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(there's no actual reason for which this article is in English, I just felt like writing in English this morning)

A lot of things changed in eRepublik in the last days, in regards to economy. First of all, the terribly bugged system which the admins choose to treat as a joke. Secondly, the new trivia and its consequences on economy. Third, the new taxes in the Romanian market. Let's take it one at a time :

You, as a game admin/owner, find out about an exploit. Let's go pass all the poor programming which is causing daily delays, the site crashing, the other exploits used before, and so on. What do you do ? Do you take the game offline for 2 days, analyse all logs, delete all the gold, fire some programmers/testers and get a real team to handle this and drive this game into a succesful business ?

Well, no. You write a joke of an article about snakes and you basically make fun out of a situation that's frustrating thousands of players. You message the guy that used the exploit asking him to tell you how he did it, promising you won't ban him. You disable some important features which greatly affect players, companies not able to exchange gold, people not being able to donate weapons or anything else. You bring the site up and down for 3 days or put our patience to the test while waiting for all the pages to load so we can train, work or fight. You LIE to us telling that the exploit was used for a few hours, when there were clear examples of a) the gold being exploited weeks before, but at a smaller scale so they won't get caught b) a certain Q5 company that produced 1000 weapons each night since over one month ago c) high ranking one-month soldiers, high Q companies appearing out of nowhere, gold on ORGs with no activity, and so on. All of this could be solved only by taking the game offline, analysing all the logs and making the necessary changes, not 4-5 on-the-fly bans which solve absolutely NOTHING.

And after all this, we, the guys that played this game hard and fair, invested our money and time into it, supposed to say "OK, great, let's go on". Let's continue to invest our money for which we're working hard in the real life, just to be equal to some guy which produces gold out of nowhere. Let's have fun, let's enjoy the community, let's enjoy the new features.

Ah yes, the new features. Who cares the site is down 20% of the time, people are using exploits, bugs with avatars, training, working and others occur every day. We have Flash Trivia ! No decoders !

First of all, that's bull$hit. I give it one week before the first decoders appear. What does it take for you people to realise that people don't like Trivia ? That it messes up the productivity numbers which we, the managers, use to estimate a price and a salary (oh, yes, making Flash Trivia was the priority, giving us some REAL TOOLS, was not). That the questions are stupid, and there were hundreds of examples of questions which are not common knowledge or even close to it.

Second, who was the brainiac that implemented that thing. Did you ever tried it on a computer with no flash installed ? You get no warning, no message, nothing but an empty window and your browser gets stuck. Did you tried it on other browsers ? Operating systems ? I got complaines from my employees that use Linux (yes, they're geeks), Opera and IceWeasel (Firefox) and it is not working. Did you bothered to, at least, post somewhere some minimum requirements for the game to work, or we should just discover ourselves through tests ? There you go, free testers !

And let's move on to the Romanian market (the next part will make no sense for the non-Romanian readers).

First of all, we have the 25% taxes (VAT + income), which are the highest in eRepublik. I never seen, in any economy, a 25% tax from the Congress, on any industry. I have to look deep and hard to even find a 15% total tax, the average in evolved countries being around 7%. The purpose, as I found out, was for some companies to go bankrupt, which would lead to a smaller number of companies, lower salaries due to unemployment and a more powerful RON, combined with higher income in the state treasury.

And I was looking yesterday at the market and saw the salaries going down, some of the prices going down, and I said, well, this could work. Well, on the longterm, it won't. And I'm looking at the weapons market, a highly competitive one.

- the lowest price for a Q3 weapon, at this point, is 25 RON (and there's no sale at that price). A skill 6 guy, with 90% wellness and, let's say, 4 answers (which is decent in the new trivia system), would produce about 1.5 weapons, or 37.5 RON. Out of that, the price of iron is around 17 RON, the income tax is 10%, so another 3.75 RON, which leads to a salary of 16.75 RON to be paid to a skill 6 worker IF you sell at production price. The guy is also getting taxes for his salary, so he would get around 15 RON every day.

To work in a Q3 company, you need, let's say, Q4 food to keep up your wellness (although that won't be enough), which is around 11 RON at this point. So you're left, after a few good months of playing the game, with a 4 RON to spend on whatever you want. Which means that, in case of a war, you can buy a Q3 weapon every.... 7 days. Or you can buy a Q1 house in 2 real months (58 days). Or a Q3 house in 233 real days. Is it just me, or there's something wrong with this picture ?

That's from the worker's point of view. From the company's point of view, we need to pay the worker EVEN less, because we have around 90 gold (5535 RON) to get back, the initial investment. So if we give the worker, let's say, 3 RON less each day, we would need 180 days only to get our investment back, considering we're selling all the weapons every day, all the workers are level 6, they all work every day, they do the productivity above, there are no disruptions in the company, and the price doesn't get any lower. And afterwards, we would need another 200 days to raise the gold needed for Q4. And another 400 days after that for Q5.

- as it was agreed that in any economy, a higher number of companies leads to a higher competition in both the prices and the salaries, why are we trying to lower the number of companies as much as possible ?

- the outcome ? From the worker's point of view, I would go and live some place where I'm earning some real gold for my skill, especially the new countries which have no high-skill workers. To get 0.19 gold/day after a few months of playing is pretty much non-sense. From the companies' point of view, a lot of them will go bankrupt (as it was intended). Those remaining will either sell outside or try to establish higher prices. Which brings us to the last subject - imports. And there's just one question here, as you're probably already bored from reading - considering the local production, especially in weapons, won't be enough to cover the demand after a lot of companies going bankrupt, do you think it's healthy for the romanian economy to be, let's say, 80% dependent on the imports during war time ?