The citizenship is on its way

Day 608, 07:31 • Published in • by Plato

Dear citizens,

One of the most awaited feature in eRepublik, if not the most awaited, is citizenship. We can easily understand why, as citizenship is primary just another word for nationality. Patriotism. This is the feeling that drives nations, and the feeling that has started wars throughout human history. The feeling that made you grab your friends and dance on the streets when your national football/soccer team won the World Cup, or the feeling that makes you proud when you answer the simple question “what country are you from?” Patriotism makes you put your country's flag on your avatar because you are proud of your nation. And you want everybody to know that.

eRepublik is about “personal winning,” but it's also about “national winning.” Would it feel so good to be a respectable, successful and appreciated character worldwide, all while your nation struggles in mediocrity? No, it wouldn't - you would do anything to help the rise of your entire nation. Many citizens have sacrificed themselves, and their social status, for the sake of their nations, which only proves how strong the love for the homeland is.

Our team has worked hard in the last months for the introduction of this vital feature, citizenship. Older citizens recall the existence of an incipient concept of having a nationality in Beta, when you had to live in a country for 10 days in order to have the right to vote. But this wasn't enough, that's why we worked hard to improve the concept.

So, let's start describing the citizenship module. If you open a citizen's profile, in addition to old information, you will also see his/her citizenship.

The citizenship will be offered as follows:

-for new citizens, after they have chosen country and region, the citizenship will be granted automatically

-for registered citizens, the citizenship will be granted according to the country they live in at the moment of the citizenship module implementation. So make sure that you are living at home that day!

-if you wish to change your citizenship, you may do that by requesting new citizenship from another country.

A citizen can have one and only one citizenship. So, if you are let's say an Italian and want to become an American, you will have to move to the USA and request American citizenship. Your request will then be added to a list, along with those requests of others, which will then be at the disposal of Congress. There's a formula which limits the maximum number of granted citizenships to 10 % of country's population. So, in the USA each congressman can offer a maximum of around 35 citizenships/month, with the current population/regions configuration. Your request will be visible for five days to all the congressmen of America, in our example. If after five day no one has pushed the “Yes” button, your request will be automatically deleted. After five days you may post another citizenship request. A congressman can only accept a pending request, he can not cancel nor delete it. Also, if you wish to leave the country for which you've requested citizenship, you will have to either cancel the request (you are “tied” to the country, like Congress Members are) or wait until you are offered citizenship.

With the introduction of the citizenship module, the diaspora voting becomes reality. If you have citizenship and decide to move temporarily to another country for a better life, you will be voting for candidates back home, not the ones in your new country. In congressional elections you will vote for candidates in the last region in which you lived before moving to the other country. In the country presidential election, you will have the same list like everybody back home. So, politically you are bonded by your citizenship to your home land. From now on, in which country you reside will have no importance - you will vote according to your citizenship.

The citizenship module is not aiming to completely stop takeovers, but to offer the possibility to fight back and protect from those political takeovers.

We'll be moving around some things on the profile page in order to accommodate the new information. During this evaluation of the home page, we spent time assessing what should go where in order to optimize the page's layout, and one of the changes we wanted to inform you about is the movement of the Ambassador achievement - which will now be considered a honor, and will live next to your citizen name. We thought this was a logical move, since it is not as in-game related as the other achievements - but still a very important acknowledgment that many citizens deserve and are eager to obtain. And on that note, thanks to all of our current ambassadors - the program is a work in progress, so we thank you for your patience while we iron out the wrinkles and get everything up and running smoothly. For now, we will be moving the Ambassador icon from the achievement section and promise it will make its reappearance with the updated profile page in the coming month - being an Ambassador will proceed as usual.

About the time-frame, our team is working on the final details, so we expect to have the new citizenship module implemented in the next two weeks. We hope you will like it!

Further details, and answers to some questions, will be available in future Insiders.

Regards,
The eRepublik Team