in touch with your playerbase! It will eventually show the playerbase that you might actually care about the quality of this game.
2) Stale Mechanics
Ignoring the social aspect of eRepublik, let’s examine the mechanics of this game. Click. Click. Click. That’s about as deep as eRepublik gets, but it’s always basically been some form of that. Social interaction is the primary reason for this game to exist, but the reason why I’m on eRepublik and not Facebook is because of the basis of this game, living in an eNation with an eEconomy, eWarfare and ePolitics.
I don’t think any of these modules were ever particularly dynamic, but the ones we have now are pitiful. The economic module is in such bad shape it’s almost funny. Plato isn’t doing anything about it either, with his constant influxes of gold due to deals and promotions into the market at uneven intervals. Supposedly the admins are working on a new economic module, but if that new map was any indication of the quality of their work, we will all be in trouble.
The political module has remained exactly the same ever since I’ve been playing - excluding the change of Congress from electing people in regions to electing partisan lists. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it, I’m sure it could be improved but I don’t have any suggestion but reversing the decision to vote for lists. But this isn’t relevant since Canada hasn’t had a Congress for many many months.
The warfare module, in my opinion has always been the most dynamic and most complex. V1 warfare was simplistic, fighting was done with individuals fighting with their influence against the opponent country’s influence, no 1v1 ‘fights’ between actual players. Pushing the ‘wall’ as it was called up or down and keeping it there until the end of the battle caused victory or loss.
An example is here: Link
In that regard, I think Plato has enhanced the war module. The one we have now is not perfect, but I do think it is an improvement, particularly the separating of fighting into divisions so new players can actually help a battle.
But as much as I like the micro enhancements made to the warfare module, the strategic, macro aspect of the game has been completely destroyed. I know this may be difficult to explain to those who didn’t experience it - but hopefully this explanation is satisfactory.
In V1, a country’s MPPs (alliances) were used in different ways. If for example, Serbia attacked Croatia, Croatia’s allies would be able to fight for it in the battle, but none of Serbia’s allies would have the battle listed and be able to fight in it from their home country, the allies of Serbia would have to get citizens to move to Serbia to be able to fight in this battle. This gave defending nations an advantage and would make it slightly more difficult for massive nations to steamroll small ones. But - if Croatia won its battle against Serbia and then attacked Serbia’s land, Croatia could still use its alliances in the battle, but then Serbia’s alliances would be activated as well and would have use of them in future battles, until a peace treaty was signed and all activated alliances would be deactivated and there would be peace. It was also possible to retreat from battles for strategic purposes.
Countries were also not forced to attack every 24 hours or whatever the current timer is, if in the example I used, Serbia attacked Croatia and Croatia successfully defended, then neglected to attack back, not activating Serbia’s alliances but not signing a peace treaty, plans could be formulated between nations to make use of these already activated advantages, for example in a plan several months later to jointly occupy Serbia with Croatia and Romania, those activated alliances would be very helpful in that regard.
Another difference is that more than one resistance war could be active at a time, so a massive rebellion could be attempted through multiple regions, making the occupying nation spread its damage and increase the success chance of at least one region to be freed. Also, those defensive alliances I was talking about would only activate on an attack of a country’s ‘original regions’, the RL borders of a country. Attacking ‘colonial’ territory held would not activate alliances, making it easy for a third party to attack and free occupied land.
As you can tell, occupations were much harder to achieve and certainly difficult to keep a country down for months at a time. This is good because occupations can be fun -- just not situations like what Canada finds itself in, extended occupation with no chance of freedom due ot our advantages being stripped from us.
My suggestion: Keep the current PVP (even guerilla fights), divisions and battle system, but bring back all the V1 era strategic aspect of the war module, defensive MPPs, retreating, multiple resistance wars, etc. And Plato needs to stop destabilizing the economy as a result of...
3) And last but not least --- ADS AND PROMOTIONS!!
It seems like every other day there is some sort of ad or promotion or dumb ‘event’ happening in eRepublik as Plato tries to pathetically stop the bleeding of players from his game without realizing the main causes of it. The promotional deals are pathetic and reek of desperation. The “Black Market” deal for .99 euros during the last event was Plato’s most desperate act yet to try and turn a profit.
These deals are not only annoying, but constantly injecting the economy with gold is not healthy and helps destabilize prices in the gold market, which then affects other aspects of the game. Also, many of these new missions are geared only to get you to spend a lot of damage and recover energy that will take lots of energy bars - I assume in hopes that you go buy energy bar packs with real life money.
My suggestion to Plato: If you make some changes and make the game interesting for players to enjoy and stay in the game, you will probably see an increase in profit - not with cheesy and terrible promotional gags.
I promise - I’m done, hope you enjoyed the read!
-Auk Rest
In the previous article we saw many of the problems of citizen retention and the stagnation of eRepublik, but now it’s time to show Plato what he was doing right and what he is now doing wrong, and how to change so we can finally enjoy eRepublik again!!
1) Newspaper and Community
Back in V1, the admins operated a newspaper, eRepublik Insider - you can see its skeleton here. This used to be an actual newspaper with the ability to vote, comment, and published in the actual media space, not a random notification. If you look at previous articles made before the change we see now, we can see plenty of votes, plenty of comments and plenty of enthusiasm. Players at least knew the developers were tuned into their concerns and were communicating with them.
And then --- nothing. Notice the 800 day(!!!) difference between the publishing of the 'Daily Tasks' article and the eRepublik summit in 2012 when they changed the newspaper to a no-feedback announcement drone. The admins have stopped listening and stopped pretending to listen, feedback is meaningless and it seems like they don’t want to hear it.
My suggestion to Plato: Get in touch with your playerbase! It will eventually show the playerbase that you might actually care about the quality of this game.
2) Stale Mechanics
Ignoring the social aspect of eRepublik, let’s examine the mechanics of this game. Click. Click. Click. That’s about as deep as eRepublik gets, but it’s always basically been some form of that. Social interaction is the primary reason for this game to exist, but the reason why I’m on eRepublik and not Facebook is because of the basis of this game, living in an eNation with an eEconomy, eWarfare and ePolitics.
I don’t think any of these modules were ever particularly dynamic, but the ones we have now are pitiful. The economic module is in such bad shape it’s almost funny. Plato isn’t doing anything about it either, with his constant influxes of gold due to deals and promotions into the market at uneven intervals. Supposedly the admins are working on a new economic module, but if that new map was any indication of the quality of their work, we will all be in trouble.
The political module has remained exactly the same ever since I’ve been playing - excluding the change of Congress from electing people in regions to electing partisan lists. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it, I’m sure it could be improved but I don’t have any suggestion but reversing the decision to vote for lists. But this isn’t relevant since Canada hasn’t had a Congress for many many months.
The warfare module, in my opinion has always been the most dynamic and most complex. V1 warfare was simplistic, fighting was done with individuals fighting with their influence against the opponent country’s influence, no 1v1 ‘fights’ between actual players. Pushing the ‘wall’ as it was called up or down and keeping it there until the end of the battle caused victory or loss.
An example is here: Link
In that regard, I think Plato has enhanced the war module. The one we have now is not perfect, but I do think it is an improvement, particularly the separating of fighting into divisions so new players can actually help a battle.
But as much as I like the micro enhancements made to the warfare module, the strategic, macro aspect of the game has been completely destroyed. I know this may be difficult to explain to those who didn’t experience it - but hopefully this explanation is satisfactory.
In V1, a country’s MPPs (alliances) were used in different ways. If for example, Serbia attacked Croatia, Croatia’s allies would be able to fight for it in the battle, but none of Serbia’s allies would have the battle listed and be able to fight in it from their home country, the allies of Serbia would have to get citizens to move to Serbia to be able to fight in this battle. This gave defending nations an advantage and would make it slightly more difficult for massive nations to steamroll small ones. But - if Croatia won its battle against Serbia and then attacked Serbia’s land, Croatia could still use its alliances in the battle, but then Serbia’s alliances would be activated as well and would have use of them in future battles, until a peace treaty was signed and all activated alliances would be deactivated and there would be peace. It was also possible to retreat from battles for strategic purposes.
Countries were also not forced to attack every 24 hours or whatever the current timer is, if in the example I used, Serbia attacked Croatia and Croatia successfully defended, then neglected to attack back, not activating Serbia’s alliances but not signing a peace treaty, plans could be formulated between nations to make use of these already activated advantages, for example in a plan several months later to jointly occupy Serbia with Croatia and Romania, those activated alliances would be very helpful in that regard.
Another difference is that more than one resistance war could be active at a time, so a massive rebellion could be attempted through multiple regions, making the occupying nation spread its damage and increase the success chance of at least one region to be freed. Also, those defensive alliances I was talking about would only activate on an attack of a country’s ‘original regions’, the RL borders of a country. Attacking ‘colonial’ territory held would not activate alliances, making it easy for a third party to attack and free occupied land.
As you can tell, occupations were much harder to achieve and certainly difficult to keep a country down for months at a time. This is good because occupations can be fun -- just not situations like what Canada finds itself in, extended occupation with no chance of freedom due ot our advantages being stripped from us.
My suggestion: Keep the current PVP (even guerilla fights), divisions and battle system, but bring back all the V1 era strategic aspect of the war module, defensive MPPs, retreating, multiple resistance wars, etc. And Plato needs to stop destabilizing the economy as a result of...
3) And last but not least --- ADS AND PROMOTIONS!!
It seems like every other day there is some sort of ad or promotion or dumb ‘event’ happening in eRepublik as Plato tries to pathetically stop the bleeding of players from his game without realizing the main causes of it. The promotional deals are pathetic and reek of desperation. The “Black Market” deal for .99 euros during the last event was Plato’s most desperate act yet to try and turn a profit.
These deals are not only annoying, but constantly injecting the economy with gold is not healthy and helps destabilize prices in the gold market, which then affects other aspects of the game. Also, many of these new missions are geared only to get you to spend a lot of damage and recover energy that will take lots of energy bars - I assume in hopes that you go buy energy bar packs with real life money.
My suggestion to Plato: If you make some changes and make the game interesting for players to enjoy and stay in the game, you will probably see an increase in profit - not with cheesy and terrible promotional gags.
I promise - I’m done, hope you enjoyed the read!
-Auk Rest
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Comments
Another great article, o7
"My suggestion to Plato: Get in touch with your playerbase! It will eventually show the playerbase that you might actually care about the quality of this game."
1,Nonsense,did you know that V2 was based mostly on players suggestion?So would you listen to players yet again,when clearly they have no idea what they want?
"I don’t think any of these modules were ever particularly dynamic, but the ones we have now are pitiful. The economic module is in such bad shape it’s almost funny. "
2,You know its pretty hard to balance considering that this game full of bots and multies....not to mention that if you are able to earn 10+ gold a day,who the hell would buy gold?
"The political module has remained exactly the same ever since I’ve been playing - excluding the change of Congress from electing people in regions to electing partisan lists. "
3,This game had lot of clone,all of them horrible but still even those clones never improved politic module....thats telling a lot.
"In V1, a country’s MPPs (alliances) were used in different ways. If for example, Serbia attacked Croatia, Croatia’s allies would be able to fight for it in the battle, but none of Serbia’s allies would have the battle listed and be able to fight in it from their home country, the allies of Serbia would have to get citizens to move to Serbia to be able to fight in this battle. This gave defending nations an advantage and would make it slightly more difficult for massive nations to steamroll small ones. "
4,Caused massive status quo since nobody dared to attack,and if somebody did was destroyed an instant see the case of eRussia.
1) V2 was not based on player suggestion...they removed it based on massive outcry and the loss of 25-50% of the players pre V2
2) No comment
3)Not sure what you're getting at
4)Status quo followed by epic wars is better than cyclical nonsense where you don't care who wins or loses because it will repeat anyways.
o7
http://blog.erepublik.com/post-summit-review/
That looks dangerously like V2.....
Its basically just a change of graphic beneath the present battle mod from what I hear, though I believe it will let you view the fights in other divs too.
wish plato cared as much as Auk. Youve been hitting the nail on the head lately sir. o7 well done
Thanks!
yes well done!
i would even go back to the days of us being occupied and us rallying to free ontario from a huge wall, loved that video back in the day! ahaha good old days
And excellent article.
Sadly I doubt if Plato really gives a furry rats arse. I can understand the need to bring real money in, but sometimes they go overboard with their promos and ads.
I played V1 and despite all its problems really liked it. I remember when A God of War was someone special and not just a player who spent a bucket load of money.
Now the game seems to be nothing more than buying Gold and wiping other countries.