The Economist ~ Plato & Bulgaria

Day 1,158, 13:10 • Published in United Kingdom United Kingdom • by Spite313


Dear friends,

It has been a while since I’ve written a proper Economist article. For those of you wondering at the last article- yes I do originate from and live in the eUK and some of my articles are region specific. I’m sure that like most your subs you will vote the ones that interest you and ignore the rest 😛

Today I’d like to talk firstly about the Plato involvement in the economy, and secondly about Bulgaria. The first half of the article will cover the effect both locally and internationally that the “bug” in the economy module had on our markets. The second half will look at the effect that the ongoing war in the Balkans has had on Bulgaria. I hope that these two issues will keep my international readers a little more interested than the last article did.

Firstly: Plato. We all noticed the major surge in demand on the 16th January, which continued through to the 18th. Based on tax data, I can estimate that over 700g of goods were sold in the UK alone on that day. I first noticed the surge myself when my entire stock of Q3 and Q2 food were bought out. What made this unusual was that the food was mainly there for my use and thus was priced well above the market value (0.5 units of currency above). After this shock, I noticed that I had sold 12 Q5 weapons on the UK market. I always have an offer on the UK domestic market, but this is the first time I have managed to sell 12 at once at home. Most of the rich UK players query me on IRC if they need something.

As the day progressed, I noticed that every few hours 12 weapons were being sold. At this point the Polish President published an article accusing the admins of attacking markets to compensate for overproduction. It seemed plausible, but the route it took was incredibly poorly thought out.

After the first wave of sales, I noticed the global MM lurching. In large countries such as Serbia, the MM barely moved, but in smaller countries it bounced up several points. At one point I had 5000 GBP on the UK market at 0.027 to try and defend against the surging currency. It became apparent to me that the reason for this was that the account buying all of the goods was using gold to buy the currency needed to do so. In light of the (deleted) articles and the (not deleted) forum posts, it became apparent that the Plato account was buying both currency and goods to try and compensate for the “work as manager” feature.

What effect did that have on our economy? Well the immediate effect was a global surge which happened over several days. It is easy to see by tracking spending which countries were affected. On the first day, the UK, Germany, Hungary, Turkey, France, Poland and Romania were definitely hit. Other countries I can’t be sure about.

Graph showing the surge in UK tax income over the past week. Graph doesn’t include a scale, but for perspective, the y axis begins at 0.

As the next few days progressed, the surge hit other national markets. What is the effect of this unnatural disaster? Firstly, many countries reacted to the hit on their MM as a genuine surge in demand and printed money. As a result, currencies were further devalued. The surge in sales has caused a sudden influx of money firstly into companies, and secondly (indirectly) onto the MM. This means that many national MMs have a glut of currency which is very damaging to companies trying to change currencies (due to exports for example).

The second “disaster” has been the massive surge in RM prices. Although there has been no change in productivity or in citizen numbers since last week, the cost of RM has more than doubled, and these costs have been passed on to manufactured goods as well. Although wages have increased, they have no increased proportionally to the increase in RM costs, meaning that firstly manufacturing companies are suffering, and later these higher production costs will be passed onto consumers.

The economy module on this game is very delicate, and very untried. Huge attacks like this have literally demolished weeks and months of work by company owners and citizens alike. If this “bug” is not brought under control we could see even more instability than was brought by the overproduction issues.


And then I used the Q5’s in a battle LOL

Secondly, I want to talk about Bulgaria. This is totally unrelated to the first part by the way. A few months ago, I published an article in Bulgaria which you can read here. At the time I spoke about how Bulgaria had the potential to be a great power, and it has exceeded even my expectations. The recent two front war with its neighbours hasn’t led to it being wiped (as many believed) but instead has seen a huge surge in both its population and economy.


Bulgarian tax income January 2011

As you can see, not only has Bulgaria’s tax income rocketed, it’s rocketed beyond everyone’s expectations. Bulgaria currently has a large economy than Poland and Spain combined. Think about that. Six months ago, Bulgaria struggled to achieve a positive bank balance each day, and today it is one of the top 5 countries in the game by income. But what caused this huge leap in income?

Firstly, the war is the most obvious reason for the increase in wealth. Not only did it create demand, encourage spending, lifted wages and encouraged exports it also attracted and retained babies. All of the Balkan countries have strong potential for baby boom, since all of them neighbour countries which they have a real life grudge against for whatever reason. Every Balkan country is a potential super-power, but for a long time Bulgaria was the little country of the region. This was for a lot of reasons- but mainly because the two enemy countries it did border (Romania & Greece) were much richer and stronger than it was so it had no real opportunity to grow. When Macedonia was added (I don’t care what your opinion is on how it is written) it gave the Bulgarians a clear enemy who they could focus on. Macedonia was weak and new, and the hate-mongering drew in large crowds of new citizens to both countries, which coincidentally has made Macedonia quite strong itself.

Secondly, the huge increase in labour in Bulgaria has made them both a booming exporter and a ravenous importer. Bulgaria requires huge quantities of both raw materials and high quality goods every day, and a surge in interest in both BGN and licences to the south-east European country have been very beneficial to the country. A modest 10% tax on finished goods has meant that the government gets a healthy cut of everything exported to the country. I know from my own experience that the market is very viable and well worth investing in. It currently has a fairly weak currency but this is offset by a very good price on the markets and optimistically it is likely the value of BGN will grow to 0.018 or so given time, meaning that getting slightly less BGN than you might like for your goods now can be viewed as an investment.


Bulgaria’s location, for the geographically challenged

So to wrap this article up~ I apologise for the recent spurt of non-economic stuff. If anyone has any specific questions or things they’d like me to talk about in future, please PM me and let me know. I’m not as active as I used to be, so I can’t guarantee anything, but if it’s interesting and relevant I’ll try and write about it.

Best wishes,

Iain