The Organization Question

Day 1,125, 00:31 • Published in USA USA • by Caleel


There has been a lot of news about the organization change lately. For those of you that don't know, the administrators recently announced that they will soon be removing organizations from the game completely. They cite their reasons as being the insecurity of Organization accounts and an easier transition into the new economics module.

In case you haven't ever used an Organization account before, let me explain. Organizations act as a second account that you can access and use as storage, to manage companies, or even create additional newspapers, thus freeing your main account for other uses. The issue is that you can also open it up to be managed by other people, who are listed as "Managers" on the account. The security issue comes in with how these accounts are accessed. You see, in order to access the Organization accounts you must log out of your eRepublik citizen account and log in to the Organization account. This means that each manager has to also be given the password, and each time the password is shared it becomes more and more insecure.

The other issue comes in with how Organizations are recognized by the game's programming. ERepublik's programming sees the Organizations as separate players, and thus would apply the new "citizen in-country ownership" bonus to the Organizations wrongly. This is rather difficult to work around in the programming without taking the website down for a day or so. As a Web Programmer I understand both of these issues.

However, as a Web Programmer I can also see a simple solution. Instead of completely removing the Organization accounts, simply redo them. The code already exists in-site for this to be done very easily.

Ideally, the organizations should be able to be accessed through an in-game menu without having to log out and back in. The one who creates the Organization should be labeled as the Owner and given full permissions, while everyone else able to access it is labeled a Manager and given differing levels of permission based on the Owner's decisions. The Organizations should be able to own property and have an inventory, and even a newspaper and shout box but without the badges attributed to citizen accounts. "But Caleel," you may be thinking, "Where does this wonderful code exist in game?" The answer is simple, and should be obvious. It doesn't. Not as a whole anyway. However the majority of this system DOES actually already exist in another section of the site. The politics/Party section.

If the Administrators took the script for the Party system's code and tweeked it with bits and pieces of the current organization script, they could quite easily upload this code as the new framework for the Organizations and avoid having any more people become fed up with eRepublik and quit in anger. Of course, this would also remove the Organizations from being classified as "Citizens" and help with the new "Citizen ownership bonus." A citizen who owned and managed a company with their Citizen account would get the new bonus, one who used their Organization section to own and manage it would not get the bonus. After all, the point of a bonus is to encourage a certain behavior, not restrict people from doing anything else.

I do not fault the administrators for their decision to remove the Organizations. It makes perfect sense from a security standpoint and it makes perfect sense from a simplicity standpoint. However with these simple changes the administrators could take the middle road and avoid losing a large amount of their populous.

For the administrators, should they ever read my humble article, I have this message: As a web programmer, I know what happens when you drive away most of your customers with unpopular changes in the name of ease of management. You are swiftly approaching the line of no return, be sure that you do not cross it.



Caleel