The Economist ~ A(nother) open letter to the admins

Day 1,783, 14:15 • Published in Poland United Kingdom • by Spite313


Dear admins,


This is an open letter and a statement. Long ago when I first joined the game it was complex, it was developing, it had a future. Now like any business you had two main considerations. One was to make a profit, the other was to develop your company so it could grow.

Over time the growth aspect has become neglected, and the focus has shifted entirely towards making a profit out of the game we have today. All changes have thus been towards a simpler, lower-maintenance game. You have focused on sinking your claws into your existing userbase at the expense of playability and - dare I say it - fun.

The top-end complexity that made eRepublik a unique internet game experience has slowly eroded to the point where it’s simply pay-to-win clicking. Each desperate reshuffle of alliances and each mad anti-government party to form represents nothing more than a last-ditch attempt by the userbase to make the game interesting.

I’ve seen so many potential great ideas come and go whilst the admins have sat and ignored them. The only module that continues to exist in any sense of the word is the military module, and that has been made so meaningless and banal by changes that it’s almost a waste of effort fighting. In fact even those spending huge amounts of money on gold must realise that any gains made by their spending are arbitrary and doomed to backslide in a very short amount of time.

When I saw the introduction of Q3 training grounds to me it represented the tipping point in this collapse. Believe it or not, this was six months ago now! That’s right, six months of demanding 280 gold (or 100 euros) per player simply to keep up with the other players. And guess what, now you’ve demanded even more with Q4. Q5 is almost an inevitability now, and with each change you ask for more money for less game.



I couldn’t think of any other way to make myself clear about what I thought other than by stopping fighting and downgrading my training centres. Six months ago I was quite a strong player- if I’d kept training and fighting at the level I did I’d be God of War and about 25k strength right now. I knew that by stopping I was permanently excluding myself from that top tier of fighting society in eRep - I can never be a tank again, but it’s a choice I happily and freely made.

Each day I log in and I see the world like someone who just started did. My impact on the military module is none, and every other module is, as I said, worthless. I have thousands of gold worth of companies and assets, but the profits aren’t worth the expense a new player would go to to build them.

Fighting was always a major part of the game- the extension of politics by other means and so on. But these days it’s not that- not a way to resolve conflicts using a kind of mini-game. Now it IS the game. In the past it was expensive to start a war. Armies actually ran out of guns. The first conflict I was in, shortly after I was born, was lost because the American and allied troops actually ran out of guns halfway through the war and had nothing to fight with.

Now wars are a necessity, and must always be open. People need them to progress, but the actual outcome is mostly irrelevant. The economy is broken, so the actual value of bonuses is almost nil. The real purpose of war is to allow true patriot medals, NE bonuses and so on. The war itself is completely irrelevant, the purpose is gone, the meaning is gone, the co-ordination is gone. Countries go halfway round the world not to secure some region, but simply because they’re bored and there’s nothing better to do. The most exciting bit of international drama is whether or not PTOers will actually succeed in taking over America. The whole of Europe is basically dead.

The other day someone pointed me to some adverts that have appeared recently on google. They go something along the line of “The UK needs your help!”. Admins, the UK is doing just fine. We suck at this game for one reason- nobody in the RL UK wants to play a shit browser game like this. Why? If we wanted to play a war-game, there are better war games. If we wanted to play an MMO, there are better MMOs. The only selling point erepublik had was the size of its userbase, the political element and the economy. Now those are all gone, nobody here wants to play. Don’t waste your money advertising to a player-base that doesn’t give a *redacted*.

People who are still reading will be wondering why I’m still playing. It’s for the same reason all of you lot are still playing, really. Which is that we hope the admins will all wake up tomorrow and realise what a complete mess they’ve made of a good idea, reverse course and actually get some growth going in their company. But the sad thing is we all know secretly that this isn’t going to happen. Half the admin team have got no experience in the gaming industry, half are just coders with no marketing knowledge or development skills. It’s actually really embarrassing, and surprising they got this far at all. Really the only way eRepublik is going to grow is if they fire half their team and start again.

At the minute that’s not going to happen, because they are meeting income targets. That’s literally the only reason they’ve still got jobs/the site hasn’t been closed. So thanks, super-tanks, for propping up the incompetent people who continue to shaft us on a daily basis. I’m not going to tell you all to stop fighting, though you can if you want to. But stop buying their gold. Stop supporting the very thing you hate. It’s the only realistic way to force a change. But most importantly, when the next “offer” or “special event” comes out that DEMANDS rather than asks you to buy gold (Q5 training, Q8 weapons) just say no. Draw a line in the sand. Because it’s that, or give up that dream of a better game and quit.

Iain