The Economist ~ Abandon all hope ye who enter here

Day 1,491, 11:25 • Published in United Kingdom United Kingdom • by Spite313




Dear friends,

Today I logged into erep, and I saw the new deal. I then logged out in disgust. That deal said one thing to me- eRepublik has decided it wants no new players. It is now time for them to milk the cow to death, before moving on to new things.

This game has gradually moved from an inclusive multiplayer game, to an exclusive single player game. You can no longer develop, you can only buy. Every single change to the game in the last two years has been designed to favour the already old and wealthy, and screw over new players. And we wonder why the average age of players is constantly rising, and the number of new players is constantly dropping. Remember the big booms that brought 20-30-60 thousand players? Remember when our battles had thousands of fighters?

Now we live in an age of gold buying elite citizens. The Q6 company “offer” is the latest incentive thrown at those people- each company costs 200g to upgrade, and the only people who have 200g lying around are the gold buyers. So this latest offer is just a demand to gold buyers- “UPGRADE NOW OR YOU’LL FALL BEHIND”. So everyone with Q5s is now sitting trying to think of how to raise 200g per company- some (like me) consider selling or dissolving one company to upgrade another. Others however will reach for the credit card and the £60 bill per company in real money to upgrade.

The underlying fact we are all missing however is what this is going to mean for new players. Firstly the scarcity of Q6 weapons and the fact that there will be so few companies will mean they are priced out of their range. Secondly, the few companies which exist will be stealing all of the workers, and relying on income from Q6-less tanks to pay for high wages. Thirdly, if new players do want to buy a Q6 company from scratch today, it will cost them 200 euros in real money. To put that into perspective, that is a little under the median household income for an OECD country per week in the real world.

On top of that, blows to the economy module have crippled the profit making capacity of these companies. Limited to five workers, it would take (I am not joking- do the maths) years of erep play time to regain your gold investment. This is because the “economy module” is not about working as part of an economy, it is about improving your own personal game play. The market simply allows people to specialise in one area (for example, tanks don’t want loads of WAM so they have higher Q companies and buy the WRM). There is no real economy involved, since your surplus is just used to supply your own needs- all growth has to be funded by buying gold.

And this is why the game is dying. Some say it is already dead. Rather than create a balanced game with a sustainable way of generating income, the admins have resorted to cashing in on the “certain deal” of harvesting the Romper crew for more gold. The elite citizen, the raising of battle ranks, the lana, the buying of bazooka parts- all the deals and offers. All have been culminating into this- the bar of how much you can spend being raised again. The only changes the admins will bring are ones which demand you spend more money. You’re not even spending gold to make the game more fun- as with lana, this Q6 move will force Q5 owners to spend gold just to keep their current place. It is betting that you value the investment you’ve already made over the cost of upgrading.



With strength impossible to overtake, with gold buyers dominating every field, what prospects does a new player have? By carefully hording their resources, they can make enough money to be one of millions of drones supplying the Gods with weapons raw material and workers. In theory they can become a CP or congressmen, though few last long enough to get the experience for that. Romper does 8577 per hit now. New players will never get a battle hero without spending gold. They’ll never achieve anything in a module where even the “co-op” element of armies has disappeared.

To fix this game the admins need to:

-Put a limit on gold buying each day
-Increase the worker-per-company limit to 20 (or at least 10)
-Fix the rate of exchange on the monetary markets at 1000 currency=1 gold
-Allow players to cash in their currency directly to the admins
-Either accelerate the growth rate of strength for new players OR
-Reduce everyone’s strength by an equal % to allow new players to catch up
-Remove special offers altogether, so people know their investment in companies won’t be undermined or made worthless
-Refund and delete Q6 companies
-Remove the “elite citizen” moniker

Most importantly- invest real time and effort into improving the other three neglected modules- the ones which make it a MMO and a strategy game. At the minute there are flash games made by students which are more complex than erep. If I want to play “how far can I catapult the monkey” I don’t have to pay hundreds of Euros. I expect a game which reflects the cost to play.

I have said this before, but a subscription model would bring in more money and would be steady reliable income- a lot more impressive to investors. Something simple like a craft shop to buy the things you can currently buy with LP (like health buildings or storage, which are nice but can be acquired in other ways) combined with a “premium user” account for something like 15 euros would be great. You have seen the things erep advanced scripts and so on can produce when your api is working. Include loads of features like that on your premium account, give extra buttons, give links to things, allow premium users to (for example) one hit kill people, using the 30 or 40 wellness with one click. Simple things, and I bet you would get 10k people sign up to premium accounts in the first week. There is your 150,000 euros straight away. And with a more balanced and playable game, new players might actually stick around.

The game is f**ked, and if you don’t fix it nobody will stay. Not even the gold buyers.


Iain




Through me you pass into the city of woe:
Through me you pass into eternal pain:
Through me among the people lost for aye.

Justice the founder of my fabric mov'😛
To rear me was the task of power divine,
Supremest wisdom, and primeval love.

Before me things create were none, save things
Eternal, and eternal I endure.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.

Such characters in colour dim I mark'd
Over a portal's lofty arch inscrib'😛
Whereat I thus: Master, these words import.