The Context of Reflection: An Interview with Alexis Bonte

Day 1,033, 01:15 • Published in USA Ireland • by CelticTiger211


Vol. 1/Issue 1

The Context of Reflection: An Interview with Alexis Bonte

Discomfort…
My attention is drawn away from the notes I’m reviewing and I readjust to my surroundings. There’s a blistering sun here that seems to have taken offence to my presence. I wipe another flourish of sweat from my brow and take the final pull on my Marlboro. They taste different in this country. Still, I relight my third and, grabbing the attention of the waiter insider, I tap the tip of my longneck to signal that I’m ready for another Konenbourgr. It’s a nice beer, traditional with a history but more importantly refreshing in this heat.
I’m sitting outdoors in a quiet café in a village of Aquitaine, Southern France. There’s a soothing melody playing inside that sets a gentle tone of peace and rest, almost unbelonging in a region that has played victim throughout the numerous conquests against France. It’s domestic importance though remains redundant and the fear of another occupation resides in its sweltering atmosphere.
The Essence of Timing…
A scuttle breeze cruises past my table and I’m brought back to the present. The gust accompanies my beverage and my discomfort gradually loosens. In the distance I can see a figure, my interviewee, striding toward the cafe. Surprisingly it had taken little effort to organise a meeting, he was more than welcoming to the suggestion, however his time is precious and I was notified that the length of our meeting would be brief. I discard my notes from the table and stand to greet him. We share pleasantries, shake hands and idle in small talk for all of a minute. He is calm, collective and cool, gesturing toward my chair we are seated to begin.



Alexis Bonte is the co-founder and CEO of eRepublik. Launched in 2007, eRepublik owes a large portion of its success to the work rate of this man. For three years eRepublik has attracted gamers from all ages and all parts of the World as it continently adds different dimensions to how strategy games are played. I’m very fortunate and grateful to have had a brief interview with the man at the helm of it all.
The following interview was conduction via email.



Hi Alexis, thank you for agreeing to see me

Thank you for inviting me.

Going back to 2007 when eRepublik was officially launched, did you foresee it attracting the large fan base that it has now and to what do you credit this success too?

Not really, we had hopes that this would work and be interesting but we did not expect that so many people would become engaged with the game so fast. I think most of that success is due to the original concept of the game and the enthusiasm of the community. We actually struggled a lot at the beginning with scalability issues in particular with the beta version of the site (those who where there will know what I'm talking about). This forced us to take some hard decisions that we probably would have not had to take if we had been better prepared and funded at the time. For example the main driver for V1 was to have a product that would scale better than V1 and there is a lot of stuff I and others loved in beta that we had to scrape because of that.

As the CEO of eRepublik what roles do you play in the company?

Initially (beta period) a bit of everything from helping the product guys to the business side and talking with the community, although I wasn't involved fulltime until April 2008.
Then for a long time (V1 period all the way to Rising launch) my main responsibility was to promote the game, raise funds so that we could continue running it, developing it and increase the team to build for growth.
So there was a lot of dealing with investors, and doing business strategy stuff. That had the good side of insuring the company had much more resources’ than before but the bad side that I could not focus as much as I wanted on the day to day stuff and specific issues outside of the business area. This means that it allowed lots of other people to grow in the company but it also meant that I made and let others make more mistakes than I would have liked. Its a common issue in fast growing start ups but still a painful one.
Now I'm trying to get closer again to the day to day issues of the company, making sure we really have the right people in the right places and that everyone works together efficiently. Even if I try not to interfere to much I do want to make sure we become better in key areas that impact the community and not just the business side although I still take care directly of that part.

Where do you see, or want to see, eRepublik in a years time? Are there many updates being planned behind the scenes? There were some hints dropped about upgrading the political module and also on expanding the game into other countries. Can you maybe shed some light of this speculation?

Well first of all there are lot of mistakes that we have made with Rising that we need to correct. When you are trying to grow something as original and different as eRepublik that hasn't been tried before you will make mistakes. The important thing is to correct them. So that is what we are doing at the moment but where possible in baby steps rather than with radical steps. Basically yes we will upgrade the important modules in the right time and might even expand into new countries but only once we have solved the main issues the game has today.
Big picture for the future, is a simpler more intuitive eRepublik that has the same depth we have now in terms of gameplay, maintains the core values of an inspirational New World based on the real one but is faster paced, less Gold intensive, easier to understand for new users and easier to maintain (less bugs). From the feedback we have received (direct and polls) this is also what the vast majority of the community wants.

Just to squash some of the rumours that have been circulating for a while. A lot of people have commented in game about the company being financially strapped and about excessive loan repayments. Is there any truth in these accusations?

No we are ok on that front for the foreseeable future.

The new war module is the biggest success to come out of Rising, it certainly highlights the multiplayer aspect of the game and emphasises co-operation between communities. How pleased are you with its introduction?

Well not everyone would agree with you on that one. The new war modules has some great sides but it also has some major flaws, in particular the time it takes play. It is also to Gold intensive for the players (even with the food consumption introduction) and is a little to hardcore for the majority of our audience. That wasn't clear to us even when we had it in beta, the positive feedback was much larger than the negative feedback then (although there was some and we would have paid more attention to it). But that changed quickly when we went to live and was confirmed by the poll results and direct feedback. A roll back to V1 wasn't possible for technical reasons, so we have been fine tuning it as best we could whilst at the same time we have been working on an changes that would keep the good sides of what we had in V1 (simplicity, speed etc...) some of the Rising advantages (fighting against other country users rather than just a wall) and some new stuff we have learned (from the community feedback and our mistakes). Its a costly lesson but we are now 2 weeks away from being able to have the basic version of this changed war module live. This will be a base without the major flaws we have now but still a basic version that we ill then build on. An insider about this should be out anytime now.

Lastly, unfortunately one of the negative elements of the game are “PTO’ers”, players who make an effort, often succeeding, in politically taking over a country and then offloading it’s resources to their own country. It’s not a nice thing to see, particularly in communities like South Africa and Australia where it’s had a massive affect. Are there any plans to incorporate a method which would give countries stronger authority when dealing with suspected or confirmed PTO’ers?

Most PTO's were due to specific users finding exploits to create several multi's, we had 2 big spikes of this type of thing in the past months. The first thing we had to do is stop these bot farms and make sure they are not longer possible at least in a large scale and to have the processes in place so that if they happen again we can react much faster and more efficiently to them. We also put in place the delayed election results to put a further control. Before that, citizenship is the main thing we did to give countries more control on this issue but we are open to other suggestions.

Alex I appreciate you taking the time out to answers these questions. One last one, are you an EDEN or Phoenix supporter?

Thank you as well and..... I'm an eRepublik supporter 😉

Thank you

No problem



Reflection.
Fair and honest, open and welcoming, cautious and clever. Alexis is a man with eRepublik at heart. Admitting to the mistakes made during the migration Alexis is prominent on recapturing what made eRepublik so special to begin with. With time and patience we should once again be playing the game we all love.
CT checking out.



(I have limited funds available for transfer so I’d ask you to consider giving this article a shout, greatly appreciated)
CT