The Economist ~ Open letter to the game owners and admins

Day 2,311, 10:35 • Published in Poland United Kingdom • by Spite313



Dear game owners and administrators,



Let me start with a story, a little snippet of my life. When I started playing way back in the last days of 2008, the eUK was the fifth largest country in the game by population. A game barely out of beta with no advertising managed to attract over five thousand British players, a significant amount of which were active and involved in the game. Over time I’ve watched as the game grew and grew- and then collapsed suddenly during the build up to v2.


Let’s not get confused here- V2 was a death blow, but I can understand why it was done. Not many around today remember the crippling economic troubles leading up to V2, but trust me they were bad. Without a major change the game was going to become completely deadlocked. Unfortunately the change was massively unpopular and killed of a significant number of players.


On the plus side for yourselves, the owners, most of the dead citizens were just “two clickers”, in other words they made up numbers but didn’t really noticeably affect gameplay. The monetisation of the game as gold buying increased compensated for the overall drop in numbers, and your strategy reflected this turn of events, appealing more and more to individuals rather than countries. eRepublik slowly became a one player game.


Now I’m not here to talk about that, I’m here to talk about the effect that has had on the community. As the co-operative aspect was removed, many of the meta-game aspects have withered and died, which has left many nations struggling. In the UK when I joined, our national forums regularly had hundreds of posts a day. Of late, we are lucky to see twenty posts in a week outside of the “spam” forums, and even those are slowly dying.


How do you judge the healthiness of an eCountry? I guess you can judge it by the quantity and quality of it’s players. A large user base means you can do damage, but it’s the quality of players which determines its organisation and differentiates between a mass of clickers and a country. Unfortunately the changes you made to the game are slowly killing the “quality” part of the userbase.


On an international level, I’ve noticed over the years a major decline in the numbers of strong candidates for leadership coming forward. It’s got to the point now where it’s like pass the parcel between people who have already done it, and when someone new with a modicum of talent comes along people are waving flags in the streets in celebration. In the eUK we’ve elected god knows how many lacklustre, incompetent and untrustworthy people simply because it was a toss up between two bad choices.





In fact it has got to the point now where the eUK probably has - at most - 30 ‘quality’ citizens who are actively organising. After that there are a bunch who are slightly more active and help out, but don’t use IRC and so can never advance beyond the level they’re at now. Of our 30 active quality citizens, the great majority are busy either in government (here or abroad) or internationally. That means people no longer have “time off”. Burn-outs are increasing and the available pool of talent is shrinking every month.


In bigger countries it might be less noticeable because they have more people to begin with, but here in the eUK it is starkly obvious. We can’t even field 5 strong parties anymore- at best we have three that are noticeably different from my eyes. No doubt people will complain about that assessment, but it’s how I see it at the moment. The gradually shrinking talent pool means that when someone burns out, we have a choice to either abolish the position they hold, or put someone incompetent or inexperienced in their place. In some cases that has worked out spectacularly well, but most of the time it hasn’t.


So where am I going with this? I think you seriously need to think about the future of the game, yes. I’m not telling you to change all your modules, or to radically reverse policy. But your focus now has to be on making the game challenging and deep enough to retain those “quality” players, because I’m telling you if we don’t have an influx soon, countries of the eUK’s size are going to drop off the map in the next year.





Once, long ago, you approached us about organising a possible eUK baby boom. Nothing came of it- I believe in the end you went for a bunch of (badly) targeted Facebook ads which did a total of nothing. As a stopgap measure- which will by no means fix the problem but will alleviate it somewhat - you could run a serious advertising campaign to attract new players to the game. Lots of other browser MMOs do it, very successfully. France, Germany, UK and the Scandinavian countries are a big market when it comes to gaming, and they’ve been totally neglected. Even the USA is a tiny fraction of what it should be by it’s potential userbase.


If you want to make this game something good, you need to act to save it now.



Iain





Copied from a ticket sent to the admins 19/03/2014. Please send your own.


Edit: Reply from admin team

Although it is against game rules to post correspondence with the admins, they have contacted me to say everyone in the office read the article, and that they would pass it to appropriate people (ie other investors). They also intimated that they would take action to improve the situation in the near future. Here's hoping 🙂