Why are you still playing this game?

Day 875, 20:04 • Published in Malaysia Malaysia • by Nagyzee

Hello all,

Long time no speak.🙂 It has been ages since I last wrote an article. Yes, I didn't do it in the last days of my presidency either for which I hereby apologize. I was a rather bad president this time because I got totally frustrated and demotivated around halfway through my term. I think you would have probably felt the same though.

The fact is that the last 2-3 months I spent more time hunting Serbian multiaccounts, reporting them and then arguing with the admins than actually playing the game. I didn't play eRepublik any more but another totally frustrating game into which I have been forced into by the Serbians and the incompetence of the admins. borissajkas and others claimed a few times that we should be happy for them being here because they make the game fun for us. Where they couldn't be further from the truth. I didn't have any fun. After a while I had to force myself to actually log into this crap, because I simply had no desire. Unfortunately I had to as I was the president.

In the second half of my presidency I didn't do much else besides negotiating for the return of Sarawak and going on with reporting Serbian fakes. I just couldn't pressure myself to work pointlessly for nothing while being cheated out of our country. When you know for a fact that what you build will be destroyed by cheating then there's no point trying and investing in time. I kept doing what was really important for the future of eMalaysia - reporting fakes that is - but that was the most I could get myself to do.

However the most frustrating part was interaction with admins. It was really a nightmare. It took several weeks to get even the most obvious fakes banned. For example they replied and closed my ticket on the 24th-25th February election fraud on 25th March. They were exactly one month late. Both our February and March elections were rigged and characterized by heavy cheating but the admins cared little about it.

I know that I'll receive an FP for this and that my article will be deleted but I simply must share this brilliant response from Andrei S. with you:

"Posted On: 02 Mar 2010 6:16 PM

Hello,
We are trying to catch and ban the big sharks and leave aside the clones which are going to die anyway. Most likely the clone master has been banned in this case.

Kind regards,
Andrei S.
eRepublik Community Officer"

In your face. Andrei S. openly told me that he wouldn't ban the fakes. Many thanks. Luckily since then other admins started working on these cases with a much better attitude and the fakes are dying at a faster rate lately but I fear the damage is unrepairable. We have a few dozen Serbians who got our citizenship thanks to the rigged elections and it seems they won't go away. Also I still have several weeks old tickets in pending and still analyzing status. For example nothing was done about the bug with the Sarawak battle either which netted us another 4 Serbian congress members.

All in all I still see close to zero chance that we might be able to play in a fair environment anytime soon.


Western Australia battle

Just wanted to add my bit on this one. There was no lag in that battle. I'm speaking of first hand experience. Australia won it fair and square but then it didn't close and PHOENIX tanked it down well into overtime. The admins' official response on the WA battle is really mindblowingly stupid and outrageous.

1. They acknowledge the bug - that their system didn't close down the battle on time.
2. They refuse to fix the consequences and to give back WA to Australia.
3. But the worst part is that the announcement has an intolerable smart-ass tone which is really insulting for the losing side and anyone who was hoping for a fair decision.

But all in all this is nothing unusual. This is the regular quality of the admins' work.


In conclusion I'd like to ask you all why you are still playing. First, the game is heavily infected with cheating. Second, the admins are totally incapable of dealing with cheaters and bugs on a timely manner which means that eRepublik offers a very unfair environment. And in such an environment playing is more frustrating than fun.

I guess I'm still playing because it's hard to quit. I have certain "jobs" here like organizing the Sol Games and the slowly dying momentum is still pushing me forward. But I'm logging in less and less often. Also I think parts of the community are nice (while other parts are simply cheaters and/or way too infected with nationalism and sometimes even hatred) and the idea of the game is also nice. It could be a nice game if it wasn't ruined by cheaters and was managed better. Maybe I still hope that things will change in this regard. Anyhow I feel less and less inclined to log in and to be honest I'd never recommend this game to any of my friends. In fact I never invited any of my RL friends to this game. I'd feel bad if they also started wasting their time on it.

So why are you still playing this game? I'm interested in your stories, answers, too.

Best regards,
Nagyzee