Negative effects of permanent wipe-out of small countries

Day 2,144, 06:53 • Published in Netherlands USA • by Yfke van de Zand

One of the greatest assets of E-Republik as a game are its real-life national communities that were created around the game, with numerous external forums, chats, IRC channels, RL meetings and so on. This is what makes this game fundamentally different than many other mass strategy games out there.

However, a dangerous trend is developing: concentration of power for a very long time (as in 6, 8, 12 months) on just a handful of countries, while other e-countries are permanently wiped out of the map and - more importantly - denied basic game functions and tools by virtue of its design



Just to refresh some memories, wiped-out countries cannot manage national treasury, cannot elect countries, cannot give citizenship to foreigners, cannot sign MPPs, cannot have citizens hiring people, cannot change taxes etc.

This all would make sense if the engine behind the simulation of the game allowed some reasonable shot for all RL countries to have some reasonable in-game way to get them back on a reasonable time-frame within the game. Currently, there is nothing like that, some e-countries where RL players form tight communities are have been denied many gaming functions and tools for many months in a row.

Now if you follow closely the ranking of citizens' population (http://www.erepublik.com/en/write-article), you will notice that many countries that formerly were higher on the tables have been languishing now, losing population every week. It is easy to understand the process: once an e-country is wiped out, players that have either political ambition or lots of companies end up needing to leave because they can't even hire people to work for them, for instance.

If this is just a temporary situation, fine, people come and go. As it stands now, though, there is a serious risk that many of these RL communities will also disappear, forums will go without audience until they go offline, people get disinterested from playing the game as fewer and fewer local-language material is produced, and so on. Once these communities languish or disappear altogether (you know, an external forum needs some interested players to be kept running, some admins etc), it would be very difficult to rebuild them.

I fear that, absent some major shake-over on the game engine, we'll be stuck with 4 to 6 big countries dominating the World with gazillion regions each operating on their own language, and then mostly irrelevant e-countries without much ties to their RL players operating as generic clans/tribes/groups/teams of some other mass strategy game. That would, then, be a loss for E-Republik, because once you remove its community of players' element, the game has fierce competition with other military strategy online games out there.

Maybe it would be a good guess that big players and tankers from these ever-more-dominating countries would say "why should I care, damn you, I'm winning, you are losing, not my problem, we are going to dominate the entire world on a monochromatic map!"



Well, it might give some short-term satisfaction to achieve this, or even to dominate an entire continent. The usual bullies might well use the fact to throw cheap insults on IRC or else. However, they should also know that a game that becomes boring for your opponent is a game where you don't have anyone else to play against because they leave!

This is already happening to some countries on the bottom half of the population count: their most powerful and involved citizens left for logical reasons, new players are not retained in-game, they come and go easily. It is a lose-lose situation in the long term.