What would you want to see?

Day 2,283, 16:52 • Published in USA USA • by Bucephalus92

Greetings Bros,


Recently Jude Connors published an article asking "What would you want to see?" added into this little game of ours. Since I've got a little free time on my hands, I've decided to take a stab at answering this question. Rather than focus on just one idea I am going to try to list as many of the good ideas about changes to this game that I can. Some of these are my own, many others are ones I have heard in the long years that I have played this game that I have also chosen to list here and elaborate on. For the sake of organization I will list these ideas in the modules under which they logically fall.


Economy

The economic module is probably the one with which I have the least knowledge and experience. I'm no dSokre or Kemal, I know only the very basics, and as such will have little to offer in this section. However I have one or two things to advocate for...

1. Stop the rampant over-production, increase consumption. This one is fairly simple, so simple that even I can understand it anyway. The people of erepublik produce so many goods that they far outstrip demand, causing prices to be bottom of the barrel low, thus causing profits for most companies to be non-existent. The easiest fix for this is to either decrease the amount of materials that people can produce, thus decreasing supply, or increasing consumption, thus increasing demand. Either of these improves the profitability of companies in erepublik.

2. Bring back different job types. Back in V1 there were three different job types that people could choose from. Off the top of my head I can't remember what they were (Manufacturing, construction, and farming maybe?) as it has been quite a long time. As you worked in your chosen field you gained experience in that job type, thus increasing your production and the profitability of the company that you were working at. Good company owners would increase your salary as you leveled up and bad ones would simply wait until you left because you were annoyed at the shi**y wage. This made the economy module more interesting in different ways. One was that the dynamic between an employer and employer as there was actually a level of negotiation about someone wage would be. Another was that if a country did not have enough people skilled in a particular field then they could face shortages (OMG what a concept) in certain products.

3. Restore national currencies
It gives the econ module some variety without being a bitch to code, and adds depth to war and all sorts of other things. I'd add that this should also be paired with a change to the gold limit. I'd advocate for lifting the limit, but if you don't want to do that then set it to something considerably higher...maybe 50 gold per day. Remember, the 10 gold per day limit was set when gold was worth 10x what it is now.

Politics

1. Allow countries to set their own political titles, give these political titles unique abilities. The reason for this change would be to take some of the pressure off the president. One of the reasons that we see such uncontested elections is because being a president takes an inordinate amount of time to do well. By giving appointees of the president a few of his buttons to push the president can actually get some sleep once in a while. This would also make who is appointed to these positions more important and might add a little life to a pretty boring political module.

2. Reduce the top 5 to a top 3 system. When I first joined this game the US had 25000 people, right now we have 4500 and we are living in a vastly simplified game. It cannot be reasonably be expected that the top five parties will be able to maintain any real differences from each other when there are essentially no issues to argue about any more. Nowadays you choose your party based off what cult of personality you find most appealing. Want to join the cult of Pfeiffer? USWP. Cult of Fingerguns? Federalist party it is. MazzyCat-WTP. You get the idea. IF we reduce our top five parties to just three parties it will enable us to maybe actually develop some differences between the parties as well as make defending against a PTO that much easier. But won't this implify an already overly simplified political system Buce? Why yes, which is why you would want to pair it with the next suggestions as well.

3. Regional elections. Now I'm tired and hoping this one if more or less self explanatory. Let people actually vote for candidate based off a region system. Makes this more interesting, get people campaigning again.

Military

1. This is a big one, undue this division change you just did. As many articles have already highlighted this change has essentially made any new player that doesn't buy gold totally irrelevant FOR YEARS. People have suggested tying division to strength, the issue with this is that players can simply stop training right before they would be due to change division and go after easy battle heroes forever. One way to perhaps deal with this would be to disallow fighting before the days training has taken place. In this way you could have divisions that actually make sense, give new players (and disadvantaged older ones) a chance,

2. Reduce the number of battles. Back in V1 battles actually had meaning. Days would go by where a nation didn't have a direct conflict and its players simply fought in the Phillipine/Malaysian training war (remember that?). During this time a nation would prepare to do battle. It would marshal the entirety of their strength against the enemy and the resulting battles were EPIC. The level of tension and excitement became palpable in the air(pixels) itself. Numerous articles were always written in anticipation of these battles and it felt as though the entire nation or alliance was one organism readying itself for some end of days showdown. I miss when battles had meaning, now there are so many battles going on at once you have to wonder whether anyone even knows why half of them are ongoing, if the have any meaning at all beyond "We were bored and wanted to NE someone".

3. Have actual damage figures during battle rather than percentages. During V1 (hmmmm I seem to be saying that a lot) you could see how much damage you were doing, and how much total damage your side and enemy side was doing. It made fighting feel more meaningful. Percentages just don't give you quite the same feel.

Media

1. Bring back citizen ads. Back in V1 citizens could purchase ads that were about 1 inch by 1 inch that appeared on the sides of your erepublik screen. These were usually images that linked to articles that were either important gov media, troll articles, or just articles by citizens driven to advocate for something such as who to vote for for cp. These would be good because they cost gold and as we all know Plato LOVES gold. They were also just plain fun and lets be honest, the media module is so dead it would take a whole lot of improvements to bring it back, why not start with citizen ads?

2. The ability to set a subscription cost for your newspaper. Most likely ranging from 1-5 cc per article a subscription fee could be handled in a number of ways. Either per article, per week, per month, or per years. At the moment there is very little incentive to participate in the media module. With almost nothing to write about (see dead economy, dead media, and political/military mods on life support) and only 5 gold to be gained after a whole lot of effort why should someone even bother to write in the first place. A little extra cc in their pocket might do the trick. I don't think 1-5 cc per article would be enough to make people stop reading article (and you could still publish for free if you wanted to) but it might just convince a few more people to start writing in pursuit of the dream of a media empire. This would also help make voters club, a terrible thing for the media module, less profitable.

3. Increase the media mogul medal to 15 gold. It is arguably one of the most difficult medals to get in this game, especially nowadays with our reduced player base, why should it be worth only 5 gold? By the time they leave D1 (especially with the new changes) a new player could have received ten times that amount of gold from battle heroes alone. What incentive doe 5 gold really offer when the only way to get it is much more time and labor intensive than a battle hero?

4. The admins actually doing their job and putting a stop to voters club and paying for subscriptions would also be nice.

Misc.

1. Restore a limit to shouts a day: Makes shouts more meaningful and gives people with large well connected friends lists influence.

2. Allow the government to highlight official shouts. There was a special tab for this before. Bring that back, or possibly give the President, cabinet, and Congressmen a button they can push to toggle on 'official' status. Set a limit on that to 3-4 shouts a day. Also highlight the Party President in the Party feed, or treat it like the MU feed and sticky their last shout.

3. Institute a RL spending limit per month: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHACan you imagine? It was actually the reality once.

4. Bring back orgs or something similar. This is in misc. because while it is largely relevant to joint economic activity, it also holds implications for other aspects of the game. Essentially orgs allow multiple players to work together.

5. Actual community support from Plato, you know, something that extends beyond spending all their time making sure that gold buyers aren’t having issues with buying gold.

Alright thats all folks, fyi I totally stole none of these from the eus forums.