Join the new world

Whether you’re English, Serbian, Chinese, Brazilian, South African, or American you have something in common with your fellow players of eRepublik. At one point or another you were a noob. I’ve only been playing for a little over a month myself, so many people would still consider me a noob. For all of us new players things can be overwhelming at first. There are forums to sign up for, jobs to find, changes in the game to keep up to date on, militaries to enlist in, and countless options for what path you want your citizen to take. Each of these tasks comes with questions. Which forum do the people of my country actually use? What are the advantages of one job over another? How will the changes outlined by the Admins affect me? Which military skill should I be training in? And above all else, which path is right for my citizen? In a game where player retention is everything the country that answers these questions best is the country that will be the superpower of tomorrow. In this first article of my newspaper I wish to address the first impressions that any citizen of the eUK gets about his or her new home.

The most obvious thing that any new player will see, after the basic tutorial provided by eRepublik itself, is the welcoming message. Personally I feel that the eUK does a reasonably good job of informing its citizens of the basics in this message. We’re informed where to sign up for the forum, how to get on IRC, and how to request further help if this message isn’t enough. The real problem that I see starts when you get to the forum. Signing up is easy enough but then you’re left with the question of what to do next. There is a place for introducing yourself, but even that isn’t as obvious as it could be. The most glaring problem seems to be that there aren’t many resources that are immediately apparent for further educating yourself on the game that you’ve just started playing. In my mind we should be pointing our new citizens in the direction of guides on everything from the current state of the nation militarily, politically, and economically to some basic pointers on the more important elements of the game according to players who have been playing for some time.

Some would say that this is what a mentor is for. I think that I am the perfect example of why the mentor program won’t always work for reaching new citizens. I read the New Citizen Message when I got it, and I followed the majority of its instructions. But when it came to getting a mentor I passed on the chance. It’s not because I don’t want to get involved in the game, but because as a relatively quick learner and someone who has some experience with online games I assumed that I could figure everything out on my own. For the most part I was right, but I have no doubt that even though I know the basics of eRepublik there are many things I don’t know. The political history of our eNation is something of a mystery to me. The military history is even more of a mystery. How we became allied with the eNations that we’re allied with, and enemies with the ones that we’re enemies with, is a total unknown to me. For quite some time I wasn’t even sure of who our allies and enemies were. As an independent learner I could have found all this out, and many other important things, by reading simple guides in my first few days if only such guides existed. Instead I learned by trial and error. How many players must we have lost because they were less successful in these efforts?

I’ve written this article not just to ask that things are made better for new players, but to offer a perspective that many experienced players have lost. The perspective of a player who is new to the game. The perspective of one of the very players we’re trying to help and keep involved in the game. To be sure there are some people who will never sign up for the forum, who will never become more involved in the game, and who will quit shortly after starting. Try as we might many of these players will follow those paths regardless of what we do. Therefore I think that our efforts are best spent making it as easy as possible for the new players that do make an effort to be active to acclimate to the new game that they’ve just joined. Perhaps these things have been tried before, but even if they have, doesn’t it make more sense to keep trying than to just let our nation fall behind in player retention? And if we’re successful in being the best nation in the eWorld at retaining players what limits can we possibly have in our future ambitions? But then these are just a few thoughts from the desk of The Time Lord.